Undisputed Truth

by Mike Tyson

  I guess I was getting to Spinks with all this bravado.

  “A little terror in your life is good,” he told the press at the final prefight press conference.

  I was totally confident going into the Spinks fight. But I still didn’t get the respect I deserved from the people in the street, who had followed Spink’s boxing accomplishments longer than mine. I’d be walking around in New York or L.A. before the fight and guys would come up to me.

  “Spinks is going to knock you out, nigga. He’s going to whoop your ass.”

  “Are you on drugs?” I said. “You have to be an extraterrestrial to believe that shit.”

  They were just haters.

  I heard that Roberto Duran wanted to come to the fight and I got very excited. I told Don to give him two tickets if he would come to my dressing room so I could meet him. He did one better. He came to my hotel room the day of the fight. I was so happy to meet my hero that I just knew that I was going to win after that. He was with his friend Luis de Cubas. De Cubas started giving me all this advice like, “Go right out and fuck him up from the opening bell.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Duran said. “You take your time, boy. Use your jab. Just go behind your jab.”

  The night of the fight, the Spinks camp tried to fuck with my head. Butch Lewis, his manager, came in to observe my gloves being taped.

  “No, no, you gotta take that glove off and retape it,” Lewis said after Kevin was finished. “There’s a bump in the tape.”

  “I’m not doing nothing. Fuck you,” I said.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Lewis said. “Retape that glove.”

  “I’m God, I don’t have to do nothing,” I sneered.

  “Well, you’re gonna do this, God,” Butch said.

  “Fuck you,” Rooney said.

  We finally called in Larry Hazzard, the New Jersey boxing commissioner, and Eddie Futch, Spinks’s trainer, and they okayed the tape job.

  But I was pissed.

  Spinks entered the ring first. I decided I’d work on his mind a little bit, so I entered the arena to the sound of funeral music. I walked slowly up to the ring. I looked at the audience like I wanted to kill them. I just wanted to create this whole ominous atmosphere of fear. I was one-hundred-percent aware of the audience when I was moving. My every thought was to project my killer image. But I also wanted to be one with the audience. I started doing my out-of-body stuff so I could be one with them, so when I got into the ring I could just lift my arms and the audience would go nuts. Then I would see my opponent’s energy leaving him slowly.

  Robin had Winston serve Cayton with a lawsuit at ringside. She was wearing an electric red low-cut dress and she sat next to Don. Of course he was delighted when she told him about the lawsuit. Norman Mailer was at the fight. He wrote something interesting later: “Tyson looked drawn, not afraid, not worried, but used up in one small part of himself, as if a problem still existed that he had not been able to solve.” Norman was right, but I had more than one problem.

  As soon as I entered that ring and looked over at Spinks, I knew that I had to hit him. He wouldn’t look at me during the ring instructions. As we were waiting for the bell to ring, Kevin told me that he had bet his share of the purse that I would knock Spinks out in the first round. When the bell rang, I went right at him. I stalked him for a while and we traded blows and I knew he couldn’t hurt me, I couldn’t even feel any of his punches. About a minute in, I got him on the ropes and hit him with a left uppercut and knocked him down with a right to the body. That was the first time that Spinks had ever been to the canvas in his whole career. I knew the fight was over then because I had been dropping my sparring partners all week with body punches. And he had gone down from a punch that I didn’t even think was that solid. He got right up and took the standing eight-count and we resumed. Three seconds later he threw a wild punch and I unleashed a right uppercut and it was over. I walked back to my corner with my hands outstretched, palms up. All the great old fighters did that, it was a gesture to demonstrate humbleness, but in my mind I was still the greatest.

  At the postfight press conference, I said that I could beat any man in the world and that, as far as I knew, this might be my last fight. I meant both those statements. I certainly didn’t want to fight again until I had everything in my life situated. By then, I pretty much knew I had to get rid of the women and my management team. I needed a fresh new start.

  We had an after-party and all the celebrities showed up—Stallone and Bruce Willis and Brigitte Nielsen. I was walking around the room when I saw my sister Denise holding court at one table. Uh, oh, I better leave because somehow I know I’m going to be embarrassed, I thought. I tried to sneak away, but then I heard her booming voice, “Mike!” I kept walking, pretending I didn’t hear her. “Mike! Mike, you motherfucker, you’d better get here right now.” I went back to the table. “Mike, get me a Diet Coke. And hurry it up!” my sister said.

  “Yes, Niecey,” I said. Some things never changed.

  My sister was an awesome person. She was always worried about me. She probably wanted to beat up Robin and Ruthless but I didn’t want her to do that. Niecey was a simple woman. She was so happy to meet entertainers like Oprah and Natalie Cole. And she loved putting me in check in front of them like she did ordering me to get her a Diet Coke. People would be saying, “Look, there’s Iron Mike,” and she’d be bossing me around.

  I’d be in Los Angeles and my sister would call. “Hey, Mike, I need to get me a mattress.”

  “Okay, I’ll send someone over to get you one,” I’d say.

  “Well, I don’t know those people. Mike, you’ve got to come and get it.”

  My friend Shorty Black had a little rinky-dink bar in Queens, but my sister made it sound like the biggest thing in the world. “I’m going to Shorty’s tonight,” she’d tell me.

  I offered to get her into Bentley’s or the China Club or any of the happening clubs in the city but she was content to go to Shorty’s.

  I had dedicated the fight to Jimmy Jacobs. Afterwards I had to make my usual stop at Cus’s grave. After every defense of my title, I’d go up there with the big bottle of champagne and celebrate with Cus. Cus loved champagne. Rooney always loved to get after me about that.

  “Stop putting the damned bottle on Cus’s gravesite,” he’d tell me. Every time he saw a Dom Pérignon bottle by the grave, he knew it was mine.

  Things got crazier after the Spinks fight. Cayton was indignant because he got sued, but nobody in the press thought it was wrong for Jim and Bill to hand me over like I was a piece of property. If anyone was betrayed it was me. With Jim gone, there was no way that I would have wanted Cayton to be my manager. And if Cus had still been around, Cayton would have been long gone. Cus never liked Cayton because he had done some work with the IBC, Cus’s mortal enemies.

  The women had enlisted Donald Trump in their camp as a consultant to advise them, but that turned out to be a bad move. He wasn’t a boxing guy. He didn’t know anything about negotiating purses, ancillary rights, foreign rights, TV deals. There were too many people who were making money off of me to let this bickering continue for long. In July, Bill renegotiated his contract and went down to 20 percent for his managerial fee and 16 percent on endorsements and commercials. One of the reasons that everyone settled was that my purse from the Spinks fight had been held up by the lawsuits. So now I got my check for ten million dollars and Bill got his five million.

  Everyone was pressuring me to get back in the ring, but I was in no hurry. I was supposed to fight Frank Bruno in London but at the press conference to announce the settlement with Cayton, I stunned everyone.

  “I think I’m going to pass on the Bruno fight and take six to eight weeks off to relax. I just don’t feel like fighting now,” I said.

  I was spending more and more time with Don King by that point. I had gone to Cleveland i
n May and stayed at his house for a few days. Don had gotten me to sign a promotional agreement with him, but we kept it hushed up until after the Spinks fight. He had played all of us perfectly.

  Sometime that year Don had taken me to see Michael Jackson perform. Don had done promotions for Michael and his father, so he took me backstage after the show. I had met Joe Jackson at some of my fights because he was a player. So we were backstage and Michael was by himself, standing in the corner, waiting for his car to come. Nobody could get near him. But he saw that I was surrounded by people wanting my autograph. I wanted to shake his hand before he got in that car, so I walked over to him.

  “How are you doing, Mr. Jackson? It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said.

  He paused for a second and looked me over.

  “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” he said.

  He shat on me that night. He knew who I was. But I couldn’t be mad, I thought it was beautiful. I couldn’t wait to try that line on someone.

  When Don King came to New York on August sixteenth, he dropped the bomb that I had signed an exclusive promotional contract with him. Bill went ballistic and threatened to sue. The women were pretty much out of the picture by now. They had lost their bid to take over my business. So they were continuing their Plan B—paint me out as some kind of monster and get a great divorce settlement. Throughout the summer, Robin kept giving interviews claiming that I was violent with her. But when the reporters would ask for documentation, they couldn’t back up her bullshit claims. I really don’t like to talk bad about people, and for all I know they both could have changed now, but back then they were the lowest serpenty bitches in the galaxy.

  The women’s next plan was to get me committed to a psychiatric ward so they could take control of my finances. Ruthless kept trying to get me to see this shrink she knew, Dr. Henry McCurtis. I refused to see him. So they talked to him on the phone and got him to write out prescriptions for lithium and Thorazine for me. He told them I was suffering from manic depression. Ruthless enlisted her brother Michael to give me the medicine. But he thought it was bullshit. At first, he’d say, “Mike, you want this medicine?” Eventually he’d just tell me, “Mike, don’t take this shit. I wouldn’t.” Then Ruth tried to get my friend Rory to make sure I took the meds. Ruthless would call every day to make sure I had taken them. Rory didn’t give a shit so he’d just tell Ruth that we were out of pills and he told me she would send more out overnight by FedEx.

  I was on alcohol not pills when I got into a little street scuffle with Mitch Green. Since I beat him, he had hit the skids. He had been busted for drugs, and was arrested for refusing to pay bridge tolls and for robbing a gas station. Supposedly the nigga had held up the station, tied up the attendant, put him under the cash register, and then collected the money from people coming in for gas.

  So I had been clubbing one night at the end of August and decided to drop by Dapper Dan’s to pick up some clothing they were making for me. It was a white leather jacket that had DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE, the name of that Public Enemy song, across the back. I also had some white leather Daisy Duke–type short-shorts to go with it. Hey, I was in shape back then, I wanted to show off my muscular thighs. Every hip hop artist/drug dealer was getting their threads from Dapper then and they would stay open late. So I rolled in there about four in the morning. I’m not a hip hop or drug guy, but I’m a street guy and we all hung out at Dapper Dan’s.

  Buying shit always made me happy, so I was feeling good. But my mood was severely altered when this crazy motherfucker Mitch Green came storming into the store, bare-chested.

  “What the fuck are you doing here, you faggot? You and your motherfucker girlfriend Don King fucked me over in that fight. You’re all a bunch of faggots,” he started ranting. “Look how you talk! You’re a faggot!”

  Now I was living in that bullshit “Hey, guys” white world at the time, still trying to get corporate endorsements, but deep down inside I was a bloodthirsty killer. I decided to try and channel my eloquent Jewish side that I picked up from businessmen like Jimmy Jacobs.

  “Now, Mitch, you must consider what you are doing. I do not think that this course of action is in the long run advantageous for your health. You’ll remember that I already vanquished you when we met in the ring,” I said. “You need to proceed to the nearest exit immediately.”

  “You didn’t beat me!” he screamed. “I had no food. That motherfucker Don King didn’t give me no food.”

  I didn’t want to keep arguing with him because I really didn’t want to kill this chump. So I took my clothes and started walking out. I got to the sidewalk but the crazy nigga followed me out there still ranting and raving. Then I had an epiphany. I was Mike Tyson, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. I didn’t have to take this shit.

  He got in my face and started clawing at me and I looked down and he had ripped my shirt pocket. That was it. I just walloped him right in his eye. I was drunk and didn’t realize that he was high on angel dust so he really wasn’t going to hit me back. It was like fighting a ten-year-old. I would drag him all up the street and he was screaming. He fought me better in the ring than he did that night.

  I was throwing punches and crunching this guy and he was weaving and wobbling from side to side like he was going to fall but he didn’t go down. So I did a Bruce Lee Enter the Dragon roundhouse kick on his ass and he went down. My friend Tom, who often drove me around when I was drunk, tried to get me away from him.

  “Yo, Mike, I think you killed this nigga,” he said.

  “Well, maybe he shouldn’t have fucked with me,” I said. And as we turned to go to the car, the Night of the Living Dead zombie pops back up like Jason from Friday the Fucking 13th and kicks me in my balls.

  “Fuck you, faggot!”

  That was not good. So I jumped on his neck and started punching him to the ground where I proceeded to smash his head into the pavement until he was out cold. Now I was tired so I went over to my car. I was driving a canary yellow Corniche Rolls-Royce. $350,000 back in 1988. I got in and waited for Tom to get behind the wheel. Tom got in.

  “Just drive, let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “No way. That crazy nigga is under the wheel,” Tom said.

  I looked out my window and up popped Mitch again. He was screaming and yelling and banging on the window. Then he just ripped my sideview mirror right off. That’s fifty grand right there. Now I was as mad as a motherfucker.

  I pulled open my door and grabbed his head and then I hit him with my signature punch, the right uppercut. Boom! Mitch went flying up in the air and came down like a ragdoll, right on his head. Anyone who’s familiar with street fights knows that when your head hits the ground twice, the first bounce knocks you out and the second one wakes you up. Well, Mitch only bounced once and then this gnarly white shit started oozing out of his mouth. By then, there was a big crowd of pimps and hos and crackheads and they were all going, “Ooooooooo.” I was scared. I really thought he was dead. I had crushed his eye socket, broken his nose, cracked some ribs, and one of his eyes was closed for the season, but I still wasn’t satisfied. Thank God there was a big audience there because if there hadn’t been, I would have snapped his neck and killed the motherfucker. I’m not a nice drunk.

  This is the last I’ll have to worry about Mitch, I thought. Wrong. A few days later, I was on a date with some exotic hot Afrocentric chick named Egypt or Somalia or some country like that. You know, the ones with the turban and the flowing dresses. We were sitting having lunch at a sidewalk café that made you think you were in some Black Paris. I was looking out to the street and I saw a huge man on a ten-speed bike.

  That can’t be Mitch Green because I know the motherfucker is a zombie and he don’t come out in the daytime, I thought to myself. Just as he was about to turn the corner, he looked back and caught my eye. Oh shit. He turned that bullshit bike around and went
over to the hostess, who looked like Queen Latifah in the movie Jungle Fever.

  “Is that Mike Tyson over there?” he asked.

  “Yeah, that’s Mike Tyson,” she told Mitch. “Hey, champ,” she yelled to me and pointed at Mitch. She looked at me as if to say “You handle this.”

  Why did that girl do that? Why? Now Mitch charged over to my table.

  “You bitch faggot. You didn’t kick my ass. You snuck one sucker punch in,” he said.

  “Oh, I hit you one time and fucked you up, crushed the side of your face, broke your teeth, broke your ribs, all that shit with one punch?”

  We were getting ready to go again when Sister Egypt/Somalia put her hand over my arm. The one that was holding my steak knife. I wasn’t a vegan then.

  “Be cool. Don’t play yourself, brother. You’re worth too much to us. That’s just the white man’s trap. You don’t want to be in that white man’s cage.”

  If I had already slept with her, I would have jumped up and carved that nigga up with my knife. But I hadn’t so I just let it go and turned away from Mitch. He got back on his bike, but word had spread and some of my friends in the neighborhood followed his ass and shot at him to scare him away. And I never did get any from Egypt/Somalia.

  But I certainly got a lot of publicity from that fight. I had to appear in court the next day to answer a summons for simple assault, a misdemeanor. Plus, I had fractured my hand on that solid uppercut, so my next fight with Bruno had to be postponed. Now the media were all turning on me. First they build you up and then they tear you down. That’s the name of the game. It didn’t matter that I had been assaulted and challenged by an out-of-control angel duster. Now everyone wanted to know why I was in Harlem at four in the morning. They were going back and trying to dig up shit on my years in Catskill, making up crazy stories about how my violent episodes had been hushed up. Even my man Wally Matthews took me on in Newsday.