by Mike Tyson
“They use them but they don’t like or respect black people. The way they talk about black people, you’d think you were living with the Ku Klux Klan,” I said. “They thought they were royalty. She and her mother wanted so much to be white, it’s a shame. And they were trying to take me away from the people I grew up with and throw me into their kind of high-class world.”
I was making changes in my life on all fronts. Bill was still technically managing me, but he was out of the picture. Maybe things would have been different if Jimmy was still alive, but after he died nobody could stop me from doing what I wanted to do. Looking back on it, I don’t think Jimmy and Bill were evil. I think they were businessmen and they were more seasoned than I was. But I was in way over my head and they took advantage of that too. But they were control freaks. As I got older I wanted my liberation, I wanted to do my own thing. If I failed or succeeded, it didn’t matter, I just wanted to do it on my own.
And then I got caught up with this other piece of shit, Don King. Don is a wretched, slimy reptilian motherfucker. He was supposed to be my black brother, but he was just a bad man. He was going to mentor me, but all he wanted was money. He was a real greedy man. I thought I could handle somebody like King, but he outsmarted me. I was totally out of my league with that guy.
I met Don through Jimmy and Cayton. So if I got involved with Don it was mostly their fault. When you really think about it, Jimmy and those guys let Don see how weak they were with me. They involved him in our business and he saw an opening. Without sounding egotistical, the whole Tyson thing was too big for Jimmy and Bill; it was probably even too big for Cus. They never saw anything like me. Nobody in the entire history of boxing had made as much money in such a short period of time as I did. I don’t know how he would have handled this thing. I was like some really hot, pretty bitch who everybody wanted to fuck, you know what I mean? It was just that Don got to me, but if it hadn’t been Don, it would have been Bob Arum or somebody else.
With Cus and Jim gone I didn’t care about any of those people. So I thought, Whoever gives me the highest bid, whatever I wanted, I’ll go with them. It became a game to me. Everybody was thinking about themselves, so I might as well think about myself. All my friends from my neighborhood were dying and dead anyway, so I was trying to have some fun. I had no anticipation of having a long life. I was too much of an irritant. You catch me in one of my irritating moods and you might get shot. I was living a fantasy life, going from country to country, sleeping with beautiful strangers. That shit began to take a toll on me.
Don gave me the freedom to do what I wanted. He was handling the business and making deals behind my back, but I wasn’t his bitch. He was very smart in instilling in me the auspices that it was me and him against the world. “Black man, white man, black man, white man.” He was always spouting some bullshit that the white motherfuckers were no good and that they were out to kill us all. I actually started believing some of his shit. I played into that stuff. He contaminated my whole barometer.
Anybody could have looked at Don with his hair and his big mouth and his ghetto-fabulous flamboyant style and seen that he was a sick motherfucker. But I was confused back then. All joking aside, if Cus had been alive, he would have gone with King to promote me. Cus hated Bob Arum, King’s rival. I don’t know why. I didn’t think Arum was worse than Don but Cus told me, “Nobody could be worse than Arum.”
I got a lot of flak for going with Don. I was with my friend Brian Hamill at Columbus one night. De Niro was there, sitting at a table, and Brian and I were standing near him. Brian was going off on me signing with King.
“What the fuck are you doing getting involved with Don King?” he was almost yelling. He wasn’t saying it for De Niro’s benefit, but Bobby could hear every word.
“Do you know how many black fighters he’s robbed? You know the history.”
“Brian, I’ve got so much money, I don’t give a fuck,” I said.
And I didn’t then. I didn’t know how long that ride was going to last. I was just living my life day by day. But I knew that I loved being champ and I felt that nobody could do that job better than me. I would destroy anything in front of me. If you were in the same occupation and we weighed the same, you would be dead. My whole job was to hurt people. Jim and Bill tried to tone that down, but Don was with the program. So when I started hanging out with Don, boom, the whole public perception of me changed. Now I was a bad guy.
In October of 1988, Don took me to Venezuela for the WBA convention. Then we went to Mexico for the christening of Julio Chavez’s son. That trip was a real revelation for me. We took a day trip to the pyramids and this little kid came up to me, begging. The guides we were with said, “No, Mike, don’t give them money.” But how couldn’t I? A hundred dollars was nothing to me, but it meant everything to the kid. So I gave him some money and he was so appreciative. I was thinking, Wow, this is a good kid, and I went to touch his hair and it felt as hard as a rock. It felt like he hadn’t washed his hair in years. You could have hurt someone with his hair. Then we went to Culiacán and I saw more kids begging. I bought clothes for this one kid and next thing I knew he was bringing around three more friends and then twenty more of his cousins were coming by for clothes. That’s why I liked that one kid, he never came by himself; he always brought his friends and relatives, and every time I bought them all stuff.
It was just like in Brooklyn when I bought sneakers for those street kids. These Mexican kids had never left Culiacán and I dressed them and we were all hanging out. I had so much money and the clothes that I was buying were so cheap. You just knew you were going to hell if you didn’t spend money on those children. By the time I left we had a crew of over fifty kids that were dressed up sharp.
Before I went to Mexico, I had such a big chip on my shoulder. I had never known anyone poorer than me. I couldn’t imagine anyone in the world being poorer than I had been. I was blown away by the poverty in Mexico. I was actually mad at them for being poorer than I had been because I couldn’t feel sorry for myself anymore. More than anything else, my success stemmed from my shame about being poor. That shame of being poor gave me more pain than anything in my life.
So many of my problems stemmed from thinking I deserved shit after being so poverty-stricken growing up. Cus was always trying to get me to transcend myself and separate myself from my ego, get out of my own head. But it was hard. Hey, I deserved that car, I deserved that mansion, I deserved a bad bitch. When I got with Don, I had to have the top-of-the-line cars and lots of them. I was getting the best Lamborghinis and a bulletproof Hummer that had been owned by some Saudi prince. I was going to Bristol to the Rolls-Royce factory and they were designing my custom Rolls for me.
Cus wouldn’t have approved of all that. If a guy had a convertible, Cus thought he was a selfish pig. We’d see a nice car and I’d say, “Wow, that’s a cool car, Cus.”
“Nah, that guy is selfish,” Cus said.
“Why is he selfish?” I’d ask.
“He drives that two-seater so he doesn’t have to drive more than him and his friends around.”
Cus had an old beat-up van that could hold twelve people. That’s just the way he was.
We would have had a great reality show back in 1988. I say this with all modesty, I started the whole bling-bling look with my customized stretch limos and collection of Rolls and Lamborghinis. P. Diddy and them were trying their best to get in our camp, but we set the tone. I started the trends that were followed by today’s hip hop moguls. I was the first to buy Rolls-Royces and Ferraris. In 1985 what other black guy in his twenties was buying these kinds of cars—legally? And I didn’t have just one. I had a fleet of them. These up-and-coming hip hop stars used to throw after-parties for our fights. They didn’t even know what Bentleys were. They thought those were old man’s cars. And back in the ’80s, I was gutting them out and putting Gucci and refrigerators in them. I even put a h
ot tub in one of my limousines. I know I was the first to put a fax machine in a car.
“You got the contract. Okay, we’re in the car. Fax it to me.”
We used to buy pieces of jewelry that cost two, three million. I’d buy a girlfriend a piece of jewelry for a million five. After every fight, my crew would go out in fur coats and stretch Rolls-Royces. When I bought that house in Bernardsville, New Jersey, I invited my friend EB over and said, “Nobody’s macking like this.” Everybody was always jealous of me because I used to throw my wealth in their faces. Yet I did share. If I ate, everybody around me ate. But they were still jealous. In all of my houses, everything was Versace, from the furniture to the walls to the comforters to the sheets to the towels to the ashtrays to the glasses and the plates.
I met Versace through an Italian journalist who came to interview me in Catskill. She was a very attractive woman who was a few years older than me, and I took her upstairs and we had sex and I saw that she was wearing Versace underwear.
“I model for him,” she told me. “I can get you all the clothes you want. I’ll introduce you.”
Versace was the coolest. He offered to send me clothes but I was too impatient.
“If you just wait, I’ll send you everything for free,” he’d tell me.
“Send me what you can and I’m going to buy what I can, okay?” I told him.
I was living out the fantasy. I’d go to London or Paris to get some clothes and all the salespeople would run out of their stores.
“Champion! Champion!” they’d shout, trying to get me to go into their place. I was taking the Concorde to see a girl, and we’d walk down the street and the whole city stopped. They literally had to drag us into the stores, we were so mobbed.
In Vegas it was worse. I’d go to the Versace store in Caesars and the whole mall would shut down. I was flourishing with all that attention. I was looking around at the clothes and I didn’t think, Thank you very much, I was looking mean at the people in the store. I didn’t even bother trying on clothes in the dressing rooms. I’d just strip down to my underwear in the middle of the store. I was ripped to a shred back then and hundreds of people would be watching me try on clothes through the store window. I’d see a girl in the crowd that I liked and I’d say to one of the salespeople, “Let her in, please.”
She’d come in.
“Do you want to stay here and help me pick out things? Do you need anything?” I’d ask her. When I’d finish shopping, I would have dropped $300,000 cash money that visit. Versace got mad at me.
“This guy spends too much money,” he’d tell whoever we were with. But he was no one to talk. That guy spent more money than I did.
It’s funny that they make a big deal about Kanye West dressing up his women. I did the same thing. I always liked to dress my girls. I think it went back to my childhood. I used to watch my mother dress the prostitutes who came over. She’d try various wigs on them and then different outfits. So that’s what I did. Not because I was such a fly guy but because I used to see my mother do it with the girls. I even taught Don how to dress. He was dressing like he came right out of the movie Super Fly back then.
“Nigga, you can’t be with us, you dressing like this. We have an image to uphold, Don, we are fly niggas. You are a bum,” I told him. “You’re a big man, you should dress different. Versace is the future, Don.”
That whole gangsta rap image formed around me. I was bringing that attitude to the world. I represented that era. Even Don got freaked out by the image I was portraying at that time. Near the end of 1988, Don tried to soften my image by having Jesse Jackson baptize me in Chicago. That was all bullshit. After the baptism, I took one of the choirgirls back to the hotel and fucked her.
They had me saying I was born-again in Jet magazine. “Remember this: Reach for God, don’t reach for the stars, you might get a cloud and nothing is in the clouds. Reach for God, reach to shake God’s hands.” That was all bullshit. The only spirituality I had back then was in my dick.
I spent a lot of time in L.A. in the late ’80s. I had an apartment in Century City off Wilshire. A friend of mine was christening his boat and he had a party where I met this beautiful girl named Hope. She was with a girlfriend of hers and they arrived near the end of the party when the food had run out. I was sitting at a table with a big plate of food in front of me, so Hope walked up to me out of the blue and went into a great Andrew Dice Clay imitation.
“Look, my friend will blow you if you buy dinner. Me and my friend are starving.”
I thought she was hilarious. I invited them to pull up a seat and I shared my food with them. I didn’t get any feeling that she wanted to be intimate with me so we just became running dogs. She had a lot of girlfriends and I would say, “Hope, I really like that girl a lot.” So she hooked me up. I became a big brother to her. She was always having problems with men. I would take one look at a guy and tell her, “Hope, that guy’s gay,” or, “This guy will never care about you.” I was really good at seeing through people’s bullshit. Except for the women in my life.
We became close. Hope was going to college then and she didn’t have much money, so I let her stay in the spare bedroom in my apartment. But we were just platonic friends. No one could believe it because Hope was so hot.
“Mike, you’re fucking her. I know you are,” all of my friends would say. “I saw you fuck that ugly fat bitch, you got to be fucking this one.”
I became super protective of Hope. One of our favorite places to go was this club called RnB Live. That was where Hope bumped into Wesley Snipes. She started dating him while I was out of town. When I got back to L.A., she came to me crying. Wesley had broken her heart; he didn’t want to see her anymore.
“See, Hope, this is what happens when you mess with those kinds of guys in your life. You need a straight guy,” I told her.
But Hope didn’t want to hear that. She wanted to hear “Why are you crying, Hope? I’m going to kick his ass.”
Hope didn’t get what she wanted from me, so she said to me, “Oh, and Wesley didn’t get why I was, with you. He said, ‘What are you doing with a guy like Tyson?’ to me.”
I knew that was bullshit.
A few days later I made plans to meet Hope at RnB. I sat next to her and asked her how school was, when we saw Wesley Snipes walk in. I excused myself and walked over to him. Wesley looked up, saw me, and panicked.
“Mike, please don’t hit me in my face, that’s how I make my living,” he said.
“Man, don’t worry about that thing with Hope. She’s just hurt.” We both laughed about it.
But I had been drinking a lot of champagne that night, so when I saw Keenen Ivory Wayans, I had to tell him something. He had been doing an impersonation of me on his show In Living Color.
“Yo, Keenen, can I talk to you for a minute?” I asked.
“Yeah, Mike, what’s up?”
“Did I do something to you or your family?” I said.
“No, why?”
“Because these motherfucking jokes about me have got to stop.”
He got all apologetic. And the jokes about me stopped. All those comedian guys talk shit on stage or in front of the cameras, but when they see me, they want to slap five.
The same time I was running with Hope, I started hanging out with this incredible guy named Kevin Sawyer. He had a pager company in L.A. and his store had become a hangout spot for all the players, hustlers, and pimps. Jamie Foxx and Joe Torry worked there before they were famous. It was a business place. People would go in to buy pagers and I would be there shooting dice in my Versace clothes with my big diamond watches and my Rolls parked outside.
Kevin was an incredible ladies’ man. He was very charismatic and the women loved him, even though he stuttered. Me and Kevin and my friend Craig Boogie would have competitions to see how many women we could get in a day. The sex scene was craz
y then. I’d meet girls on the street, say, “Come, let’s go,” and we’d go. I’d be in a club and I’d be touching girls, putting my tongue on their backs, licking their skin, and I didn’t even know them. But I’d take them home and let my friends have sex with them too. My reputation began to spread. I was the guy who might take you shopping, but then we would go home to have sex.
One time, Boogie was driving me around Philadelphia. I was there training for the Buster Mathis Jr. fight. I saw a beautiful girl walking down the street. I didn’t even have to say anything to her; the girl just hopped right in the back of the car.
“Where are we going?” she said.
Another time I was in a cab in New York with this girl I had met. She started taking off her clothes in the cab and having sex with me. It wasn’t even a limo; it was a regular yellow cab. I was, like, “Whoa. Okay, let’s go.”
In my mind I was ordained to do this. All my heroes had had all these women. Someone should have said to me, “This is going to have an ugly ending.” But there was nobody there to do that.
I started making sex videos at home. Boogie would direct the scene, place the camera in the right spot, and then he’d hide in the closet and watch. They started calling me “the Womb Shifter” or “the Pelvis Pulverizer.” I’d show the tapes to my friends and then I’d destroy them. Man, if one of them had gotten out, it would have made the Kardashian tape look PG-13.
I was drinking a lot in those days and partying wherever I found myself. I had a girlfriend in Chicago named Carmen. She was a nice Catholic girl from a solid family—too nice to be hanging around us. I was in a nightclub in Chicago one night with her and Eric Brown, who everyone called EB. They had a sexy-lady contest and some guy disrespected Carmen during it. I didn’t say anything, but I was fuming. I guess the guy thought that he had punked Mike Tyson, but I followed him, sneaky-like, downstairs to the bathroom.
“Listen, man, I don’t care about no pussy. But you don’t ever fuck with me like that, man. This championship shit don’t mean nothing. We can get it on right here.”
