by Mike Tyson
But meeting these guys couldn’t hold a candle to meeting my boxing idols. Of any celebrity I met around that time I was most in awe meeting Max Schmeling. He was in his mideighties when I met him. It was fascinating to talk to him about boxing. We talked about Dempsey and Mickey Walker. He told me that Joe Louis was the greatest fighter and also the greatest man. When he heard that Joe Louis was bankrupt, he left Germany and went to Harlem to look for Joe. Can you imagine an older white guy going to all the clubs in Harlem looking for Joe Louis? By the time I met him, Schmeling had become a billionaire, he owned all the rights to Pepsi in Germany. But what was so fascinating about him was that he still loved boxing. Everywhere he went, he’d take copies of his old fight films with him.
I loved old fighters. When I learned that Joey Maxim, the former light heavyweight champ, was working as a greeter at a Vegas hotel, I’d go visit him every other week and talk to him about his career. He was so mad that he was never introduced at ringside at any of the big fights at the Hilton, so I made sure they did that from then on. I never looked at guys like him as being bums or down on their luck. I looked at him as being bigger than me. It wasn’t like I was some big shot doing him a favor coming in; I was in awe to be there with him. I was just so happy to see him and touch him. When I went home that first night, I cried.
• • •
On January 8, 1990, I got aboard a plane to fly to Tokyo. Kicking and screaming. I didn’t want to fight; all I was interested in then was partying and fucking women. By the time we left, I had put on thirty pounds. King was so worried about my weight that he offered me a bonus if I would make my usual weight when we fought in a month.
I didn’t consider Buster Douglas much of a challenge. I didn’t even bother watching any of his fights on video. I had easily beaten everybody who had knocked him out. I saw him fight for the ESPN championship when I was on the undercard and he got beat by Jesse Ferguson, who I had knocked out in my first fight on ABC. I felt like my heroes Mickey Walker and Harry Greb. I read that Greb was so arrogant he’d tell his opponents that he hadn’t trained because “you are not worth me sweating for.” So I followed his lead. I didn’t train at all for the fight. Anthony Pitts was there with me and he would get up early in the morning and run with my sparring partner Greg Page. But I didn’t feel like it. Anthony would tell me that he’d see Buster out there, digging in with his army boots on, snotsicles hanging off his nose, getting in his run.
I couldn’t eat since I was overweight and I wanted to lose the weight and win the bonus from Don, so I drank the soup that was supposed to burn off fat. And then I had the cleaning ladies for the main course. It was ironic, because you go to Japan and the women seem so shy and introverted, but fortunately I ran into some unconventional Japanese ladies. People would ask me if I learned any sexual tips from the Japanese women, but I didn’t have time to learn. This was no sex education course; this was a guy trying to get his rocks off.
I didn’t even have to pay the maids to screw them. But I did tip them heavily because I had a lot of that Monopoly-looking money they had over there. They must have been appreciative because they’d come back and sometimes bring friends.
“My friend would like to meet you, Mr. Tyson, sir. She would like to accompany us, sir.”
Besides having sex with the maids, I was seeing this young Japanese girl who I had had sex with the last time I was in Japan for the Tony Tubbs fight. Robin would go out shopping and I would go upstairs in the stairwell with her.
I had her do the same thing this time. There were too many people on my floor and I didn’t want Don or Rory or John or Anthony to know my business. They might have scared her; she was very shy around people. In the two years since I had seen her, she had matured a great deal.
So that was my training for Douglas. Every once in a while, I did show up to work out and spar. I was sparring with Greg Page ten days before the fight and I walked right into a right hook and went down.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Greg asked me later.
A few days later, Don opened up one of my sparring sessions to the public for $60 a head. I never saw any of that money, of course. At the time, I didn’t even know he was charging people. We were supposed to spar for two rounds but I looked so bad that Aaron Snowell and Jay stopped it after one and closed the session. Don was pissed off. He wanted to make a buck. He had no idea I was so out of shape. Don knew nothing about fighting. He couldn’t tell the difference between a guy in shape or out of shape. He didn’t even know how to tie a boxing glove.
The day before the fight I weighed in at 220½ pounds, my heaviest fighting weight to date. But I still got my bonus. The day before the fight I also had two maids at the same time. And then two more girls, one at a time, the night before the fight.
I wasn’t following the story but apparently Douglas had a lot of motivation to do well in this fight. In July of 1989, he had been born-again. And then his wife left him, his baby momma got a terminal disease, and early in January while he was in camp his mother died. I didn’t know any of that and I didn’t care. HBO was making a big deal about Douglas fighting for his mother, but my arrogance at the time was such that I would have said that he was going to join her that night.
We fought at nine a.m. because of the time difference back in the United States. Half of the arena’s sixty-three thousand seats were empty. Don was a lousy promoter. As soon as I got with him, everything just sunk. He was a dark cloud.
It wasn’t the usual Tyson going into the ring. It was obvious to anyone who was watching that I really didn’t want to be there. The fight started and I fought horribly. I was punching as hard as shit because I knew if I caught him right he wasn’t going to get up, I didn’t care how big he was. But I was hardly throwing. It was the least amount of punches I’d ever thrown in a fight. He used his jab and his reach to throw me off my game and then when I tried to throw body shots, he just held me. He fought very well that night. But I was an easy target for him. I wasn’t moving my head at all.
He wasn’t intimidated by me. In fact, he was the one punching after the bell and on breaks. He was fighting dirty but that’s just part of boxing, everyone did that. After the third round, I went back to my corner and it was obvious that Aaron and Jay were in over their heads.
“You’re not closing the gap,” Aaron said. “You’ve got to get inside, you’re flat-footed in there.”
No fucking shit. Why don’t you try to get inside? The guy had a twelve-inch reach advantage on me.
“Get back to what you know,” Jay said. “Do it. Let it go.”
Easy to say when you’re not getting punched. I kept staring at the floor.
Douglas rocked me in the fourth and the fifth. During the fifth round, my eye began to swell, but when I went back to the corner, they didn’t even have the End-Swell to keep my eye open. I couldn’t believe it when they filled what looked like an extra-large condom with ice water and held it to my eye.
I was exhausted by the sixth round. My left eye was totally shut. But Buster looked tired too, especially when the seventh round began. But I couldn’t get to him. In the eighth he wobbled me and had me against the ropes in the last twenty seconds. I was looking for one punch by then. I was still rocked by his punches, I couldn’t focus but I saw an opening. For the whole fight he had eluded me whenever I saw openings and I couldn’t bridge the gap, but by then he was tired too and he couldn’t move. So I threw my trademark right uppercut and down he went.
Then I got screwed. The timekeeper was Japanese and the referee was Mexican and they spoke different languages and couldn’t coordinate the count. When the ref was saying “five,” Douglas had actually been on the canvas for eight seconds. So he got a long count. I had to take the short end of the stick. That’s just part of boxing but I think I was really screwed. The WBA was supposed to be on our side. I knew I was going to win because the guys I fought were fighting me and the
officials too, basically. Don always paid off the officials. At least that’s what he told me. Maybe he forgot to pay off the ref that night.
But I don’t want to take anything away from Buster. He had so much courage and guts that night. I had hit him with an awesome shot. Anybody else’s head would have been sent to the space shuttle if they had experienced that punch. I was so spent that I couldn’t follow up on the knockdown the next round. He came back strong. When the tenth began, I hit him with a straight right to the jaw but then he unleashed a barrage of punches at my head, starting with a right uppercut. I was so numb that I didn’t even feel the punches, but I could hear them. My equilibrium was shot. Then I went down.
When I hit the canvas, my mouthpiece came out and as the ref was counting, I was trying to stumble to my feet and grab the mouthpiece at the same time. I was operating on pure instinct. I was totally out of it. The ref hugged me after he counted to ten. I walked back to my corner totally dazed. I was chewing on my mouthpiece but I didn’t even know what it was.
“What happened?” I asked my corner.
“The ref counted you out, champ,” Aaron said.
I knew it was inevitable. I was fucked from early on that fight. I didn’t do the postfight interview with HBO, my head was still ringing. I must have had at least one concussion.
Within minutes Don had organized a meeting with the WBC and WBA officials. Then he called his own press conference.
“The first knockout obliterated the second knockout,” he ranted. Jose Sulaiman, the president of the WBC, suspended recognition of anyone as champion because the ref had failed to take the count from the timekeeper. The referee admitted that he had made a mistake. Sulaiman immediately called for a rematch. By then, I was conscious enough to join the press conference. I was wearing sunglasses to hide my mangled eye and holding a white compress to my swollen face.
“You guys know me for years, I never gripe or bitch. I knocked him out before he had me knocked out. I want to be champ of the world. That’s what all young boys want,” I said.
I went back to my hotel room. There was no maid there. It was weird not being the heavyweight champion of the world any longer. But in my mind it was a fluke. I knew that God didn’t pick on any small animals, that lightning only struck the biggest animals, that those are the only ones that vex God. Minor animals don’t get God upset. God has to keep the big animals in check so they won’t get lofty on their thrones. I just lay on my bed and thought that I had become so big that God was jealous of me.
8
It was a long flight back from Tokyo. My eye was still fucked up so I was wearing these big dark sunglasses that Anthony Pitts gave me. During the flight I talked to Anthony.
“So I guess you’re going to leave me now,” I said. The addict in me was saying “I’m doomed. My world is over.”
“Mike, I’ll never leave you,” he said. “You can’t fire me and I can’t quit so we’re stuck together. You watch, you’ll be all right when the swelling goes down.”
We went straight to Camille’s house when we landed. I’m a weird dude, I go right back to the basics. Home to my moms. The next morning Anthony got up at seven a.m., and when he went downstairs I was already doing sit-ups and push-ups.
“Oh, now you want to train? After the motherfucking fight,” he said.
“Man, I’m just trying to stay focused,” I said.
I talked to Camille later. She had been at the fight watching from the front row and she thought that I looked like I was in a daze.
“You didn’t throw any vicious punches,” she said. “You looked like you wanted to lose. Maybe you just got tired of it.”
She was probably right. I believed in the Cus theory that the only thing wrong with defeat is if nothing is learned from it. Cus always used to tell me that fighting is a metaphor for life. It doesn’t matter if you’re losing; it’s what you do after you lose. Are you going to stay down or get back up and try it again? Later I would tell people that my best fight ever was the Douglas fight because it proved that I could take my beating like a man and rebound.
So I hung out in Catskill and played with my pigeons and read about my heroes. How Tony Zale had come back from Rocky Graziano. How Joe Louis came back to demolish Max Schmeling. How Ali came back from exile. How Sugar Ray Robinson just bridled at seeing the word “former” in conjunction with his name. My narcissism started working again and I started thinking that I was from these guys’ bloodline. I knew that it was inevitable that I would get back those belts. I was going to go away to some destitute place and learn this masterful trade and come back and be better, like in all those great Shaw Brothers karate movies. Ain’t that some bullshit? I was just a sewage rat with delusions of grandeur.
Meanwhile, the whole boxing world was in turmoil. The day after the fight, every major newspaper abhorred the idea that Douglas wouldn’t be recognized as the new champ. As soon as he got back to the States, Jose Sulaiman recanted. And Don was reduced to begging for an immediate rematch. He was banking that Evander Holyfield, who was the mandatory challenger, would take a nice sum to step aside to let me fight a rematch. But Holyfield’s people knew that if Evander beat Buster, Don would be on the outside of the heavyweight picture looking in.
Then there were the reporters who couldn’t contain their glee that I had lost. That little slimy coward Mike Lupica from the New York Daily News saw me as some Satan figure.
“Someone who bounces women around and gives it in the back to his friends and turns his back on people who helped make him champion, making it seem as if dogs have more loyalty than he does . . . Tyson was some kind of savage, on whom the culture bestows all that is normal, only for him to reject the gifts and the givers, and revert to life on the instinctual level. The only end for such a man is death.”
Woooo! I loved that shit.
I picked up on that sentiment in an interview I did with ESPN. They asked me why everyone was so fascinated with my life.
“I believe a lot of people want to see me self-destruct. They want to see me one day with handcuffs and walking in the police car or else going to jail. Like you’ve seen Marlon Brando’s son. People love saying, ‘This is what I told you, I told you he was heading for that.’ But I’m not in jail and I’m not in Brownsville anymore and I beat all the odds.”
Don had me do a few press conferences and I tried to put on the best face I could but my honesty kept getting in the way.
“Nobody’s invincible,” I told them. “Sometimes the guy just breaks your will in a way. Buster kicked my butt. I didn’t train for that fight. I didn’t take the fight serious. I was fucking those Japanese girls like I was eating grapes. You’d thought I was Caligula when I was out there in Japan.”
In L.A., I cracked up the press when I told them how I watched the fight on tape back home.
“I sit there and I tell myself, ‘Hey, man, duck!’ But on the screen, I don’t duck. I scream, ‘Duck, you dummy!’ But the dummy don’t listen to me.”
A reporter asked me if I felt suicidal after losing the belt.
“Hey! I got lots of money to spend before I kill myself. You have to deal with things like this every day. Did I cry? I wish I could cry! The last time I cried was when I got my divorce. That’s when you cry. Actually, can I tell you something? It was a relief, is what it was. It was a relief of a lot of pressure.”
The divorce really fucked me up. I wouldn’t want to ever tell anybody that now, so for me to say that then means I must have still been fucked up about it.
People were trying to make excuses for me, but I wasn’t buying it. Even Larry Merchant, who was not always respectful to me, tried to blame the loss on my eye closing up when he interviewed me for an HBO special a week after the fight.
“You have another eye. Use that one. You fight to the finish,” I said. “My heart was still beating.”
When I got back from L.A.,
I went straight to my refuge in Catskill. Except now half the world was going up there looking to interview me. You’d see reporters from Brazil, England, Scandinavia, Japan hanging out in Catskill and Albany, going to the places I frequented like September’s. They’d ring Camille’s door and she’d fight with them.
“You don’t come here anymore, you leave him alone, he’s just a little baby!” she yelled. “You should feel ashamed of yourself.”
Buster Douglas won the fight but no one was paying any attention to him, people were looking for me. They even made a dance video of my knockout and me fumbling for my mouthpiece. It was ironic. I subconsciously wanted to lose to get out of that pressure cooker but not even that worked.
“Now I can’t quit, I’m a whore to the game,” I told one reporter. “Now I have to prove something. In fact, now I wonder sometimes if I’m not bigger than I was before because I lost.”
In the midst of all this confusion, my sister died. She was the only person who wasn’t afraid to put me in deep check. She was always my protector, even right until she died. She was pretty obese and her husband told me that she had been doing cocaine the night before. I really hope that she wasn’t doing it because she was depressed about me. I had a long phone conversation with her the night before she died.
“Go talk to your father,” she said. “And please get your eye checked out.”
She was always close to Jimmy, our biological dad. She wanted us to start having a relationship. My sister was something. I’d try to give her money but she didn’t like to take my money. She was really comfortable with her ghetto life. She never sweated me for anything.
I was sad when she died, but by then I had become accustomed to death and understood it implicitly. We had her funeral in Brooklyn and the Reverend Al Sharpton presided over it. We would make fun of Reverend Al and tease him about being fat and his big hairdo but he was a giant hero in our community. We were proud of him. You saw where he came from and you knew where he was then and you’d have to say it was a miracle. I saw a documentary on PBS the other night about the history of Broadway and they had Milton Berle talking about growing up poor in Brooklyn. He said that having a humble shitty-paying job wasn’t failing. Going back to Williamsburg and Brownsville, that was failing. That cut me right to my soul.
