by Mike Tyson
I had to go visit my friends in Brownsville after I lost the title. I really didn’t want to go back with my tail between my legs but my friends were wonderful. It was all love. I hung out a lot with my friend Jackie Rowe. She and I used to hustle together when I was a kid. Me and my friends would rob a place and then go to Jackie’s house to split the money up. Jackie was a big, brash, in-your-face person, kind of like my sister. In fact, after Niecey died she began to call herself my sister.
Despite thinking that the gods wanted me to get my belt back, I was sad and embarrassed and doubting myself after my loss. Jackie was always upbeat.
“Are you crazy, motherfucker?” she’d yell at me. “Do you know who you are? It was one fight, Mike. You lost. Big deal. Let’s move on. You’re the best.”
“Do you think so?” I’d say.
“Yes, I know so. You just didn’t follow protocol; you just didn’t do what you were supposed to do.”
“You’re right, you’re right,” I said.
I’d visit Jackie and park outside her apartment, which was in one of the city housing projects. I’d just chill at her house and Jackie would go out and get me my favorite food. I’d hang out her window calling to girls. They’d look up and do a double take.
“That can’t be Mike Tyson. Is that Mike Tyson? Mike! Mike!”
When the word got out, so many people rushed out that they had to put police tape around my Ferrari and cordon off the whole block.
Sometimes Jackie took me up to Harlem and people would go crazy.
“You’re still the greatest, champ,” they’d yell out. “You can do it again!”
I definitely got some reassurance by being around all these people and seeing that I was still loved.
Don had signed me to make my comeback in Vegas on June 16, 1990, fighting Henry Tillman. I started training in New York before we went out to Vegas. My buttocks-grabbing case was winding down and I’d go to court and then go train. Emile Griffith, the former world champion, was working with some fighters at the gym I was training at. One day he said something that just rocked me to my bones and made me finally forget about my loss to Douglas.
I was talking to him about that Douglas fight.
“Yeah, I really didn’t do that well, huh?” I said.
“I know the great Mike Tyson is not going to let something like this discourage him,” Mr. Griffith said.
Oh, man. Those few words completely changed my opinion of myself and my comeback. Isn’t that crazy? Just hearing those words made me forget about the loss and think I was champion again. Once he said that, I was back.
We had two new additions to Team Tyson. Don had hired Richie Giachetti as my new head trainer. And I had my first child with this woman Natalie Fears, a son that I named D’Amato.
In mid-April we relocated to Vegas to train. I jumped into it like a maniac. Up at four a.m. to run, working out at the gym, sparring in the afternoon, then riding a bike for two hours at the Las Vegas Athletic Club. George Foreman was fighting on my undercard and he had an interesting thing to say about losing a title.
“You are ashamed to see everybody, especially the skycaps at the airport. You don’t want to see the taxi drivers because everybody is going to say something, in your mind. And you have to build yourself up, so you start spending billions of dollars on cars, suits, anything you can to make yourself look like the best in the world. Mike Tyson will never sleep again until he gets a chance to fight for the title again and win it. He’ll never sleep again until he redeems himself. I hate to see a young man go through that, but that is the way that it is.”
I didn’t necessarily agree with George then. I was such a megalomaniac that I knew that it was foreordained that I’d win the belt back. I just knew that I had to train.
The night of the Tillman fight I was primed. I’m fighting the guy who beat me in the amateurs. It was a great comeback story. The guy goes down and I’d get revamped.
Even though he was an Olympic gold medalist and had a respectable 20-4 record, the odds were 1–2 for a first-round knockout.
I obliged the oddsmakers. At the very beginning of the fight, I took a heavy right from him and it didn’t even faze me. I slowed him up with a huge right to the body and then finally caught him with an overhead right to his temple with twenty-four seconds left in the round. He was out on his back. I really didn’t want to hurt Henry. I wanted to get it over with real quick. I liked him a lot and I was just glad he got a nice payday. Tillman was one of those fighters who was really great but just didn’t have confidence in himself. If he had believed in himself, he would have been a legendary fighter; he would have been in the Hall of Fame.
At the postfight press conference Don was being Don.
“He’s back, he is Mighty Mike Tyson,” he yelled.
I yanked his arm and told him to shut up.
“You know you are back,” Don said.
I talked a little bit about the fight and gave Henry some props but I wanted to talk about my baby boy.
“He’s so gorgeous. He’s six weeks old and twelve pounds. He can already sit up! I live for my son.”
A few months after the fight, my buttocks case finally came to a conclusion. I was convicted of battery and, to assess damages, her attorneys made us file a statement of my assets. Don’s attorney filed it and we found out that Don still owed me $2 million from the Tokyo fight. According to what was filed I had assets of $2.3 million in cash, the Jersey house that was worth $6.2 million, my Ohio house, and about a million and a half in cars and jewelry. My assets totaled $15 million but with all my purses I should have had a lot more. I didn’t know if they were cooking the books for the trial or if I was getting ripped off. Either way the damages the jury awarded to that woman were a bit short of the million dollars they were asking for. They gave her $100. When I heard that verdict, I stood up in court, pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of my pocket, licked it, and pasted it to my forehead. I guess she didn’t want to take cash.
My next comeback fight was supposed to have taken place in Atlantic City on September twenty-second. I was going to fight Alex Stewart. Stewart was a former Jamaican Olympiad who started his career with twenty-four straight knockouts. His only loss was an eighth-round TKO by Evander Holyfield, a fight that he was dominating until he got cut and Holyfield went to work on that cut. During camp, I got a cut over my eye and I needed forty-eight stitches to close it so the fight was postponed until December eighth.
Meanwhile, HBO was pressing to re-sign me. Seth Abraham thought he had reached a deal with Don for a ten-fight extension for $85 million but then Don backed out of it. He claimed that the reason he backed out was because he didn’t want Larry Merchant doing my fights, because Merchant would always talk shit about me. After the Stewart fight Don used that excuse to move to Showtime. I thought that the Showtime deal was better, but later I would learn that it was better for Don not me.
While I waited to fight Stewart, Buster Douglas defended his title against Evander Holyfield. I knew Holyfield would win. Douglas went in way overweight and Holyfield was the better fighter. Douglas just quit. He got hit a little and laid down. He was a whore for his $17 million. He didn’t go into the fight with any dignity or pride to defend his belt. He made his payday but he lost his honor. You can’t win honor, you can only lose it. Guys like him who only fight for money can never become legends. I can tell that it still affects Buster to this day. Years later, I ran into him again at an autograph session we both attended. No one wanted his autograph. This was the guy who made history for beating me but now his legacy had been reduced to nothing.
The next night after his win, Holyfield announced that he would defend his title against George Foreman. That pissed me off. Everybody wanted to put me down, overshadow me, but they couldn’t. I was still the biggest star in the boxing world, bigger than any of them without a belt.
Stewart and I
finally squared off on December eighth in Atlantic City. HBO was so intent on re-signing me that they even hired Spike Lee to do the prefight introduction film segment just to placate me. I decided to talk some shit on film with Spike and make people mad.
“Everything is totally against us,” I said. “Don and I are two black guys from the ghetto and we hustle and they don’t like what we’re saying. We’re not like prejudiced anti-white, we are just pro-black.”
I didn’t take that shit seriously. I was just having fun fucking around.
“They’re always changing rules when black folks come into success, black success is unacceptable,” Don said. When HBO screened the segment for reporters, they were disgusted. Mission accomplished.
But I was paying a price for my association with Don. Hugh McIlvanney, a famous Scottish sportswriter, had blamed my losing to Douglas on my relationship with King.
“Of all the contributing factors in Tyson’s downfall, most damaging of all, perhaps, has been his alliance with Don King, who has precipitated decay in practically every fighter with whom he has been associated.”
He was absolutely right. Don was very toxic. His presence was offensive. He did it on purpose. Everybody blackballed me once I got involved with him. He gave me free reign to indulge my childish behavior and people saw that I wasn’t trying to get away from him, so they blocked everything I tried to do.
At the prefight press conference, I sounded crazy.
“I am a champion. Being a champion is a frame of mind. I’m always going to be champion. Being happy is just a feeling like when you are hungry or thirsty. When people say that you are happy, that’s just a word somebody gave you to describe a feeling. When I decided to accomplish my goals, I gave up all means of even thinking of being happy.”
I am not a happy camper. I just wasn’t built that way.
I must have liked fighting at Trump’s casino in Atlantic City. That was my third fight there and my third first-round knockout. I hit Stewart four seconds into the fight with my right hand and he went down. Then I stalked him around the ring and floored him again with a right. I was pretty wild and at one point I even missed and fell to the canvas. But I finally cornered him and knocked him down with a left with thirty-three seconds left in the round. The three-knockdown rule was in effect, so they stopped the fight.
When they finished examining Stewart, I went out to him and hugged him.
“Don’t be discouraged. You’re a good fighter. Remember I got beat by a bum.”
On my way out of the ring, Jim Lampley, the play-by-play announcer for HBO, asked me a few questions. The last two fights, I had refused to talk to Larry Merchant when the fight was over.
“I’d like to thank all my fans watching on HBO for supporting me all these years,” I interjected. “This is my last fight for HBO because I think that they’d rather see Holyfield than me.”
The new sensation in the heavyweight ranks was a Canadian boxer named Razor Ruddock. He had fought Michael Dokes in April of 1990 and the tapes of that knockout were circulating throughout the boxing world. I finally saw the tape when Alex Wallau of ABC Sports showed me a copy.
Dokes was ahead during the fight and then, boom, Ruddock hit him with one punch and knocked him cold. It was a very frightening, gut-wrenching, breathtaking KO.
“What do you think?” Alex asked me.
Since I was a palooka in the art of manipulation, I laid back and stayed cool.
“What about it? I’m not Michael Dokes. He’s going to be a quick knockout, he’s nothing.”
But with Holyfield signed to fight Foreman, I had to keep busy. So Don signed me to fight Ruddock in Vegas on March 18, 1991.
Fuck, these people are trying to kill me out here. They’re sending the big guns out to get me, I thought.
I started training hard in early January. I had Tom Patti, my old housemate when Cus was around, in my camp. We were watching TV one night and one of Ruddock’s fights came on and I saw a flaw in Ruddock.
“I’m going to kill this guy,” I told Tom.
I knew that Ruddock was a dangerous puncher, but I also saw that I’d be too elusive for him. He wouldn’t be able to hit me solidly.
We almost started the fight a few days before it was scheduled at the prefight press conference at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. We were doing the face-off for the photographers and I told Ruddock that I was going to make him my bitch. Razor tried to approach me like a tough guy and Anthony Pitts pushed him back. I said, “No, no. Let him come closer to express himself better.” I knew I could beat him in a street fight. Razor’s bodyguards wanted to step up but it was squashed.
So we went to the airport for the plane back to Vegas. Turned out that Razor and his crew were on the same flight. When we got there, Rory forgot his phone in the car so Anthony went to get it from Isadore, our driver. When Anthony was on his way back, he started walking down the steps and Ruddock’s people were walking up the steps and they blocked off Ant.
Ruddock had twin bodyguards and one of them, Kevin Ali, said, “Oh, you think you’re bad?” He showed Anthony his walkie-talkie. “You see what these are for?” So he stepped up on Anthony and Anthony popped him. But Isadore saw there was a fracas and he ran up the stairs and grabbed Anthony.
“Isadore, why are you grabbing me?” Anthony said. “Grab one of these motherfuckers.”
By then, airport security had broken up the fight. When Anthony returned to the waiting area, he told me what had gone down. When we got on the plane, I saw that they were supposed to be sitting behind us, so I moved my guys to the back of the plane. The whole flight I was flinging grapes at Ruddock. Just to be safe, we called ahead and had our whole crew, the training camp, the sparring partners, everyone, meet us at the airport in case something went down. But nothing happened.
When we got to the Mirage the night of the fight, they had us in facing dressing rooms and Kevin Ali started trash-talking Anthony.
“Yo, man, let me tell you something,” Anthony said. “I don’t smoke, but I will smoke your whole fucking family, you, your brother, your mother, I’ll kill all you motherfuckers, I don’t give a fuck.”
John Horne heard Anthony hollering and he pulled him aside.
“Yo, man, you don’t go inside the ring tonight,” he said. “You stay outside the ring. Because if Mike wins this fight, I know these motherfuckers are going to start something, so you be aware.”
It was a chilly night in Vegas and we were fighting outdoors in front of a huge crowd of sixteen thousand people. I wore a green-and-white-striped sweat suit and a ski cap into the ring. I was the first boxer to wear urban clothes into the ring.
Ruddock looked nervous and was hyperventilating. He was in with the big boys now. I knew he was going to come right at me, he was so nervous. A few seconds into the fight, I rocked him with a right hand. He came back with some hard punches but I was just too elusive for him. In the second, he went down from a left but it was a glancing blow, it looked like his leg got tangled up with mine, but my vicious body attack had slowed him to a standstill. He couldn’t hit me with hard punches, and by the third round he was pretty much holding on for dear life. I managed to get in a vicious left-hook counterpunch with ten seconds to go in the round and he went down.
I was winning every round. In the sixth, he suddenly seemed to wake up and hit me with a flurry of hard punches. I shook my head at him. He hit me with a right to the jaw and I tapped my jaw and dared him to throw again. Me taking those punches with impunity must have demoralized him because I came out in the seventh and stunned him with a left hook to the jaw. Four more punches and he was stumbling back into the ropes. But Richard Steele jumped in and stopped the fight without Ruddock even going down. I thought the stoppage was premature, although one more punch and he would have been down.
Before I knew it, I was in the middle of a riot. Murad Muhammad, Razor’
s manager, got my trainer Richie on the floor and was kicking him in the head. Jay Bright pulled me over to a corner and we watched the rumble. By then, Anthony Pitts had come into the ring and he saw Kevin Ali charging across the ring and Ant cracked him with a right. Then Razor’s brother Delroy tried to hit Anthony, but Anthony grabbed him and was about to throw him over the ropes out of the ring but security grabbed his arm. So Delroy was up in the air, pushed up against the rope, and he had his arm hanging down, trying to catch himself. While this was happening, my friend Greg snatched Kevin Ali’s Rolex and then went into his pocket to see what else he could get. It was a crazy scene.
There was a lot of controversy about the quick ending, so we decided to give Ruddock a rematch. We were at Don’s office on East Sixty-ninth Street in Manhattan, working out the details of the second fight. Don and Rory and John were upstairs, but I was chilling downstairs with Anthony because I was chatting with Don’s cute little receptionist who I was sleeping with. All of a sudden, Kevin Ali walked in. Kevin was a good Muslim brother but some Muslim brothers take their Muslim thing and bring it with them everywhere they go, fighting, eating, everywhere. So Kevin looked at me and said, “Oh, most beautiful champion. Great fight. I have to give you much respect. You’re a true warrior.” Then he pointed towards Anthony and said, “But I’m gonna kill him.”
“Yo, man, I’m standing right here, motherfucker,” Anthony said. “Don’t send no messages to nobody for me. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”
“We’re going to have to do this and what we do is, do or die. We could do this shit right now,” Kevin said.
“That was just work, that’s over, let that shit go.” I tried to defuse the situation.
