by Mike Tyson
“Obviously, I was unaware of Mike’s visit to Cuba. To the extent that Mike was there for a statutorily exempt purpose, or to the extent that Mike’s Cuba-related expenses were covered by a person not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and that Mike provided no service to Cuba or a Cuban national, we should attempt to confirm this as soon as possible.
“Lastly, it is my strong advice that Mike cease from making any additional statements regarding his travel to Cuba. Specifically, I was contacted by Tom Farrey of ESPN who purported to have numerous photos and quotes related to Mike’s travels. Apparently, Mike is alleged to have stated that he was there as a tourist and to support the ‘people’ of Cuba. We refused to confirm that Mike was in Cuba. The bottom line is that Mike should not travel to a foreign country without first consulting legal counsel. This is particularly true given his status as a felon and a registered sex offender.”
Darrow was always there for me. Nothing ever came out of that Cuba trip.
But right after I got back, Monica filed for divorce. I guess she had had enough of my fooling around, because I sure did a lot of it. Calling to tell her that I had AIDS probably didn’t help either. And the fact that I had just had a baby boy with this stripper in Phoenix was icing on the cake. I couldn’t blame Monica. What kind of marriage was it where I could fuck five different girls a night and then just send her money? I don’t know if we were ever in love.
I had met my baby momma Shelley at a strip club in Phoenix. I really liked Shelley. She kept her house immaculate and she did a lot of stuff with me. She was a fitness freak, so when I’d work out and go run, she’d run with me. I’d run five miles, she’d run ten. She’d always one-up me. One time, my assistant Darryl and I were throwing around a fifteen-pound medicine ball and Shelley got in on the action. She and I threw the ball two hundred fifty times and I got sore, but she kept on throwing it with Darryl. This ninety-pound Mexican chick must have done five hundred throws. She wore our asses down.
Shelley tried to work on our relationship. She’d talk to Hope and get tips from her on how to keep me happy. When she got pregnant with Miguel, I had no idea how I could take care of another kid. I was broke and in debt by then. She kept saying she was going to get an abortion, but she didn’t.
The Lewis fight was scheduled for April so I didn’t have much time to stop doing coke and weed and start training in earnest. I was still high on coke when I flew to New York to do a big press conference with Lennox on January twenty-second. They had us facing each other on slightly elevated platforms on one big stage at the Hudson Theatre. The Showtime announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr. introduced each of us like it was a real fight. As soon as Lewis was announced, I lost my mind. I looked over at him and wanted to hit the motherfucker. So I got off my platform and went up in his face. I guess Lewis was expecting trouble because he had about ten huge forest-tree-looking motherfuckers hiding in the wings, so as soon as I did that, they all came rushing out. I was only there with a few of my bodyguards, Anthony and Rick and my trainers and also Shelly Finkel. The Lewis camp must have thought that we’d see these big guys and run.
I moved up to get in Lewis’s face and one of his bodyguards pushed me back, so I threw a left hook at him. Lewis then threw a right at me and Anthony threw one back at Lennox and all hell broke loose. I found myself down on the ground with Lennox, but he was so tall that when we went down, I didn’t fall by his head; I was down by his leg. So I bit him on the thigh. He said that he had my teeth imprints for a while after that.
They pulled us apart and I couldn’t get near him but I saw his bodyguard who pushed me so I spit right in his face. Anthony told me that I was so filled with rage that I picked up a fire extinguisher and threatened to hit Ant with it.
“Mike, you ain’t going to hit me with that,” he said to me. “I ain’t even worried because I love you, you love me. Put the fire extinguisher down and let’s get the fuck out of here,” he told me.
But first I had to preen in front of the stage where all the reporters were assembled. I put my arms in the air to show off my biceps and then I grabbed my crotch.
“Put him in a straitjacket,” someone yelled out.
“Put your mother in a straitjacket you punk-assed white boy. Come here and tell me that. I’ll fuck you in your ass you punk white boy,” I screamed.
“You faggot. You can’t touch me, you’re not man enough. I’ll eat your asshole alive, you bitch. Nobody in here can fuck with me. This is the ultimate man. Fuck you, you ho.”
Shelly Finkel was trying to restrain me, but I shrugged him off.
“Come and say it in my face. I’ll fuck you in your ass in front of everybody. Come on, you bitch, you scared coward. You are not man enough to fuck with me. You can’t last two minutes in my world, bitch. Look at you scared now, you ho. Scared like a little white pussy. Scared of the real man. I’ll fuck you until you love me, faggot!”
That was the audacity that Cus had instilled in me. But it was also me talking like my momma. She would curse just like that. I feel bad now about saying that to that writer. I was out of my mind coming down off my high.
After the press conference I went out to see my pigeons in Brooklyn with a friend of mine named Zip. He was really concerned.
“What the fuck are you doing, Mike? You’re going to blow all this fucking money,” he told me. “You’re up there acting like a nigga. They could arrest you.”
“What did I do? They attacked me first,” I said.
“Not Lewis. I heard you threaten somebody’s life. If that reporter gets scared, they can put charges on you, man. Are you fucking crazy? That’s almost a terrorist threat. You’re a scary motherfucker, Mike. You may not be to us, but to them you’re scary.”
Then we flew some birds and smoked some weed and I did some coke.
“You’re fucking up, Mike,” he told me again. “Why are you doing this shit? Why are you out here fucking with these pigeons? Go back and train, man. We should be out near a beach on a yacht. Just train and fight, Mike.”
On January twenty-second, the same day that I was in New York for the Lewis press conference, the Las Vegas Police Department said that they found evidence in the raid on my house supporting the woman’s claim that she was raped and held hostage. Now they could only wait to see if the D.A. would bring charges against me.
Meantime, Darrow Soll had gone to work. He got affidavits from all the people who had seen this woman in the house. He called up all the maids, the landscapers, the plant waterers, everybody who had seen her. They all testified that the young lady was more than pleased to be there, walking around the place of her own free will with nothing on but a T-shirt.
By then, the girl had recanted and she went to my friend Mack and told him that she had been pressured by both the police and her boyfriend to file charges. Her stepfather had also told Mack that she had lied.
I was at the barbershop one day when a black lady who worked for the FBI came in for some work on her eyebrows.
When she saw me, she said, “I’ve watched your work on tape and you look very good.”
It took me a second to realize that she was referring to my private sex tapes that the cops had confiscated from my house.
“Umm, mmm, mmm,” she said. “You are something else, boy.”
Thanks to Darrow, the whole thing was shut down. The D.A.’s office stood up to the cops and after seeing the so-called evidence the cops presented, they decided not to bring charges against me. Meanwhile, my name had been dragged through the mud again for no reason.
Because of the fracas at the Lewis press conference, the Nevada officials voted 4–1 to deny me a license to fight there. Why was everything my fault? At Lewis’s last press conference, during an interview segment for ESPN, he and Hasim Rahman had a knockdown brawl on the air that was much worse than the little scuffle we had in New York. But now they had to find a new venue and the fight was postponed u
ntil June. Which gave me more time to get high.
In February, a state senator in Texas said that I should be arrested if I went back to Texas because I didn’t register as a sex offender when I trained in San Antonio in 2001.
It was bullshit; I had registered, but why let facts get in the way? When we announced that the fight would be held in Memphis, officials in both Tennessee and Mississippi announced that I had to register as a sex offender before the fight. Why was I such a pariah in my own country? Overseas, the people knew what time it was. Whenever I went abroad, especially in former Communist countries, I was treated like a hero.
I went to Hawaii for my training camp. That should give you some indication of how much I was motivated for this fight. The epicenter of some of the baddest weed in the world was there. I was smoking my brains out. Even the prospect of getting the belt back didn’t mean much to me by then. I just wasn’t focused at all.
I was obviously fucked up then, big-time. That’s why I was doing weed. And the residue of coke doesn’t leave your system right away, especially psychologically. All that Maui Wowie made for some interesting press conferences. In one of the most serene places in the world, I met with the press and started ranting about hypocrisy in society.
“I’m just like you. I enjoy the forbidden fruits in life too. I think its un-American not to go out with a woman, not to be with a beautiful woman, not to get my dick sucked. . . . It’s just what I said before, everybody in this country is a big fucking liar. The media tells people . . . that this person did this and this person did that and then we find out that we’re just human and we find out that Michael Jordan cheats on his wife just like everybody else. We all cheat on our fucking wife in one way or another, either emotionally, physically, or sexually. There’s no one perfect. We’re always gonna do that. Jimmy Swaggart is lascivious, Tyson is lascivious, but we’re not criminally, at least I’m not, criminally lascivious. I may like to fornicate more than other people—it’s just who I am. I sacrificed so much of my life, can I at least get laid? I mean, I been robbed of most of my money, can I at least get head without the people wanting to harass me and wanting to throw me in jail?
“I’m a big strong nigga that knocks out people and rapes people and rips off people. I don’t know nothing about being the heavyweight champion, the only thing I know is how to fight. I am a nigga, right? No, really, really, really, I’m not saying like I’m a black person, I am a street person. I don’t even want to be a street person, I don’t even like typical street people. But that is just who I became and what happened to my life and the tragedies in life that made me that way. The pimps, the hos, the players, the people who have been cast aside, the people who have been lied to, the people who have been falsely accused, the people who were on death row and killed for crimes they never committed. Those are my people. I know it sounds disgusting. Those are the only people who showed me love.
“But I’m Mike, I’m not malevolent or anything, I just am. And I just want to live my life and I know you guys talk some bad stigma out there about me, but you know I’m going to make sure you talk about me, and your grandkids and kids after that are going to know about me. I am going to make sure of that. They are never going to forget about me. Your great-grandkids are going to say, ‘Wow, wasn’t that a bizarre individual?’
“I feel sometimes that I was not meant for this society because everyone here is a fucking hypocrite. Everybody says they believe in God but they don’t do God’s work. Everybody counteracts what God is really about. If Jesus was here, do you think Jesus would show me any love? I’m a Muslim, but do you think Jesus would love me? I think Jesus would have a drink with me and discuss ‘Why are you acting like that?’ Now, he would be cool. He would talk to me. No Christian ever did that. They’d throw me in jail and write bad articles about me and then go to church on Sunday and say Jesus is a wonderful man and he’s coming back to save us. But they don’t understand that when he comes back, these crazy, greedy capitalistic men are gonna kill him again.”
What was I, Lenny Bruce now? These reporters were sitting there taking all this down, parsing every word to get to the true essence of me, but what was so obvious was that this was the Maui weed talking. I was stoned out of my mind. End of story.
I did a ton of crazy interviews, and they culminated with my appearance on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox. Rita Cosby interviewed me. She was combative, asking me the most outrageous questions just to get me to say something crazy so that O’Reilly could go ballistic and take something I said out of context and put me down.
“Are you an animal?” Cosby asked me during the interview.
“If necessary. It depends on what situation am I in to be an animal . . . If I’m fighting because I’m constantly being assailed against by your cohorts or people in the street because they feel that they have the right to assail me because of what people write in the papers, because of the courts, then you’re correct and you’re right.” I told her that I would tell my kids that they were niggas and that “this society will treat you like a second-class citizen for the rest of your life, so there are certain things that you must not get upset for. But, you must fight.”
“Are you evil?” she asked.
“I think I’m capable of evil like everyone else.”
She also seemed to enjoy asking me about my financial state.
“I do need the money. That’s why it’s called ‘money’—because we all need it. It’s our god. It’s what we worship, and, if anybody tells me anything different, they’re a liar. Stop working, just live on the street and show me how much God’s going to take care of you.”
“Where does the rage come from?” she finally asked me.
“You’re so white. Where does that rage come from?” I replied.
Lennox and I fought in Memphis on June eighth. Wherever that rage had come from, by then it was gone, even despite the fact that on the day of the fight, Monica served me with more divorce papers. Besides getting served, I was being sued up the ass by everybody. I had my little baby boy there with me because his mother had flipped on me so I was taking care of him. I was a mess. But still, my dressing room before the fight had a party atmosphere. It was packed with people. I’d never kissed babies or laughed or posed for pictures before a fight when Cus was around, but that was what was going on that night.
Shelly had gotten rid of Crocodile and Tommy Brooks and they had brought in a new trainer, Ronnie Shields. Crocodile came to the fight and stopped in to see me before it began. I grabbed him tight and hugged him.
“Croc, I’m so tired,” I said. “I’m so tired.”
When they were making the introductions in the ring, they cut it in half with twenty yellow-shirted security guards who formed a wall between me and Lennox. The fight started and I was aggressive in the first round, stalking him around the ring and making him hold me so much that the referee had to warn him. But after that round, something strange happened. I just stopped fighting. It was as if my mind had shut down. Ronnie Shields and my other trainer Stacy McKinley were shouting instructions at the same time, but I didn’t hear a word either of them said.
It was very hot in the arena and I got dehydrated. I couldn’t seem to start. As the rounds progressed, I stood there in front of him and got hit. I knew I wasn’t in any condition to beat anybody, especially a fighter of Lennox’s superb skill level. I had only fought nineteen rounds in the past five years. All those years of snorting coke and drinking and smoking weed and screwing around with massive amounts of women had finally taken their toll.
A lot of my close friends and associates thought that I had been drugged during the fight, I seemed so passive. I was in a fucked-up mood and it was hard for me to throw punches. It was as if all those heroes, those boxing gods, those old-time fighters had deserted me. Or I had deserted them. All of my heroes were truly miserable bastards, and I emulated them my whole career, a hundred percent, but I was
never really one of those guys. I wish I was, but I wasn’t.
By then I had spent years in therapy with different psychiatrists and the whole purpose of my therapy was to curb all my appetites, including my appetite for destruction, the one that had made me Iron Mike. Iron Mike had brought me too much pain, too many lawsuits, too much hate from the public, the stigma that I was a rapist, that I was public enemy #1. Each punch I took from Lewis in the later rounds chipped away at that pose, that persona. And I was a willing participant in its destruction.
It went eight rounds and I got tagged with a solid right hand and I went down. I was bleeding from cuts over both of my eyes and from my nose. The ref counted me out. Jim Gray interviewed both of us at the same time after the fight. During the interview, Emanuel Steward, Lennox’s trainer, interrupted Gray.
“I’m still one of Mike’s biggest fans,” he said. “He’s given me so many thrills, going back to Roderick Moore. You’ve given all of us a lot of excitement. He’s the most exciting heavyweight in the last fifty years.”
“How sorry are you guys that this fight didn’t occur many years ago when you, Mike, were at your best and you, Lennox, weren’t quite as old either?” Gray asked.
Lennox was starting to answer and I wiped some of the blood off his cheek.
He said, “Heavyweights mature at different times. Mike Tyson was a natural at nineteen. Nothing stood in his way and he ruled the planet at that time. But I’m like fine wine. I came along later and I took my time and I’m ruling now.”
