Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (30 page)

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 G 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.

“No, champ, I can’t let that go, I gotta do this,” Ali said.

So he put his briefcase and his coat down and, boom, Anthony cracked him with one punch. They were fighting by the stairs and Don had a wall divider that blocked off the stairs, so I didn’t actually see Kevin go down, but it was like in a cartoon, you heard him go boom, boom, boom, down each step. Then he flew back up like he was a superhero and they went at it again. My friend Greg walked in drinking a bottle of soda and he saw Anthony and Kevin going at it so he clocked Kevin in the head with his bottle. Kevin went down and Greg started going through his pockets.

“No, Greg, we can’t do that shit here,” I said. “You need some money, nigga? We can’t rob motherfuckers.”

All this commotion made Don and John and Rory come down the stairs to see what was happening. Ali had gotten up and he claimed that Anthony had sucker-punched him.

“That’s bullshit,” I said. “Ant was just in there chilling, this motherfucker came in threatening Anthony. Ant just defended himself.”

Don kicked Kevin Ali out of the office and Kevin went outside and started pacing up and down in front of the townhouse. When we left, we saw Ali there. Our driver at the time was Captain Joe, a forefather in the Nation of Islam. He knew the Ali twins. Ali wanted to resume the fight but I told him that it was Ramadan and it was a time of peace.

“Mike, this is a man thing,” Captain Joe said. “He can’t be in peace with Ramadan until he has peace with himself. He has to settle this.”

“Do you want to do this?” Ali asked Anthony.

“Hell, yeah. You said do or die.”

The two went at it outside on the sidewalk like Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. Anthony finally connected and dropped Ali. He hit the ground and Anthony drop-kicked him twice to the head. He was about to do it a third time when Rory grabbed him.

“You’re going to kill him, man,” Rory said.

“That’s the whole motherfucking idea,” Ant said. “He said ‘do or die.’ ”

It was time to go to the movie. Anthony stepped over Kevin and we got in the car and split. Just then, Al Braverman, a legendary trainer who worked for Don, walked up to the office entrance. He saw Ali lying there unconscious and ran into the office and got some paper towels and water and cleaned him up and revived him. They called for an ambulance and that was the end of that.

The rematch was set for June twenty-eighth. I had some time off before we went to camp, so I drove my black Lamborghini Diablo from New York to Ohio and did some sightseeing. Then it was back to Vegas to train. Richie had put me on a strict regimen that included a seven p.m. curfew so I was rested for my six-mile run at five a.m. I was so bored. Most of the time when I wasn’t training, I would watch cartoons. Then Don would come storming into the room.