Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (39 page)

That bag had been there for over a week. I had had a rough night in the city and had forgotten where I had left it. Every time Latondia would bring my clothes to the cleaners in Vegas, she would come back with plastic sealed envelopes containing priceless bracelets or $20,000 in cash that I would have left in my pockets before the clothes were sent out. When it came to money, I wasn’t such a big details guy.

But my most over-the-top spending was when I decided that I should buy some tiger and lion cubs. I was still in jail when I was talking to my car dealer, Tony. I was anxious to find out what new cars were coming out when Tony told me that he was thinking about getting a tiger or a lion and drive around with it in his Ferrari.

“Hey, I want a tiger,” I said.

Tony got the word out and Anthony Pitts heard about it and the next thing I knew as soon as I got home to Ohio from prison there were four cubs on my lawn. I was fascinated with them. I played with them a lot and I soon realized that they didn’t have the same personality as our common cat house pets. They’d get finicky and pissed off when you played with them too much. You had to learn their behavioral characteristics because in a few short years they’d be seven feet tall, weigh over four hundred pounds, and could stand up on their hind legs and break the top of my skull off with a swipe of their paw.

I got closest to the white tiger cub that I named Kenya. She went everywhere with me and even stayed with me in bed. People in the wild-animal world couldn’t believe the relationship I had with her. They said that in thirty years they had never seen a white tiger follow somebody around like she did with me. She would walk through the house crying like a baby, looking for me. If I had a girl in the house, I would lock her outside in her sanctuary and she’d cry. Hot summer nights when she was in heat, she’d cry until I would go out and rub her belly.

Kenya pretty much had the run of the house. When she was outside, she’d sit on top of the pool ledge and look over the fence at Wayne Newton’s horses. She could have easily jumped that fence but she never did. We had this trainer named Keith working with her, and I paid him $2,500 a week to train her. My assistant Darryl and the people who cleaned the house helped raise her, but they didn’t want to go near her. She’d nip at them sometimes, so they didn’t really trust her.

When you have cubs, you have to have them around you all the time because if you leave them alone and then come back, they don’t know who you are and then you’ve got a problem. So I got licenses for my animals and got two eighteen-wheel vans to transport them around the country. By then, I had only the two tiger cubs. The lions kept going up on two paws and were too intimidating. One of them actually bit me on the arm and I had to go to the hospital and get six stitches to close the wound. At the emergency room, they said, “Hey, what happened to you?” and I told them that I had gotten bit by a dog. I wanted to kill that motherfucking lion, but I realized that it was my fault, so I got a tetanus shot to be safe and then I gave him away.

After a few months of getting acclimated back to society, I began to train for my comeback fight. I had added a new member to my team. I had met Steve “Crocodile” Fitch years earlier in the bathroom of Madison Square Garden that night my opponent never showed up. He had asked me if I was fighting that night and I said, “Yeah, if my opponent shows up.” When I was in jail, I was talking to Rory, and Crocodile had been working with the boxer Oba Carr, who Rory managed and Don promoted, so Rory put him on the phone with me. We were talking about some friends of mine who he had met when he was in jail and we just clicked. So when I got out, I told him to hang out with us. He was my kind of guy – a street guy.

After I got out of jail, Don didn’t come around too much. I think he was still scared that I’d get physical with him. So he used John Horne to deal with me on business matters and Rory was my point man for anything personal. They were splitting the 20 percent manager’s fee, but even then they were making more money than they could have ever dreamed. Besides Rory and John, I had my same security team headed up by Anthony Pitts. I also had Farid, my old cellmate, around until the authorities told us that we couldn’t associate with each other because we were both felons.

By now Team Tyson had gone high tech. Instead of using phones, we each had a walkie-talkie so we could all communicate about what was going on. Everybody had their own handles. Rory was L1 and John was L2. Ant was T1. My friend Gordie was called Groove. Don was called Frederick Douglass because of his hair. I had a few different handles. Sometimes they called me Mad Max. Sometimes it was Arnold, after Arnold Rothstein. Most of the time it was Deebo. They called me Deebo after the bully in that movie
Friday
because I was always, “Give me this, give me that,” housing other people’s stuff, eating their food, changing the TV programs they were watching.

I didn’t really like that whole walkie-talkie setup because it meant that I could be tracked down much more easily. I was trying to be disciplined in camp, but sometimes the smell of a French fry would knock me off track and I’d sneak out and go eat. And I was always trying to ditch my security and get down with some woman. As the fight on August nineteenth with Peter McNeeley approached, I’d get more and more surly. I had been confident about it at first because I was in such great shape coming out of jail, but when we started sparring in camp in Ohio, I got hit with some punches from an amateur young kid and it hurt like hell. I wasn’t accustomed to getting hit. I was supposed to box five rounds but after two I said, “That’s enough for today. I’ll be back tomorrow.” Fuck, I couldn’t believe that this little amateur kid had hurt me so bad. Taking punches was definitely different from being in shape. I thought,
How could I beat McNeeley when that amateur nearly stopped me?

I eventually got my rhythm back and I was ready to go when August rolled around. I was my usual ornery self when we got together for the prefight press conference. I strolled in wearing a black suit and a white Panama hat. Nobody in boxing was taking McNeeley serious as an opponent. This guy was a club fighter at best.

I named the McNeeley fight “King Richard – The Return of the King.” I used to name my fights after warriors. Even though Cus was long dead, I’d talk to him. “Don’t worry, Cus, the King is coming back. King Richard is going to return triumphant.”

If I had any doubts, they were all dispelled when I got in the ring and stared at McNeeley. We came together for the instructions and he wouldn’t look at me. A year after the fight, he told some reporter what was going through his mind.

“Tyson came into the ring with this thuggy song and I wasn’t prepared to be scared. I was checking him out at the press conferences and he wasn’t that big in street clothes. I stood in my corner with my back to him, that’s not where you want to get beat, staring at your opponent. I was just going to look at his belly button when we got to the middle of the ring. Well, Pandora’s box, I have to take a peek. He’s all pumped up. He’s so wide! His lats are gigantic. His neck, his cranium. He’s a fierce-looking individual. I winked and blew him a kiss, but I was scared.”

I was just thinking this guy was crazy! I wanted to say, “You’re really a fucking asshole,” but I couldn’t break my tough-guy image. When the bell rang, he swarmed me and got me in my corner. I countered with a short right and he went down, but then he jumped right up like a jack-in-the-box. Before Mills Lane could even begin a mandatory eight-count, this guy was skipping around the ring and then charging back at me. I couldn’t believe this shit. After the eight-count, he came at me again and I hit him with a left hook and a right and he went down again. He got up and could have continued, but his trainer jumped in the ring and stopped the bout while Mills Lane was taking me to a neutral corner. It was a disaster. People started booing. The ring announcers kept saying, “What a letdown.” We were fighting before fans in ninety countries, the biggest audience in history, and the guy’s corner wouldn’t let him fight.

At the press conference after the fight, I tried to be humble and praise Allah. “I’ve got a lot to learn. I have to continue to cultivate my skills,” I told the reporters. When they asked me about his corner stopping the fight, I said, “You know me. I’m a blood man. I’m glad they stopped it. Look, fighting to me is what theory was to Einstein and what words were to Hemingway. Fighting is aggression. Aggression is my nature. I don’t want to talk about boxing.”

Afterwards McNeeley said, “Look at the films! I came to fight. I talked the talk and walked the walk.”

“He also swooned the swoon,” the
New York Post
wrote.

The Nevada Athletic Commission decided to withhold his manager’s share of the purse. But the manager turned out to be a genius. He got McNeeley two national commercials – $40,000 from AOL to reenact the fight and $110,000 from Pizza Hut where he was knocked out by the pizza crust.

I guess Don was embarrassed by the fight because he had lined it up for me, and he decided that my fans could save their $50 and watch my next fight on free TV. I was set to fight Buster Mathis Jr. on Fox on November fourth. I’m sure Don picked that date because it was the same night as the pay-per-view of the third fight between Riddick Bowe and Evander Holyfield, but it became a moot point when the fight was postponed because I fractured my right thumb. Immediately, the press jumped all over me. The
New York Post
had a headline that read: “Prove It, Mike.”

They actually had a point. I had postponed several fights in the past as a tactic to psychologically mess with my opponent’s head. My opponent would be all ready to fight, all pump, pump, pump, and then I’d postpone it and they’d never come back like that again. They would think that I was working out hard because I was in the gym all day, but I wasn’t actually doing anything. Then I’d bust my ass before the rescheduled date and they’d have already peaked. That was a trick that Cus taught me.

Part of the problem was that the pressure mounting on me to win the title back was escalating.

“The public isn’t going to put up with me fighting ten or fifteen nobodies before I fight for the real title,” I told a reporter. “There is a great deal of pressure on me to get some things done right now. People want to see Mike Tyson in big-time fights. And I have exclusive contracts I have to honor. Those contracts pay too much money for me to come back slow and easy. It’s business, big business. All those people care about is that I’m in the ring and making them money.”

We rescheduled the fight for December sixteenth in Philadelphia. I guess the oddsmakers saw something in my McNeeley fight. He was only a 15–1 underdog, but they had Mathis at 25–1. Mathis was a much better fighter than McNeeley, but he did come in a little overweight. At the weigh-in, I took off my
PROPERTY OF ALLAH
sweatshirt to reveal chiseled abs.

“Cut in stone! Adonis!” Don King kept bellowing.

But when it was Buster’s turn, he kept his T-shirt on and he weighed a flabby 224.

When the fight began, Buster tried to do what McNeeley had done and charged me. Buster and I fought in close for two rounds and then in the third he tried to smother me against the ropes, but I moved to my left and got my leverage and peppered him with two right uppercuts and he went down. When I was asked at the press conference why I had missed so many punches, I said that I was “lullabying” Mathis and that the missed punches were “all a plot, all a setup. Just like this society.” In truth, Mathis was just really hard to hit. If you look at his whole career, nobody had done what I had to him.

Mathis was a little lighter.

“Mike Tyson dropped me and when I looked up the count was at five. I said to myself, ‘Damn, whatever happened to one to four.’ ”

Frank Bruno, one of the reigning heavyweight champs, was ringside and Crocodile and I went to work on his head. As we left the ring, Croc yelled at Bruno.

“There he is, Mike. There goes your meat right there. We’re coming for you, son.”

I pointed at my pecs.

“I’m number one,” I told Bruno.

The fight with Buster drew a twenty-nine share of the audience, the highest rating ever for Fox TV, but I wasn’t pleased with my performances coming out of jail.

I brought Kenya to that fight. By now Monica had a girl we named Rayna and I had a stepdaughter named Gena, along with my own daughter Mikey I had with a woman from New York. Monica or the kids couldn’t get close to me when Kenya was around. If they’d get affectionate with me, Kenya was ready to attack. I left her in the hotel room during the fight and when I got back to the suite it was totally demolished. The blinds were ripped, she had shit on the floor, the big couch in the living room was torn to shreds.

She did the same thing to Don King’s townhouse in Manhattan when I stayed there after the fight. I left her and went out to a club and she was mad. When she was through with that townhouse, they had to close it down and fumigate it, she messed it up so much. You’d think we would have learned a lesson. We were in Ohio and Rory locked her up in my garage. When he came for her later, she had literally torn the roof off of one of my Maseratis.

I had only been out of jail for a year, and Don already had me fighting Frank Bruno for his belt, but I wasn’t really in shape either physically or emotionally for that sort of pressure again. I was interviewed by
The Ring
magazine and you could feel my anguish.

“I find myself more nervous now than in the beginning of my career or when I was champion. Maybe it’s a slight insecurity. Even in training, I find myself taking that last breath. I don’t know if it’s good or not. I know what to do, but you have those doubts. I guess that’s what pisses you off – you have those doubts about yourself even though you’ve been successful for so many years.”

When the interviewer asked me about my loss to Douglas, I started ranting.

“People say, ‘Look how much money you have.’ But I’ve been through a bunch of dysfunctional evaluations. I just can’t imagine anybody being jealous of my life. If they had to go through what I went through, they’d probably kill themselves. I almost died. My hair started turning gray and falling out because I was thinking of those things. I could’ve snapped then but instead I just got out and just went and ran all day in place in my room. I’d get in the shower and then, boom, it just hits you again. I just expect the worst of things to happen now. If good things happen, I enjoy them. But I expect the worst things to happen. I expect to be dumped on all my life. I just need to get my confidence back. After I have that fight with Bruno and I have the belt around my waist, there’s nobody who could beat me. My confidence will rise to the sky, to the stars.”