Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (41 page)

Total due Dr. Smedi: $2,182,862.00

Payment in full expected by September 15th, 1996

Respectfully submitted K.J. Smedi. PhD.

Wow, I got a five-million-dollar discount for good behavior. We never paid this poor schmuck, and as soon as my probation was over we fired his ass.

Now that I had my belt back, my grandiosity began to stomp all over my humbleness. I threw myself a thirtieth-birthday party at my Connecticut estate and spent a fortune flying in friends from all over the country and putting them all up in a nearby hotel that we took over. We had thirteen different chefs, each one cooking in their own kitchen. Everyone from Oprah to Donald Trump to Jay Z to street pimps and their hos were there. There was a guy hand-rolling cigars. Frankie Beverly and Maze performed. You entered the house on an actual red carpet. Once you got past the forty big Fruit of Islam bodyguards stationed outside.

I was so egomaniacal that I reserved the nineteen bedrooms in my house for girls who I wanted to sleep with. I actually told Crocodile, “See all these girls? They’re mine.” Hope was pissed at me. She had been staying at the house, but I moved her out and put her up at the hotel so the room would be available for one of my lady suitors. She was hurt. Hope was an extremely attractive woman and the girls I was sleeping with were nowhere near her stature.

“Mike, this woman you’re bringing in is just so atrocious and unclean, she’s going to dirty my bed. You’re gonna have to burn the mattress if she sleeps on the bed,” Hope told me.

I didn’t even bother to invite Monica. I hardly saw her much by then. She was always trying to make it work out, but I was a cad. I was definitely not marriage material.

The next step in unifying the title was to get the WBA belt. It was around the waist of Bruce Seldon, but it wouldn’t be for long. I didn’t think much of Seldon as an opponent; he wasn’t much of a competitor. I hardly trained for the fight. Crocodile came with me to the prefight press conference and we both got under his skin so much that he started doing push-ups off a chair in the hallway at our weigh-in. He looked terrified. Seldon’s manager had bragged about what a great athlete Seldon was – he could run a fifty-second quarter mile, jump forty inches off the ground.

“What’s he gonna do when he gets in the ring?” I said. “Is he going to pole-vault out of there?”

I regained my WBA belt in less than two minutes. I hit Seldon on the top of his head with a right. Although it wasn’t a hard punch, my elbow hit him in the follow-through and he went down. As soon as he got up, I threw a left hook that put him down on his stomach. He got up but then he started wobbling and Richard Steele ended the fight. I didn’t think that either of those punches was enough to knock out a guy, but his trainer later said that Seldon had had a nervous breakdown in the ring he was so scared.

“Cus, you got two down and one to go,” I told Ferdie Pacheco when he interviewed me after the fight.

I had fought eight rounds since getting out of jail and I had earned $80 million. That was all that people focused on. Nobody ever gave me any credit for coming out of jail after three years behind bars and winning two championship belts. That hurt my heart a lot not to get that recognition.

After the Seldon fight, Tupac came to my dressing room. I was so happy to see him. Tupac represented where all of us black people came from and what we’re trying to hide. I have Jewish friends who might look at a Jewish guy and say, “He’s too Jewish.” That’s what some blacks thought about Tupac. He was that bitterness, that frustration that was in all of us and that we were all trying to hide and not let people know we possess. We want to front that we have it all together, but it’s not like that. If you’re black, it’s constantly a struggle. I don’t care how rich you are or how much power you have, they’re still going to come after you. Tupac would talk about black people who were tired of being beaten down and who had nothing. Tupac put our slave heritage in our face and most black people respected his strength in doing that. He let us know why we should be angry.

I made plans to see Tupac later that night at Suge Knight’s Club 662. But I wanted to go home and hang out with my daughter, Rayna. I had a few drinks at home and I passed out. Someone woke me.

“Mike, they just shot Tupac.”

I couldn’t believe it. He had been in a car driven by Suge and they stopped at an intersection and someone in the next car started shooting at them. It had to be a setup. Especially since Tupac had had an altercation with a gang guy in the casino after the fight and stomped him in his face. He didn’t kill the guy, but his senses had to be on high alert after that. When I come out of the ring after fighting, my senses are at their zenith. I can see everything, smell everything, hear everything in the audience. You’d think that Tupac’s were like that too after his altercation. So he had to have been assassinated.

Being a street guy, it just didn’t seem right to me. Normally these guys have forty guys shielding them in their entourage. He doesn’t have cars around him blocking him off in the traffic? If Tupac was their general and had just been in a fight, they should have put a shield around him. Where was that shield? That was just a really nasty night. Tupac was only twenty-five, but he had such determination and will. Where did he get that stuff from? Such a big heart, such a caring man, but still a warrior. He was a beautiful person and I really enjoyed the time I spent with him.

So now I had two belts and tons of money and I should have been a happy camper. But that was not who I was. I was always a depressed, wretched person. I’d been on medication since I was a kid and I was probably still getting medicated after I got out of jail. But then I began to self-medicate. I’d been dying to smoke pot the whole time I was in jail, but I didn’t dare do it because they’d do random piss tests. But now I had the quack doctor, Dr. Smedi, and I knew he’d make sure my piss was clean.

I even began to do coke again. It was right after the Seldon fight and I was with a friend who had some and I told him to give me the bag. Out of the blue. That’s what addicts do. I hadn’t done those kinds of drugs in fifteen years and, boom, it just snapped right back.

I know that good Muslims didn’t smoke weed or snort coke or drink champagne but I was going through an awful lot of shit. I’m sure Allah knew that my shit was just overwhelming and that I wasn’t strong enough then to deal with it.

Because of some bullshit lawsuit by Lennox Lewis, I had to relinquish my WBC belt right after the Seldon fight. Lewis was the mandatory challenger, but I wanted to unify the titles. So now I just had the WBA belt and my next opponent was Evander Holyfield.

If I would’ve fought Holyfield in 1991 when I was supposed to fight him originally, I would have knocked him out. He knows that, everybody in his camp knows that. The best thing that ever happened to him was that I went to prison. That’s when I lost all my timing. I couldn’t be the tough eight-round fighter I had been. I told everybody that I wasn’t ready to fight major-league fights, but Don was pushing me and I wanted the money. I was being greedy, so I took the fight.

Holyfield hadn’t looked very good in his fights leading up to ours. He lost a couple of them but at least he was active. I watched him fight Bobby Czyz, a puffed-up light heavyweight and Czyz beat the shit out of him before he lost in the tenth round, so I didn’t really train all that much for the first fight with Holyfield. I looked at some of his fights, but I didn’t really have any particular strategy going into my fights at that time, usually it was just go in and hit them. The odds opened up at 25–1 in my favor.

Later I found out that Crocodile was getting reports from slick guys around who were supposed to know the boxing game. Holyfield had been training in the mountains for seventeen weeks like a dog, but Croc was hearing some bullshit disinformation that he wasn’t even in shape.

“Mike, you’re gonna kill this guy,” he kept telling me.

Holyfield and I go back a long way. We were both together at the Junior Olympics and we were always friendly with each other. He was always on my side, rooting for me while I was fighting, and vice versa. He got a lot of bad breaks in the amateurs. He lost some fights that he should have won, and then they screwed him big-time in the Olympics. When we were younger, we never thought we would ever fight and make that much money together later on.

Actually, that’s why I was fighting. My heart wasn’t into boxing but I needed the money. There was no fun in getting into the ring for me anymore. Once I left prison, the fun really died. That’s why I had a guy like Crocodile around me then. He was a good guy and he always motivated me, got me psyched to fight. He was also a training nut and I needed somebody like that pushing me then.

The first fight started well enough. I landed a good body shot on him in the first round and he screamed. I was thinking that I was going to win. But from the second round on, I really blacked out. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but during the second fight, I finally realized he had been using his head to butt me senseless. From the second round of that first fight on, I was fighting on pure instinct; I didn’t remember anything. In the sixth round, one of his head butts opened up a cut. The next round I was almost knocked out by a butt. In the tenth round, he connected with twenty-three power punches, and I never felt a thing, I only heard the sound of them whooshing around my head. I was only staying up because of adrenaline. When I’d go back to my corner between rounds, I didn’t hear a fucking thing my trainers were saying to me. I don’t remember going into the ring, or getting up to fight; I just remember being there. After the fight was over, I was still so out of it that I asked my cornermen which round I knocked Holyfield out in.

In the dressing room afterwards, Crocodile was enraged.

“Look at your head, Mike,” he told me. I had six knots as big as a fist all over my head from Holyfield’s head butts.

I wanted to fight Holyfield right again, I was so mad. I was really sore and beat-up, but I started training the next night.

I was angry that I lost my title, but I never looked back at fights or was, like, “Aw, fuck it.” It just happened and I would start my day over. Losing is very traumatic for some people. Floyd Patterson would put on fake beards and wear dark glasses when he went out in public after he lost his title. When Foreman lost to Ali and then to Jimmy Young, the press asked him what it was like to lose and he said, “It’s like being in a deep dark nothing, like out at sea, with nothing over your head or under your feet, just nothing, nothing but nothing. A horrible smell came with it, a smell I hadn’t forgotten, a smell of sorrow. You multiply every sad thought you ever had it wouldn’t come close to this and then I looked around and I was dead. That was it. I thought of everything I worked for, I hadn’t said good-bye to my mother, my children, all the money I hid in safe-deposit boxes, you know how paper burns when you touch it, it just crumbles. That was my life. I looked back and I saw it crumble, like I’d fallen for a big joke.”

I never had a reaction like that. I know who I am, I know I’m a man. A guy like Holyfield based his whole existence around boxing, that’s why he continued to fight for so long. I was raised with Cus D’Amato. He’d always say that boxing is not your life, it’s what you do for a living; it’s what you do to make a life, but it is not your life. He said, “Losing, winning, never take it personal.” Every time I lost, I just dealt with it, because it never became my life. That’s what I was taught.

By that time, Monica was pregnant with our second child. I was getting a lot of shit from the Imam in my Vegas mosque about the fact that we hadn’t gotten married yet. The truth was I hardly saw Monica and the kids. I was in training and when I wasn’t in training I was seeing one of my multiple girlfriends. In fact, the day that I proposed to Monica, Hope had been staying with us, since she was going to school in D.C., and I dropped her off at her school and then went to hit some new girl I had been seeing in D.C.

Hope was ragging on me about getting a prenup. I probably should have, but I was an impulsive smuck. Monica and I would fight all the time. Of course, a lot of the time it was over my cheating.

I had Brother Siddeeq fly to Maryland and he performed the ceremony and then he brought the papers to a local D.C. Imam who could certify them. Being married didn’t change anything with Monica. I was still seeing my girls on the side and now I had to go into training for the second Holyfield fight.

When I began to get ready for our rematch, I told the press that I had had a bad night but that I would fight Holyfield like I knocked him out the first time. I got that attitude from the Mexican fighters. When you fight an American fighter and knock him out, invariably the next time you fight, their fighting is tentative. But with a Mexican fighter, even if you knocked him out the first time, he’s going to fight the next fight like he knocked
you
out. Those guys don’t feel intimidated. They come back uninhibited and just go for it.

I made some changes for the second fight though. My old roommate Jay Bright had been my trainer but I replaced him with Richie Giachetti. Firing Jay was easy. He was family and family is always the first to go. I trained twice as hard for the second fight.

Three days before the fight, there was some controversy over the referee. Mitch Halpern was supposed to ref the fight again, but he had been drunk as a skunk during the first Holyfield fight. As soon as I went out for the instructions and he went to touch my glove, I smelled it. His eyes were red. I’m an addict, I could tell right away. No referee would have let me take that kind of punishment that Holyfield was giving me, but he let me take it all the way to the eleventh round because he was so drunk and out of it.

Some people in my camp tried to get Halpern off the second fight. I don’t know much about it, I never objected to anybody. My job was to fight and not worry about the referee or the timekeeper. But John Horne went before the commission and said that Halpern was too lenient in allowing Holyfield to hold me and butt me.