Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (42 page)

“If it wasn’t for Mike Tyson you wouldn’t be here,” he told the commissioners.

That was smart. The commission voted 4–1 to retain Halpern. But after the issue was raised, Halpern took himself off the fight. Holyfield’s camp had gotten Joe Cortez and Richard Steele, two referees that they thought might favor me, excluded from the fight, so the commission wound up using Mills Lane. Mills Lane was a former district attorney and district judge who had been quoted extensively saying that I was a “vicious criminal” who shouldn’t be allowed to box. How could I possibly get a fair shake when the ref was saying stuff like that against me? What I didn’t know at the time of the second Holyfield fight was that Lane and Holyfield had a close relationship. Holyfield’s own trainer, Tommy Brooks, was quoted as saying that Mills Lane “cried tears” the night Holyfield lost to Riddick Bowe.
Ha! Ha!
I didn’t know that Mills was in love with Evander!

Holyfield and I were originally supposed to fight for the second time on May 3, 1997, but I got head-butted in training and the fight was postponed to June twenty-eighth. I was the challenger, so I had to enter the ring first. On my walk in we played a song by Tupac. People think that I would use gangster rap to solidify my image, but that wasn’t the case. I was just listening to good music going in.

The fight started and I was feeling pretty good. I was confident, my body felt good, my movement was fluid. I was pretty elusive, moving around, not throwing anything big, just boxing. Then Holyfield butted me again. It was obvious to anyone watching that Holyfield’s tactic was to wait for me to throw a punch and then burrow in with his head. So the head butts were no accidents, they were a strategy.

It got worse in the second round. I started winging some punches at Holyfield and he dove in again and, boom! A big gash opened up over my eye. I immediately turned to Mills Lane.

“He butted me!”

Lane didn’t even say anything, but he ruled it an accident.

Now Holyfield started looking at the cut on top of my eye. He was charging at me with his head. He was taller than me, so what was his head doing underneath my head? I was getting frustrated.

When the third round began, I was furious. I was so anxious to start fighting that I left the corner without my mouthpiece, but Richie called me back and put it in. We started the round and I hit Holyfield with a couple of hard punches. The crowd started going crazy. They could feel that the fight had really shifted. And that’s when he butted me again. I started feeling weary, like I was blacking out a little, but my anger and adrenaline jolted me back. I just wanted to kill him. Anybody watching could see that the head butts were so overt. I was furious, I was an undisciplined soldier and I lost my composure. So I bit him in the ear.

People think that I spit my mouthpiece out to bite him, but I didn’t. From that point on, I don’t remember too much because I was so enraged. When I looked at the tape, I must have spit the piece of his earlobe on the canvas because I was pointing to it. It was, like, “Yeah, you take that.” They actually found that piece after the fight and tried to sew it back on but it didn’t take.

Holyfield leapt up in the air in pain and then he turned to go to his corner, but I followed him and pushed him from behind. I wanted to kick him right in his groin, but I just pushed him. It was a street fight now. The doctor took a look at him and allowed him to continue and then Mills Lane took two points away from me, but in my mind, it didn’t matter. They were all against me anyway. So the fight resumed and he butted me again. And the ref, of course, did nothing. So we clinched and I bit him again on the other ear, but we kept on fighting till the end of the round.

Then all hell broke loose. Holyfield’s corner complained to Mills Lane that I had bitten him again and Lane stopped the fight. I was too enraged to even hear the ring announcer say, “Referee Mills Lane has disqualified Mike Tyson for biting Evander Holyfield on both of his ears.” Holyfield was in his corner. He didn’t want any part of this shit, but I was still trying to get a hand on him. I wanted to destroy everything and everybody in his corner. People were pulling me and blocking me and he was standing in his corner, huddled up. Everyone was protecting him. He looked frightened. I was still trying to get at him. I had fifty people on me and I was still fighting the cops. Oh lord! They should have tased me. I vote for being tased that night.

Somehow they got me out of the ring. On the way back to the dressing room, someone tossed a full bottle of water at me and someone else gave me the finger. I climbed over the railing and tried to get at them, but my cornermen pulled me back. Then more people were throwing their sodas and beers on us. Anthony Pitts’s $2,500 tailor-made suit was ruined.

Mills Lane was interviewed in the ring and he claimed that all the butting Holyfield had done was accidental. Holyfield was interviewed and he praised Mills Lane.

“I’m grateful we have a referee like Mills Lane to see the situation that this thing is intentioned.”

I was still going crazy in the dressing room. I had my gloves on and I was punching the walls. John Horne went out to talk to Jim Gray, the Showtime announcer.

“All I know is that Mike got a cut over his eye three inches long and Evander got a little nip on his ear that don’t mean nothing. He jumped around like a little bitch. The head-butting was going on so long. Come on, one head butt may be accidental, fifteen is not,” John said.

I barely remember being interviewed after the fight. My face was a grotesque mask, all cut up and swollen. I looked like a monster. Jim Gray caught up to me outside my dressing room as I was leaving.

“The head butt in the second round, which opened the gash in your eye, tell us about that firstly,” he said.

“He butted me in the first round, but then he butted me again in the second round, then as soon as he butted me I watched him, he had held me and he looked right at me, and I saw him and he kept going, trying to butt me again. He kept going down and coming up and then he charged into me. And no one warned him, no one took any points from him. What am I to do? This is my career. I can’t continue getting butted like that. I’ve got children to raise and this guy keeps butting me, trying to cut me and get me stopped on cuts. I’ve got to retaliate.”

“Now, immediately you stopped fighting right there and you turned to Mills Lane and you said what, and as a result of which he did nothing, but what did you say to Mills right at that time?”

“I don’t remember, I told him that he butted me. I know I complained about being butted and we complained about it the first fight. Listen, Holyfield is not the tough warrior everyone says he is. He got a little nick on his ear and he quit. I got one eye, he’s not impaired, he’s got ears, I got one, if he takes one, I got another one. I’m ready to fight. He didn’t want to fight. I’m ready to fight him right now.”

“Mills Lane stopped the fight, it wasn’t Holyfield who stopped the fight,” Jim said.

“Oh, he didn’t want to fight …”

“Mills said he stopped the fight. You bit him, was that a retaliation for the eye, when you bit him in his ear?”

“Regardless of what I did, he’s been butting me for two fights,” I said.

“But you’ve got to address it, Mike.”

“I did address it! I addressed it in the ring!”

“Why did you do that though, Mike, I mean was that the proper response?”

I was getting exasperated.

“Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me!” I screamed. “I’ve got to go home and my kids are going to be scared of me, look at me, man!”

Then I stormed off. We drove straight to my house where all the women were waiting. For some reason, none of the wives had gone to the fight, they just watched it on TV.

There were angry protestors outside my gates. People were blowing their horns and screaming, “Fixed fight!” and “Move out of the neighborhood!” and someone even threw a fish head onto my property. They kept it up until some of my security guys shot some BBs in their direction.

A doctor came and stitched up my cut. Then I started pacing around the dining room.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said. I was regretful but reluctantly regretful. I was an undisciplined soldier.

“My fans are going to hate me,” I worried.

Monica was very understanding and comforting. She told me that everybody makes mistakes. After a while, I smoked some weed and drank some liquor and went to sleep.

Back at the MGM Grand, people were fighting one another in the casino, being sent to the hospital. Gaming tables were knocked over and people were grabbing the chips. They had to close it down. And then they looked at the surveillance videos and tracked down and arrested the people who stole the chips. It was mayhem.

The next day I was feeling really down. I had no idea that what had happened would become such an international incident. My whole life’s been like that. I say or do something I think is small but the whole world thinks it’s big. I didn’t think that people would use my reaction to define my career. Maybe I should have thought about how things will affect me in posterity, but that’s not the way I think.

People said I thought I was gonna get beaten, so I did the biting routine. That’s bullshit. If that was the case, I would have done that in the first fight. In any fight anybody ever saw me lose, I took my beating like a man, I never sat down. No one could ever call me a dog. I was angry, I was mad, I lost my composure. I bit Evander Holyfield’s ear because at that moment I was enraged, and I didn’t care about fighting no more by the Marquis of Queensberry rules.

But there was no escaping the story.
Sports Illustrated
put it on the cover under the huge headline “MADMAN!” President Clinton said that he had been “horrified.” They were making jokes about it on Letterman and Leno. I was nominated for Sportsman of the Ear. They said it was a good fight for Pay Per Chew. The press called for a lifetime ban. I was called “dirty,” “disgusting,” “repellent,” “bestial,” “loathsome,” “vile,” and “cannibalistic.” But I didn’t care about any of that. I already felt that things were stacked against me anyway.

Part of the problem was that people were responding to images, not reality. If you watched a tape of the fight you’d see that Holyfield was clearly fighting a dirty fight, but he had the good-guy image. He was the one who strolled to the ring singing gospel songs. It didn’t make huge headlines when he was later implicated in a steroid ring out of Mobile, Alabama.

The crazy part was, there were a lot of people out there who were defending what I had done. I got a lot of love from the overseas press. Tony Sewell, an English writer, published an article called “Why Iron Mike Was Right to Take an Earful.” He wrote, “As the world rises in moral indignation and demands that Tyson be banned for going berserk, I smell a distinct waft of hypocrisy. Tyson was a gladiator who broke the rules. The real savages are the audience who now want to feed him to the lions.”

I reached the darkest place that’s in each and every human being – the place where you say, “Oh, this is fucked, I shouldn’t do this, but this is who I am.” After a few days, I went out and there would be crowds of people applauding me for biting that guy. Everybody thought it was cool.

“Yeah, champ, I’d bite that motherfucker too,” they’d scream.

I felt much better when people were condemning me for biting that ear than when they praised me for it.

Shortly after the fight, the lawsuits rolled in. One guy started a class action suit to get his ticket money refunded. Another woman who was serving drinks at a temporary bar in the arena said she was injured when a security guard threw her over a table when the riots broke out. All of those suits were dismissed.

Holyfield’s wife was also threatening to sue Crocodile. During the fight, Crocodile was screaming out instructions and exhortations to me.

“Bite, bite, Mike!” he yelled.

But she didn’t know that when you say “bite” it just means to fight harder.

Don was worried about me being banned for life, so he convinced me to do some damage control. He hired Sig Rogich, my great public relations specialist, to write a statement that I read that following Monday at a press conference at the MGM Grand.

“I snapped. Saturday night was the worst night of my professional career. I’m here today to apologize, to ask the people who expected more from Mike Tyson to forgive me for snapping in the ring and for doing something I have never done before and will never do again.” I apologized to Holyfield and then continued to read the words that were written for me. “I thought I might lose because of the severity of the cut above my eye and I just snapped. I can only say that I’m just thirty-one years old, in the prime of my career, and I have made it this far because I had no other way. I grew up in the streets, I fought my way out and I’ll not go back again. I learned the hard way from the past, because I didn’t have the luxury of schools or people to help me at a time when I needed it the most, and I expect punishment and would pay the price like a man. I reached out to the medical professionals for help to tell me why I did what I did, and I will have that help, now I will attempt to train not just my body, but my mind too.”

I was reciting those words, but I wasn’t buying into them. I felt shitty and embarrassed for saying all that because it wasn’t what was in my heart at the time. I was just going through the motions. I knew that they would hold it against me anyway and frankly, I really didn’t care if I got suspended. I was in New York buying a Ferrari when the Nevada State Athletic Commission met to decide my fate. I was represented by Oscar Goodman, who would go on to become the most famous mayor in Las Vegas history. Writers had been calling for a lifetime ban. Oscar put up a good defense, but in the end, those commissioners wanted some more blood. On July ninth, they called me a “discredit to boxing” and fined me 10 percent of my purse, which was $3 million, and then suspended me for at least a year. I really felt betrayed after all the money I’d made for that city. Nobody else even approached the revenue I brought into Vegas.