Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (55 page)

After the fight, we went to the after-party in a downtown club. I was sitting drinking with Zip when he pointed to the dance floor.

“Check your security out,” he said.

I looked and saw my new bodyguard all hugged up dancing with a white girl while he was holding a champagne bottle. We stayed for a while and then me, Zip, the bodyguard, and the girl went back to the hotel.

Zip and I were chilling in the room, smoking some weed, when there was a knock on the door.

I answered. Some guy was standing there.

“Mike, your security is in the elevator and he’s butt naked.”

“What!!”

Zip and I rushed out to the elevator and we saw that the security guard was lying in the elevator and his pants were down around his ankles. I had Zip pull up his pants and put him back in his room. Then we went to our room.

A few minutes later the cops came. They told me that they had the whole incident on the surveillance cameras. The girl that my bodyguard had picked up had accused him of rape, but when they saw the footage, they saw her slipping him a Mickey and pulling his pants down. She was setting him up to rob him. So there wasn’t going to be any charges or bad publicity.

I shut the door and we smoked some more weed. Then minutes later, there was another knock on the door. I looked through the peephole and saw four more cops.

“Hey, hey! Stop! Leave me alone, I’m finished talking to you guys! I didn’t do nothing, I just talked to the cops! Please leave me alone.”

Later that night I had the limo take Zip home and I went along for the ride. He was still bummed out from the bodyguard thing.

“Man, we were almost back, Mike,” he said. “Almost back. We’d have been in the movies, we’d have been commentating fights. We were almost back and this dumb-assed motherfucking security guard fucked it up, Mike.”

I got in trouble myself a month later. I was in Phoenix staying at a hotel with my regular security guy Rick. Some of my Arizona friends took me out, and Rick stayed back at the hotel. We went to the Pussycat Lounge in Scottsdale and got wasted on coke and booze. We were all fucked up when we were leaving the club and were walking across the street when we saw a car coming fast at us.

“I’m going to jump over the car,” I told one of my friends. So I stopped in the middle of the street but the driver stopped too. I jumped up on his hood, got on my hands and knees, and started yelling and pounding the shit out of the car. The guy got out of his car to yell at me, but when he saw that it was me, he ran back into his car. My friends pulled me down and told the driver that he was okay. But the next day he looked at his Toyota and noticed there were dents all over the hood, so he called the police. I got charged with a misdemeanor criminal damage count but Darrow got involved and the guy got paid off.

I still had no money when the New Year rolled around. Shelley was pregnant again and in March we had a daughter we named Exodus. I called the other Shelly and told him I needed to make some quick money. He set up a fight with a palooka named Kevin McBride in Washington, D.C., on June eleventh. But he was a big palooka, 6'6" and 271 pounds.

A reporter from
USA Today
came out to my home in Phoenix after one of my sparring sessions and I unburdened myself on his ass.

“I’ll never be happy. I believe I’ll die alone. I would want it that way. I’ve been a loner all my life with my secrets and my pain. I’m really lost, but I’m trying to find myself. I’m really a sad, pathetic case. My whole life has been a waste – I’ve been a failure. I just want to escape. I’m really embarrassed with myself and my life. I want to be a missionary. I think I could do that while keeping my dignity without letting people know they chased me out of the country. I want to get this part of my life over as soon as possible. I want to develop my life into missionary work. I’m not going to be a Jesus freak. But that’s what I’m going to give my life to. I love Jesus and I believe in Jesus too – and I’m a Muslim. Listen, I’ve got an imam, I got a rabbi, I got a priest, I got a reverend – I got ’em all. But I don’t want to be holier than thou. I want to help everybody and still get some pussy.

“In this country, nothing good is going to come out of me. I’m so stigmatized there’s no way I can elevate myself. I was depressed after my last fight. I was hanging out with a lot of prostitutes and stuff. I felt like scum, so I hung out with scum. I was getting high all the time. But you realize you’ve got to put all the drugs away and deal with reality.”

I never should have been in that ring. I was missing wildly, I was standing still, I had no stamina. It was an ugly fight. At the end of the sixth round McBride just leaned on me when we were on the ropes and I went down on my ass. I just sat there with my legs sprawled out. The bell rang and I could hardly get up. McBride’s corner was working on a cut that he got from a head butt. I sat in my corner and told my new trainer Jeff Fenech that it was over. I wasn’t going out for the seventh round.

Jim Gray came over to me to do the interview.

“Mike, first let’s start with you. Did you want to continue?”

“Well, I would like to have continued. But I saw that I was getting beat on. I realized, I don’t think I have it anymore, because, um … I got the ability to stay in shape, but I don’t got the fighting guts, I don’t think, anymore.”

“When did you recognize that, at what part of the fight?”

“I don’t know, early into the fight. I’m just sorry I let everybody down. I just don’t have this in my heart anymore.”

“Did you feel as though you had it coming into the fight?”

“Um, no, I’m just fighting to take care of my bills, basically. I don’t have the stomach for this no more. I’m more conscious of my children. I don’t have that ferocity. I’m not an animal anymore.”

“Does that mean we won’t see you fight again?”

“Yes, most likely, I’m not gonna fight anymore. I’m not gonna disrespect the sport anymore by losing to this caliber of fighters.”

“Why did you come out so passive?”

“I’m not taking nothing away from Kevin. I don’t love this no more. I haven’t loved fighting since 1990, but Kevin, congratulations on your career and good luck. And I wish you the best and make a lot of money.”

I met the boxing reporters for the last time after a fight. I walked into the interview room and they gave me a standing ovation.

I told them to sit down and I repeated the same stuff I had told Jim Gray. I wasn’t going to fight anymore because I didn’t want to disgrace the sport.

And then I left the arena as a boxer for the last time. And I forgot about doing missionary work or contributing to society. I just said to myself, “Wow, this is over. Now I can go out and really have fun.”

Back when I was ten years old, I was doing a robbery with this older guy named Boo. He had me go through the window of this guy’s house and we hit the mother lode – big-ass TV, nice stereo, some guns, and some money. Boo knew I was a good little hustler. He’d have me lure guys who wanted to fuck a little boy into a room and he and his friends would be there to smash him and take his money.

After this heist, Boo took me to the pad of this older black lady. She was an unscrupulous, evil-looking person, but when I got to know her she was really kind and considerate. There were a bunch of guys in the place lying around and nodding out. Boo gave her some money and she gave him an envelope with some white powder in it. I couldn’t take my eyes off him as he put the powder into a spoon and heated it up with a lighter. When the shit started bubbling, he took out a syringe and sucked the liquid up through the needle. Then he tied off his arm and he was about to inject the shit into his vein when he turned to me.

“Turn around, baby, turn around, baby,” he said to me.

He didn’t want me to watch him shooting up heroin.

Later, when we left the shooting gallery, he slapped me on the head.

“I better not ever hear or see you doing this shit or I’m going to kill you dead, little motherfucker. Do you hear me?”

Of course, that made me want to do heroin even more. When an old heroin head would tell me not to fuck with dope, I’d be thinking,
Why is that? So that they can have it all to themselves?

I tried heroin once when I was younger. I smoked it and it made me feel really bad. I had to throw up. Just looking at junkies was enough to put me off heroin. I could look at a heroin addict and see that his soul was gone. You figure that’s what you have to look forward to.

I started buying and sniffing coke when I was eleven but I’d been drinking alcohol since I was a baby. I come from a long line of drunks. My mother used to give me Thunderbird or Gordon’s gin to make me go to sleep. When I was ten, my friends and I would buy bottles of Mad Dog 20/20, Bacardi 151, Brass Monkey, the real cheap shit that kills your guts. We also started smoking weed and hash and even opium and angel dust. I even did some blotter acid once when I was young. We did some jostling when we were high on acid but that didn’t work out so well. We’d be snatching shit and laughing and running.

“The cops, the cops, they’re coming.” We’d laugh and hide under a car.

Except for one two-year stretch and the time I was in prison, I always drank. Which was not surprising since all my role models who I had read about were raging drunks. Mickey Walker, Harry Greb. My heroes were these white, Irish drunks. They were the guys who would be in a bar drinking and laughing while their opponents were running and doing rope work.

Booze brought out the worst in me. When I got drunk, I’d become totally emotionless and careless about other people’s feelings. I’d fight with anyone, even cops. Anybody that knew me would say, “Don’t let Mike drink. Give him some pot, just don’t let him drink.” If I got high on pot, I was happy and I was ready to cry and give you all my fucking money. Just as long as you don’t tell me not to get high, because if you tell me to stop getting high, then I’m mad at you. If you’re okay with me getting high, then it’s “You sure you don’t need that nice Porsche out there?”

I really think that one reason that I started doing so much coke was because I was in a lot of physical pain from my boxing career. I know some hockey players who told me the same story. When you have that kind of pain, you can’t be friendly with anybody. You’re like a lion with a hurt paw. When an animal gets hurt, they know that the other animals will attack them. That’s how I felt when I was in pain, vulnerable and scared. So you get some coke and then you’re in the room alone with the coke and you want a woman in there, because you feel so bad about doing the drug that having a woman is going to kill the guilt.

I had no problem getting cocaine, even when I was totally broke. I knew a lot of the big drug dealers when they were little guys just coming up and I showed them some love. Now they’re multimillionaires and they own big clubs, so when they see me they treat me real good. But I treat them as if they were still those little guys. I’d just say, “I’m going to go somewhere, run me some of those little packages.” Or I might have just met an absolute stranger that knows the drug man and they’d say, “Give Mike two eight balls on me.”

When you start doing coke, you can see that people who you’ve known all your life and you’d never suspect are doing coke also. I was once drinking with a major celebrity when he turned to me.

“You got any powder?” he asked me.

“What??”

I was trying to be discreet. How the fuck did he know I was doing blow?

“Yeah, I got some. But how did you know?” I asked him.

“People that do it know the people that do it, Mike,” he said. “We have radar.”

When you have cocaine, you could be in the Mojave Desert in the middle of the fucking night, snorting your blow, and out of nowhere a bitch pops up in a bathing suit. Coke radar. The women that I was around loved coke so much we even started naming it after them. If you wanted some coke, you’d say, “Where’s that white bitch at? I want that ho.” We’d also call it “blondie” or “white girl.”

When I first started using coke heavily, I would carry half a brick with me. I was carrying sales weight but I didn’t care, I just wanted to be able to share it and turn all my friends on. I would go around and ask people, “You want some?” People I never dreamed of were doing that shit. The interesting thing is that these motherfuckers would sniff my dope and then reprimand me while they were doing it.

Or all of a sudden some guy that you never snorted with before is now an expert. He does some lines, delicately wipes his nose clean, then he looks like he’s deep in thought and says, “I can get you better stuff.” All of a sudden, he’s an aficionado.

Sometimes you get guys who can’t wait to turn you onto their coke.

“Mike, are you ready for this shit? You sure you’re ready for it,” he’d say. “Welcome to fucking Dreamsville, buddy.”

He laid out some lines and I snorted them.

“Pure Peruvian flake,” he said proudly, like he had just opened a bottle of Lafite Rothschild.

But he was right. The shit was so good, it made my eyeballs freeze.

I was hanging out with friends in L.A. after the McBride fight, feeling pretty depressed, when my phone rang. It was Jeff Greene, a new friend of mine. On the face of it, you’d think it was pretty improbable that Jeff and I would be friends. Jeff was a Jewish businessman who made a billion dollars playing the real estate market. I was a Muslim boxer who spent almost a billion dollars on bitches and cars and legal fees. I met him through a mutual friend and we just clicked. He started coming to my fights in Europe and I started traveling around the world with him on his yacht. He’d invite me over for dinner during Rosh Hashanah, shit I even got to read from the book during the Passover seder.

“Hey, Mike, why don’t you come join me on my boat in Saint-Tropez? I’ll charter a jet to take you to France and then I’ll have my guy come pick you up and take you to the boat.”

Jeff was worried that I’d get depressed just thinking about the way I went out of boxing, so he figured that hanging out with some of the most beautiful women in the world and partying might be just the remedy I needed.

Before I left, I called Zip to see if he wanted to come along.

“No, man, I can’t go,” he said. “Some nigga shot me and I want to find out why.”

“Zip, come on. We’re flying on a private jet, we’ll be hanging out on a yacht all around the Mediterranean …”

“Shit, man. I got shot. Somebody else needs to get shot. A shot for a shot.”

“We’re going where the best pussy in the history of the world is and you’re talking about someone getting shot? They don’t care if you’re toked or broke, if you’re there, you’re fucking,” I said. But he was bent on getting revenge.

So I went there and it was cool. I didn’t really feel out of place. I saw some people who I knew and they started taking me around. I would eat breakfast on Jeff’s boat and then get on one of his Jet Skis and I’d be riding around and some Wall Street guy would see me and invite me over to his boat.

“Hey, my boat’s bigger than Jeff’s,” they’d say. “Come over and party with us on our boat.”

I don’t know what these guys thought. I wasn’t no nigga for rent. Jeff was a friend of mine. Besides, we had the most exciting boat. Jeff’s boat was over 150 feet long but it wasn’t big enough because there was too much fun happening.

I was a little nervous at first that I wouldn’t fit in with Jeff’s other friends.

“Jeff, this is white honky heaven. I don’t know if Mr. As-salamu alaykum is gonna fit in here,” I said. This was my introduction to real Jewish jubilance. All of a sudden Denise Rich saw me and she came over and introduced me to her friend, trying to get me comfortable. She’s such a beautiful, elegant, sophisticated lady. And nobody’s tripping out on me. Then I realized that I was the only one tripping in my head. So I’m sitting there getting comfortable with all my new Jewish friends and suddenly this rude, obnoxious rich Saudi Muslim comes up to us.

“My son was going to pay fifteen million dollars to get you out of jail when that girl said you raped her,” he said. He didn’t even say, “Mr. Tyson, so nice to meet you …”

“Oh, thank you, sir,” I said.

Denise Rich looked sadly at me. “I am so sorry,” she said.

What kind of guy does something like that? What arrogance. Suppose that my new friends here didn’t know I was in prison for rape? Suppose they asked, “What were you in prison for, Mike? Did you embezzle money? Insider trading?” Thank you, Mr. Desert Jockey, for explaining this in minute detail to the whole Jewish jubilance. I didn’t talk to that guy the whole rest of the night.

I had another more pleasant chance meeting while we were in Saint-Tropez. I was on another rich Jewish guy’s yacht and I watched him checking out this other Jewish guy whose boat was moored nearby. They were looking at each other, just like black people do, you know how we look at each other? And then one guy said, “Harvard seventy-nine?”

“Yes, didn’t you study macroeconomics?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you date Cindy from Hyannis Port? I dated her too for a second.”

So I’m on this boat and I see a big black guy. He’s the bodyguard for a very well-known international arms dealer. And I’m looking at him and looking at him and I just can’t place him. He came over to me.

“Spofford seventy-eight?” he asked.

“Shit, nigga, we met in lockdown,” I remembered.

“Yeah, I got into that fight with the guy in the chow hall.”

“All right, that’s you!”

After Saint-Tropez we took that boat all over. We went up and down the coasts, and every time we stopped at another country, it was chaos when they found out I was on Jeff’s boat. There’s nothing like it. You could get off the plane anywhere and it’s like you never left home. You get to meet kings, queens, and princes. Everything’s carte blanche, people open doors for you. You never have to wait in line to go to a club, you always have a table at the finest restaurants in the world. It was just a wonderful world to live in. It seemed like one big blur. But one thing I did realize is that none of all that filled that big hole that I had in my soul. I never truly respected the championship; it all came very easy. I truly put in a lot of hard work to achieve what I did, but I took it for granted.

When we docked in Sicily, we went out to a party and about a hundred people followed us back onto the boat. They all wanted to see me and take pictures with me. All of a sudden, the whole boat started tilting and sinking. Everybody wanted to party with us. Which was ideal for my demons, no doubt about it.

We stopped in Sardinia and that was off the hook. I’m a history buff so when I think of Sardinia I think of the Punic Wars and Hannibal. I was vibing on the fact that great wars were fought here. Jeff and I stopped into a place called the Billionaire Club. That place lived up to its name. A bottle of champagne cost something like $100,000.

“You don’t have to worry about me drinking tonight,” I joked to Jeff. But they kept sending bottles over to us anyway. In Sardinia, we were hanging out with Cavalli and Victoria Beckham. He invited me on his boat that was so lavish that it changed colors. I would hop on one of Jeff’s Jet Skis and go from boat to boat, eating some food, drinking some liquor.

We had one unpleasant incident in Sardinia. There was another guy on Jeff’s boat who was an English friend of Jeff’s. He brought these two French girls on the boat and we all got high. I took one of the girls to my room and had sex with her. Afterwards I went upstairs on the deck, and when I came down, I saw the girl I was with going through the staterooms. I was high as a kite but I got really pissed at her. I thought,
Holy shit. If anything comes up missing, they’re gonna blame me. I’m the only nigga here
. So I grabbed the girl by her hair and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” I dragged her up onto the deck. I was so upset and paranoid from the coke that I was about to throw her overboard when a guy on the next boat saw me.