18

Mike Tyson and Me

“Mike Finally Found Happiness” (Courtesy of Will Hart)

ABC Sports, motivated by Alex Wallau’s relationships, had signed a contract with the 19-year-old heavyweight punching phenom from upstate New York who, while growing up, had exposure to gangs and drug cartels but managed to escape that life. Mike Tyson would beat journeyman Jesse Ferguson in Troy, New York, on February 16, 1986. This would be Tyson’s first fight on broadcast national television since the Olympic trials as an amateur.

In our meeting with Mike the day before the fight, he was markedly soft-spoken and polite. He hugged Alex coming in, as did some members of his posse, so I was the outsider in the room. Alex asked most of the questions, and for his part Mike acted genuinely 19, kind of uninformed, and in a way tender. Alex explained to me that Mike was superbly managed by Jimmy Jacobs and Bill Cayton, two old pros who knew exactly what they were doing, and they were grooming him for the maximum in global exposure.

The following day Mike created a spectacle, just as Alex had told me and the network he would. In the fifth round he broke Jesse Ferguson’s nose with a perfectly placed uppercut, and a round later Jesse was bleeding so profusely that he was disqualified for holding. In a classic moment of career building, Cayton and Jacobs got the New York State Athletic Commission to change the DQ to a TKO, to preserve Mike’s career-beginning knockout streak. In the post-fight interview with Alex, Tyson gave a hint of his near-future niche as the most prolific quote machine in sports. Alex asked about the classic right uppercut that had wrecked Ferguson.

“Cus D’Amato taught me the purpose of the uppercut is to drive the opponent’s nose bone into his brain, so that’s what I was trying to do, I wanted to drive the nose bone into his brain. I knew I could finish the fight.” Indeed.

Calling the fight hadn’t been at all uncomfortable. Working with Alex was a dream, he was so inside it all. Tyson had a storyline built around the bid to become history’s youngest heavyweight champion. I began to consider that I might just have backed into a good parking space. But I should have kept the car running.

In his next ABC fight on May 3, Tyson’s 19-straight knockout streak ended as the crafty James “Quick” Tillis took him the distance in Glens Falls, New York. I knew the knockout streak wouldn’t last forever, but I still felt disappointment. I now understand, better than I did then, there are professional techniques for avoiding being knocked out, and veterans like Tillis know how to use them.

Seventeen days later, Mike had his first fight at Madison Square Garden. The opponent was a former amateur star named Mitch “Blood” Green. Like Tillis before him, Green was taller than Tyson and had some defensive skills. Again, Mike was given a decision, this time wider than Tillis’s scores, but the large crowd at the Garden was disappointed, expecting fireworks.

The Green fight was on a local New York channel, not on HBO, so since I would have the night off from a microphone, Art Kaminsky talked me into inviting Dennis Swanson to be my guest at the Garden. To my surprise he accepted. We knew Swanson was dickering over whether to compete with an expected contract bid by HBO to try to hold on to Tyson’s rights. By the end of the dull fight, it was clear to me from the division president’s body language that Mike would be headed out the door. I wasn’t quite sure if I should follow him.

The last Tyson fight on ABC was set for July 26, 1986, again upstate in Glens Falls. The opponent was Marvis Frazier, who was trained by his father, Joe, and had been irrationally rushed three years before into a title fight against heavyweight champ Larry Holmes, which ended in a first-round knockout.

Alex Wallau kept a beautiful green Jaguar in a garage near his apartment, and by now we had developed a routine for the Tyson upstate scenario, which meant Alex programmed the music, Alex picked the route, and Alex drove us back and forth, stopping for food at Alex-history diners along the way. It was a pleasure, and when he wasn’t introducing me to obscure rock and roll groups like Cock Robin, he was always talking boxing, and I was absorbing this like the proverbial sponge. And while he was the authority on boxing, he made it clear he regarded me as the authority on what to say on TV.

“Lamps, I have a serious question.”

“Sure. What?”

“Do you think I should predict in the opening on camera that Mike will knock Marvis out in the first round?”

“Well, that has to depend on whether you believe it. Are you certain of it?”

“Couldn’t be more certain.”

“Well, Alex, you are the expert. If you think that is the best way to illuminate the matchup, that’s what you should say.”

“Okay, that settles it. I’m going to predict a first-round knockout.”

Silence. Back to music for a while. Then nearly an hour later, music off.

“What would you think of me predicting he will knock him out in the first minute of the first round? One-minute knockout, what do you think?”

“Alex, it’s all about what you believe. It would be very attention getting, and as long as Mike does knock Marvis out, I don’t think anyone will penalize you for it.”

This was before the internet, before social media.

“Aah, I don’t know for sure,” Alex said. “Feels pretty audacious.”

I teased him. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Another half hour of music. Then the last volley.

“I’m going to go with the first-round knockout.”

He seemed satisfied. It was brave enough and had two more minutes of margin for error. The one-minute knockout prediction went by the wayside.

In the ring, Marvis looked uneasy. Then Tyson landed a huge uppercut, followed by a combination. Referee Joe Cortez began to count, then looked closely and waved his arms. Marvis was out cold. Thirty seconds on the nose.

All the way back to the city Alex ranted at himself. “Why didn’t I have the nerve to say what I really believed?” I couldn’t convince him the first-round KO prediction was good enough. He couldn’t have been more depressed. He felt like he had left money on the table.

At that point in his career Mike made the sensible move and migrated to HBO. At that time the logic was less visible to the average sports fan than continuing history would show. ABC appeared in every television home in America, while HBO was still developing and only a minority of households were anteing up the monthly fee for what was mostly seen as a movie-recycling channel. The high-impact drama series like The Sopranos and The Wire that later came to identify HBO’s artistic profile were not yet in development. But the network, along with its direct competitor Showtime, saw a pathway to growth in boxing.

The critical link was boxing’s entrepreneurial nature. While major sports like NFL football, Major League Baseball, and NBA basketball thrived on abundance and regularity, boxing matches were more like popcorn movies—they came along once, they would never come again in exactly the same form—and if you missed them there was no certain chance you would see those two fighters live in the moment of confrontation. If the Bears lost to the Packers in September, there was a guaranteed rematch coming up in November. But in boxing you had no guarantee that Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler would ever meet again. And as history demonstrates, they didn’t. So every major fight was the Super Bowl, which made it the perfect sport for premium pay cable.

I remained at ABC calling fights with Alex and collecting on the contract Swanson was determined to destroy. I was still the studio host of college football. I was developing a portfolio in a new genre of extreme endurance events, which were winning awards for originality and inventiveness. And the contract that included the critical guarantees for marquee exposure at the Calgary Winter Olympics was still there in black and white. Until my agent decided that was untenable.

On Monday, June 28, 1987, I got a call from Kaminsky advising me that before the end of that week we would be summoned to a meeting in Swanson’s office at which I would agree to resign from ABC Sports.

“Jim, he just isn’t under any circumstance going to honor the contract in Calgary. Very shortly the publicity process will begin and it will immediately become clear to other media you are being stiffed. You could sue them, but it would be an insurmountable black mark on your career image. There are only three of these networks, and while that implies competition in many ways, they operate as a cartel. You sue one, you sue them all. We’re not going to do that. You go in, you shake his hand, you walk away honorably, and we’ll see what CBS or NBC have to offer. It’s not the end of the world.”

To me, it felt like the end of the world. Hadn’t I been publicly anointed by the great Roone Arledge? I had. But looking around me, I knew that already a significant number of ABC Sports stalwarts with Arledge-blessed identities had been rooted out: the head of production who ran college football, Chuck Howard; Roone’s handpicked administrative assistant, Jeff Ruhe, who was now safely married to Ethel Kennedy’s daughter Courtney; star producers Terry O’Neil and Ric LaCivita; all these people close friends of mine, now elsewhere despite their histories. I was just another chess piece to be removed from the board. I wasn’t a pawn, maybe I was a rook or a bishop, but I was being taken out.

It felt like my precious career was being erased. Art said again, “Jim, he is taking away your job. He can’t take away your proven talent. That stays in place.”

On July 2, I walked out of ABC after nearly 13 years. By the end of the year, I was living in Los Angeles where I was sports director for the CBS-owned station there. I had a prime-time interview show titled One on One with Jim Lampley that aired on CBS four times a year. I was calling CBS Sports telecasts of NFL games on Sundays. I had a daily three-hour slot on the pioneer station for 24-hour sports talk radio, WFAN and was already making twice as much money as I had earned in the ABC contract I had left behind. And most significant, I was signing a new contract to become the voice of boxing and Wimbledon at HBO, where Mike Tyson had become the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of prizefighting before taking his first loss in a huge upset to Buster Douglas on February 11, 1990, in Tokyo.

The Tyson narrative was built and rebuilt until it was interrupted by his 1992 conviction and incarceration for rape. That was a weird experience for those of us at HBO who had never had to deal with the cognitive dissonance of having a friend or a business associate charged with rape. I slept restlessly over the three years Mike spent in prison and was relieved when he was released. When friends asked me what I thought about his guilt or innocence I just said, “I was not on the jury, so I’m not equipped to judge.”

The Mike Tyson I dealt with in the years that followed was always civil and congenial. I owe him a form of gratitude for being an eye-catching and galvanizing subject in my career.

When in 2002 HBO and Showtime made an unprecedented partnership deal to put Lennox Lewis into the ring with Tyson, I was chosen to call the fight with Showtime’s Bobby Czyz. After Tyson ran across the stage and bit Lennox’s leg at the initial press conference in New York, a vagabond tour was conducted to find a city and a state boxing commission willing to host the event. The promoter Main Events wound up with a deal in Memphis on June 8. In boxing terms, Tennessee was not Nevada or New York or New Jersey, but Tennessee it would be.

There was no fighter meeting the day before the bout because Tyson wanted no part of it. I rehearsed a few things with Czyz because we had never even spoken before, much less traded comments during a fight. It was agreed that our pre-fight on-camera appearance would conclude with each of us predicting who would win. Czyz picked Tyson, which I judged to be in line with Showtime politics. I had been telling radio audiences for years that Lennox Lewis was a larger, stronger, much better version of Buster Douglas, whose style had given Tyson his first loss in Tokyo 12 years before. I had been scoffed at by radio hosts and callers all that time.

I also knew that two decades before that night, when Mike and Lennox were teenagers, Lennox’s amateur coach, Arnie Boehm, had taken his pupil from Kitchener, Ontario, to the Catskills to spend a week with Tyson and Cus D’Amato. The boxers worked out together and watched old black-and-white fight films on a white sheet draped against the wall in the room where they slept. Mike told me that at the beginning of the week Lennox seemed tentative and intimidated, but by the time Lewis left to go back to Canada, he was more than holding his own. So I was confident when I picked Lennox to win on camera. I had it, symbolically, from the horse’s mouth.

The fight was just as one-sided as I had expected. Lennox controlled Tyson with his jab and gradually began to mix in power shots. Lewis’s trainer, Emanuel Steward, was still properly respectful of Tyson’s one-punch power and fretted in the corner, sometimes cursing his fighter for, in his view, getting too careless. Lennox flashed a little grin and urged him to calm down, suggesting that he was playing with Mike, having fun with him. When Lewis wasted Tyson once and for all with a savage right cross in the eighth round, a truly great handheld cameraman named Gordy Saiger leaned out over the ring ropes to focus downward on the supine Tyson, and his lens revealed blood seeping from Tyson’s mouth, from his nose, from the tender flesh around both eyes.

In the post-fight interview in the ring, Lennox was joined as he almost always was by his mother, Violet. Mike was overwhelmingly gracious, praising Lewis for his dominance, documenting that they had known each other since boyhood, professing love for Lewis and his mother, even reaching across interviewer Jim Gray at one point to gently clear a globule of blood—his blood—off Lennox’s cheek. It was beautiful. It was love. It was the height of what sets prizefighting apart from other sports.

The pay-per-view fight over HBO and Showtime set a record with 1.95 million purchases at $55 each, a gross of more than $107 million, which has only been eclipsed since then by four Floyd Mayweather fights.

Before Tyson was knocked out by Lewis in the eighth round, I had not had a face-to-face conversation with Mike since a ringside interview at the Alex Stewart fight exactly 11 and a half years before. HBO wanted me to go to his dressing room to see if he would have a longer conversation on camera, to sum it all up. Throughout the weekend in Memphis, a few of Mike’s fans and followers confronted me, knowing that I had spent years denigrating his level of competition and predicting his demise against Lennox. Some of those closest to King and Tyson had openly threatened me.

“Hey, Mike knows the bullshit you been spreading about him. You’d better not bump into him in a dark hallway.”

His dressing room was in a dark hallway. There were three very large men in black suits and bowler hats standing near the door. I asked one of them where I could find Mike. He smiled and pointed to the door. “Go on in. I think he’s expecting you.”

I found Mike Tyson sitting alone on a metal chair in the middle of an empty room. On his lap was a naked baby boy, whom I later identified as his son Miguel, the first of two children he had out of wedlock after his tumultuous two-year marriage to actress Robin Givens ended in divorce. Mike was gently stroking the infant as he sat quietly. Not sure how to treat this, I waited for him to set the tone. Without looking up, he delivered an opening line I couldn’t have possibly imagined.

“I’ve missed you.”

And in that moment, I realized that didn’t refer just to me. He missed the glory of his pre-prison HBO days. He missed the legitimacy of being the real heavyweight champion of the world. He missed the luster of HBO. He missed all the things he had sacrificed on one lost weekend in Tokyo. He missed being Mike Tyson. Then the follow-up:

“I didn’t have a chance in there. What did everyone expect? He’s six feet, six inches tall. I’m about five ten. I couldn’t have reached him with a baseball bat.”

There would be no interview. I just wasn’t going to put him through it. I had known him, at first up close, later from a distance, for more than 16 years. And at that moment, I saw a larger, wiser, more humane person than I had ever seen before. For the first time I felt I was getting a clear picture of Mike Tyson. I left the room overwhelmed with admiration for him. He had grown up, mostly on the strength of his own bitter experiences, and as the baby on his lap portrayed, he was still capable of love. Maybe more capable than ever before.

Over the ensuing two decades, I have seen Mike many times, and because of his more recent emergence into a different public persona, it won’t shock anyone to know he has been uniformly gracious, polite, respectful, and a true friend, not just to me but to everyone else I know who has the privilege of knowing him. To people from outside the boxing culture I always say, and Mike has affirmed to me, “The old image of the Baddest Man on the Planet, that’s not Mike. Not by any means. The shy kid on the rooftops building relationships with pigeons? That is Mike, to the core.”

When he was the loneliest of lonely boys, choosing to stay away from the gangs, the pigeons made him happy. His greatest victory as an adult is that through a hard path, he found a way for his life to make him happy. That is a championship worth winning, and it fills me with joy to see that he has won it.