I was worrying the whole flight back to New York. I was also still a little high from the last of the coke I had in Jamaica. Usually I just breezed through customs with the royal treatment, but this time I was met by people from Homeland Security. And these guys were all hard-asses.
“What were you doing in Cuba?” one of them asked.
How did they know I was in Cuba? It wasn’t on my passport. Then I remembered the fight I had with the paparazzi in the lobby of the hotel. It was all over the news.
“I was just hanging out for New Year’s,” I said.
“So you figured you’d just take off and go to Cuba for a New Year’s vacation for a day, disregarding the laws we have in place that prohibit travel to Cuba,” the official said.
“I did it from Jamaica,” I said, as if that was any better.
“Did you spend any American funds?” he asked.
“I had Cuban currency but nobody took it. They only take U.S. dollars over there,” I told him. I bought Cuban money because I thought they would take it, but I got scammed.
This was not the best time to be caught sneaking into Cuba. Bush had just been elected and he said that he was going to crack down on any relations with the Castro government, so I played the religion card.
“Am I being held here because I’m Muslim?” I asked the lead interrogator. “This ain’t no Muslim shit. I’m just trying to have a good time, brother.”
They all laughed. Once I get a laugh out of people, I’m a ham. So I gave them a little shtick and they said, “Go ahead, you can go.”
I was still sick and losing weight when I got back to the States, so the first thing I did was to make an appointment to see a doctor. I just knew I had AIDS. I started calling all my friends to say good-bye to them. I even called Monica and told her that I had AIDS and that I was going to die. That might not have been the smartest move.
I went to see a Spanish doctor and he did the AIDS test. It came back negative.
“Nah, doctor. I have it. You’re not doing this shit right. Get me another doctor,” I said. He started laughing.
“Mike, you’re HIV negative,” he said.
“Did someone pay you to say I don’t have it?” I said. He finally convinced me that I was AIDS-free.
I was also worry-free. I had a huge fight in a few months with Lennox Lewis for the heavyweight title, and I was fucking around in Jamaica and Cuba not even training, just living a crazy drug-fueled life. I had to be nuts.
Then I started getting fallout from the Cuba trip. Darrow was seriously concerned that the Bush administration was going to make an example out of me.
He sent out a memo to my whole boxing and legal team.
“As you are no doubt aware, Mike is alleged to have traveled to Cuba and to have committed an assault on a Cuban journalist while there. I am less troubled by the assault (it is unlikely the Cuban government would be able to extradite Mike given the current status of Cuban-American diplomatic relations), than by the fact that the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) has petitioned the Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury to investigate Mike for criminal violations of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations and the Trading With the Enemy Act. It is difficult to determine how seriously the Bush administration will take this matter. Unfortunately the Bush administration, in order to repair the damage caused by the Clinton administration’s handling of the Elian Gonzalez matter, has pledged to organizations such as the CANF to enforce strenuously travel and trade restrictions.
“Obviously, I was unaware of Mike’s visit to Cuba. To the extent that Mike was there for a statutorily exempt purpose, or to the extent that Mike’s Cuba-related expenses were covered by a person not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and that Mike provided no service to Cuba or a Cuban national, we should attempt to confirm this as soon as possible.
“Lastly, it is my strong advice that Mike cease from making any additional statements regarding his travel to Cuba. Specifically, I was contacted by Tom Farrey of ESPN who purported to have numerous photos and quotes related to Mike’s travels. Apparently, Mike is alleged to have stated that he was there as a tourist and to support the ‘people’ of Cuba. We refused to confirm that Mike was in Cuba. The bottom line is that Mike should not travel to a foreign country without first consulting legal counsel. This is particularly true given his status as a felon and a registered sex offender.”
Darrow was always there for me. Nothing ever came out of that Cuba trip.
But right after I got back, Monica filed for divorce. I guess she had had enough of my fooling around, because I sure did a lot of it. Calling to tell her that I had AIDS probably didn’t help either. And the fact that I had just had a baby boy with this stripper in Phoenix was icing on the cake. I couldn’t blame Monica. What kind of marriage was it where I could fuck five different girls a night and then just send her money? I don’t know if we were ever in love.
I had met my baby momma Shelley at a strip club in Phoenix. I really liked Shelley. She kept her house immaculate and she did a lot of stuff with me. She was a fitness freak, so when I’d work out and go run, she’d run with me. I’d run five miles, she’d run ten. She’d always one-up me. One time, my assistant Darryl and I were throwing around a fifteen-pound medicine ball and Shelley got in on the action. She and I threw the ball two hundred fifty times and I got sore, but she kept on throwing it with Darryl. This ninety-pound Mexican chick must have done five hundred throws. She wore our asses down.
Shelley tried to work on our relationship. She’d talk to Hope and get tips from her on how to keep me happy. When she got pregnant with Miguel, I had no idea how I could take care of another kid. I was broke and in debt by then. She kept saying she was going to get an abortion, but she didn’t.
The Lewis fight was scheduled for April so I didn’t have much time to stop doing coke and weed and start training in earnest. I was still high on coke when I flew to New York to do a big press conference with Lennox on January twenty-second. They had us facing each other on slightly elevated platforms on one big stage at the Hudson Theatre. The Showtime announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr. introduced each of us like it was a real fight. As soon as Lewis was announced, I lost my mind. I looked over at him and wanted to hit the motherfucker. So I got off my platform and went up in his face. I guess Lewis was expecting trouble because he had about ten huge forest-tree-looking motherfuckers hiding in the wings, so as soon as I did that, they all came rushing out. I was only there with a few of my bodyguards, Anthony and Rick and my trainers and also Shelly Finkel. The Lewis camp must have thought that we’d see these big guys and run.
I moved up to get in Lewis’s face and one of his bodyguards pushed me back, so I threw a left hook at him. Lewis then threw a right at me and Anthony threw one back at Lennox and all hell broke loose. I found myself down on the ground with Lennox, but he was so tall that when we went down, I didn’t fall by his head; I was down by his leg. So I bit him on the thigh. He said that he had my teeth imprints for a while after that.
They pulled us apart and I couldn’t get near him but I saw his bodyguard who pushed me so I spit right in his face. Anthony told me that I was so filled with rage that I picked up a fire extinguisher and threatened to hit Ant with it.
“Mike, you ain’t going to hit me with that,” he said to me. “I ain’t even worried because I love you, you love me. Put the fire extinguisher down and let’s get the fuck out of here,” he told me.
But first I had to preen in front of the stage where all the reporters were assembled. I put my arms in the air to show off my biceps and then I grabbed my crotch.
“Put him in a straitjacket,” someone yelled out.
“Put your mother in a straitjacket you punk-assed white boy. Come here and tell me that. I’ll fuck you in your ass you punk white boy,” I screamed.
“You faggot. You can’t touch me, you’re not man enough. I’ll eat your asshole alive, you bitch. Nobody in here can fuck with me. This is the ultimate man. Fuck you, you ho.”
Shelly Finkel was trying to restrain me, but I shrugged him off.
“Come and say it in my face. I’ll fuck you in your ass in front of everybody. Come on, you bitch, you scared coward. You are not man enough to fuck with me. You can’t last two minutes in my world, bitch. Look at you scared now, you ho. Scared like a little white pussy. Scared of the real man. I’ll fuck you until you love me, faggot!”
That was the audacity that Cus had instilled in me. But it was also me talking like my momma. She would curse just like that. I feel bad now about saying that to that writer. I was out of my mind coming down off my high.
After the press conference I went out to see my pigeons in Brooklyn with a friend of mine named Zip. He was really concerned.
“What the fuck are you doing, Mike? You’re going to blow all this fucking money,” he told me. “You’re up there acting like a nigga. They could arrest you.”
“What did I do? They attacked me first,” I said.
“Not Lewis. I heard you threaten somebody’s life. If that reporter gets scared, they can put charges on you, man. Are you fucking crazy? That’s almost a terrorist threat. You’re a scary motherfucker, Mike. You may not be to us, but to them you’re scary.”
Then we flew some birds and smoked some weed and I did some coke.
“You’re fucking up, Mike,” he told me again. “Why are you doing this shit? Why are you out here fucking with these pigeons? Go back and train, man. We should be out near a beach on a yacht. Just train and fight, Mike.”
On January twenty-second, the same day that I was in New York for the Lewis press conference, the Las Vegas Police Department said that they found evidence in the raid on my house supporting the woman’s claim that she was raped and held hostage. Now they could only wait to see if the D.A. would bring charges against me.
Meantime, Darrow Soll had gone to work. He got affidavits from all the people who had seen this woman in the house. He called up all the maids, the landscapers, the plant waterers, everybody who had seen her. They all testified that the young lady was more than pleased to be there, walking around the place of her own free will with nothing on but a T-shirt.
By then, the girl had recanted and she went to my friend Mack and told him that she had been pressured by both the police and her boyfriend to file charges. Her stepfather had also told Mack that she had lied.
I was at the barbershop one day when a black lady who worked for the FBI came in for some work on her eyebrows.
When she saw me, she said, “I’ve watched your work on tape and you look very good.”
It took me a second to realize that she was referring to my private sex tapes that the cops had confiscated from my house.
“Umm, mmm, mmm,” she said. “You are something else, boy.”
Thanks to Darrow, the whole thing was shut down. The D.A.’s office stood up to the cops and after seeing the so-called evidence the cops presented, they decided not to bring charges against me. Meanwhile, my name had been dragged through the mud again for no reason.
Because of the fracas at the Lewis press conference, the Nevada officials voted 4–1 to deny me a license to fight there. Why was everything my fault? At Lewis’s last press conference, during an interview segment for ESPN, he and Hasim Rahman had a knockdown brawl on the air that was much worse than the little scuffle we had in New York. But now they had to find a new venue and the fight was postponed until June. Which gave me more time to get high.
In February, a state senator in Texas said that I should be arrested if I went back to Texas because I didn’t register as a sex offender when I trained in San Antonio in 2001.
It was bullshit; I had registered, but why let facts get in the way? When we announced that the fight would be held in Memphis, officials in both Tennessee and Mississippi announced that I had to register as a sex offender before the fight. Why was I such a pariah in my own country? Overseas, the people knew what time it was. Whenever I went abroad, especially in former Communist countries, I was treated like a hero.
I went to Hawaii for my training camp. That should give you some indication of how much I was motivated for this fight. The epicenter of some of the baddest weed in the world was there. I was smoking my brains out. Even the prospect of getting the belt back didn’t mean much to me by then. I just wasn’t focused at all.
I was obviously fucked up then, big-time. That’s why I was doing weed. And the residue of coke doesn’t leave your system right away, especially psychologically. All that Maui Wowie made for some interesting press conferences. In one of the most serene places in the world, I met with the press and started ranting about hypocrisy in society.
“I’m just like you. I enjoy the forbidden fruits in life too. I think its un-American not to go out with a woman, not to be with a beautiful woman, not to get my dick sucked. . . . It’s just what I said before, everybody in this country is a big fucking liar. The media tells people . . . that this person did this and this person did that and then we find out that we’re just human and we find out that Michael Jordan cheats on his wife just like everybody else. We all cheat on our fucking wife in one way or another, either emotionally, physically, or sexually. There’s no one perfect. We’re always gonna do that. Jimmy Swaggart is lascivious, Tyson is lascivious, but we’re not criminally, at least I’m not, criminally lascivious. I may like to fornicate more than other people—it’s just who I am. I sacrificed so much of my life, can I at least get laid? I mean, I been robbed of most of my money, can I at least get head without the people wanting to harass me and wanting to throw me in jail?
“I’m a big strong nigga that knocks out people and rapes people and rips off people. I don’t know nothing about being the heavyweight champion, the only thing I know is how to fight. I am a nigga, right? No, really, really, really, I’m not saying like I’m a black person, I am a street person. I don’t even want to be a street person, I don’t even like typical street people. But that is just who I became and what happened to my life and the tragedies in life that made me that way. The pimps, the hos, the players, the people who have been cast aside, the people who have been lied to, the people who have been falsely accused, the people who were on death row and killed for crimes they never committed. Those are my people. I know it sounds disgusting. Those are the only people who showed me love.
“But I’m Mike, I’m not malevolent or anything, I just am. And I just want to live my life and I know you guys talk some bad stigma out there about me, but you know I’m going to make sure you talk about me, and your grandkids and kids after that are going to know about me. I am going to make sure of that. They are never going to forget about me. Your great-grandkids are going to say, ‘Wow, wasn’t that a bizarre individual?’
“I feel sometimes that I was not meant for this society because everyone here is a fucking hypocrite. Everybody says they believe in God but they don’t do God’s work. Everybody counteracts what God is really about. If Jesus was here, do you think Jesus would show me any love? I’m a Muslim, but do you think Jesus would love me? I think Jesus would have a drink with me and discuss ‘Why are you acting like that?’ Now, he would be cool. He would talk to me. No Christian ever did that. They’d throw me in jail and write bad articles about me and then go to church on Sunday and say Jesus is a wonderful man and he’s coming back to save us. But they don’t understand that when he comes back, these crazy, greedy capitalistic men are gonna kill him again.”
What was I, Lenny Bruce now? These reporters were sitting there taking all this down, parsing every word to get to the true essence of me, but what was so obvious was that this was the Maui weed talking. I was stoned out of my mind. End of story.
I did a ton of crazy interviews, and they culminated with my appearance on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox. Rita Cosby interviewed me. She was combative, asking me the most outrageous questions just to get me to say something crazy so that O’Reilly could go ballistic and take something I said out of context and put me down.
“Are you an animal?” Cosby asked me during the interview.
“If necessary. It depends on what situation am I in to be an animal . . . If I’m fighting because I’m constantly being assailed against by your cohorts or people in the street because they feel that they have the right to assail me because of what people write in the papers, because of the courts, then you’re correct and you’re right.” I told her that I would tell my kids that they were niggas and that “this society will treat you like a second-class citizen for the rest of your life, so there are certain things that you must not get upset for. But, you must fight.”
“Are you evil?” she asked.
“I think I’m capable of evil like everyone else.”
She also seemed to enjoy asking me about my financial state.
“I do need the money. That’s why it’s called ‘money’—because we all need it. It’s our god. It’s what we worship, and, if anybody tells me anything different, they’re a liar. Stop working, just live on the street and show me how much God’s going to take care of you.”
“Where does the rage come from?” she finally asked me.
“You’re so white. Where does that rage come from?” I replied.
Lennox and I fought in Memphis on June eighth. Wherever that rage had come from, by then it was gone, even despite the fact that on the day of the fight, Monica served me with more divorce papers. Besides getting served, I was being sued up the ass by everybody. I had my little baby boy there with me because his mother had flipped on me so I was taking care of him. I was a mess. But still, my dressing room before the fight had a party atmosphere. It was packed with people. I’d never kissed babies or laughed or posed for pictures before a fight when Cus was around, but that was what was going on that night.
Shelly had gotten rid of Crocodile and Tommy Brooks and they had brought in a new trainer, Ronnie Shields. Crocodile came to the fight and stopped in to see me before it began. I grabbed him tight and hugged him.
“Croc, I’m so tired,” I said. “I’m so tired.”
When they were making the introductions in the ring, they cut it in half with twenty yellow-shirted security guards who formed a wall between me and Lennox. The fight started and I was aggressive in the first round, stalking him around the ring and making him hold me so much that the referee had to warn him. But after that round, something strange happened. I just stopped fighting. It was as if my mind had shut down. Ronnie Shields and my other trainer Stacy McKinley were shouting instructions at the same time, but I didn’t hear a word either of them said.
It was very hot in the arena and I got dehydrated. I couldn’t seem to start. As the rounds progressed, I stood there in front of him and got hit. I knew I wasn’t in any condition to beat anybody, especially a fighter of Lennox’s superb skill level. I had only fought nineteen rounds in the past five years. All those years of snorting coke and drinking and smoking weed and screwing around with massive amounts of women had finally taken their toll.
A lot of my close friends and associates thought that I had been drugged during the fight, I seemed so passive. I was in a fucked-up mood and it was hard for me to throw punches. It was as if all those heroes, those boxing gods, those old-time fighters had deserted me. Or I had deserted them. All of my heroes were truly miserable bastards, and I emulated them my whole career, a hundred percent, but I was never really one of those guys. I wish I was, but I wasn’t.
By then I had spent years in therapy with different psychiatrists and the whole purpose of my therapy was to curb all my appetites, including my appetite for destruction, the one that had made me Iron Mike. Iron Mike had brought me too much pain, too many lawsuits, too much hate from the public, the stigma that I was a rapist, that I was public enemy #1. Each punch I took from Lewis in the later rounds chipped away at that pose, that persona. And I was a willing participant in its destruction.
It went eight rounds and I got tagged with a solid right hand and I went down. I was bleeding from cuts over both of my eyes and from my nose. The ref counted me out. Jim Gray interviewed both of us at the same time after the fight. During the interview, Emanuel Steward, Lennox’s trainer, interrupted Gray.
“I’m still one of Mike’s biggest fans,” he said. “He’s given me so many thrills, going back to Roderick Moore. You’ve given all of us a lot of excitement. He’s the most exciting heavyweight in the last fifty years.”
“How sorry are you guys that this fight didn’t occur many years ago when you, Mike, were at your best and you, Lennox, weren’t quite as old either?” Gray asked.
Lennox was starting to answer and I wiped some of the blood off his cheek.
He said, “Heavyweights mature at different times. Mike Tyson was a natural at nineteen. Nothing stood in his way and he ruled the planet at that time. But I’m like fine wine. I came along later and I took my time and I’m ruling now.”
“Mike, are you sorry that this fight didn’t take place years ago?”
“It wasn’t meant to be. I’ve known Lennox since he was sixteen. I have mad respect for him. Everything I said was to promote the fight. He knows that I love him and his mother. And if he thinks that I don’t love and respect him then he’s crazy.”
“So you’re saying that a lot of the behavior was just to sell tickets and that doesn’t represent your true feelings?” Gray seemed shocked.
“He knows who I am and he knows that I’m not disrespectful. I respect this man as a brother. He’s a magnificent, prolific fighter.”
The little gesture of me wiping the blood off Lennox’s cheek was seized on by all the boxing writers. They thought that I had been heroic in defeat. And for the first time, a lot of them seemed to see the human behind my façade. Almost.
“Tyson is a despicable character. A rapist, a thug you would not want within an area code of your daughter. But it’s going to be just a little harder to despise him now,” a nemesis from Sports Illustrated wrote.
As soon as the fight was over, I got right back into my vices. I had met an attractive Dominican girl named Luz. She had come to the Lewis fight with some other guys and we started hanging out. She lived in Spanish Harlem in New York and I moved in with her that fall. And I was right back in my environment. Abandoned buildings, the dope man on the street, people were OD’ing, a fat lady was pushing an addicted newborn down an alley, niggas with beers shooting at one another. That’s my element, sorry.
It was bad for me to be in my element, but once I was there my senses sharpened. I was paranoid, on the move, I was in survival mode. Once I moved into Spanish Harlem, I became Brownsville Mike again. People were feeding me. My drugs were free. I started hanging out in the drug dens.
How did I get from slapping a motherfucker five and letting him take a picture with me to being right there in the dope den where the naked women are packing the bags of coke? How did I get there, sniffing the coke and the man is going, “No, that shit is for the dumb crack niggas. This is the flakes. You’ve got to try the flakes, Poppy.” I took one hit of that shit and my eyeballs froze.
I’d go down to the restaurant that was on the corner and they’d give me free food. I’d be eating all the rice and beans and they were plying me with liquor and it was still early in the morning. Some of my gangster friends would come to visit me. They’d be in their Rollses and fancy cars.
“What the fuck are you doing up here with these bitches?” one of them asked me. “Come live in my house.”
“No, I’m good right here, nigga,” I said. “This is my woman, I’m good.”
“Mike, you got to watch these niggas up here,” he said.
“Nah, man. These people are good,” I told him.
I was hanging with those people and deep in my heart I knew I belonged there at that moment because that was how I felt about myself. Because in the hood it was different—people might feed me for free and give me drugs and take care of me, but if something went down, I was there with them. I had my vices and the people in the neighborhood understood my barometer.
I was juggling at least twenty girls at that time. Sometimes their worlds collided and I bore the brunt of it. Someone I was dating heard that I had been with someone else. Now, you would think a girl would be out of her mind to put her hands on Mike Tyson. But when they got mad they didn’t give a shit. They’d hit me and scratch at my face. Then when you thought that it was all over and they’d cooled down, the next thing you know, a rock hits you in the head and she was mad as a motherfucker all over again.
• • •
On January 13, 2003, my divorce was finalized. Monica got the Connecticut house, her house, and $6.5 million from my future earnings. Eventually she would get a lien on my Vegas house. She was pretty hostile towards me at this point, but I didn’t care about giving her the money. I’m a street guy; I was going to be out in the streets hustling.
Even though my heart wasn’t in boxing anymore, I still had to make some money. I had Shelly get me a fight on February twenty-second against Clifford Etienne. A week before the fight, I went to get a tattoo that became my most notorious tattoo. I told the artist, S. Victor Whitmill, aka Paradox, that I wanted a tattoo on my face. I hated my face and I literally wanted to deface myself. I suggested tiny little hearts all over it. It wasn’t some ploy to make me more attractive to women; I just wanted to cover up my face. But Victor refused to do that; he said that I had a good face. He came up with that Maori tribal design and I told him I’d think about it. The more I thought, the more I liked the idea of putting a tattoo that was used by warriors to scare their opponents in battle on my face. So I went with it.
I trained much harder for this fight than the Lewis fight. I came in under 225 pounds, nine pounds lighter than for Lewis. Etienne had a good record and he was in the top ten of both conferences, but he had a weak chin. He’d been knocked down ten times in twenty-six fights.
There was a documentary crew trailing me around for a film. They filmed me as I gulped down my prefight meal.
“I hate Mike Tyson. I mostly wish the worst for Mike Tyson. That’s why I don’t like my friends or myself. I’m going to extremes. Maybe in my next life, I’ll have a better life. That’s why I’m looking forward to go to the other world—I hate the way I live now. I hate my life now.”
I didn’t know why I was more focused for this fight than for the fight with Lewis. I didn’t know if I was coming or going. The bell rang and I charged Etienne and we came together on the ropes and I pulled him down on me. I think that I had hurt him with one of my first punches. We got up and I ducked one of his punches and threw a counter that landed square on his jaw and down he went. I thought that he could have gotten up. I didn’t think it was a great punch that could knock someone cold, but I don’t really know because it was really precise. After he was counted out, I helped him get up and we hugged. Clifford whispered something in my ear.
Jim Gray came into the ring to do the interview.
“He said something to you in your ear that nobody could hear, what exactly was it that he said?”
“To be honest, he said, ‘You need to stop bullshitting and be serious, you’re not serious, that’s why you are out here playing around.’ He said the truth.”
“And he is right, isn’t he?” Jim asked.
“Yeah, he is. I am just happy to be back in Memphis and give a decent show and I am glad brother Clifford gave me a fight and people don’t understand the business when you show your love and respect, when you fight one another, because that is how we elevate our lifestyle.”
“Mike, were you really sick this week? What was the problem?”
“I broke my back.”
“What do you mean by that, you broke your back?”
“My back is broken.”
“A vertebrae or a portion . . . ?”
“Spinal.”
“You did that in sparring?”
“No, I did it by a motorcycle accident. The doctor discovered, I was doing my sit-ups, 2,500 a day with my twenty-pound weight, and one day I couldn’t move anymore. And I just asked the doctor, ‘What is wrong?’ And he said, ‘Believe it or not your back is broken slightly.’”
“Are you in pain right now? Did you take some type of injection? How did you make it to this fight?”
“I can’t take injections; you know they’re going to test me. But all praise be to Allah, I don’t know. I’m just happy that I’m fighting and I’m punching well and accurate.”
“Were you ready for this fight, Mike, I mean your trainer Freddie Roach advised you four days before the fight, not to fight. Were you ready?”
“No, but I’m obligated, I’ve got to be a man and fight. I canceled too many fights in my career, and I don’t want anybody to think I was afraid. And I needed the money, I am always in need of money, and I am glad the both of us did it. I have so much respect for him as a man, he is a friend of mine.”
Gray started asking me whether I was going to fight Lewis again. That was the speculation: another big Lewis fight to make a lot of money.
“I’m not ready to fight him now. I’m not interested in getting beat up again. I don’t know if I want to fight anymore if I have to fight Lewis next fight. I want to get my shit together. I’m so messed up; I just want to get my life together.”
I carried that morose attitude with me back to my hotel suite, trailed by my documentary film crew. I did a video conference call with my kids to see if they had seen their daddy win. Then I kicked the camera crew out of my room and started partying with my pimp/gangster friend. He had brought some of his girls with him along with another girl who was a friend of a friend. I had a few snorts of coke and smoked some weed and my mood lifted. We had a few bottles of Dom Pérignon open. My friend was telling one of his war stories and we were all laughing and the girl who was a friend of my friend joked and said, “Oh, you’re full of shit, nigga.”
BOOM! My friend grabbed that Dom bottle and clocked her on the head with it. I tried to stop him, but he was too fast. The blood was bursting out of her head like an oil geyser.
I was thinking that my life was ruined. We were in the South. The girl was screaming like crazy, and she was married to a very well-known celebrity. My friend was going to have to kill these people and I would be associated with all this. Then all of a sudden, my friend and the girl were talking all pleasant with each other. That was just how that pimp-ho shit goes.
I had picked up another $5 million from the Etienne fight, but I was still in massive debt. My lawsuit against Don King was still making its way through the court system and Don was getting nervous about me having my day in court. So he started reaching out to me. I didn’t have any long-standing contract with Shelly, so I was a free agent of sorts at the time. Don figured he could woo me and show me a little cash and I’d come back to him and drop the lawsuit.
I was consumed with getting money. I couldn’t wait years for the lawsuit to play out; I needed money right then. Instant gratification wasn’t quick enough for me. So I reached out to Jackie Rowe to help me deal with Don. Jackie was like a pit bull. I’d say, “Baby, get me this,” and she’d go out and get it done. And then I’d go get high.
In April of that year, I had Jackie talk Don into buying me three Mercedes-Benzes. I had him put one of them in Jackie’s name, one in Luz’s name, and the other in my friend Zip’s name. We were playing Don, telling him that if he’d come through with cash and cars, maybe I’d drop the lawsuit. So Don would set up a meeting thinking he could fool me into signing some new agreement to settle the case for peanuts and I’d wind up robbing or beating him each time.
One time, I brought two childhood friends of mine to a hotel room where Don was staying. When we got there, Don started threatening my guys and talking smack. “I got three bodies, two on record,” Don bragged. He looked over at my friend but my friend didn’t say anything. He was supposed to scare Don, but Don had him all shook up. I was looking at my guys like, What the fuck, you’re supposed to be tough guys. So all of a sudden I got up and smacked the shit out of Don.
“Just shut the fuck up, motherfucker,” I said.
And my guys, the guys I brought up to deal with Don, started jumping on me to restrain me.
Meanwhile, I kept meeting with Don whenever he reached out to me. I’m so happy that at that stage in my life, I didn’t have the guts that I had back when I was younger or I really would have done a number on Don. Don once called me and said that he was going to come over to my office in Vegas and drop off $100,000 for me. My friend Zip was in town, so the two of us were there waiting for Don to show up.
Don arrived with a bag full of cash.
“I’ve got to pay some people off,” he said and began counting out $100,000. Zip walked over to him, calmly took the whole bag, and brought it over to me.
“Thank you very much. Please escort Don to the door,” I said.
Zip grabbed Don’s arm and walked him out.
“Me and the champ are going to work out now,” Zip said.
“Hey, man, I need that money. I’ve got to pay some people off. I told you that,” Don said.
“See you later, Don, it was a pleasure meeting you. I’ve always been a big fan,” Zip said and closed the door in his face. We started counting the money. There was sure a lot of gwap in the bag.
My lawyer Dale Kinsella heard about these meetings with Don and drafted a letter to Don’s attorney at the end of May.
I am appalled about what is going on with the participation of your office in the last thirty days.
In this context, I would appreciate it if Don and/or your office would see fit to advise Jerry and me to what in the world is going on.
What Dale didn’t know was that a few weeks before he sent that letter, I had Jackie negotiating with Don behind their backs. My assistant Darryl had called Jackie to tell her that we were down to our last $5,000. We had no money to pay the house bills or the maintenance workers or anything. Jackie came out to Vegas and saw how dire my financial situation was.
“I want my fucking money from Don,” I told her.
Don was thrilled to hear from Jackie. He was desperate to settle the case because we finally had gotten a trial date the coming September. As soon as we heard that, Jeff Wald told me that Don was going to do his magic and we’d see why he was Don King. Jeff didn’t know that I had Jackie talking directly with Don, trying to get some money from him. Don was offering me a $20 million settlement in exchange for him getting to promote my fights again. I told Jackie that before we could talk about working together and settling, I wanted three things of mine that Don still had—a green Rolls-Royce, a painting that the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had given me that was supposed to be worth a lot, and the thing I was worried the most about: a drawing of me in the middle of a bunch of X-Men that Stan Lee had done.
Don called Jackie and told her that he would fly us down to Florida and put us up in the Delano Hotel so we could work out a settlement. Jackie, her son, my girlfriend Luz, and I got on Don’s private jet and flew down. I packed a big block of coke and a duffel bag with a half-pound of reefer. I was doing my coke and smoking my blunts and listening to my Discman and I was higher than the plane was when an epiphany hit me.
“This is my motherfucking plane. I paid for this plane. And this motherfucker is acting like he’s doing me a favor sending me down on my own fucking plane. This nigga is playing me.”
The drugs were playing with my head and I was freaking out and getting jealous.
Don picked us up at the private airport in his Rolls and he had Isadore Bolton, his chauffeur, who used to be my chauffeur before he stole him from me, driving some of Don’s associates in the lead car. We were driving down to Miami from Fort Lauderdale on I-95, the main highway, and Jackie was in the front seat and I was in the back with Luz and Jackie’s son. Don said some innocuous thing, and all that jealousy and rage spilled out of me and I kicked him in his fucking head. Boom! You don’t turn your back on a jealous cokehead.
Don swerved off onto the side median and I started choking him from the backseat.
“No, no, let him go, Mike,” Jackie screamed.
“Jackie, you hold this nigga up, I’m coming to the front,” I said.
She said, “Okay, I got him.”
I got out of the car to get into the front seat and kick his ass some more, but Jackie couldn’t hold him, she was in shock, and Don took off down the median.
Now I was on the side of the fucking highway by myself. Don drove a little bit down the road and then let Jackie and her son and Luz out of the car. They came up to me carrying my bag with the half-pound of reefer. I had the coke stash on me when I got out of the car.
“Why did you let him go, Jackie?” I screamed. “Now we’re out here on the fucking highway.”
The cars and the trucks were whizzing by us. All of a sudden, Isadore pulled up. He was there to pick us up because he lost our car and when he called Don, Don told him to turn around and get us.
He pulled up alongside me and rolled his window down and told me to get in the car.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” I screamed.
Isadore got out of his driver’s door and I was right on him. I punched him in the face twice, shattering his left orbital bone. The force of the blows knocked him across the driver’s seat and I reached in and grabbed his leg and bit it. Isadore managed to kick me off him and close his door, so I punched the outer panel of his door and bent the steel. I was about to break his window when he managed to drive away.
His shoes were still on the side of the road and he was driving barefoot.
Then the cops came. They were talking to us and I had the half brick of coke and Luz was holding the duffel bag with the half-pound of weed. These cops were so excited to see me that the motherfuckers didn’t even ask me what the four of us were doing on the side of the highway. They’d have put anybody else’s ass on that grass, and they’d be locked up for life for having all that coke. I’m an extremist. Why couldn’t I just buy an eight ball? No, I had to have a half a brick. The guys who sold it to me said, “Mike, this is sales weight. Police are not going to hear that you’re getting high with a half a brick of blow.” And I had this as my personal stash.
The cops offered to drive us to our destination and we piled into one of the cars and they took us to South Beach. Don had reserved half of a floor for us, so we started living it up. Jackie talked Don into giving us some money, and he sent a guy over with a couple hundred grand.
We partied every night for a month and then a friend of mine came by with his tour bus and we picked up a couple of girls and drove all around the East Coast.
In June, I got hit with another bullshit paternity case. This lying wench Wonda Graves claimed that I had raped her in 1990 and that I had fathered a boy. That piece-of-shit lawyer Raoul Felder, who represented Robin Givens, took on the case and bragged that he would “defeat Mike Tyson in the ring again.” They both crawled back into the gutter when the DNA test came back and showed a zero percent chance that I was the father.
But I was no angel then either. Later that month I was visiting my childhood friend Dave Malone and we were flying our pigeons in Brownsville. That night Dave drove me back to the Marriott Hotel where I was staying. Outside the hotel, two guys who were returning to their rooms and they were pretty drunk and came up to me and asked me for an autograph. I was high on cocaine. Let me tell you something about me. When I was getting high and it was nighttime or early in the morning, I was not a good person to meet. I was just nasty, looking for trouble. I could have these Herculean fucking mood swings, almost Jekyll and Hyde shit.
So these two Puerto Rican guys approached me and asked me for my autograph. I told them to fuck off.
“You ain’t all that, anyway,” one of them said. “We got guns and you only got your fists.”
If I wasn’t on coke probably nothing would have happened. But I was, so I chased them into the lobby and up the escalator. We got to the top of the escalator and I knocked one of them out with one punch. The other guy was hiding behind the front desk and I pulled him out and hit him. He was spared when hotel security came.
The fight was my fault. They were going to charge me with misdemeanor assault and them with menacing and harassment. I had to go to court the next day and when I got back I showed my friends Dave and Zip the thick rap sheet that was part of the court record.
“They’re born troublemakers,” Dave said. “Look at their records.”
“Hey, that’s my rap sheet,” I corrected him.
“Man, we hang around you because we think you’re a celebrity and you’re gonna give us a good look,” Zip said. “You got a worse police record than we do, nigga.”
I was living day to day then. By now I was tired of all the bullshit surrounding me. I didn’t feel like there was anyone in my camp I could trust and I got tired of all the Machiavellian power grabs, so I got rid of my whole management team.
So now I had Shelly handling what was left of my career. I had a rematch clause in my contract with Lennox Lewis and he wanted to fight me again to get another big payday. But I didn’t want to get my ass kicked twice. If I was motivated and got in top shape I had no doubt that I could have kicked his ass. But I wasn’t interested in boxing; I was interested in drugs.
So Shelly and Lewis’s people came up with the idea of me fighting on the undercard of Lennox’s next fight. I would be billed as a co-headliner. I declined to fight on the undercard because it was a dis to me. So we turned down Lewis’s offer and they turned around and sued me and Don King for $385 million, claiming that King was enticing me to neglect the contract so he could promote my next fights.
My only real asset left was my suit against Don. By then, Jeff Wald knew that I was meeting with Don and he was furious at me. He told me that Don would keep delaying lawsuits that were filed against him until the last minute before the trial was about to start and then he would settle. Jeff and Dale Kinsella were telling me that we could settle for as much as $60 million out of the $100 million we had sued for and that I might even be able to get my fight film library back, which would be money in the bank for me for years to come. All I had to do was hold on until our court date in September.
But my financial predicament was so bad that the people who were around me on a day-to-day basis were telling me to file for bankruptcy. Jackie and I had been hanging around Jimmy Henchman at that time, the rap entrepreneur who managed the Game and was CEO of Czar Entertainment. Jimmy brought in Barry Hankerson, a record producer who had managed Toni Braxton and R. Kelly. They were all pushing for me to file for bankruptcy. Hankerson had told Jackie that I should file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, so Jackie actually went online and Googled “Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.” That was what I was dealing with at the time. Jackie was a good person but she was in way over her head. None of us knew anything about high finance or bankruptcy; we were just having fun and spending money.
So I called Jeff Wald and told him that all these people were suggesting that I go bankrupt.
“Do not file for bankruptcy because the minute you do, we don’t control the lawsuit anymore, the bankruptcy judge does. Then the suit is out of our hands,” he told me.
“Well, what if I lose?” I asked.
“You’re not going to lose. It’s black and white,” he said.
I wasn’t so sure. In my first deposition against Don I had picked up a pitcher of water and poured it on his lap. And now Don had that Florida stomping to hold over my head.
Wald was convinced that Don was working all my friends, including Jackie, to influence me to file for bankruptcy. He started calling me a few times a day, begging me not to file. But I didn’t believe that my friends were taking kickbacks.
But when I looked at the mountains and mountains of bills that I couldn’t pay, I decided to file. Hankerson got me a bankruptcy lawyer and we filed on August first. That same day, I went shopping on Rodeo Drive with Hankerson, Henchman, and my bodyguard Rick. Hey, just because I filed for bankruptcy didn’t mean I had zero money. I just didn’t have $100 million to pay off my debts. I was still hustling deals. The media made a big deal of me shopping on Rodeo Drive, but they didn’t go into the stores with me. I was talking to Muslim guys who ran some of these high-end clothes stores and I pulled out my Muslim card in hopes they would cut me a deal.
“How about if I give you fifteen hundred dollars for this three-thousand-dollar suit, my brother. You know the golden rule of Islam. Want for your brother what you want for yourself.”
The next day all the newspapers had every little detail of my finances splashed across their pages. I owed about $27 million, $17 million of which was for back taxes I owed the IRS and the English tax people. The other $10 million was for personal expenses, which included the money I owed Monica from the divorce, what I owed the banks for my mortgages, and my huge legal fees.
I was so overwhelmed and pissed off by the whole bankruptcy thing that I just gave up my house.
“Fuck it, take the fucking house,” I told my lawyers and they auctioned it off. I was so high I couldn’t get anything done. I was just working out. I had no fight scheduled, but I worked out anyway and got high.
I was a real adaptable kind of guy. I could live in the gutter or in an elevated state. I knew all the hustles and I was gambling with life. Even when I was in the gutter, I had my $2,000 pants and shoes on. I didn’t have a nickel in my pocket, but I was still talking shit, hitting on chicks.
I spent some time in Phoenix with Shelley, the mother of my child. Dave Malone came down and hung out with me for a while. I was so poor that we were eating Frosted Flakes and Twizzlers for dinner. We had no money to do anything, so we used to sit in the backyard and watch my pigeons fly. Every once in a while, I’d set up an autograph signing somewhere and I’d charge twenty-five bucks for an autograph, just to get over the hump. I was so poor that a guy who had stolen my credit card account number went online to complain that I was so broke he couldn’t even pay for a dinner with my credit card.
But there were some benefits. I went back east and I was hanging out with my friend Mario Costa who had some of my pigeons behind the Ringside Lounge, his restaurant and bar in Jersey City. It was a beautiful Indian summer day and we were sitting in the back where the pigeons were. I fell asleep and Mario left me alone. Two hours later I woke up and started shouting, “I’m rich! I’m rich!” Mario came running out back.
“You okay, champ?” he said.
“I’m rich, Mario,” I said. “I don’t have no watch, no money, no phone, but I feel so peaceful. No one’s telling me to ‘go here,’ ‘go there,’ ‘do this.’ I used to have cars that I never drove and I wouldn’t even know where the keys for them were. I had houses I didn’t live in. I had everybody robbing me. Now I have nothing. Nobody calls me, nobody bothers me, nobody is after me. It’s so peaceful. This is rich, man.”
Some of my friends stepped up to the plate for me. My friend Eric Brown and his brother gave me a $50,000 advance from their company CMX Productions. I would have done anything for them, but I never had to.
Meanwhile, in August, my friend Craig Boogie started negotiating a deal for me with the mixed martial arts K-1 people. I had nowhere to live so the K-1 people put me up in a suite in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in L.A. and paid all my expenses. I needed that. I had already been kicked out of every big hotel on the Strip in Vegas. In return, I did promotional appearances for them.
“Mike, we need you to be in the audience at this event in Hawaii.”
Boom, I flew down to Hawaii. The next month I went somewhere else. I was getting fifty grand for this, a hundred grand for that. I was making all this money by doing nothing. Instead of saving that money and paying off my bills, I bought an Aston Martin Vanquish and a Rolls convertible. I had all these cars and nowhere to go. I shopped on Rodeo Drive every fucking day. I was in these shops, looking in the mirror, deciding how I was going to project myself when I went out that night. I’d be wearing $3,000 pants, a $4,000 shirt, and a $10,000 blazer. Meanwhile, I didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.
Everybody in the Beverly Wilshire knew me. They’d have these exclusive dinner parties in one of the meeting rooms and I’d crash them. If there was a Palestinian-Israeli debate, I was going. I was a master schnorrer.
I’d have parties in my room and order steaks and lobsters and caviar and Cristal. I’d invite up the biggest dope dealers and hustlers and we’d shoot dice. I’d whoop their asses in the dice game and then talk shit to them.
“Is that all the money you got, nigga? I thought you were a big-time motherfucking player out here in L.A. This is what happens when you fuck with the Iron One. You think I’m just a fighter? I’m a hard stonecutter nigga, man. You may as well go play Lotto; you ain’t gonna win nothing from me.”
I lived it up in that suite for two years. Partying my ass off, getting high on weed and coke, having my girls come up. I ballooned up in weight from all the late-night eating.
Right after I signed up with K-1 that August, they put out a press release that I was going to fight Bob Sapp, a 6'5", 390-pound ex-NFL player who was one of the K-1 stars. But I was never going to fight no kickboxer.
“It might be nice,” I told the New York Times when they called me. “But under the Marquis of Queensberry rules. I don’t really feel like getting kicked in the head, you know?”
Then I showed up at the big K-1 fights at the Bellagio in Vegas on August fifteenth. Right after Bob Sapp won his match, he called me into the ring and challenged me.
“I’ll do it right here,” I told the crowd. “Get me a pair of shorts and I’ll fight him tonight with the Marquis of Queensberry. Sign the contract, big boy.”
This was wrestling shit talk. I loved doing these appearances.
A few weeks after I moved into the Beverly Wilshire, I went to Neverland to see Michael Jackson. It was nice hanging out with Michael. He was very low-key then. He asked me what I had been doing and I told him that I had been taking it easy.
“Rest is good. Rest is just real good, Mike,” he told me. “Get as much as you can.”
I didn’t know then that he couldn’t sleep at all.
It was weird, everyone was saying that he was molesting kids then, but when I went there he had some little kids there who were like thug kids. These were no little punk kids, these guys would have whooped his ass if he tried any shit.
In April 2004, I made a joint appearance with Ali at a big K-1 event. Again they announced that I had signed with them to fight and that I’d make my debut that summer. One of their stars had a press conference and said he looked forward to fighting me.
“I would accept a fight under boxing rules,” Jerome Le Banner said. “But as soon as I am in the ring I’d do whatever the fuck I want . . . Western boxing or not, I will kick him . . . Tyson has already bit an ear, now he’s gonna eat a size twelve foot.”
I would have been crazy to fight those monsters. I’d rather go back to my hotel suite and just chill.
My bankruptcy was winding along. In June, Don finally settled the suit. The bankruptcy judge let him pay only $14 million. He had played everybody once again. I didn’t get no film rights or anything. Monica was the first to get paid out of the settlement. The bankruptcy lawyers wound up costing $14 million. They got paid ahead of the IRS. I was still up shit’s creek, so I had Shelly get me a fight. He chose an English boxer named Danny Williams and we signed to fight in Louisville on July thirtieth. Williams was the former British heavyweight champ who was on the comeback trail. He had knocked out his last two opponents, but he had lost to Julius Francis so I wasn’t too worried about fighting him.
I had to do press again. A couple of weeks before the fight, I was my usual optimistic self when I met them.
“I guess the thing I am most curious about, Mike, is where you find serenity in your life?” I was asked.
“I don’t know. I’m realizing that I am not the only person that has been in a situation. You have to understand I have lost everything and I mean everything. Anyone I ever cared about, anybody I ever loved, romantic, I’ve just lost everything. My money, home, I’ve lost everything. The people who love you, you just chase them away by being so belligerent and crazy. You have to lose it all. And I think at some point of your life you wish you could receive them back but I guess that is part of our growing pain. We lose people that we love and care about the most in order to start our life off fresh, with a brand-new start.”
I was doing drugs right up to the fight. I went into the fight weighing 232, but I was in pretty good shape. My entourage was gone when I walked into the ring. I had made my security guy Rick one of my cornermen. I rocked Williams in the first round and almost had him out, but he was a smart fighter and he held on to me and got through the round. With thirty seconds to go, I felt something snap in my left knee after I threw a punch. I found out later that I had torn my meniscus, so I was fighting on one leg from the second round on. I still managed to rock him in the second round, but I couldn’t move and be elusive and he started pounding me pretty good to the body. In the third round the ref deducted two points from him for low blows and a late punch.
By the fourth I was just out of gas and was a stationary target. He unleashed a barrage of punches and between my knee and my lack of conditioning I couldn’t move. A final right hand sent me down. Then I was sitting up against the ropes, watching as the ref counted me out. That fight really killed my spirit.
I went back to Phoenix to Shelley’s house and I had an operation on my knee. I was in a wheelchair for a while and then on crutches. Of course, that was another excuse to do drugs. I spent the next few months in a deep depression, just hanging out in the backyard and flying my birds.
I came out of seclusion in October when I went to New York to see the Trinidad-Mayorga fight at Madison Square Garden. I was there with my friend Zip and a new bodyguard from the Bronx. When we walked to our seats in the Garden, the people at the fight went nuts. They hadn’t seen me for a long time and they were losing it. I got a standing ovation. I love Zip like a brother but Zip didn’t understand that the people were just showing appreciation for me. He got so excited.
“We’re back, Mike, we’re back!” he said. “They’ll be calling you for commercials soon. They’ll get you in movies. We’re going to have that big book deal. You’re a hell of a man to overcome this, brother. We’re back!!”
Forget the fact that I was a full-blown cokehead, we were back.
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.”