Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

I was a pudgy kid, very shy, almost effeminate shy, and I spoke with a lisp.

We headed back to the hotel. Little did I know, but about thirty cars were following my limo, all filled with women. They had been on our tail since I left the club. When I got out of the limo in front of the Ritz, EB was waiting for me. But first, I walked over to each of the cars that followed us, pulled out my roll of cash, and threw hundred-dollar bills on each car.
“What the hell are you doin’, Mike?” EB said.
“That’s all they want. Money,” I said.
I walked into the hotel, EB beside me.
“What are you doing here?” I said to him.
“I’m waiting on you,” EB answered.
“I don’t need nobody waiting on me. I came into this world by myself and I’m going to leave by myself,” I said.
“Well, I got to stay with you for the night, so you’ve just got to get mad at me,” EB said.
We got into the elevator to go up to the room.
By then, I was hungry, so we got off the elevator and went to the restaurant. This little white dude came up to us and said, “Sorry, Mr. Tyson, the restaurant is closed.”
I grabbed the guy around the neck, picked him up and said, “Feed me, don’t treat me like no nigga.”
Fifteen minutes later, we had an amazing spread before us. I ate all my food, then started in on EB’s too. Suddenly I broke down.
“Man, why’d she do me like that?”
I still hadn’t gotten over Robin.
“Man, take it easy,” EB said.
“That bitch. I loved her. She didn’t have to do me like that,” I moaned.
My mood was spiraling downward, so EB pulled out his phone and called Isaiah Thomas’s mother, Mary. She was a beautiful lady. Mary started consoling me and after a few minutes, I felt better.
It seemed that every time I went out, trouble was following in my wake. Sometimes it wasn’t even my fault. I once was in New York and picked up this Spanish girl.

The same time I was running with Hope, I started hanging out with this incredible guy named Kevin Sawyer. He had a pager company in L.A. and his store had become a hangout spot for all the players, hustlers, and pimps. Jamie Foxx and Joe Torry worked there before they were famous. It was a business place. People would go in to buy pagers and I would be there shooting dice in my Versace clothes with my big diamond watches and my Rolls parked outside.
Kevin was an incredible ladies’ man. He was very charismatic and the women loved him, even though he stuttered. Me and Kevin and my friend Craig Boogie would have competitions to see how many women we could get in a day. The sex scene was crazy then. I’d meet girls on the street, say, “Come, let’s go,” and we’d go. I’d be in a club and I’d be touching girls, putting my tongue on their backs, licking their skin, and I didn’t even know them. But I’d take them home and let my friends have sex with them too. My reputation began to spread. I was the guy who might take you shopping, but then we would go home to have sex.
One time, Boogie was driving me around Philadelphia. I was there training for the Buster Mathis Jr. fight. I saw a beautiful girl walking down the street. I didn’t even have to say anything to her; the girl just hopped right in the back of the car.
“Where are we going?” she said.
Another time I was in a cab in New York with this girl I had met. She started taking off her clothes in the cab and having sex with me. It wasn’t even a limo; it was a regular yellow cab. I was, like, “Whoa. Okay, let’s go.”
In my mind I was ordained to do this. All my heroes had had all these women. Someone should have said to me, “This is going to have an ugly ending.” But there was nobody there to do that.

I met Versace through an Italian journalist who came to interview me in Catskill. She was a very attractive woman who was a few years older than me, and I took her upstairs and we had sex and I saw that she was wearing Versace underwear.
“I model for him,” she told me. “I can get you all the clothes you want. I’ll introduce you.”
Versace was the coolest. He offered to send me clothes but I was too impatient.
“If you just wait, I’ll send you everything for free,” he’d tell me.
“Send me what you can and I’m going to buy what I can, okay?” I told him.
I was living out the fantasy. I’d go to London or Paris to get some clothes and all the salespeople would run out of their stores.

The only spirituality I had back then was in my dick.
I spent a lot of time in L.A. in the late ’80s. I had an apartment in Century City off Wilshire. A friend of mine was christening his boat and he had a party where I met this beautiful girl named Hope. She was with a girlfriend of hers and they arrived near the end of the party when the food had run out. I was sitting at a table with a big plate of food in front of me, so Hope walked up to me out of the blue and went into a great Andrew Dice Clay imitation.
“Look, my friend will blow you if you buy dinner. Me and my friend are starving.”
I thought she was hilarious. I invited them to pull up a seat and I shared my food with them. I didn’t get any feeling that she wanted to be intimate with me so we just became running dogs. She had a lot of girlfriends and I would say, “Hope, I really like that girl a lot.” So she hooked me up. I became a big brother to her. She was always having problems with men. I would take one look at a guy and tell her, “Hope, that guy’s gay,” or, “This guy will never care about you.” I was really good at seeing through people’s bullshit. Except for the women in my life.
We became close. Hope was going to college then and she didn’t have much money, so I let her stay in the spare bedroom in my apartment. But we were just platonic friends. No one could believe it because Hope was so hot.
“Mike, you’re fucking her. I know you are,” all of my friends would say. “I saw you fuck that ugly fat bitch, you got to be fucking this one.”
I became super protective of Hope. One of our favorite places to go was this club called RnB Live. That was where Hope bumped into Wesley Snipes. She started dating him while I was out of town. When I got back to L.A., she came to me crying. Wesley had broken her heart; he didn’t want to see her anymore.
“See, Hope, this is what happens when you mess with those kinds of guys in your life. You need a straight guy,” I told her.
But Hope didn’t want to hear that. She wanted to hear “Why are you crying, Hope? I’m going to kick his ass.”
Hope didn’t get what she wanted from me, so she said to me, “Oh, and Wesley didn’t get why I was, with you. He said, ‘What are you doing with a guy like Tyson?’ to me.”
I knew that was bullshit.
A few days later I made plans to meet Hope at RnB. I sat next to her and asked her how school was, when we saw Wesley Snipes walk in. I excused myself and walked over to him. Wesley looked up, saw me, and panicked.
“Mike, please don’t hit me in my face, that’s how I make my living,” he said.
“Man, don’t worry about that thing with Hope. She’s just hurt.” We both laughed about it.

Maybe things would have been different if Jimmy was still alive, but after he died nobody could stop me from doing what I wanted to do. Looking back on it, I don’t think Jimmy and Bill were evil. I think they were businessmen and they were more seasoned than I was. But I was in way over my head and they took advantage of that too. But they were control freaks. As I got older I wanted my liberation, I wanted to do my own thing. If I failed or succeeded, it didn’t matter, I just wanted to do it on my own.

In October of 1988, Don took me to Venezuela for the WBA convention. Then we went to Mexico for the christening of Julio Chavez’s son. That trip was a real revelation for me. We took a day trip to the pyramids and this little kid came up to me, begging. The guides we were with said, “No, Mike, don’t give them money.” But how couldn’t I? A hundred dollars was nothing to me, but it meant everything to the kid. So I gave him some money and he was so appreciative. I was thinking, Wow, this is a good kid, and I went to touch his hair and it felt as hard as a rock. It felt like he hadn’t washed his hair in years. You could have hurt someone with his hair. Then we went to Culiacán and I saw more kids begging. I bought clothes for this one kid and next thing I knew he was bringing around three more friends and then twenty more of his cousins were coming by for clothes. That’s why I liked that one kid, he never came by himself; he always brought his friends and relatives, and every time I bought them all stuff.
It was just like in Brooklyn when I bought sneakers for those street kids. These Mexican kids had never left Culiacán and I dressed them and we were all hanging out. I had so much money and the clothes that I was buying were so cheap. You just knew you were going to hell if you didn’t spend money on those children. By the time I left we had a crew of over fifty kids that were dressed up sharp.
Before I went to Mexico, I had such a big chip on my shoulder. I had never known anyone poorer than me. I couldn’t imagine anyone in the world being poorer than I had been. I was blown away by the poverty in Mexico. I was actually mad at them for being poorer than I had been because I couldn’t feel sorry for myself anymore. More than anything else, my success stemmed from my shame about being poor. That shame of being poor gave me more pain than anything in my life.
So many of my problems stemmed from thinking I deserved shit after being so poverty-stricken growing up. Cus was always trying to get me to transcend myself and separate myself from my ego, get out of my own head. But it was hard. Hey, I deserved that car, I deserved that mansion, I deserved a bad bitch. When I got with Don, I had to have the top-of-the-line cars and lots of them. I was getting the best Lamborghinis and a bulletproof Hummer that had been owned by some Saudi prince. I was going to Bristol to the Rolls-Royce factory and they were designing my custom Rolls for me.
Cus wouldn’t have approved of all that. If a guy had a convertible, Cus thought he was a selfish pig. We’d see a nice car and I’d say, “Wow, that’s a cool car, Cus.”
“Nah, that guy is selfish,” Cus said.
“Why is he selfish?” I’d ask.
“He drives that two-seater so he doesn’t have to drive more than him and his friends around.”
Cus had an old beat-up van that could hold twelve people. That’s just the way he was.
We would have had a great reality show back in 1988.

He paused for a second and looked me over.
“I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” he said.
He shat on me that night. He knew who I was. But I couldn’t be mad, I thought it was beautiful. I couldn’t wait to try that line on someone.
When Don King came to New York on August sixteenth, he dropped the bomb that I had signed an exclusive promotional contract with him. Bill went ballistic and threatened to sue. The women were pretty much out of the picture by now. They had lost their bid to take over my business. So they were continuing their Plan B – paint me out as some kind of monster and get a great divorce settlement.

My friend Mark Breland, the boxer, wanted me to make up with Bill Cayton and shake his hand. Shelly Finkel and Cayton had brainwashed Mark. They told him I was really messed up and they convinced him to come talk to me. We went up there and Cayton was very concerned about the manic-depressive label so he set up an appointment for me with Dr. Abraham Halpern, the director of psychiatry at the New York United Hospital Medical Center in Port Chester, one of the top psychiatrists in the world.
Halpern saw me for an hour. Then he called and spoke to Camille, Steve Lott, and Bill Cayton. He was certain that I didn’t suffer from manic depression. When Halpern called their shrink to see why he had diagnosed me as a manic-depressive, he started backpedaling. He said I wasn’t a full-fledged manic-depressive, I merely had a mood disorder, something he called “Boxer Syndrome.” That was a new one for Freud.
I was relieved that a much more prominent psychiatrist had cleared me of manic depression, but I wondered why Bill made such a big deal about seeing me to Mark. He really had nothing to say. I went there under the pretense that something big was going to happen and then I got there and he was real ambiguous on what he was trying to say. My relationship with Bill had run its course.
So when all the dust cleared, there was Don still standing. I had no illusions about him. When Robin used to ask me about Don, I’d say, “Look, I know how to control a snake. This guy is a snake, but I know how to control a snake.” Don did have his good points. Two days after the women split for the coast, Don took me around to each and every one of my bank and brokerage accounts. He had them take Robin’s name off of each account and switch them back to me. That was fifteen million right there.
The people in the banks disliked those women so much that they were thrilled to help us.

I heard that Roberto Duran wanted to come to the fight and I got very excited. I told Don to give him two tickets if he would come to my dressing room so I could meet him. He did one better. He came to my hotel room the day of the fight. I was so happy to meet my hero that I just knew that I was going to win after that. He was with his friend Luis de Cubas. De Cubas started giving me all this advice like, “Go right out and fuck him up from the opening bell.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Duran said. “You take your time, boy. Use your jab. Just go behind your jab.”
The night of the fight, the Spinks camp tried to fuck with my head. Butch Lewis, his manager, came in to observe my gloves being taped.
“No, no, you gotta take that glove off and retape it,” Lewis said after Kevin was finished. “There’s a bump in the tape.”
“I’m not doing nothing. Fuck you,” I said.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Lewis said. “Retape that glove.”
“I’m God, I don’t have to do nothing,” I sneered.
“Well, you’re gonna do this, God,” Butch said.
“Fuck you,” Rooney said.
We finally called in Larry Hazzard, the New Jersey boxing commissioner, and Eddie Futch, Spinks’s trainer, and they okayed the tape job.
But I was pissed.
Spinks entered the ring first. I decided I’d work on his mind a little bit, so I entered the arena to the sound of funeral music. I walked slowly up to the ring. I looked at the audience like I wanted to kill them. I just wanted to create this whole ominous atmosphere of fear. I was one-hundred-percent aware of the audience when I was moving. My every thought was to project my killer image. But I also wanted to be one with the audience. I started doing my out-of-body stuff so I could be one with them, so when I got into the ring I could just lift my arms and the audience would go nuts. Then I would see my opponent’s energy leaving him slowly.