Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life by Joyce Carol Oates
More coolly, Tyson observes of himself and D’Amato: “You give a weak man some strength and he becomes addicted.”
Though the death of Cus D’Amato would be devastating to Tyson, the young boxer would continue on his succession of winning bouts for several years afterward with such opponents as James “Bonecrusher” Smith (1987)—so terrified of Tyson, Smith grabbed the young champion and clinched for dear life to lose each of twelve rounds in arguably the only boring fight of Tyson’s career; Pinklon Thomas (1987)—knocked out in six rounds; Tony Tucker (1987); Tyrell Biggs (1987)—whom Tyson said he could have knocked out in the first round of their title fight at Atlantic City but chose to knock out slowly “so that he would remember it for a long time. I wanted to hurt him real bad”; Larry Holmes (1988)—a former world champion who’d once defeated an aging Muhammad Ali, and who had never before been knocked out in seventy-five professional fights; Tony Tubbs (1988)—in two rounds; Michael Spinks (1988)—in ninety-one seconds, the defeat of the former light-heavyweight champion who had never before been knocked down; Frank Bruno (1989)—in five rounds; Carl Williams (1989)—in one round. In retrospect, Tyson-Spinks would be considered the most spectacular fight of Tyson’s career, along with Tyson-Berbick. It is possible that Tyson’s dazzling career would have begun to self-destruct eventually, given the evidence in Undisputed Truth of the young boxer’s self-doubt as early as 1987 (“The truth is . . . I was sick of fighting in the ring. The stress of being the world’s champ and having to prove myself over and over just got to me. I had been doing that shit since I was thirteen”) and his self-destructive behavior between fights. But with the unexpected death in 1988 of Tyson’s manager Jimmy Jacobs, who had been Cus D’Amato’s longtime friend and associate, and a part of his “white family,” Tyson was devastated anew, and left with no close advisers whom he could trust. “With Jim gone the vultures were circling for the fresh meat: me.”
By this time Tyson has married TV actress Robin Givens, having been told that Givens is pregnant; in one of the two worst mistakes of his young life, Tyson gives his new wife, to whom he would remain married a scant year, his power of attorney. (Shortly after their marriage Givens has a “miscarriage.”) Tyson’s other disastrous mistake is to sign contracts with the controversial boxing promoter Don King, a former convicted felon who’d served time in an Ohio prison for manslaughter (“‘I got three bodies, two on record,’ Don bragged”) and whose exploitive treatment of Muhammad Ali, among other fighters, should have been known to Tyson.
For boxing purists, Tyson’s ignominious loss of the heavyweight title in 1990 to the 42–1 underdog James “Buster” Douglas marks the end of the Tyson era—that is, the end of the boxer whom Cus D’Amato had so carefully crafted as a fighter with extraordinary defensive skills as well as an extraordinary offense. No one who has seen this fight, one of the great upsets in boxing history, is likely to forget the sight of Tyson knocked to the canvas by Douglas in the tenth round, groping desperately for his mouthpiece to fit back into his mouth—a futile gesture. But for the lackluster performance of the titleholder, there would be something Shakespearean in such a fall. Tyson would say negligently of this fight that he hadn’t taken it seriously, had scarcely trained and was thirty pounds overweight, had been “partying” virtually nonstop (in Tokyo, where the fight took place)—but the fact would seem to be simply that the reign of Iron Mike Tyson was over. The posthumous glory of Cus D’Amato was over. However Tyson would continue as a boxer with an erratic public career and a yet more erratic private life as a celebrity exploited by others as by himself, it would be a champion’s afterlife he would inhabit.
The title Undisputed Truth is a play on the familiar boxing phrase “undisputed champion”—as in “Mike Tyson, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world” delivered in a ring announcer’s booming voice and much-heard during the late 1980s and early 1990s. A more appropriate title for this lively hodgepodge of a memoir would be Disputed Truth, for much in these recollections of Tyson’s tumultuous life, begun as a one-man Las Vegas act at the MGM casino, subsequently brought to Broadway in 2012, and now shaped into narrative form by a professional writer best known as the collaborator of the “shock comic” Howard Stern, is aimed to shock, titillate, amuse. and entertain, since much is wildly surreal and unverifiable. (Like the claim that “I’m such a monster. I turned the Romanian Mafia onto coke” and that Tyson was a guest in a Sardinia Billionaires Club “where a bottle of champagne cost something like $100,000.”) Mostly, Undisputed Truth is a celebrity memoir of indefatigable name-dropping and endless accounts of “partying”; there is a photograph of Tyson with Maya Angelou, who came to visit him in Indiana when he was imprisoned for rape; we learn that Tyson converted to Islam in prison (“That was my first encounter with true love and forgiveness”) but as soon as he was freed, he returns to his old, debauched life, plunging immediately into debt:
I had to have an East Coast mansion . . . so I went out and bought the largest house in the state of Connecticut. It was over fifty thousand square feet and had thirteen kitchens and nineteen bedrooms. . . . Thirty wooded acres, an indoor and outdoor pool, a lighthouse, a racquetball court, and an actual nightclub. . . . In the six years I owned it, you could count the number of times I was actually there on two hands.
This palatial property is but one of four luxurious mansions Tyson purchases in the same manic season along with exotic wild animals (lion, white tiger cubs) and expensive automobiles—“Vipers, Spyders, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis” in addition to more commonplace Mercedes-Benz and Rolls-Royces. We hear of Tyson’s thirtieth birthday party at his Connecticut estate with a guest list boasting Oprah, Donald Trump, Jay Z, and “street pimps and their hos.” In line with Tyson’s newfound Muslim faith, he stations outside the house “forty big Fruit of Islam bodyguards.”
Apart from generating income for Tyson, the principal intention of Undisputed Truth would seem to be settling scores with individuals whom Tyson dislikes, notably his first wife Robin Givens and her omnipresent mother Ruth—(“Robin and Ruthless were really deplorable people. There was nothing they wouldn’t do for money, nothing. They would fuck a rat. They had no boundaries—money was like paper blood to them. They were evil people.”)—and the infamous Don King, whom Tyson sued for having defrauded him of many millions of dollars—(“this other piece of shit, Don King. Don is a wretched, slimy reptilian motherfucker. He was supposed to be my black brother, but he was just a bad man. . . . He was a real greedy man. I thought that I could handle somebody like King, but he outsmarted me. I was totally out of my league with that guy.”)* Nor is Tyson above using Undisputed Truth to revisit his Indiana rape trial of 1992 and speak scathingly another time of the eighteen-year-old Miss Black America contestant Desiree Washington whom he was convicted of raping—(“I told her to wear some loose clothing and I was surprised when she got into the car, she was wearing a loose bustier and her short pajama bottoms. She looked ready for action.”) Tyson’s strategy in the memoir is to acknowledge bad behavior on his part—(“I’m a real dirty fighter. . . . I think I really wanted people to talk about how dirty and vicious I was”)—as a way of validating his vicious treatment of others. It’s a technique not unlike smearing a modicum of mud on yourself before tossing mud at others.
To the extent that Tyson has a predominant tone in Undisputed Truth it’s that of a Vegas stand-up comic, alternately self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, sometimes funny, sometimes merely crude:
Without sounding too egotistical, the whole Tyson thing was too big for Jimmy [Jacobs] and Bill [Cayton]; it was probably even too big for Cus. They never saw anyone like me. Nobody in the whole history of boxing had ever made as much money in such a short period of time as I did. . . . I was like some really hot, pretty bitch who everybody wanted to fuck, you know what I mean?
Defending his friend Michael Jackson against charges of pedophilia:
It was weird, everyone was saying that he was molesting kids then, but when I went
Alternately flush with money, which he spends with the giddy abandon of a nouveau rich black athlete stereotype, and alternately near-bankrupt:
I was so poor that a guy who’d stolen my credit card went online to complain that I was so broke he couldn’t even buy a dinner on my credit card.
Admirers of Tyson’s early boxing career will be stunned if not mystified to learn that even when Tyson was undefeated as a heavyweight champion—even when Tyson was training with Cus D’Amato as a teenager in the 1980s—he often drank heavily, like his mother, and took drugs, favoring cocaine: “I started buying and sniffing coke when I was eleven but I’d been drinking alcohol since I was a baby. I came from a long line of drunks.” It is generally believed that Tyson’s downward spiral began at the time of the Buster Douglas debacle, but this memoir makes clear, as Tyson admits countless times, that he’d been a “cokehead” more or less continuously. At one point his cocaine addiction is so extreme, he seems to have infected his wife Kiki, whose probation officer detects cocaine in her system, a consequence of Tyson having kissed her before she went for her drug test:
[Kiki] had me there. I was a licker when it came to my blow. And I’m not talking about licking no little bit of residue off that folded sliver of paper that the coke might be in. I’m talking about a jar of coke. I stuck my tongue down that jar and I hit pure cocaine. So much that you don’t even feel your tongue anymore.
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, almost Jekyll and Hyde shit.
There’s a comical account of Tyson in a fit of road rage violently attacking a driver whose car has accidentally rear-ended his own:
Someone had called the police and they pulled us over a few miles from the scene. I was high as a kite and I started complaining about chest pains and then I told them that I was a victim of racial profiling.
After Tyson’s conviction on charges of assault he is sentenced to two years in prison in Maryland (“with one year suspended”); though he has fewer celebrity visitors than he’d had in the Ohio prison, his most attention-getting visitor is John F. Kennedy Jr., who bizarrely assures Tyson that “the only reason you’re in here is you’re black.” Tyson encourages John Jr. to “run for political office,” an idea that is evidently new and startling to John Jr. Tyson elaborates to the Kennedy heir:
No, nigga, you’ve got to do this shit. . . . That’s what you were born to do. People’s dreams are riding on you, man. That’s a heavy burden but you shouldn’t have had that mother and father you did.
With admirable prescience Tyson tells John Jr. that he’s “fucking crazy” to be flying his private plane. Though Tyson has been stressing his humility in prison he can’t help but brag, “Shortly after John-John was there, boom, I got out of jail.”
As if in rebuke of such self-aggrandizement, every few pages there is a perfunctory sort of self-chastisement, like a tic: “I might not have been a scumbag but I was an arrogant prick.”
And, “I was a slave addicted to the chaos of celebrity.”
And, on the occasion of acquiring the Maori tribal tattoo that now covers nearly half his face: “I hated my face and I literally wanted to deface myself.”
Upon the occasion of accepting an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, in 1989, Tyson in cap and gown says to the commencement audience:
“I don’t know what kind of doctor I am, but watching all these beautiful sisters here, I’m debating whether I should be a gynecologist.”
(Don King was also awarded an “honorary doctorate” at this historic commencement.)
The funniest jokes in Undisputed Truth trade upon racial stereotypes. Tyson speaks of being taken up by a Jewish billionaire named Jeff Greene who’d made a “billion dollars playing the real estate market” while “I was a Muslim boxer who’d spent almost a billion dollars on bitches and cars and legal fees.” Greene invites Tyson to dinner during Rosh Hashanah—“Shit I even got to read from the book during the Passover seder.” This is Tyson’s introduction to what he calls “Jewish jubilance.” In “white honky heaven” Tyson is relaxing with his “new Jewish friends and suddenly this rude, obnoxious Saudi Muslim comes up to us”—so rude, the Saudi Muslim alludes to Tyson’s rape charge. Tyson thinks indignantly:
What kind of guy does something like that? What arrogance. Suppose my new friends here didn’t know I was in prison for rape? Suppose they asked, “What were you in prison for, Mike? Did you embezzle money? Insider trading?”
Funnier yet, a joke that must have drawn peals of appreciative laughter in Vegas:
I was on another rich Jewish guy’s yacht and I watched him checking out this other Jewish guy whose boat was moored nearby. They were looking at each other, like black people do, you know how we look at each other? And then one guy said, “Harvard seventy-nine?” “Yes, didn’t you study macroeconomics?” So I’m on this boat and I see this black guy. He’s the bodyguard for a very well-known international arms dealer. And I’m looking at him and looking at him and I just can’t place him. He came over to me.
“Spofford seventy-eight?” he asked.
“Shit, nigga, we met in lockdown,” I remembered.
A hilarious interview with USA Today:
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 think I want to be a missionary. . . . I love Jesus and I believe in Jesus too—and I’m a Muslim. 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.
One of the more lurid incidents in the afterlife of Tyson’s career is the ear-biting fracas of Holyfield-Tyson 1997. Provoked by his opponent’s head-butting, which opened gashes in his forehead (and which referee Mills Lane unaccountably ruled “an accident”), Tyson lost control and bit one of Holyfield’s ears—and then, as the fight was resumed, when Holyfield butted Tyson’s forehead again, Tyson bit Holyfield’s other ear. “I just wanted to kill him. Anybody could see that the head butts were so overt. I was furious, I was an undisciplined soldier and I lost my composure.” The referee stopped the fight, with Holyfield declared the winner. Though Tyson’s behavior was roundly condemned as poor sportsmanship, an examination of the video shows clearly that the referee behaved with unwarranted leniency toward Holyfield and prejudice against Tyson. (Ironically, in a Golden Gloves tournament, Holyfield himself had once bitten an opponent.)
Undisputed Truth ends with Tyson in a somber, even elegiac mood, reflecting upon his Muslim faith and the “old-time fighters” like Harry Greb, Mickey Walker, Benny Leonard, John L. Sullivan. His mood is nostalgic, remorseful—“Now I’m totally compassionate. . . . I’ve really come to a place of forgiveness.” But “sometimes I just fantasize about blowing somebody’s brains out so I can go to prison for the rest of my life.” Tyson acknowledges that he has returned to AA and that his sobriety is a precarious matter, like his marriage. After the jocular excesses of Undisputed Truth it is ironic to end on so subdued and tentative a note: “One day at a time.”
Undisputed Truth
By Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman
THE FIGHTER:
A FILM BY DAVID O. RUSSELL
The Fighter might more accurately have been titled The Fighter and His Family: it’s a brilliantly orchestrated ensemble piece at the paradoxically near-still center of which is the boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), whose once-promising career, like his grim hometown Lowell, Massachusetts, is on what app
In a sequence of sharply realized scenes, not unlike the rounds of a boxing match, The Fighter pits the matriarch Alice (Melissa Leo) and her favored son, ex-boxer Dicky (Christian Bale), the half-brother of Micky, against Micky Ward and his girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams): the film traces a highly contentious, often darkly funny tug-of-war for Micky’s soul, which is to say Micky’s career. The viewer is made to experience, like Micky, the almost literally suffocating and coercive “love” of a family for its own; the heroic, if desperate, effort an essentially nonrebellious son like Micky must make simply to be allowed to be an adult—though he’s at least thirty years old, divorced, with a young daughter from whom he’s separated, and, in his own words, “Not getting any younger.” (In professional boxing, most boxers are burnt out by thirty and in risk of serious injury.) Dramatizing the historic Micky Ward’s life, but only to a degree, The Fighter follows the archetypal pattern of the generic boxing film—see Cinderella Man (2005) as a recent example, as well as the cruder, more slickly produced Rocky films—in its modestly uplifting ending.
These are not great boxers of the quality of the young Mike Tyson or the legendary Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson, or Joe Louis but journeyman fighters who’ve managed through sheer dogged effort to win just a little more than they’ve lost. Though touted as a “warrior,” Micky Ward isn’t even, by nature, aggressive; he’s far from the “raging bull” counterpuncher Jake LaMotta, of Scorsese’s film. He is so desperate in his ring stratagems that even his victories have an air of the haphazard and the tentative. (By default, while losing a crucial fight with the British boxer Shea Neary in 2002, Micky is forced to fall back upon the strategy that brought Ali victory against George Foreman in 1974 in Zaire: the notorious “rope-a-dope” ploy in which the weaker boxer allows the stronger to literally punch himself out on the weaker boxer’s body through round after devastating round until, as in an astonishing fairy-tale reversal of fortune, the “weaker” boxer knocks out the “stronger.” It’s a strategy that gave the thirty-two-year-old Ali an unexpected, historic victory against his twenty-five-year-old opponent, but certainly contributed to Ali’s physical deterioration, including the “Parkinsonian” condition with which he has been afflicted now for decades. The effect of such a beating on the less physically exceptional Micky Ward may lie sometime in the future—The Fighter doesn’t come near suggesting the physical consequences of Micky Ward’s fighting style. We never see a doctor examining poor Micky though, in fact, following even his victory against Arturo Gatti in 2002, he’d had to be hospitalized, as he was following the punishing rematch-fights with Gatti, which he lost.) It’s a relief to the viewer to learn at the film’s end that Micky has retired from boxing—not a moment too soon.