this is the real world. You see all these people,” and he pointed to all the ring officials and the reporters and the boxing officials in the arena. “When you lose, they don’t like you anymore. If you’re not spectacular, they don’t like you anymore. Everybody used to like me. Believe me, when I was in my fifties, young, beautiful women would chase me all over the place. Now that I’m an old man, no one comes around anymore.”
Ten minutes before my fight, I had to go out for some air. Teddy went with me.
“Just relax, Mike, just relax,” he said.
I lost it. I started crying hysterically. Teddy put his arms around me.
“It’s just another match. You done it in the gym with better fighters than this guy,” he tried to console me.
“I’m Mike Tyson …,” I sobbed. “… everyone likes me.”
I couldn’t get a coherent sentence out. I was trying to say that if I lost, nobody would ever like me again. Teddy comforted me and told me not to let my feelings get the best of me.
When I walked into the ring, my opponent was waiting for me. He was a 6'6" white guy named Kelton Brown. I composed myself, summoned up my courage. We went to the center of the ring to get the instructions and I got so up into his face with my malevolent stare that the ref had to push me back and give me a warning before the fight even started. The bell rang and I charged him. Within a minute, I was giving him such a masterful beating that his corner threw in the towel. I was now a two-time Junior Olympic champ.
After my hand was raised, the TV commentator interviewed me in the ring.
“Mike, you must be very satisfied with how your career has progressed so far.”
“Well, I can say, ‘Yes, I am.’ I’m in here with kids, but I’m just as old as they are and I am more on the ball than them. I’m more disciplined. I learned first how to deal with my problems mentally, then physically. That’s an advantage I have over them mentally.”
“How did you feel at the end of the bout after defeating Brown?”
“I went in there to do my job. I don’t have nothing bad to say about my opponent. He did a well job. He was just in a little over his head. I commend him on his efforts,” I said.
When I got back east, I went back home to Brownsville. Everybody in the neighborhood had seen me on TV knocking out Kelton Brown. A lot of the guys who used to bully me came up to me on the street.
“Hey, Mike, you need anything? Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you,” they’d say.
They used to kick my ass, now they were kissing it.
But the audience I was really after was my mom. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with her.
“Hey, Mom, I’m the greatest fighter in the world. There ain’t a man living who can beat me,” I said.
My mom was living in this damp, decrepit, lopsided tenement building and was just staring at me as I talked about myself as if I were a god.
“You remember Joe Louis? There’s always someone better, son,” she said.
I stared back at my mom.
“That is never going to happen to me,” I said coldly. “I am the one who is better than everyone else. That’s me.”
I was dead serious because this was what Cus had brainwashed me into believing. My mother had never seen me like that before. I had always been creepy and looking for an angle. Now I had dignity and pride. Before, I smelt like weed or liquor. Now my body was pumped, I was immaculate. I was ready to take on the world.
“There is not a man in the world that can beat me, Ma. You watch, your boy is going to be champion of the world,” I boasted.
“You’ve got to be humble, son. You’re not humble, you’re not humble …” She shook her head.
I had my little bag with me and I took out the clippings of me getting my gold medals and handed them to her.
“Here, Mom. Read about me.”
“I’ll read it later,” she said.
The rest of the night she didn’t talk to me. She’d just go “um hmm.” She just looked at me with concern, like, “What are these white people doing to you?”
So I went back to Catskill and was feeling on top of the world. I was a spoiled upper-middle-class kid there. A few months after that, Cus told me that my mother was sick. He didn’t tell me the details, but my social worker had found out that my mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The same day that Cus told me, my sister called me.
“Go visit Mommy,” she said. “She’s not feeling well.”
I had seen my mother a few weeks before my sister called and she had had some kind of stroke and her eye on one side of her face was drooping, but I didn’t know she had cancer. The only cancer I knew was my astrological sign. I knew something wasn’t right, but I didn’t know it had anything to do with dying.
But when I got to the hospital, I got a big shock. My mother was lying in the bed, moaning, but she was pretty catatonic. It was painful just to look at her. Her eyes were sunken; her skin was wrapped tight around her cranium; she had lost all this weight. Her bedsheet had fallen off her and you could see some of her breast exposed. So I kissed her and covered her up. I didn’t know what to do. I had never seen anyone with cancer. I’d seen movies, so I expected to see something like “Well, I love you but I’m a goner now, Johnny.” I thought I’d have a chance to talk to her and say good-bye before she died, but she wasn’t even conscious. So I walked out of that hospital room and never went back again.
Every night I’d go back to the apartment and tell my sister that I had seen Mommy and that she looked good. I just didn’t want to deal with the hospital scene, it was too painful. So I went on a house-robbing spree. I ran into Barkim and some other hustlers I knew from the neighborhood and we robbed some houses.
One night before we went out to rob a place, I showed Barkim a photo album I had brought down from Catskill. There were photos of me and Cus and Camille, and me with all these white kids at school.
Barkim couldn’t get over those photos.
“Yo, Mike, this is bugging me out. Are they trying you up there? Do they call you ‘nigga’?”
“No, this is like my family. Cus would kill you if you said that about me,” I told him.
Barkim shook his head.
“What are you doing here, Mike?” he asked. “Go back there with those white people. Shit, man, those white people love you. Can’t you see that, nigga? Man, I wish I had some white people that loved me. Go back, man. There ain’t shit out here for you.”
I thought about what he said. Here I was, a two-time national champ, and I was still robbing houses because you just go back to who you are. Every night I was drinking, smoking angel dust, snorting cocaine, and going to local dances. Anything to get my mind off my mother.
My
