Fire & Fear

One of Mike Tyson's earliest memories is of being in the hospital in Brooklyn at the age of three or four: "My godmother brought me a toy gun and a doll one day, and I broke the gun by accident right away, and I started to cry. I was so pissed off that I pulled the doll's head off"

Tyson told me this story ten days before his fight with Michael Spinks in June 1988. The memory seemed to exhilarate him. "I remember that scene very clearly," he said. "I felt an immense thrill when I ripped the head off the doll. It was like an orgasm."

•

I knew I was destined to write about Mike Tyson. Not out of any conceit but because I understand him better than most people. We have a lot in common. First, we both grew up poor: he in Brooklyn and I in Puerto Rico. I went on to be a champion boxer (I held the light-heavyweight title in the Sixties), just as Mike did. I understood the toll that celebrity could take on your life and your family. And, as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, I had presided over Tyson's arrival in the top rank among boxers.

Our strongest bond, though, was that we both had been schooled by the extraordinary man and teacher Cus D'Amato, who died back in 1985, when Mike was 19. If boxing were a religion, offering salvation to so many poor kids like Tyson and me, then Cus would be the Pope. Had he not met Cus, Tyson would probably be dead or in jail today.

I'd watched this kid from the age of 13 batter whatever demons possessed him, leaving groggy opponents in his wake. Cus said Tyson would be the youngest heavyweight champion ever. As usual, he was right.

•

Cus D'Amato loomed large in our discussions of Mike's boyhood. But his advice was filtered through the champ's own violent perspective, born of the streets of Brooklyn.

"Cus used to talk to me about hunger," Tyson told me once, "about being vicious and mean. 'You've got to be a smart animal,' he said to me. 'You've got to know when to strike, when to let your adrenaline flow and how to deal with fear.'

"Cus used to talk about the good fighters and how they were mean motherfuckers--tigers, fucking mean. Mickey Walker, Jack Dempsey, how they act tough and be mean bastards. 'You can't turn your back or complain to the referee because they hit you low or punch you after the bell,' he used to say. I wanted to be like them: mean, savage, vicious. I wanted to be like that even when I was in the street. I wanted to be a mean motherfucker and kick ass all the time. I even used to train to be wicked. I used to walk to school and be mean, snappy to everybody. I knew I had to be mean, because if I lose, I'm going to die, starve to death."

Tyson found the streets to be a perfect place to practice that meanness. He thought of crime as a fitting diversion, given the environment he was confronted with. And he understood that criminal expertise and knowledge were for "the survival of the fetus," as he put it. With a gang of his childhood friends, he roamed the streets, looking for trouble. He paid no mind to the threats and beatings from his mother, meant to prevent such things.

"I just became immune to the beatings," Mike said. "They didn't matter. I wanted to hang out with my friends, because those guys would teach me certain ways to rob."

As his practice of the art of stealing increased, so did his chances of getting caught. He claims not to remember when he was first arrested. "It happened so many times that I really forgot why and where I was arrested for the first time," he said. "But it had to be for stealing. And I had to be around nine, ten."

Mike's sister Denise remembers those days well. "The cops would wake us up so my mother could go to a police station and pick up Michael," she says. "They came quite often, usually at night."

"I think I was caught about twenty-five, thirty times," Mike told me.

"Did you ever shoot anybody?"

"I've shot at a lot of people."

"A lot of people?"

"Yeah, I liked to see them run. I liked to see them beg."

"What did they say?"

"'Please don't shoot me. I'll do anything you say.' I'd shoot real close to them, skin them or something, make them take off their pants and then go run in the streets. We used to make guys scared and make them steal, make them snatch that chain or rob that person."

"And if they didn't do it?"

"We would kick their asses."

•

By the beginning of 1983, Mike had begun kicking more asses in the boxing ring than on the street. Cus D'Amato had by then taken him in hand and transplanted him to his Catskill, New York, training camp, and the manager was so certain of the kid's potential that he began bringing in $1000-a-week sparring partners to give Tyson the opposition he needed.

Even top prize fighters who were having problems getting sparring partners began going to Mike's Catskill camp for free practice against him. For as long as they could take it, that is. Cruiserweight champion Carlos De Leon, for one, bowed out after two days. "I miss my family in Puerto Rico too much," he said.

Top heavyweight prospect Carl "The Truth" Williams stepped into the ring as well, and he told me at the time, "That's a boy we'll have to contend with very, very soon."

Although his boxing skills were improving, Tyson was plagued with feelings of dislocation and was frustrated by the stagnancy of his personal life. "I'm just not a good-looking guy," he told Cus during one of their long talks.

"Mike," Cus said, "I'm going to have to buy you a baseball bat so you can keep away the hordes of women who will be begging to be with you." Cus did buy his young prospect a Louisville Slugger, but Mike decided early on that there were certain kinds of attacks you didn't want to fend off.

That wasn't really a problem to D'Amato, who did not subscribe to the notion that sex and boxing were incompatible. He taught his fighters that objectivity, coldness and detachment were essential to a professional boxer. If occasional relief could foster those attitudes, so much the better.

By 1984, Tyson had pretty much chosen relief over the baseball bat. Women by the bunch had begun stampeding in his direction. He was barely 18, had a name and money and was able and willing. He seemed cool about his new macho-man image. He talked a good game.

"They're all chasing me because of my fame and because they think I've got lots of money," he said repeatedly back then. "They feel important being with me."

"Tyson was a ladies' man," said an assistant to the Olympic boxing committee. "He had girls around him like hungry mosquitoes."

•

On November 15, 1986, seven days before the World Boxing Council heavyweight championship bout against titleholder Trevor Berbick, I went to see Tyson train at Johnny Tocco's Ringside Gym in Las Vegas. When he saw me, he jumped with happiness and hugged me. He'd been under a lot of pressure--this was the first match in the Unification tournament, the biggest match of his life.

Tyson was sparring that day, and Jim Jacobs, his comanager, wanted my opinion of his progress. There wasn't much to say; he had no mercy for his sparring partners, pounding them as if they were enemies bent on killing him.

After the workout, Mike and I decided to walk from the gym to the Las Vegas Hilton, two or three miles away. I'd seen a few mistakes in the ring and mentioned them as we walked. He said very little. At times, we would stop while I illustrated some technical point. Then he changed the conversation to his favorite topic: women.

"You know something," he said, "I like to hurt women when I make love to them." He stopped, searching my face for a reaction. "I like to hear them scream with pain, to see them bleed," he said, putting his arm around me. "It gives me pleasure."

"Why?"

Mike shook his head. "José, I am that way and I don't know why."

"Well," I said, "did it ever occur to you that men who behave that way probably hate women, that deep-down, they simply don't like them?"

"You may be right. You're the first person to tell me that.... You know, you may be fucking right. Holy fucking shit!"

Later, in his hotel room, he laughed and gave me a brotherly punch in the chest, then kissed me on the cheek.

"Girls, pussy, butts, women's butts," he said, "that's what I like."

There was no shortage of evidence that that was true. A few days before, Tyson had been in his car inside a car wash with Steve Lott, his assistant, and had pulled down his pants. "Look at this," he'd said, revealing patches of dried pus on his underwear.

So a week before the Berbick fight for the W.B.C. championship, Tyson had needle punctures in his buttocks and antibiotics in his blood. I'd fought many times with penicillin in my system, mostly because of colds brought on by prefight pressures. I related my own experiences to him.

"Mike," I said, "you're also recovering from a serious ear infection that was treated with antibiotics. That shit could do you harm. Do you feel strong?"

"Chegui," he said, using my nickname almost sarcastically, "nothing and nobody is going to stop me from winning this fucking fight. I refuse. The doctor said it would make me weak and I say he's full of shit, 'cause I want that title so bad. There is no way I'd give up that title."

"That's not the point."

"That's the only point."

"Yes, but when you----"

"When," he interrupted, "they raise my hand in the ring as the youngest heavyweight champion of the world, all of you are going to be very proud of me. That's the fucking point, my friend."

After two rounds, knockout victim Trevor Berbick understood that point better than anybody.

•

Tyson's next match in the Unification tournament would be against James "Bonecrusher" Smith on March 7, 1987, 15 weeks after the Berbick fight. This was Tyson's longest gap ever between fights. That much free time can be dangerous for any 20-year-old, but especially for a well-to-do young heavyweight champion.

It was during this hiatus that Mike told me about the night he and his friend Rory Holloway had had sex with 24 women somewhere near Philadelphia. He tried to elaborate, but I thought he was imagining the entire event and changed the subject.

Later, though, after Mike was married, I was interviewing him with tape recorder running, and Holloway was at his side. Tyson was dividing his attention between a movie called Super Ninja and me. I remembered his story about the 24 women and asked him about it.

"There were twenty-four," he confirmed. "We fucked those bitches in Pennsylvania."

Holloway jumped up from the end of the bed and joined the conversation.

"They were whores," he said. "The first bunch of girls came and they were beautiful. Mike was in his room and I was sitting there with one girl. So I walked into the room, right? Mike had two bitches at one time in bed. He was fucking them. No shit, fucking both of them.

"He was fucking the bitch so hard that she hit the wall and Mike said, 'I made the bitch faint! I made the bitch faint!'" Tyson was listening quietly, watching TV and nodding in agreement.

I turned toward Mike. "Did you have an orgasm with each one of them?"

"Yeah."

"You came twenty-four times in one night?"

"You know, after a couple of times, you just stay hard for a while, and----"

"He was fucking girls," Holloway interjected, "like this: 'Come here, it's your turn.... Now it's yours.... Next!' Then (continued on page 70)Fire & Fear(continued from page 60) the girls would come to me and I would fuck them. We had the house full of bitches. We stayed all day long fucking, from five in the afternoon till one o'clock in the morning."

Holloway said he invited one of the women to go back with him and Tyson to Albany. She accepted without hesitation. "That was the best-looking one of them all," Holloway said. "Mike was driving and I was with her in the back seat, fucking her. And Mike said, 'Is it good? Is it good?' And I said, 'This shit is good, man.' Mike said, 'I'm pulling over, I'm pulling over, man. Let me get back there.'"

The trip ended at September's, a club in Albany that had become one of Tyson's favorite hangouts. "A friend came to us in the club," Holloway said, "and asked, 'Where the fuck are you guys coming from, man?' We just laughed."

•

I visited Mike in his dressing room a few minutes before his fight with Bone-crusher Smith for the World Boxing Association title. I did a little work on his neck and gave him some basic advice--"Keep your hands up, your chin down and punch in combinations."

Tyson changed the subject. "You know," he said, "I saw the most beautiful girl in the world on television ... tall, elegant. Her name is Robin Givens."

"Another one?"

"Well, I haven't met her yet...."

Had he finally found someone who could help alleviate the tension? Why hadn't he mentioned her before, and why was he mentioning her now? A few minutes later, Tyson's name was called, we embraced for good luck and in a few moments, the fight was on. It was a long, ugly 12-rounder, more akin to sumo wrestling than to professional boxing, but Mike came away with a unanimous decision.

A few days after the Bonecrusher fight, Mike called John Horne, a thin, handsome actor he'd met in the Albany area. Horne was in California auditioning for parts. "I want you to get me in touch with Robin Givens," Mike told him. "I wanna meet her." Horne called Givens' publicist, and in a day or two, Mike had her telephone number.

His timing was a little off, however. He was scheduled to travel to England to promote a possible match against Frank Bruno. Mike decided to call Givens from London. "When I heard her voice, I hung up the phone," he told me later. "The third time I called her, I said to myself, 'What the hell is wrong with me?'"

They talked for nearly an hour.

"I'm very charming," Mike explained. "I made her laugh. And I thought, This is my girl. I've got her. Basically, women love to talk about themselves. So I spoke about her, about how much I admired her beauty, acting, just pouring it on. And then she said, 'Why do you want to meet me? I'm flattered, but I'm sure you'll find somebody.' I said, 'Maybe I will.' You know, I didn't want to push the issue."

When Mike got back to his training camp in Catskill, he and Holloway made arrangements to go to California. The day of the flight, Mike withdrew a few thousand dollars from the bank and took a limousine to the airport. "Everything I wore was from Gucci's," he said. "I wanted to impress her, you know."

He blew that right from the start, as Tyson and Holloway arrived three hours late for dinner with Givens and a group of her friends. When Mike arrived, they were finishing their dessert. His first impression: "Holy shit, this girl looks good." He figured that if she'd waited three hours, it was "because she wanted to meet me bad."

At the restaurant, they made small talk, and after a while, everyone left, leaving the champion and the actress alone.

"We hung out that night and I was a complete gentleman," Mike said. "Then the next night, I took her out again." He said Givens had invited him into her house, and after a while, he had gotten very tired and had laid his head on her lap. "I fell asleep with my head resting on her legs--oh, God, she has great legs--and I drooled on them. Shit, that was so bad. I got nervous. When I woke up, I tried to cover it up and stick it back in my mouth. But you know something? She loved it; she thought it was great."

•

When Tyson introduced me to Givens, I thought that she was beautiful, determined and intelligent and that they were enthralled with each other. I was, perhaps, the only one in the place who thought she was more than just a sexual conquest. "This is marriage material," I told Tyson in front of her. I thought that she'd force him to settle down, keep his roving eye riveted on her.

At the end of April, before Tyson and his crew left for Las Vegas to fight top contender Pinklon Thomas, he and I spoke at length about Robin. "It's no secret that she knows about the women I go out with," he said. "She told me she'd seen me on television with a bunch of girls. But now she is very possessive."

By now, Mike had moved into Steve Lott's East Side apartment. No one could gauge how he really felt about Robin, but judging from the number of young women calling him, the young champion was still not ready to commit.

Still, Givens was clearly different. She didn't operate like the other girls in Mike's life. While most of his women kept themselves out of the limelight, Robin seemed to enjoy the exposure. And Tyson didn't object; I thought it was a sign of new and better things to come.

When I told that to Lott, he laughed. "José," he said, "Mike's interest in women as a group has not subsided one iota. He's still screwing half of the town."

•

Just before Mike's fight with Tony Tucker, the final round in the Unification tournament, he was at Lott's Manhattan flat. Tyson was apt to show up at the apartment any time with young women he'd picked up in bars or at parties, even though Lott, a bachelor, often had one of his own friends there. It didn't matter. To Lott, having the champion at his place was "an incredible experience."

The first night Tyson took Givens to the apartment, it was late, and Lott went to bed very tired. But around four in the morning, Lott recalled, he was awakened by a loud noise, followed by a woman's screams. Then there was a knock at the door. Lott said he put on a robe and left his bedroom to see what was going on.

"Standing at the entrance to the apartment," he said, "was the doorman--who apparently had been summoned by a neighbor. He was asking both Robin and Mike if he should get transportation for either one of them. Robin was complaining of being struck by Mike and Mike was telling the doorman to calm down and to leave."

I would later hear another account of that night from Tyson himself. Just before the Spinks fight, I asked him to tell me about the best punch he'd ever thrown. A broad smile covered his face and his answer burst out. "Man, I'll never forget that punch. It was when I fought with Robin in Steve's apartment. She really offended me and I went bam," he said, throwing a fast backhand into the air to illustrate. "She flew backward, hitting every fucking wall in the apartment. That was the best punch I've ever thrown in my fucking life.

"The bitch wanted to call the cops from my own fucking telephone. Was she (continued on page 122)Fire & Fear(continued from page 70) crazy or something? She had some fucking balls."

•

A few days after his first match with Robin Givens, Tyson went back to Las Vegas to prepare for the bout with Tony Tucker. It was a tough fight, and Tucker even embraced Tyson in his corner before the decision was announced, thinking he'd won and promising to give Tyson a rematch. But the referee lifted Tyson's hand in victory, and then Don King led him off to the infamous coronation scene, complete with crown, robe and scepter. Throughout the festivities, the champ looked down at the floor in embarrassment.

Freed from boxing for a while, Mike continued his amorous forays. But Robin was by his side more than her competitors, and the public began to see a lot of her. Tyson seemed proud of her good looks and elegance.

However, by the time Don King and Donald Trump called a press conference in New York to announce the Tyson--Tyrell Biggs fight, Mike's extracurricular activities had come back to haunt him. At the end of the conference, he was asked to take the usual physical examination, but he put it off.

Later, he pulled Lott aside. "I think I have that shit again," he said. Sure enough, the man who'd scored victories over Berbick and Smith while recovering from venereal disease had managed once again to make a friend of that pesky bacteria. I warned him not to engage in any type of intimacy with Robin. "It would be an unforgivable sin if you transmitted a social disease to your girlfriend," I said.

The disease notwithstanding, Tyson would handily defeat Biggs, an enemy ever since the 1984 Olympic trials, at which Tyson served as a mere sparring partner for the contenders. Biggs had won the gold, but when it really mattered, Tyson won the war.

•

Shortly before Tyson's fight with Larry Holmes, on a cold January afternoon in 1988, Jim Jacobs called me on the telephone. "I must talk to you," he said. "When can I see you?"

"How about now?"

We met at his office on East 40th Street at 5:45 that afternoon. Looking around to make sure no one else was within hearing range, he said, "Mike has a problem that must be attended to promptly. Ruth Roper says----"

"Who's that?" I cut in.

"Robin Givens' mother."

"I like her ... I mean Robin. She's smart, independent."

"This cannot, I repeat, this cannot get out of this room. Jose, I can't emphasize it more." After a pause, he said, "Miss Roper tells me her daughter is pregnant--by Mike. She says we must take appropriate action, or else."

"Is he willing to marry her?"

"What do you think?" Jacobs asked, probing my eyes for an answer.

"I think he should. Cus would have loved her."

"Are you sure?"

"My instincts seldom betray me." So much for my instincts.

Two weeks later, we discovered that Tyson was no longer a bachelor.

"He called me on Sunday [February 7, 1988]," Lott told me, "and asked, 'What would you say if I married Robin right now?'" The hypothetical question took Lott by surprise. He knew more about Tyson's sex life than anyone else except Holloway and never suspected that the champ was that serious about Givens. He told Tyson it was a great idea. The next day, Roper called Jacobs and told him that Mike and Robin had been privately married by Father George Clements, a Catholic priest. [The cause for this hurried match--Robin's pregnancy--would later end in miscarriage.]

So that Mike and Robin's entry into wedded bliss wouldn't lack pomp and circumstance, Robin's mother gave her daughter and new son-in-law a small but high-toned party on Valentine's Day, at the Library Room of the Helmsley Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue. Mother and daughter both wore black--looking so much alike they might have been sisters--and guests mingled pleasantly and sampled the delicious food. The affair amounted to Roper's coming-out party. Although she is small and energetic, with diminutive features, her guileful smile and devious eyes gave me the impression that she didn't trust anyone. Here was a woman who might drive insecure people insane.

My wife, Ramona, who's never at a loss for words, pulled me aside at the party. "Tell your friends Bill Cayton, Jimmy Jacobs and Mike Tyson himself," she said, "that this is a woman they'll have to contend with from now on."

One day after the party, both of Tyson's comanagers fell ill. Cayton was hospitalized with an inflammation of the membranes of the heart. Jacobs, who had left town supposedly to visit relatives, was recovering from intestinal surgery.

It was while in the hospital that Cayton first faced Robin's wrath. She'd been unable to contact Jacobs and apparently figured Cayton would do, even though he was suffering from a serious illness. "I'm Mrs. Mike Tyson," she announced over the telephone, "I'm taking over my husband's affairs."

Cayton was enraged by her manner. "She said those words in a rather abusive, dominant tone of voice, as though she had taken over the managership functions of Mike as well." Cayton was surprised at her tone and told her so. "Here she is, married for a few weeks, and she's taking over for people who've been with Mike since the boy was twelve years old."

Tyson's other comanager would never learn of those developments. At that moment, he lay dying in New York's Mount Sinai Hospital. He had succumbed to an eight-year battle with leukemia, finally giving in the day after Tyson and his entourage had returned from Japan, where the champ had successfully defended his title against Tony Tubbs.

"I was on my way to the hospital to visit him," Tyson told me later, "and my wife reached me on the car phone to tell me that Jimmy had just died. I told the driver to make a U-turn and go to [Jacobs and Cayton's] office."

Cayton said Tyson arrived "in tears and out of control."

That same day, Tyson and Givens showed up at Merrill Lynch to shift $1,900,000 from his stock account to make the down payment on the couple's new $4,000,000 mansion. "Robin was not even concerned that Jim had just died," Merrill Lynch's James Brady told the Daily News. "I followed her instructions and made a wire transfer."

I saw Tyson later that night. He and his wife had gone to Jacobs' modest two-bedroom East Side apartment--two floors below theirs--to join the mourners. A few friends of the family were there, and Jacobs' wife, Loraine, was doing her best to be a cordial hostess.

Later, Tyson, his wife and I went upstairs to the couple's apartment, and after a short while, Mike asked me to go out for a walk. When we left the apartment, he seemed in a deep fit of melancholy. It was as if he'd been hit by a sucker punch.

He started crying on my shoulder. "You know," he said, "people think I'm tough. But that's bullshit. I'm a fucking coward. You know something, I feel like taking my own life ... killing myself. But I don't have the fucking guts to do it, you know what I mean?" We were walking on Second Avenue in the 40s against the cool March breeze.

"When Cus died, I felt the same way," (continued on page 145)Fire & Fear(continued from page 122) he said. "Life is shit. One minute you're here, the next you're gone."

When I got home that night, there were a number of messages next to my bed. One read: Don king called. Please call him whenever you get home. At any time. When I returned the call, King pressed me for the details of Jacobs' funeral--date, place, time--and my flight number going out to Los Angeles, where the services would be held.

The following day, at J.F.K. Airport in New York, the conspicuous figure of Don King could be seen making its way to the American Airlines terminal. In the V.I.P. room, King embraced each of us: Tyson, Loraine Jacobs, Bill and Doris Cayton, Steve Lott and Kevin Rooney. Most of us were wondering why he was there.

Givens and Roper, on the other hand, were nowhere to be seen. They had decided not to attend the funeral.

When we arrived at L.A.X., Tyson had some trouble getting a limo right away. "These people don't know how to deal with this kid," King complained, but loud enough for only me and Tyson to hear. "There should have been not one but a couple of limousines waiting for the champ before you people got here. I'll tell you something, Muhammad Ali never waited this long in any airport. Never!"

King was a master opportunist, and sowing subtle seeds of doubt and suspicion was just one weapon in his psychological arsenal. He was never averse to using unorthodox methods if they got him somewhere. Although an uninvited guest, he seemed to fit in with the mourning party. Of course, he himself had no trouble arranging for a proper conveyance from the airport. He even had space for whoever had been "careless enough" not to be prepared. After a few idle minutes, we were all on our way to the Beverly Hilton.

On the morning of the funeral, King and I ate at a restaurant near the hotel. He seemed to be testing my loyalty to the Tyson crew and expressed reservations about Givens and her mother. He wasn't sure how to secure a place in Tyson's future. Accustomed to maneuvering tough men in a rough game, King had to be careful. Givens and her mother weren't puppets; they had minds of their own.

Three thousand miles away, in fact, the pair was hard at work. While Tyson and his entire boxing family mourned Jacobs, mother and daughter were visiting the Merrill Lynch office, this time exhibiting power-of-attorney papers authorized by Tyson. Again, they met with strong resistance from Brady, and a clamorous shouting match resulted. "I want my money! Where is my money?" Givens yelled. "You're one of Cayton's boys. We're going to take our money out of here."

•

In early May 1988, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world was a bit too heavy. He'd been eating an enormous amount and was wearing it poorly. His 20-inch neck now seemed to be part of his back, and he was walking differently. He had no respect for his next opponent, Michael Spinks. Consequently, he wasn't training hard.

Shelly Finkel, a fight manager and friend of Jim Jacobs', told me that after Jacobs' funeral, King had tried to talk Mike out of the Spinks fight, saying, "I can give you five easy matches for five million each instead." What King had failed to mention was that the five matches would be against boxers he and his son controlled.

Tyson had answered, "Why should I take five easy fights when I can make the same amount of money in one easy match?"

Tyson's lack of respect for Spinks, along with all the other distractions in his boxing family, lent a carnival atmosphere to the preparations for the richest fight of his career. The media frenzy intensified on May 8, 1988, when Tyson, in the company of Givens, was driving his silver Bentley on Varick Street in downtown Manhattan. He lost control and hit two parked cars. Two Port Authority cops quickly arrived on the scene, and Tyson handed over the keys to his $185,000 automobile in an attempt, some would say later, to smooth things over. Reporters had a field day speculating about the reason for Tyson's largess, as well as the cause of the accident itself.

I asked Mike about the wreck soon after it happened. "Tell me the real story behind the car you gave the cops," I said. "I heard you had a fight with Robin when she found condoms in your pocket and, as a result, you crashed against a parked car. I know you're not fooling around. Why did you have the condoms?"

"It's funny," Mike told me. "No one would believe the story." He had been making a commercial that day and wanted to have a quiet dinner with Robin afterward. "A friend of mine was carrying these condoms and he said to me, 'Hold on to these so I won't get into trouble.' I'm serious. Honest truth. My friend gave me the condoms because he didn't want his wife or his girlfriend--whoever it was--to bust him with the condoms."

"And you put them in your pocket?"

"That's right," said the champ. They were at dinner "and my wife went into my pocket to take some money and she found the condoms. You know, there are some situations when the truth just won't work. I had to lie because the truth just didn't sound like the truth." He closed his eyes. "I had to lie like I was cheating. It killed me, because I'm lying to myself and to her. It hurt. I'm lying to myself! I'm saying to myself, I didn't screw anybody. If I'm going to make love, it would be to her. But then she hit me."

"She what?" I said. "Where?"

"In my face. Can I tell you somethin'? My sweet, loving wife doesn't take any shit."

They left the restaurant quietly, but Mike knew she was fuming. He was nervous. "As I was driving," he said, "I saw a cat in the middle of the street and I swerved to the right and bang! I hit a parked car and also two guys who were near the car----"

"Wait a minute; you hit two guys, two human beings?"

"Yes," he said, "I hit one guy; he hurt his arm and I gave him five hundred bucks and he ran to the O.T.B. parlor near there. Then the cops came and I signed autographs, and they got rid of the other guy I hit, so he won't bother me.

"Then I told the officers, 'Whitey don't think you can own these kind of cars, because you're black, right? I want you to keep this one.' I didn't want them to ask for my driver's license. I don't have one. So before I could panic, I said, 'Fuck it. The car is not worth shit. Take it!' And I gave it to them. I don't think it's their fault they took the car. It was my fault.

"You know," he continued, "as they drove away, I started to think, They are two; how in hell are they gonna split the fucking car in half?"

•

June 1988 was a month of torment for the heavyweight champion. Roper and Givens joined the all-too-public struggle for control of Tyson that was being waged between King and Cayton.

On Wednesday, June 15, King and his black limousine were waiting for me in front of the Trump Plaza, in New York. I had recently warned Tyson not to sign an exclusive contract with anyone, promoter or otherwise, and King was angry with me. "We lost the chance of our lives," he grumbled. "I wanna know why you told Mike not to sign the contract with me."

How could I tell a friend of mine who happened to be the world heavyweight champion to sign an exclusive contract?

"You'd be giving ammunition to Cayton by signing that exclusive contract," I told King.

"Legal matters? I handle that. That's my business," he said, shaking his head in disgust. "We had Tyson, and because of you, we lost him."

"You mean you lost him," I clarified.

"You know very well, José," he said, "that the Jews want to control Tyson ... the Jacobses, the Caytons, the Finkels. You know it."

•

The next morning, I visited Tyson at his penthouse with my tape recorder. It was around ten A.M. and he was in the kitchen, sitting at a small table, leafing through the morning newspapers. Kevin Rooney was next to him; Steve Lott was in the living room.

"How do you feel?" I asked Tyson, who moved his head from side to side. "Anything wrong?" I asked. "I didn't like that wordless answer."

"I feel like killing someone," he snapped, his face contorted with anger.

"That's good," I said. "That's the way you should feel two weeks before an important fight."

"I don't mean it that way. I mean, I'm going to kill someone, maybe today. Please visit me in jail."

•

Finally, after all the ballyhoo, all the gossip, all the tension, June 27 mercifully arrived. A mixed crowd--show-business personalities, high rollers and hustlers--overwhelmed the front seats, with only a scattering of boxing people among them. I visited the dressing room and was impressed by Tyson's self-confidence. He seemed almost too much at ease.

When the boxers were finally in the ring, Tyson looked at Spinks's eyes. He saw panic. For Tyson, the last seconds before the bell--waiting to justify that panic--were probably more of a hardship than the fight itself. It was the biggest mismatch I'd ever seen in a championship fight.

A few days later, I was watching television and heard comedian Jackie Gayle describe the most intriguing aspect of the fight. "Don King and Donald Trump shook hands on the fight," he said. "It will take five years to find out who's the screwer and who's the screwee."

•

Early last September, Tyson drove his BMW into a tree--in a suicidal panic, or not, depending on whom you listen to. He fell unconscious for a time and was rushed away by ambulance. When the champ was installed in Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in upper Manhattan, Givens and her mother made a list of who would be able to visit him there. It didn't include Bill Cayton, Steve Lott, Kevin Rooney, Loraine Jacobs or me. In short, none of the people from Tyson's past, none of the pre-Givens people, none of the people who knew him from when Cus D'Amato molded a kid from Brooklyn into a champion.

But Donald and Ivana Trump didn't have to worry. They were on the list.

•

Every now and then, pictures of Tyson and his life run uncontrollably through my mind. The savage childhood, the perverse boyhood, the spoiled adolescence, the crazy adulthood. The deaths of his mother, his mentor, his manager and his marriage. He didn't have a fighting chance.

When Cus D'Amato first saw Tyson in action, his heart pounded with euphoria. He saw the raw anger, the determination to inflict pain, the will to win, the lack of grace and tolerance, the meanness and the killer instinct. No boxing man could've asked for more. Cus took this kid's ghetto instincts and honed them. He didn't take Tyson away from his blood family, he took him away from the street, from reform school, from a violent, dead-end life.

But when Cus and Jim Jacobs died, Tyson became an orphan. His civilizing influences were gone. People trying to survive in the street often say they have no friends, just acquaintances. If Tyson were not the champ, worth untold millions of dollars, would 1989 have found King constantly at his side?

In Tyson's fight against Frank Bruno last February, the champ ignored the trio of new corner men who'd been hired to manage his title defense. It was as if no one were in his corner. In the fifth round, Tyson put Bruno away with a barrage of unsynchronized punches; his natural speed and power concealed his inadequacies. That night, Tyson was a great puncher but not the great fighter he could be. Not even close. The complex championship skills Cus had drilled into him--the timing, the patience, the lightning combination punches, the side-to-side moves and even the basic left jab--were missing. And so were Tyson's last links to the grand old man of boxing.

•

A man I know recently told me to leave Mike Tyson alone, to forget him. "I was in a concentration camp and I know what it is to survive," he told me. "You should only know what I did in order to pull through. I cheated and I lied and I robbed; I wounded and killed people. I had six nice, decent brothers and sisters, and they all went straight to the ovens. I was the only one to survive. But I have never recovered. Bed-ford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville were Tyson's concentration camps. Only a very few recover, and Tyson is not one of them."

The realist in me suspects the man may be right. But the young, starry-eyed fighter who remains in me--the part that still yearns for those special moments in the ring--says it cannot be. Fight fans have waited too long; Mike Tyson has struggled too hard for him not to get up off the canvas.

"'Mike's interest in women as a group has not subsided one iota. He's still screwing half of the town.'"

"I warned him, 'It would be an unforgivable sin if you transmitted a social disease to your girlfriend.'"