Now 50, with his last professional fight a dozen years behind him, the warrior tattoo on his face serves only as an incongruous reminder that the affable businessman in the smart suit was once the world's most feared boxer, variously loved and loathed by a public enthralled by his prowess in the ring and disturbed by his behaviour out of it.
Iron Mike, once known as “The baddest man on the planet”, is in Dubai for the launch of the Mike Tyson Academy, his new fitness and boxing gym franchise. But for all the civilising effect of Tyson’s reinvention as Corporate Mike, when he sits down for a meet-and-greet session at the launch gala at the J W Marriott Marquis on Saturday evening, it will be a brave fan who mentions Evander Holyfield’s ear.
Born Michael Gerard Tyson on June 30, 1966, and raised in Brooklyn’s Brownsville district – “a very horrific, tough and gruesome kind of place”, in Tyson’s recollection – the future heavyweight champion of the world seemed destined at best for a life on the margins of society.
In his ghostwritten 2013 autobiography, Undisputed Truth, Tyson recalled how his family relied on welfare for food, and were sometimes reduced to living in condemned buildings with no heat or water.
His father left home when his son was 2 years old. His mother struggled to cope with her three children and, before his teenagers, Tyson had been arrested multiple times for acts of violence and petty crime. At the age of 10, Tyson and his gang carried guns when they went burgling.
At 12, Tyson was expelled from school for endless fighting, and sent to a juvenile prison, where he started boxing. In 1980, his life changed when Cus D’Amato, a boxing manager and trainer, saw the 13-year-old in the ring and declared: “That’s the heavyweight champion of the world.”
Tyson went to live and train with D’Amato and his partner Camille Ewald, who became his guardians after his mother died when he was 16. The tough Italian-American from the Bronx was like the father Tyson never had. “If it weren’t for that old, Italian white guy, I would’ve been a bum,” he once said. “I wanted to make him happy and prove that all the good things he was saying were right.”
He would, but not before D’Amato died, at the age of 77, in November 1985, just 10 fights into his protégé’s professional career. Tyson wept “like a lost soldier on a mission without a general”. Later, he said: “I shut down emotionally after Cus died.”
Regardless, D’Amato had left his mark. A year after D’Amato’s death, Tyson became world champion.
Tyson had turned pro in March 1985, at the age of 18, and in his first year fought and won 19 fights, all by knockout. In November 1986, he scored his 28th straight win, defeating Trevor Berbick in Las Vegas to take the WBC heavyweight title. He was 20 years and four months old, and remains the youngest fighter ever to take a heavyweight title. The following year he became the first fighter ever to hold the WBC, WBA and IBF heavyweight crowns simultaneously.
With 37 straight wins in four years, when he travelled to Japan in February 1990 to take on James “Buster” Douglas, a journeyman fighter in the last year of his career, Tyson looked unstoppable. But Douglas did stop him, putting the champion down for the count in the 10th round. It was Tyson’s first taste of canvas and he later admitted he had neglected his training.
Fate had another blow in store. Within days of the defeat, Tyson’s sister Denise, who was just 24, suffered a fatal cardiac arrest at her home in New York.
It was Holyfield who would prove to be Tyson’s nemesis, but outside the ring, Tyson was his own worst enemy, succumbing increasingly to his unpredictable temper and the temptations strewn in his path by his fame and notoriety. “In my mind,” he later wrote. “I was a titan, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. It’s amazing how a low self-esteem and a huge ego can give you delusions of grandeur.”
In February 1992, Tyson was convicted of raping Desiree Washington, an 18-year-old beauty queen, and spent almost three years in prison. He returned to the ring in August 1995, and took back his WBC and WBA titles, from Frank Bruno in March 1996 and Bruce Seldon in September the same year.
But then came the beginning of the end. In November 1996, Holyfield handed Tyson only the second defeat of his career, and during the rematch the following June, Tyson earned a 16-month disqualification by biting both of Holyfield’s ears.
In September 1998, after psychiatric tests “did not suggest the presence of any major mental illness” but found the boxer had grappled with and been treated for depression for much of his life, Tyson regained his licence. He would fight on for the next six years, but his time at the very top was over.
The following year, he spent nine months in jail for assaulting two motorists in a road-rage incident. Tyson finally retired in June 2005, at the age of 38, calling a halt in round 6 of his 58th and last professional fight. “I do not have the guts to be in this sport anymore,” he said afterwards. “It’s time to move on and be a father, take care of my children.”
Even this ambition would be part-thwarted by tragedy. In May 2009, his 4-year-old daughter Exodus died after accidentally strangling herself on a treadmill cord at her mother Sol Xochitl's home. Along the way, Tyson lost most of his US$400 million career earnings and filed for bankruptcy in August 2003. He had, reported The New York Times, squandered his money on "jewellery, mansions, cars, limousines, cell phones, parties, clothing, motorcycles and Siberian tigers".
Throughout his career, Tyson doubtless missed the steadying hands of D’Amato and his co-manager Jimmy Jacobs, who died in 1988. The flamboyant promoter Don King was no substitute, and in 2004, Tyson ended their 10-year business relationship by suing him for fraud, settling for a $14 million payment.
In 2005, at the age of 39 and with five surviving children and two ex-wives – his 1988 marriage to actress Robin Givens had ended in acrimony and allegations of domestic violence, which he always denied – he told USA Today he was "a sad, pathetic case … a failure."
Since 2009, however, Tyson has been married to Lakiha “Kiki” Spicer, with whom he has had a son and a daughter, and appears finally to have found domestic happiness and stability.
“I know at times I come across like a Neanderthal or a babbling idiot,” Tyson said in the run-up to his fight with Lennox Lewis in 2002, “[but] that’s who you all come to see.” It was, he added, better to be “a fake somebody rather than a real nobody … I wouldn’t be making the money I make if I was smart and erudite”.
Self-destructive and driven by socially unacceptable impulses, Tyson will be forever remembered as the boxer who bit a chunk out of an opponent’s ear. But if you come face to face with him on Saturday, it would probably be best to restrict talk to the lightning left hook that left so many bigger, heavier fighters on the mat.
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