Mike Tyson's long search for redemption - GOOD ARTICLE

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/men/article4961502.ece

When Mike Tyson shakes hands, there is a fleeting frisson of fear that must have been felt at some point by every one of his opponents. He may be in a dark blue suit and he may have hung up his boxing gloves, but the big fist, brown eyes and warrior-like tattoo dominating the left side of his face are as vivid as they always were.

The man they once called Iron Mike still speaks in a high-pitched voice with a faint lisp. But, it seems, some of the menace has gone. And so it should have. He is no longer the feared opponent, the fighting machine that seemed indestructible throughout the 1980s. The man who never went anywhere with an entourage of fewer than 30, who reportedly earned a $300m fortune and boasted that he was the “baddest man on the planet”.

He is bald and pudgy, a 42-year-old convicted ****** who has done time in jail and rehab for drug offences, declared himself bankrupt and was last seen on these shores hosting a ques-tion-and-answer session in Loughton, in the badlands of Essex.

No one in modern sport has self-combusted in such spectacular fashion as Tyson. No one has fallen from grace so fast. To some he is a monster who brought boxing into disrepute. To others he remains – despite his unpleasant past – the greatest heavyweight boxer since Muhammad Ali, and a man whose life is a contemporary parable about the perils of fame and fortune.

Today he is searching for redemp-tion. He admits that he has “screwed up” – he recently said his “whole life has been a waste” – and he is brutally honest about a life that shames him. “I’ve done the lot,” he says. “Drink, drugs; I’ve screwed other men’s wives; I have been threatened, chased and survived. I’ve been on the streets, in jail and have done things that have not been pretty.

“I’ve been broke and I have been rich. I have also earned a fortune – several fortunes – and spent them. I have been called an animal. I have been treated as an animal. But I have also met presidents and leaders and been given the best of hospitality.”

He pauses, then adds: “I have to live my life and hope that people can accept me as I am – my highs and lows and vulnerability and who I am as a human being. I am an individual and this is what you get.”

The final chapter of Tyson’s fighting career began exactly 10 years ago today. On October 19, 1998, amid much fanfare, the Nevada Athletic Commission renewed his boxing licence. He had been stripped of it the previous year after biting a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear in a world title bout. At the time, the animal intensity of the act caused outrage throughout the boxing world, but by the time the ban was lifted, the truth was that boxing needed him back: he was pay-per-view gold, the most famous fighter in the world.

His comeback started well when, three months later, he knocked out Francois Botha with one second left in the fifth round in his first fight in 19 months, but he was already spiralling out of control. A month later, in February 1999, he was given two concurrent two-year sentences for assaulting two motorists after a traffic accident the previous summer.

The sentence was subsequently reduced, and later that year he was back in the ring, though the fight was ruled a no-contest after he knocked down his opponent Orlin Norris with a punch after the bell ending the first round.

Less than a year later he was branded a “disgrace” after knocking down the referee as well as his opponent in a bout in Scotland, where he infamously announced he wanted to eat his opponent’s children.

When he met Lennox Lewis, the British boxer who was then the heavyweight champion, the fight (which Lewis won) was overshadowed before it had even begun when Tyson threw a punch during a press conference. Iron Mike was clearly a man on the edge, with deep personal problems, but the boxing world couldn’t get enough of him: the sell-out bout in Memphis took $17m at the gate, a record for a fight at that time.

The end was in sight long before Tyson’s final fight, in 2005, against the unheralded Irishman Kevin McBride. Ali was in Tyson’s dressing room before the bout, which saw him lumbering about the ring before finally succumbing to a man who – in his prime – wouldn’t have lasted a round. “I don’t have it any more,” he said after the contest. “I don’t have the fighting guts any more.”

That sentiment remains unchanged today: “That [boxing] will never happen,” he says. “I am completely disillusioned with boxing. There is just not the draw for me any more, in any shape or form. I used to love it.”

But it is his life outside the ring that for many people will define his legacy. When looking back on newspaper cuttings before our interview, I was surprised to note that Tyson has received more column inches about his personal life than his professional one over the past 20 years.

It started with his marriage to Robin Givens in 1988. When they divorced after a year, in February 1989, one article on the 24-year-old Givens was headlined: “The girl who KO’d Tyson”. It went on to report how Tyson had agreed with his wife to be interviewed by Barbara Walters, then fronting the most successful television chat show in America. Givens mugged him in front of millions while he sat meekly beside her. Being married to the heavyweight champion, she declared, “has been torture, pure hell, worse than anything I could possibly imagine. Michael is manic depressive”.

Their subsequent break-up marked his first big payout. “I have paid out a lot of money over the years,” he says, evenly. How much? A snort. “No idea.” Has he any idea how much he’s earned? “No. I have not been counting.”

It is a matter of record that in two years, 1995-7, Tyson had six fights and netted $112m. Of that, he spent $5m on cars, $1.7m on house maintenance and insurance, $95,000 a month on clothes and $385,000 on personal security. He set aside $236,000 a month for cash living expenses and spent $411,000 on his 30th birthday party.

When the taxman – the Internal Revenue Service – came in with a demand for tens of millions, he could not pay it in full. He was reported in March 2004 as being “broke”. He’d made another huge payout in 2003 with the divorce from his second wife, Monica Turner, after nearly six years. They have a daughter, Rayna, 12, and an 11-year-old son, Amir.

He handed over the deeds to the couple’s home in Farmington, Connecticut, worth $4.75m. She was also awarded a second home, valued at $4m, and granted custody of the children. He agreed to pay her $6.5m from future earnings.

But no amount of money can wash away the incident that he will for ever be remembered for. He still denies the **** of the 18-year-old beauty queen Desiree Washington in his hotel room at the Canterbury in Indianapolis on July 19, 1991 – “She planned it from the beginning” – but his life has been littered with accusations of sexual harassment. He served just three years of a six-year sentence.

The **** was the point of demarcation in Tyson’s life: what had come before was almost poetic, something straight out of a movie script: a dirt-poor black kid from the ghetto who turned his back on a life of street crime to pursue the noble sport of boxing and went on to become the youngest ever heavyweight world champion.

Tyson was born on June 30, 1966, in Brooklyn. His father left the family when he was two, and his mother died when he was 16. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, Tyson was bullied and had breathing difficulties. “I was always fat – the fat kid,” he once said. “I had a huge inferiority complex. Everybody picked on me.”

At 12, when he was already on drugs and robbing with a gang, he was imprisoned in a juvenile detention centre for the first time. It was here that he first began to box. “Right now a lot of my friends that I grew up with are dead, or they’re not around any more, or they’ll stay in jail for the rest of their life or they’re strung out on dope somewhere.”

Tyson would have gone the same way were it not for Cus D’Amato – a well-known trainer who had famously coached the former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson – who spotted the raw promise in the stocky young boy with a lisp. D’Amato was old but determined to stay alive long enough to see his protégé fulfil his potential. “I started believing in this old man. It changed my whole life,” says Tyson.

In the event, D’Amato died before Tyson became heavyweight champion in 1986, but he would have been proud of his record in the ring: he beat 37 opponents – the first 19 by knockout – before he suffered his first defeat, and triumphed over the biggest names in boxing at the time: James “Bone-crusher” Smith, Tony Tucker, Larry Holmes, Tony Tubbs, Tyrell Biggs and Michael Spinks. These were the glory years. He looked unbeatable.

I can also recall a 21-year-old Tyson giving a long, detailed interview to the BBC and its boxing correspondent, Harry Carpenter. He had absorbed every detail of previous heavyweight champions, watching the oldest black-and-white footage, and gave his analysis. It was as expert and articulate an assessment of past fighters as I can recall hearing from any boxer, and a long way from the unhinged Tyson who would later rage after a fight with Lou Sava-rese: “I want to rip out his heart and feed it to him. I want your heart. I want to eat your children. Praise be to Allah.”

There are no trophies or...

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