Interview

The world is a small place, and it’s getting smaller all the time. Two weeks before I was asked to interview Mike Tyson, I went out onto the balcony of my Los Angeles hotel room and saw him sitting on the terrace right next to mine. He puffed a cigarillo and impassively watched the plumes of smoke dissipate into the air. After thinking better of it, I said hello (something I would rarely do on such an occasion), and he turned slowly toward me—at a rate of speed so reduced I wasn’t even sure he was moving. Then, at an equally leisurely pace, he raised his right arm, flashed a thumbs-up and returned to the task of keeping the cigarillo burning. So, after heading out to meet him on a pitilessly hot Burbank afternoon, I am shocked that he remembers me. “I know you,” Tyson says, as he offers an enormously genial handshake. There’s something entirely unhurried about him now, as if he’s taking the world in on its own terms instead of trying to get in the first lick. In James Toback’s documentary Tyson, the former champ reveals closely held confidences and secrets rather than unleashing them. Even the knockout blow he tosses in his lovably funny cameo in The Hangover comes with a leisurely—yet still brutal—lack of rush. And he takes his time immersing himself in this interview. But once he’s ready, Tyson, now 43, is waist deep in talking, and excitedly, happily, pulling together connections and moving from one topic to another.

ELVIS MITCHELL: One of the things that amazed me about the Jim Toback documentary is the part when you talk about having asthma. I mean, you basically went into the ring every time with the idea of trying to win the fight quickly because you were afraid that you wouldn’t be able to breathe. It’s interesting, too, how you were talking about having these memories of being in the hospital as a kid. What’s your first memory of that?

MIKE TYSON: Asthma? Couldn’t breathe one day. I was real young. I don’t know how old I was—probably about three.

MITCHELL: And you had an attack and needed to go to the hospital or something?

TYSON: Yeah.

MITCHELL: It was interesting to see in the documentary how you were actually kind of a shy, sensitive kid.

TYSON: Yeah, this is true. But that quickly changed when my parents moved into this neighborhood called Brownsville, Brooklyn, which was just totally different than the neighborhood we lived in before. The people in Brownsville were very aggressive. It was like a dog-eat-dog world. So I had to get familiar with it.

MITCHELL: You’ve talked about how other kids were robbing people and stuff.

TYSON: Yeah. I was just a little kid, and I watched these guys . . .  They would come back around the neighborhood later, and -people would be slappin’ them five and talking about what they did. Or the older criminals would say what they should have done. It was like they’d come back and have a press conference. [laughs] I was like, Wow. This is exciting!

MITCHELL: Do you feel like you ever really got over your -shyness at all?

TYSON: I don’t know. Maybe a little.

MITCHELL: Because you still seem like you’re kind of reticent about talking in a lot of ways.

TYSON: I don’t know. I don’t feel much like talking about my past. I can’t believe I was expressing it on tape like I did.

MITCHELL: But when you were fighting, you talked about yourself more, and in different kinds of ways, than any other boxer I can remember.

TYSON: Muhammad Ali was pretty open with the public.

MITCHELL: But still, it was like there were two different Alis. There was the Ali who was the showman, and then there was the guy he was with his squad, with the Black Muslims. But you kind of opened up every aspect of your life to people.

TYSON: I don’t know. It’s just who I am.

MITCHELL: I was talking to Jim about your reaction at Cannes after Tyson screened there last year and the film got a 10-minute standing ovation. He said that he felt like you were of two minds about it. Do you remember what you were thinking at the time?

TYSON: Yeah. I was thinking, What the hell am I doing here? It was just something new to me. I’d never dealt with movies from that perspective—being a participant, so to speak.

MITCHELL: But Jim told me that you were also saying that you were suspicious of all the white people accepting you.

TYSON: I was just saying that those were my thoughts that I was having at the time . . . I would look to sabotage something because it was going so good. When things go so good like that, normally my old self would sabotage it.