Interview

MITCHELL: And, like you, a great manipulator of other people’s emotions.

TYSON: Yeah.

MITCHELL: Is that one of the things you got from him?

TYSON: Well, I used to read a lot of books. Cus used to tell me about people like the Borgia family. He used to talk about their character and what they were about, manipulating . . . Cus knew all that stuff. He just had so much confidence in me. He said, “All right. We’re going to take this method of life, and we’ll be able to accomplish anything. There’s nothing worthy of being intimidated by for us.” I’d never had that kind of ideology before. I didn’t come from a household where my mother dragged me outside and said, “You’d better fight.” My mother wouldn’t let me fight. I was not an aggressive kid.

MITCHELL: What did it feel like to you the first time you were out of the country and people were recognizing you?

TYSON: It was crazy. In 1986, I went to London, and they had this big dinner for me, like a banquet. I was just 19, 20 years old, and I was like, “Whoa!” Everybody knew me. I was at the Grosvenor House, and they closed the gate because too many people were there. It was just crazy—like I was the Beatles or something.

MITCHELL: Is that when you first started to get addicted to it a little bit?

TYSON: Yeah, exactly. It made me want to win fights like the fighters of old. I wanted that status. I used to read about all these legendary fighters in the boxing encyclopedia, and I’d always
be jealous. It was just amazing what they could do and how they would do it—the courage they would have to go about doing it.

MITCHELL: When was the first time you noticed that your relationship to fighting was different, that your emotional balance was changing?

TYSON: When I was 15 and I started taking it real serious.

MITCHELL: Is that when you thought you might have a future as a boxer?

TYSON: No, that’s when I knew I was going to be champion of the world.

MITCHELL: You knew that at 15?

TYSON: Yeah. Because, you see, I’d been planning on it since I was 12. I was very dedicated and serious about fighting. I’d read about all the fighters. I found out where they came from, knew about their mothers and their fathers . . . I just read all about their lives, their training.

MITCHELL: Who was the first boxer you studied? Was it Ali?

TYSON: Nah, no way. I knew of Ali. But I’m talking about studying them. I probably looked at Henry Armstrong first.

MITCHELL: Oh, so you went that far back.

TYSON: Yeah . . . I actually went all the way back to 1812.

MITCHELL: To when it was basically bare--knuckle boxing.

TYSON: The Kings’ Rules, yeah. And then I started looking at guys like Jack Dempsey because they were mean and tough. In today’s society, you want fighters to be white knights in fucking armor who come and save the day. But back then they were just hard, mean men. Jack Dempsey was also the first million-dollar fighter. This was in the ’20s, when you could buy a steak dinner for 25 cents. He’d had a hard life, and he fought hard. America had seen nothing like him before.

MITCHELL: Sonny Liston was one of those guys too, who had nothing else going for him but fighting.

TYSON: Exactly. There was this guy named Joe Gans who fought in the 1890s and the early 1900s. He fought in the Jack Johnson era, and he was like the patriarch of black fighters. And then Johnson came along and became bigger than the sport. Johnson was just amazing. He had like a third-grade education but spoke something like seven different languages. He was also very cynical.

MITCHELL: But he had to be. Did you find that you became cynical at a certain point too?

TYSON: You do become cynical. There’s a lot of Jack Johnson in all of us. But he was a bad man all his life. The guy was denied for so long . . . He lived in 1908 like we live today. Today, we live and speak our minds and never hold our tongues back to white people. But in Jack Johnson’s day, you could get killed just for looking at a white woman, and Jack Johnson married three of them.

MITCHELL: Johnson has always struck me as being really the first black athlete who was like Ali—who was the same person with white people as he was with black people.

TYSON: Society wasn’t ready for him. Black and white—people just weren’t ready for him.

MITCHELL: But that seems to be the case with a lot of boxers. Look at Ali. And then, in a lot of ways, society doesn’t know what to make of you either.

TYSON: That’s absolutely right. But they didn’t have no NAACP in Jack Johnson’s day—it was established in 1909, and by that time, Johnson was already champion. He just wouldn’t take no shit. Guys like Joe Gans and Sam Langford were great fighters, and society wasn’t too keen on brutalizing them because they were kind of Tom-ish. They were nice and, you know, submissive. But Johnson was an extrovert. There’s this story about how he was driving through a town and he was speeding, and the police stopped him and wanted to charge him $25 for a speeding ticket. This is 1908, right? And he probably was speeding. So Johnson gave the officer a $50 and said, “Motherfucker, you hold on to that because I’m driving back the same way.” [both laugh]

MITCHELL: People forget how important Jack Johnson was, because 30 years later, when Joe Louis became champion, he was once again playing the nice guy.

TYSON: Because of Jack Johnson, they didn’t let a black man fight for the title for a long time. In 1910, when he beat Jim -Jeffries in Reno, there were race riots afterward. Oh, man, so many black people died that night. But Jack Johnson had been all over the world. He’d been everywhere. No black man at that time traveled like he did.

MITCHELL: And look at you now—I mean, they threw a parade for you when you went to Moscow.

TYSON: Yeah, it’s interesting. I was just talking to somebody in a clothing store. I went to buy this outfit, and the guy said, “You’ve been to Chechnya before. I saw you in Chechnya.” Everybody’s strapped in Chechnya; they all walk around with M16s. But I’m Muslim, and they’re Muslim, so they love me.

MITCHELL: You’re like a king over there. You hear these stories about the Russian mob . . .

TYSON: Oh, I met those people. I won’t say “Russian mob,” okay? I won’t use that word.

MITCHELL: I’m sorry. Forgive me.

TYSON: But these guys were . . . These were interesting guys. They ran the city. They had a dinner for me in Moscow, andit takes two hours to get to your meal because everybody’s toasting. All they do is toast. I said, “When will they eat this fuckin’ food?” And somebody would say, “I’d like to make a toast . . . ” These guys are extremely intelligent, but it’s a totally different life.

MITCHELL: I was wondering what you thought of heavyweight boxing today. What do you think has happened?

TYSON: Well, there are no stars. If you had a star electrifying the heavyweight division, then boxing would light up again.

MITCHELL: You have stars in the lesser weight classes.

TYSON: Yeah, but people want to see a heavyweight beating people to death, knocking them out cold.

MITCHELL: Is there anybody who you think could potentially be that guy in the next couple of years?

TYSON: I haven’t seen anybody yet, but I’m sure there’s somebody on the horizon.

MITCHELL: I find myself watching the middleweights now more than anything else. When you were getting started, right after the Ali–Foreman period, the middleweights were dominating. You had Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy Hearns,
Marvin Hagler—all these guys who were small and fast. I always thought you fought like one of those middleweights because of your speed.

TYSON: I always admired guys like [Jimmy] Robertson, -[Carlos] Monzon, [Roberto] Duran. They were phenomenal fighters. A lot of people say I’m better than those fighters because I have more notoriety. But I have the utmost respect for them. Goddamn, could those guys fight. Wilfred Benitez? Shit! Alexis Argüello? Fuck, man, did he hit guys. When Tommy Hearns knocked out Pipino Cuevas, Hearns knocked him dead. I thought no one in the welterweight division hit harder than Hearns. He was a freak.

MITCHELL: Because he was so fast and so skinny.

TYSON: And tough as shit, too! You ain’t gonna beat him on no decision. You got to kill this man to
beat this man! Now, look at how people handle their fear differently: Going into a fight, most people would be thinking about how they’re going to strategically do this or do that. But Hearns says, “Fuck it. We’re gonna shoot it out, motherfucker!” All of a sudden, a guy who is afraid becomes a killer. He’s scared to death, but he’s trying to kill this guy! It’s just an oxymoron, that side of fighting. These guys are frightened to death like cowards, but they’re fucking assassins. It’s strange—the psychological warfare in fighting.

MITCHELL: To me, that period, from around 1975 until you came along in 1985, was the most exciting period in boxing. There were people coming from every weight class.

TYSON: I was a little kid coming up watching those guys. Fighting was off the hook back then.

MITCHELL: But it’s almost as though you studied all of these other boxers we’ve talked about, and then said, “This is who I need to be to make this exciting. I need to be like this. I need to bring in this . . . ” It’s like you brought something from every era of boxing into the ring when you fought.

TYSON: Exactly.