The temperature seems to drop by 20 degrees when Mike Tyson and his minders enter the room. “Have I got to be nice to this guy?” he asks the filmmaker James Toback. “No,” Toback replies. “You can be as hostile as you like.”
Yet Tyson doesn’t seem to have the energy to muster up much hostility. He is wearing a baggy pinstripe suit that fails to disguise what’s going on underneath. His belly squeezes out of his black shirt, and he can barely drag his size 14 feet along with him. His almost-beard, white flecked, is more oversight than design. His head slumps to the side as if his massive pit bull neck can’t quite bear its weight. Everything is such an effort. He speaks quietly, lethargically, like a man who has been on a heavy dose of antidepressants for too long. His Maori facial tattoo, once so warrior-like, looks benign today. He could be Lennie in Of Mice and Men, the half-gentle giant who strokes the things he loves to death.
“Hello, legend,” I say. Tyson looks confused, uneasy, says he doesn’t take compliments well. But, for good or bad, Mike Tyson is a legend. Many experts would argue that he was the greatest heavyweight boxing champion — or at least should have been. Sure, he didn’t have Muhammad Ali’s wit or grace, but as a knockout puncher, none could match Iron Mike. He won his first 19 professional fights by a knockout, he was the youngest world heavyweight champion at 20, unbeaten in three years, so far ahead of the pack that there were no rivals. Then things started to go wrong.
His former wife, the actor Robin Givens, went on television in 1988 alongside him and announced that he was a terrifying manic depressive and that their marriage was pure hell. In 1990 he lost his first fight to 42-1 underdog Buster Douglas. He’d become lazy and complacent, seduced by alcohol and drugs. In 1992 he was convicted of rape and deviant sexual misconduct, and served three years in jail. It should have destroyed him, and he might well argue that it did, but, amazingly, within a year of his release he regained his world title. Then, once again, he chucked it all away.
Since retiring four years ago, Tyson has done little with his life. He has boxed in a few exhibitions, put on more weight, got in trouble with the law again: in 2007, he was convicted of drunk-driving after almost crashing into a police car. Three bags of cocaine were found on him, and he was given a day in jail, three years’ probation and ordered into rehab. That is when Toback, an old friend, asked Tyson, now 42, if he could make a film about his life.
The result is extraordinary — pretty much a 90-minute monologue, some of it stream of consciousness. What emerges is a man who finds it impossible to censor himself. He talks vividly about growing up with a promiscuous mother who might have been a prostitute and about a father he never knew, stealing drugs from dealers as a 12-year-old, detention center and being taken under the wing of the boxing coach Cus D’Amato, all while he was barely into his teens. Tyson is not a man who went off the rails. He was born on the skids. Somehow, and all too briefly, he managed to transcend his traumatic destiny.
We arrange to meet in the Hollywood Hills at the opulent house of another filmmaker friend, Brett Ratner. There are Warhols in the toilet, Bacons in the kitchen, Giacomettis on the sideboard, Toback at the center of the conversation, but as yet no Tyson. “We could be here a while — Mike’s been held up.” Toback and his entourage grin at each other. It’s not the first time the boxer has delayed them.
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