Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography. Mike Tyson
At four, I had a steak. Then some more pasta at five. In the dressing room I had a Snickers bar and some orange juice.
Then Kevin wrapped my hands and put on my gloves. It was time to walk to the ring. It was chilly in the arena so Kevin cut a towel and draped it over my neck. I was wearing the black trunks that I had changed to a few fights ago. I had to pay a $5,000 fine since Berbick was wearing black, but I didn’t care. I wanted that ominous look.
I was the challenger so I had to go out first. They were playing a Toto song for my entrance but all I could hear in my head was that Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight”: “I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord / And I’ve been waiting for this moment for all of my life, oh Lord.”
I went through the ropes and I started pacing around the ring. I looked out at the crowd and I saw Kirk Douglas, Eddie Murphy, and Sly Stallone. A few minutes later, Berbick entered wearing a black robe with a black hood. He was projecting cockiness and confidence, but I could feel that was all a façade, an illusion. I knew that this guy was not going to die for his belt.
Ali was introduced to the crowd and he came over to me.
“Kick his ass for me,” Ali told me.
Five years earlier, Ali had been beaten by Berbick and retired after the fight, so I was more than happy to comply.
“That’s going to be easy,” I assured Muhammad.
Finally it was time to fight. The bell rang and referee Mills Lane motioned us into action. I charged Berbick and began peppering him with hard shots. I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t moving and he wasn’t jabbing; he was standing right there in front of me. I threw a right hand near the beginning of the fight square on his left ear, trying to bust his eardrum. About halfway through the round, I staggered him with a hard right. I swarmed him and by the end of the first, Berbick seemed dazed. He had taken some really, really good shots.
I went back to my corner and sat down. Because of the antibiotic shot, I was dripping like a Good Humor bar in July. But I didn’t care; I was in there to nail Berbick. Besides, one of my heroes, Kid Chocolate, fought with syphilis all the time.
“Move your head, don’t forget to jab,” Kevin said. “You’re headhunting. Go to the body first.”
Ten seconds into the second round, I hit him with a right and Berbick went down. He sprang up immediately and came right back at me. He was trying to fight back but his punches were ineffective. With about a half a minute or so left in the round, I hit him with a right to the body instead of an uppercut and then I shot the uppercut but I missed him. But I threw a left and hit him in the temple. It was a delayed reaction but he went down. I didn’t even feel the punch, but it was very effective. He tried to get up but then he fell back down and I noticed that his ankle was all bent.
No way he’s gonna get up and beat the count, I thought.
I was right. He tried to get up a second time and he lurched across the canvas and flopped down again. He finally got up but Mills Lane hugged him and waved him off. That was it. I was the youngest heavyweight champion in history.
“It’s over, that’s all, and we have a new era in boxing,” Barry Watkins, the HBO announcer, said.
“Mike Tyson did what Mike Tyson normally does. And that’s fight,” Sugar Ray Leonard added.
“That’s with a capital F,” Watkins said.
I was just numb. I couldn’t feel anything. I was conscious of what was going on around me but I was just numb. Kevin hugged me. José Torres came over.
“I can’t believe this, man. I’m the fucking champion of the world at twenty,” I said to him. “This fucking shit is unreal. Champion of the world at twenty. I’m a kid, a fucking kid.”
Jimmy came into the ring and gave me a kiss.
“Do you think Cus would have liked that?” I asked. Jimmy smiled.
Don King, whose son managed Berbick, came over to congratulate me. Then I looked out over the audience and started to feel arrogant. Yeah, we did it, I thought. Me and Cus did it. Then I started talking to Cus.
“We did it, we proved all those guys wrong. I bet Berbick don’t think I’m too short, does he?” Then I realized that Cus would have hated the way I fought.
“Everything else you did in the ring was garbage,” I heard him say in my head. “But the ending was so resounding that it’s all people will remember.”
It was time for the postfight interviews. I had to acknowledge Cus. I was the best fighter in the world at that time, and I was his creation. Cus needed to be there. He would have loved to have told off those people who wrote him off as a kook. He would have said, “Nobody can beat my boy here. He’s only twenty but nobody in the world can beat him.”
“This is the moment I waited for all my life since I started boxing,” I said when the press conference started. “Berbick was very strong. I never expected him to be as strong as me … every punch I threw was with bad intentions. My record will last for immortality, it’ll never be broken. I want to live forever … I refused to lose … I would have had to be carried out dead to lose. I was coming to destroy and win the Heavyweight Championship of the World, which I’ve done. I’d like to dedicate my fight to my great guardian Cus D’Amato. I’m sure he’s up there and he’s looking down and he’s talking to all the great fighters and he’s saying his boy did it. I thought he was a crazy white dude … he was a genius. Everything he said would happen happened.”
Someone asked me who my next opponent would be.
“I don’t care who I fight next,” I said. “If I’m going to be great, then I’m going to have to fight everybody. I want to fight everybody.”
Even Dundee praised me after the fight.
“Tyson throws combinations I never saw before. I was stunned. I worked with Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, but I’m seeing from Tyson a three-punch combination second to none. When have you seen a guy throw a right hand to the kidney, come up the middle with an uppercut, then throw a left hook?”
I didn’t take that belt off that whole night. I wore it around the lobby of the hotel. I wore it to the after-party, and I wore it when I went out drinking later with Jay Bright, my roommate at Cus’s house; Bobby Stewart’s son; and Matthew Hilton, the fighter. We went to a dive bar in Vegas called The Landmark, across the street from the Hilton. Nobody was in there, but we just sat and drank all night. I was drinking vodka straight and I got truly smashed. At the end of the night, Matthew passed out and I went around to different girls’ houses, showing them my championship belt. I didn’t have sex with them, I just hung out with them for a while, and then I’d leave and call another girl and go over to her house and hang out. It was crazy. You have to understand that I was still only twenty years old. And when you think about it, a lot of my friends were only fifteen or sixteen. That wasn’t a big difference at that age. Now all of a sudden, because I’m champion of the world, everyone expected me to be a totally together guy because of the title and what it represents. But I was just a little kid having fun.
And I was lost. By the time I won the belt I was truly a wrecked soul because I didn’t have any guidance. I didn’t have Cus. I had to win the belt for Cus. We were going to do that or else we were going to die. There wasn’t any way I was leaving that ring without that belt. All that sacrifice, suffering, dedication, sacrifice, suffering. Day by day in every way. When I finally got back to my hotel room early that morning, I looked at myself in the mirror wearing that belt, and I realized that I had accomplished our mission. And now I was free.
But then I remembered reading something Lenin wrote in one of Cus’s books. “Freedom is a very dangerous thing. We ration it very closely.” That was a statement I should have taken into consideration in the years that followed.