Desperate Tyson Prepares For His Real Last Stand

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

For the past two years, I been a bum, truly a bum in the streets. I got nowhere to live. I been crashing with friends, sleeping in shelters. “Unsavory characters are giving me money, and I’m taking it. I need it. The drug dealers, they sympathize with me. They see me as some sort of pathetic character. They got more money than me. Imagine that!


“I’m Mike Tyson, I made all this money and the drug dealers are doing better than me. I gotta laugh about it.”


This was yesterday afternoon, and the former two-time heavyweight champion, now 38 and broke, was in Bethesda, Md., visiting his children en route to returning to a borrowed bedroom in Phoenix, where he is training for what will absolutely, positively be his last chance to salvage what could have been a great life and an even greater story.


There had been titles and women and money, some $300 million all told, and mansions in Las Vegas and Connecticut and Ohio and Bernardsville, N.J., and enough cars to fill the 65-space garage he once owned.


All that has been gone for a long time now. Mike Tyson hasn’t been a champion for eight years, hasn’t won an important fight for perhaps twice that long. He was once the youngest heavyweight champion in history. Now, he is just another middle-aged fighter scuffling for one more payday.


Monday started out as a rare good day for Tyson – he had been granted a license to fight in New Jersey, scene of his greatest triumphs – but it quickly turned bad again by nightfall, when Governor McGreevey announced he would bar Tyson from fighting at any state-funded facility.


That meant the Meadowlands, the Continental Airlines Arena, the old Boardwalk Hall – site of Tyson’s 91-second demolition of Michael Spinks – and the new Atlantic City Convention Center were off-limits. If Mike Tyson is to fight in New Jersey, it will be in a hotel ballroom or at best, the 7,500-seat Mitchell G. Etess Arena inside the Trump Taj Mahal.


“Isn’t this incredible?” Tyson said. “I’m 38 years old, still fighting, still headlining. Nobody in boxing can draw no money like I can; not Holyfield, not Lennox Lewis, not nobody. I been out of the game and I’m blessed, truly I am, and now these guys are saying I don’t deserve to fight. How much can a human being take?”


The night before, Tyson had met with Larry Hazzard, the chairman of the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board, and Hazzard had handed him the piece of paper that was as important to Tyson as a clean X-ray to a cancer patient.


“He said to me, ‘You saved my life by giving me this license,”‘ Hazzard said yesterday. “He had tears in his eyes. It gave me chills.”


Later that night, after Tyson learned of McGreevey’s announcement, he called Hazzard at home.


“He was worried about me,” Hazzard said. “He wanted to know if I was in trouble or anything. I’m not in any trouble, and I know I did the right thing. He passed all our requirements. I’ve never tried to measure the character of the guys who box here. Besides, he knows the rule – if he [messes] up, I keep the purse.”


Hazzard was the boxing boss when Tyson knocked out Spinks in Atlantic City, and Carl “The Truth” Williams and Larry Holmes and Alex Stewart and a handful of others.


He has seen the brilliance and the ugliness. He was here the night Tyson punched a hole in the wall of Boardwalk Hall in a rage because Spinks’s manager, Butch Lewis, insisted his hands be re-wrapped just before the fight. He was in Las Vegas the night a frustrated Tyson bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear. He knows what he’s dealing with.


“The guy has literally begged us for a chance to prove he’s a changed man,” Hazzard said. “The man says he’s broke. He says he can’t feed his family. Hey, I’m, not saying it’s not possible the guy’s conning everybody again, and if he goes back to being the old Mike Tyson, I’ll be the first to say we screwed up. But everybody’s entitled to a second chance, aren’t they?”


The case can be made that Tyson has used up his second chance, and his third, fourth and fifth. But when McGreevey says, as he did through a spokesman yesterday, that he doesn’t believe “Mr. Tyson has a temperament to engage in good sportsmanship,” it strains credibility.


After all, McGreevey is the governor who last February appointed Joseph Santiago the director of the Trenton Police Department, just three months after Santiago resigned as State Police superintendent amid charges of having ties to the mob, to illegal gambling and to hindering a state investigation into his practices.


Clearly, McGreevey is not against all second chances.


“Hasn’t Kobe Bryant played at the Meadowlands while under indictment for rape?” Hazzard asked. “Didn’t Lawrence Taylor play in a state-run facility every Sunday? What about some of these rappers who perform regularly in our casinos? Clealry, there’s a different standard for Mike Tyson.”


The story of Mike Tyson’s meteoric rise and fall hit its nadir last year when Tyson filed for bankruptcy, showing $55 million in debts, $5 million in assets, and a measly $5,583 in cash.


At the time, Tyson was so dispirited by his prospects that he turned down a three-fight deal that would have settled his $17 million obligation to the IRS and put $10 million back into his hands.


At a fight in December, he told me he had lost the desire to fight, lost the desire to train, lost the desire, it seemed, to live.


In recent months, Tyson’s desires have been rekindled, helped in no small part by seeing Lamon Brewster, who could not even have held a job as a Tyson sparring partner a few years back, lay claim to a slice of the lucrative heavyweight pie by knocking out the grossly over hyped – and overpaid – Wladimir Klitschko.


“Watching that fight, it was burning my heart,” Tyson said. “I couldn’t give up.”


He has been training in Phoenix with trainer Freddie Roach, planning on a comeback against a ham-and-egger named Danny Williams on July 30 in Louisville.


Then, he is hoping to fight Brewster, Antonio Tarver, and Vitali Klitschko, in succession. But with nowhere to fight in New Jersey and no license in New York or Nevada, Mike Tyson’s last chance may be over before it even begins.


“I was just so excited I got my license back, and now these guys are trying to stop me, like I’m, some kind of criminal or something,” Tyson said. “I know I was a tough, badass talking fighter, but I ain’t no mob figure. I did my time for the rape. I paid my money to Las Vegas. I paid my dues. I ain’t the same person I was when I bit that guy’s ear off. I lost all my pride and dignity and all I’m asking for is forgiveness. That’s what life’s all about, forgiveness.”


Or, as Larry Hazzard said, “I’d rather give him two or three chances to straighten out than support his ass in jail for the next 20 years with my taxes.”


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