Read: 2026-07-20
Recommend: 10/10
I watched Tyson fight Lennox Lewis in 2002 as a kid — already the fallen Tyson, knocked out in eight rounds. This book filled in the story I’d only seen the middle of, and I loved it.
Fair warning: this may be the rawest memoir ever put on paper — the book clocks in at roughly 600 “fuck”s, 412 “shit”s, and 125 “nigga”s. 🤬 That’s not sloppy editing; that’s the voice, unfiltered, and it’s exactly why the book feels true.
What hit hardest: this is a rock-bottom-and-back story. Cus taught that the only thing wrong with defeat is learning nothing from it, and Tyson lived it — he calls the Douglas loss his best fight, because he took his beating and rebounded. Broke, he felt rich for the first time: no watch, no phone, nobody chasing him. “This is rich, man.” 🙌
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
You think you know the difference between a hero and a coward, Mike? Well, there is no difference between a hero and a coward in what they feel. It’s what they do that makes them different. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same but you have to have the discipline to do what a hero does and to keep yourself from doing what the coward does.
“Your mind is not your friend, Mike. I hope you know that. You have to fight with your mind, control it, put it in its place. You have to control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is ninety percent psychological. It’s just the excuse of a man who wants to quit. The night before a fight, you won’t sleep. Don’t worry, the other guy didn’t either. You’ll go to the weigh-in, he’ll look much bigger than you and calmer, like ice, but he’s burning up with fear inside. Your imagination is going to credit him with abilities he doesn’t have. Remember, motion relieves tension. The moment the bell rings, and you come in contact with each other, suddenly your opponent seems like everybody else, because now your imagination has dissipated. The fight itself is the only reality that matters. You have to learn to impose your will and take control over that reality.”
That was very important for me. I’m way too emotional in general. Later on I realized that if I didn’t separate from my feelings inside the ring, I would be sunk. I might hit a guy with a hard punch and then get scared if he didn’t go down. Cus took this out-of-body experience one step further. He would separate his mind from his body and then visualize the future. “Everything gets calm and I’m outside watching myself,” he told me. “It’s me, but it’s not me, as if my mind and my body aren’t connected, but they are connected. I get a picture in my mind, what it’s going to be. I can actually see the picture, like a screen. I can take a fighter who is just beginning and I can see exactly how he will respond. When that happens, I can watch a guy fight and I know everything there is to know about this guy, I can actually see the wheels in his head. It’s as if I’m that guy, I’m inside him.”
A lot of people assume that Ali was my favorite boxer. But I have to say it was Roberto Duran. I always looked at Ali as being handsome and articulate. And I was short and ugly and I had a speech impediment. When I saw Duran fight, he was just a street guy.
I loved history. By reading history, I learned about human nature. I learned the hearts of men.
I really loved the family environment Cus had given me. And I was madly in love with Cus. He was the first white guy who not only didn’t judge me, but who wanted to beat the shit out of someone if they said anything disrespectful about me. Nobody could reach me like that guy. He reached me down in my cortex. Any time I finished talking to him, I had to go and burn energy, shadowboxing or doing sit-ups, I was so pumped. I’d start running and I’d be crying, because I wanted to make him happy and prove that all the good things he was saying were right.
I thought that it was unfair for the rest of the fighters trying to win the championship because I was raised by a genius who prepared me. Those other guys wanted to make money and have a good life for their family. But thanks to Cus, I wanted glory and I wanted to get it over their blood. But I was insecure. I wanted glory, I wanted to be famous, I wanted the world to look at me and tell me I’m beautiful. I was a fat fucking stinking kid. Cus made me believe that the green and gold WBC belt was worth dying for. And not for the money. I used to ask Cus, “What does it mean being the greatest fighter of all time? Most of those guys are dead.” “Listen. They’re dead but we’re talking about them now. This is all about immortality. This is about your name being known until the end of time,” he said.
I believed in the Cus theory that the only thing wrong with defeat is if nothing is learned from it. Cus always used to tell me that fighting is a metaphor for life. It doesn’t matter if you’re losing; it’s what you do after you lose. Are you going to stay down or get back up and try it again? Later I would tell people that my best fight ever was the Douglas fight because it proved that I could take my beating like a man and rebound.
While I waited to fight Stewart, Buster Douglas defended his title against Evander Holyfield. I knew Holyfield would win. Douglas went in way overweight and Holyfield was the better fighter. Douglas just quit. He got hit a little and laid down. He was a whore for his $17 million. He didn’t go into the fight with any dignity or pride to defend his belt. He made his payday but he lost his honor. You can’t win honor, you can only lose it. Guys like him who only fight for money can never become legends. I can tell that it still affects Buster to this day. Years later, I ran into him again at an autograph session we both attended. No one wanted his autograph. This was the guy who made history for beating me but now his legacy had been reduced to nothing.
At the time, I didn’t realize that being in jail was a blessing in disguise. If I had stayed out, God knows what would have happened to me. Being locked up was the first time in my life that I could actually catch my breath and be still, but I don’t want it to sound like I instantly gained enlightenment or that I was singing “Kumbaya” all day. I was angry as fuck when I first got put in. I knew that I would be in for at least three years. If it had been a white girl, I would have been in for three hundred years.
The hole was a trip. They threw me in a six-foot-by-nine-foot room with just a mattress on the floor and a toilet. During the day they would remove the mattress and make me sleep on the concrete floor because they didn’t want me to be comfortable. It was pretty inhumane to be in a room twenty-three hours a day with the light always on, but you get used to it. You become your own best company. In a weird way, you get your freedom in the hole. Nobody was controlling your every move like they did in the general population. The hole was the worst situation you could be in and that became my element.
“Can I tell you something now? Praise be to Allah, I cheer for myself a hundred million times a day in my mind. To me I am my biggest fan, there is nothing in the world better than me. So I don’t think about that, those guys really don’t know what they’re cheering for. I know the total me and I know why they should be cheering, but they don’t know, they cheer for the knockout. That’s all they cheer for, the knockout and the performance. I cheer because I know who I am.”
I was waiting for them, but I really didn’t want to leave the prison. I had gotten used to being in jail. I enjoyed just being able to chill and get visits from celebrities and TV journalists. It was a rest well deserved, but then I had to go out into the world again. I took a deep breath and then we left. It was only a short walk to the limo, but it seemed like an eternity.
I never had a reaction like that. I know who I am, I know I’m a man. A guy like Holyfield based his whole existence around boxing, that’s why he continued to fight for so long. I was raised with Cus D’Amato. He’d always say that boxing is not your life, it’s what you do for a living; it’s what you do to make a life, but it is not your life. He said, “Losing, winning, never take it personal.” Every time I lost, I just dealt with it, because it never became my life. That’s what I was taught.
I just didn’t have the skills or tools to be a responsible person. Or the desire. You can’t have one foot in a marriage and the other foot in the gutter. Having all those girlfriends while I was married was like a drug in itself. And if I needed some more, I’d just walk down the street and women would throw themselves at me. I was a slave addicted to the chaos of celebrity. I wished I could stop it but I couldn’t.
Listen, can I tell you something? It doesn’t faze me what anyone says about me. Michael and Tyson are two different people. To my children and my wife I am Mike and Daddy. But I am Tyson here. Tyson is just a freak, somebody who generates a ton of money. No one knows me, no one has any kind of consideration for my feelings, my pain, anything I’ve ever been through in my life. You have no iota who I am or what I am. They don’t even know why they cheer for me. Why, because I’m a good fighter? Because I stand up for myself? Tyson is not who I am. I become that person,
I was doing some blow before the fight and I smoked some pot. There was no problem with the blow because that leaves your system right away, but for the pot, which stays in your system, I had to use my whizzer, which was a fake penis where you put in someone’s clean urine to pass your drug test.
I feel sometimes that I was not meant for this society because everyone here is a fucking hypocrite. Everybody says they believe in God but they don’t do God’s work. Everybody counteracts what God is really about.
“I’m rich, Mario,” I said. “I don’t have no watch, no money, no phone, but I feel so peaceful. No one’s telling me to ‘go here,’ ‘go there,’ ‘do this.’ I used to have cars that I never drove and I wouldn’t even know where the keys for them were. I had houses I didn’t live in. I had everybody robbing me. Now I have nothing. Nobody calls me, nobody bothers me, nobody is after me. It’s so peaceful. This is rich, man.”
I knew that my demons from my childhood were on my trail everywhere I went. So she wanted to deal with that little boy who was acting up my whole fight career, that little boy that had been bullied and brutalized and abused. I didn’t know how to take care of him when I was the champion of the world and now I had to learn how to nurture him and give him the love he never received before.
I’ve learned how to deal with women in these kinds of situations. I always put myself down, don’t make myself important. I’m really good at that. “Oh, baby, I’m a junkie. Please, girl, don’t mess with me. I’ve caught so many diseases. I’m surprised you didn’t get one just by being in my presence.” I know how to turn a woman off. And that’s good for my health. Sometimes a woman is a man’s whole life. A woman can invade a man’s mind. She can take a pussy-whipped boyfriend and turn him into a gut-wrenching psychopath.
We brought her back to a house that I had purchased in Phoenix and we started messing with the girl but we were both so high that we couldn’t get an erection, even though we were kissing on her and licking her. So we went out to some twenty-four-hour porn shop and brought some dirty movies back. And that didn’t even work. Man, it was so frustrating. This was the best-looking person I’d ever seen in my life and I couldn’t do anything. Croc and I were like two little kids at Christmas who weren’t strong enough to open the toy box. I was so pissed that I wasn’t packing my Cialis that night. I was just out getting high, I didn’t think I was going to run into any pussy.
After putting in a lot of work in the program I realized that the reason that I always wanted to satisfy women was because I was hoping that they would satisfy me not with sex but with their love. I was using sex to get intimacy. In order for me to get that intimacy and that attachment, I had to have sex. You won’t get it from her if you don’t have the sex but it’s really not about the sex itself. So I was a whore just like my mother. But it was different. This whore had the money. Hey, if I didn’t make you happy and satisfy you sexually, how about this Mercedes-Benz? This car is really orgasmic, isn’t it? It sounds trite but I was probably looking for someone to mother me. My whole life I was looking for love from my mother.
While Kiki was gone, I decided to try to go to an A.A. meeting in Henderson. It’s a new, sleek-looking town, but the meetings were held in the creepiest section. I went to one meeting and I couldn’t take it. After the meeting, I went out and got high. I was a relapse artist. If you read anything about A.A., you find that relapse is part of recovery. You can’t have recovery without relapse. You’ve still got those demons that you have to struggle with. The devil fucks with me all the time. He knows I’m a relapse artist, that’s why he comes to me. If he thought I was strong he wouldn’t go near me. The devil is aware that I know God doesn’t like me that much, so he wants me to rebel.
I realized that even when I was a fighter, entertaining the people was more paramount than winning the fights. Cus always had me around all these charismatic show-business and media people with magnetic personalities. I realized that Cus was all about the arts. When Cus talked about putting his thoughts in other people’s minds, that was an art too, even if it was a dark art. The art of war, the art of survival, we always looked at everything as art. I’m not a good artist but I know the arts. It was like I said that I wasn’t a good fighter, but I knew how to fight real good.
What I really felt was that I had been broke for ten years. I had a family to feed and support. I’m not going to get rich from doing special-guest appearances on TV shows. What do these people want, for me to die? How am I going to make a living? If I can’t work mainstream, do they want me to do porn?
When you’ve never had anything, you tend to want to accumulate a lot when you can. But as you get older, you realize that life is not about accumulation, life is about loss. The older you get, the more loss you experience. We lose our hair, we lose our teeth, we lose our loved ones. Hopefully we learn to be strong from those losses and we can pass on our wisdom to the people we care about.
I’m so glad that I’m not that guy anymore. Now I’m totally compassionate. And this is no religious rap. I don’t believe in confessing your sins to get into heaven. I don’t believe in an afterlife. This world is it. And it makes sense to do good in this world for your own moral existence. Doing good feels better than doing bad. Believe me, I should know. I’ve gotten away with doing a lot of bad things. There’s no satisfaction in that, only in doing good. I’ve really come to a place of forgiveness. I’m not mad at anybody like I used to be. Back then, I never understood what a waste of time that was.
I still have a lot of work to do. I have to try to really love myself. Not on a superficial “I’m great” level but to really examine who I am. That’s going to take a whole bunch of struggle, a whole bunch of thinking, and a whole bunch of therapy. I can’t underestimate how much therapy has played a role in changing my life.
When you’re a young kid with a ton of money and girls, God is not really paramount in your life. As you get older, you realize that from a spiritual perspective your life has been a waste. You never did anything to help people collectively. I need to be of service rather than just going around doing meet and greets and collecting money. I feel dirty after my appearances. People come up to me and say, “You were great. You were my hero!” No, I’m not. I’m filthy and I’m wretched. But I want to make up for it now, pay back in some way. I don’t want to offend you if you have any veneration for me, but it’s just that I’m very shallow and simple and I just want to do something good and help people.
People often ask me what I regret in my life. I regret sleeping with all those women. I used to brag about that but now I’m so embarrassed by my conquests. I’m so happy to be with one woman. I still enjoy looking at girls but I never ever think of crossing the line and saying something out of line. You aren’t going to see me on Page Six in a nightclub with a table full of gold diggers.
Kiki dug me out of the gutter and cleaned me up. I owe a great deal of my blossoming as a functional human being to her. I never thought that after boxing I would be famous, still living my life, making a career out of my life. I figured that I’d be dead or at best owning a bar. I could see myself off the cocaine but I never thought that I’d give up alcohol. I thought I’d be overweight for the rest of my life. And here I am being responsible, working, taking my kids to school. I owe all that to Kiki.
I can’t find a balance between the two. I’m not a balanced person. It’s not like I can say, “Well, I’ll just find another woman to be devoted to.” If I’m not going to live this monogamous life with Kiki, then we’re going to get in trouble now. I’m going to do drugs, I’m going to fuck a bunch of strippers and prostitutes, I might catch a disease, and I might make some guy jealous and he’ll blow my brains out.
Speaking of kids, I’m taking care of that fifteen-year-old boy that’s still in me. I have the tools, I can do that now. He hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still traumatized, but he’s living a productive life now. It’s awesome. I could never do this when I had $300 million. I’m out here raising kids, being a respectable husband, not having to worry about giving my wife a venereal disease. I’ve never been in this space in my life before, and this is just going to be so awesome. I never thought I was the settling type, I thought I deserved the world, but I feel safe here. This is where I want to be. I get to nurture my children and grow deeper with my wife and it feels good in my soul. That’s why I’m here.
After my recent relapse I was no fun to be around. Kiki and I were having a lot of rough times. Part of me was even trying to blame the pressures of being married as the reason for my relapse. Then the galleys for the book came. In going over the book with Kiki I had a spiritual rebirth. When we got to the section about Exodus it was very difficult to get through. We both cried our eyes out. And I realized in that very moment why I was married to Kiki. I suddenly knew the answer to the question “Why would a guy like me be married?” I realized that our marriage was more than the union of Kiki and me. I had to be married to Kiki to fulfill Exodus’s legacy. My marriage will allow me to do that and to bolster my ability to be a good father. I’m a better person now because Exodus was in my life and I vow to continue to be a better person now that she’s gone. I truly want to deepen my relationship with Kiki and see my kids grow up to be healthy and happy. But I can’t do any of those things if I don’t have control over myself. I can’t help anyone if I’m not well myself, and I desperately want to get well. I have a lot of pain and I just want to heal. And I’m going to do my best to do just that. One day at a time.