Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography. Mike Tyson

first how to deal with my problems mentally, then physically. That’s an advantage I have over them mentally.”

      “How did you feel at the end of the bout after defeating Brown?”

      “I went in there to do my job. I don’t have nothing bad to say about my opponent. He did a well job. He was just in a little over his head. I commend him on his efforts,” I said.

      When I got back east, I went back home to Brownsville. Everybody in the neighborhood had seen me on TV knocking out Kelton Brown. A lot of the guys who used to bully me came up to me on the street.

      “Hey, Mike, you need anything? Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you,” they’d say.

      They used to kick my ass, now they were kissing it.

      But the audience I was really after was my mom. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with her.

      “Hey, Mom, I’m the greatest fighter in the world. There ain’t a man living who can beat me,” I said.

      My mom was living in this damp, decrepit, lopsided tenement building and was just staring at me as I talked about myself as if I were a god.

      “You remember Joe Louis? There’s always someone better, son,” she said.

      I stared back at my mom.

      “That is never going to happen to me,” I said coldly. “I am the one who is better than everyone else. That’s me.”

      I was dead serious because this was what Cus had brainwashed me into believing. My mother had never seen me like that before. I had always been creepy and looking for an angle. Now I had dignity and pride. Before, I smelt like weed or liquor. Now my body was pumped, I was immaculate. I was ready to take on the world.

      “There is not a man in the world that can beat me, Ma. You watch, your boy is going to be champion of the world,” I boasted.

      “You’ve got to be humble, son. You’re not humble, you’re not ­humble …” She shook her head.

      I had my little bag with me and I took out the clippings of me getting my gold medals and handed them to her.

      “Here, Mom. Read about me.”

      “I’ll read it later,” she said.

      The rest of the night she didn’t talk to me. She’d just go “um hmm.” She just looked at me with concern, like, “What are these white people doing to you?”

      So I went back to Catskill and was feeling on top of the world. I was a spoiled upper-middle-class kid there. A few months after that, Cus told me that my mother was sick. He didn’t tell me the details, but my social worker had found out that my mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The same day that Cus told me, my sister called me.

      “Go visit Mommy,” she said. “She’s not feeling well.”

      I had seen my mother a few weeks before my sister called and she had had some kind of stroke and her eye on one side of her face was drooping, but I didn’t know she had cancer. The only cancer I knew was my astrological sign. I knew something wasn’t right, but I didn’t know it had anything to do with dying.

      But when I got to the hospital, I got a big shock. My mother was lying in the bed, moaning, but she was pretty catatonic. It was painful just to look at her. Her eyes were sunken; her skin was wrapped tight around her cranium; she had lost all this weight. Her bedsheet had fallen off her and you could see some of her breast exposed. So I kissed her and covered her up. I didn’t know what to do. I had never seen anyone with cancer. I’d seen movies, so I expected to see something like “Well, I love you but I’m a goner now, Johnny.” I thought I’d have a chance to talk to her and say good-bye before she died, but she wasn’t even conscious. So I walked out of that hospital room and never went back again.

      Every night I’d go back to the apartment and tell my sister that I had seen Mommy and that she looked good. I just didn’t want to deal with the hospital scene, it was too painful. So I went on a house-­robbing spree. I ran into Barkim and some other hustlers I knew from the neighborhood and we robbed some houses.

      One night before we went out to rob a place, I showed Barkim a photo album I had brought down from Catskill. There were photos of me and Cus and Camille, and me with all these white kids at school.

      Barkim couldn’t get over those photos.

      “Yo, Mike, this is bugging me out. Are they trying you up there? Do they call you ‘nigga’?”

      “No, this is like my family. Cus would kill you if you said that about me,” I told him.

      Barkim shook his head.

      “What are you doing here, Mike?” he asked. “Go back there with those white people. Shit, man, those white people love you. Can’t you see that, nigga? Man, I wish I had some white people that loved me. Go back, man. There ain’t shit out here for you.”

      I thought about what he said. Here I was, a two-time national champ, and I was still robbing houses because you just go back to who you are. Every night I was drinking, smoking angel dust, snorting cocaine, and going to local dances. Anything to get my mind off my mother.

      My sister kept telling me, “You came here to see Mommy. Don’t get carried away, you’re not here to play.”

      One night Barkim went to pick his girl up and the three of us were walking through one of the Brownsville projects and we saw a couple of my old friends playing dice. Barkim was friends with them too, but he didn’t stop to talk to them, he just kept walking. I went over to say hello to them and they said, “What’s up, Mike?” but they were acting leery. “We’ll talk to you later,” they said. I could feel the vibe that something real bad happened, somebody died or somebody got a lot of shit taken from them.

      I later found out that there had been some power struggles going on in the neighborhood and when the smoke had cleared, Barkim was on top. He had all of the cars and the girls and the jewelry and the guns, ’cause he had the neighborhood drug enterprise. The whole street scene had changed since I had lived there. Drugs had come in and people were dying. Guys we used to hang out with were killing one another for turf and money.

      Then one day my sister came home. I was hungover, but I heard her key in the door, so I opened it and as soon as it swung open, POW, she punched me right in the face.

      “Why did you do that?” I said.

      “Why didn’t you tell me Mommy was dead?” she screamed.

      I didn’t want to say “I didn’t go to the hospital. It was too painful to see Mom a shell of her old self” because my sister would have killed me, so I said, “Well, I didn’t want you to be hurt. I didn’t want you to know.” I was just too weak to deal with this. My sister was the strongest one in my family. She was good at dealing with tragedy. I couldn’t even go down with my sister and witness the body. My cousin Eric went with her.

      My mom’s funeral was pathetic. She had saved up some money for a plot in Linden, New Jersey. There were only eight of us there – me, my brother and sister, my father Jimmy, her boyfriend Eddie, and three of my mother’s friends. I wore a suit that I had bought with some of the money that I had stolen. She only had a thin cardboard casket and there wasn’t enough money for a headstone. Before we left the grave, I said, “Mom, I promise I’m going to be a good guy. I’m going to be the best fighter ever and everybody is going to know my name. When they think of Tyson, they’re not going to think of Tyson Foods or Cicely Tyson, they’re going to think of Mike Tyson.” I said this to her because this was what Cus had been telling me about the Tyson name. Up until then, our family’s only claim to fame was that we shared the same last name as Cicely. My mom loved ­Cicely Tyson.

      After the funeral, I stayed in Brownsville for a few weeks, getting high. One night I saw my friends who had been playing dice a few nights before. They told me that Barkim had been killed.

      “Yeah,