Tag: Mike Tyson

In a black-walled gym tucked away in a quiet corner of Las Vegas, Mike Tyson looks on approvingly as the unmistakable sound of violent, powerful punches fills the air.

Thirty-seven years after rewriting boxing’s record books by becoming the youngest heavyweight champion in history at the age of 20, Tyson is plotting another ambush.

The 57-year-old has been hired to help train mixed martial arts star Francis Ngannou ahead of the Cameroonian fighter’s money-spinning heavyweight boxing showdown with Britain’s Tyson Fury taking place in Saudi Arabia on October 28.

In the eyes of bookmakers at least, the odds are stacked against Ngannou, who will climb into the ring against the undefeated Fury next month having never boxed professionally. Ladbrokes have installed Fury as a 1⁄10 favorite; Ngannou a 6⁄1 underdog.

Yet as the 6ft 4in (1.93m), 264lb (120kg) Ngannou unleashes an array of punches on his heavily padded trainer, Dewey Cooper, the mood is anything but pessimistic.

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Occasionally, Tyson, standing to one side, will intervene to correct a movement or suggest a subtle tweak. Ngannou, a long-time fan of the American boxing icon, relishes each suggestion.

 “He comes from time to time to lend a hand, to give his expertise,” Ngannou told a group of reporters during a workout. “I had specifically asked for him to train me four years ago, long before this fight was announced, the first time I met him.

 “He has something inspiring, something motivating. If I could ever have just a tiny piece of what he has, boxing would be very easy for me.”

Ngannou, 37, has taken a long and unconventional road to his boxing debut.

He first took up boxing in his 20s in his native Cameroon, later moving to Paris hoping to forge a professional career.

But he would ultimately end up in the rough and tumble world of mixed martial arts, eventually becoming the UFC’s heavyweight champion and one of the circuit’s biggest stars, winning 17 of his 20 fights including 12 by knockout.

EXTRAVAGANTLY ensconced in his suite here at Paris’s Raffles Hotel, Mike Tyson is still imprisoned by his past. We had been due to meet at a gym in London’s Westbourne Park before a change in UK immigration laws, barring any person who has served more than four years in prison from entering the country, brought this week’s ignominious retreat to the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe.

“So disappointing,” he sighs, conscious that his six-year sentence for the rape of beauty queen Desiree Washington has left indelible shame. “I’m emotionally attached to the UK. I remember when I did my meet-and-greets there in the late Nineties oh man, I was financially destitute and they were just blessings in disguise. I owe a huge debt to people there I can never repay.”

Tyson would like nothing better, either today or in his searing autobiography Undisputed Truth, than to document the precise events of July 19, 1991, when Washington testified that he had taken her back to his room at the Omni in Indianapolis and raped her.

The British legal system, much to his rage, affords him no such privilege and any accounts of the incident in the memoir have had to be redacted.

“How can anybody defend themselves in your country?” he asks. “There are laws that suit or empower the government, but certain people are not going to benefit.”

For two decades Tyson has been peddling these conspiracy theories. He is convinced that the judge at his rape trial, former sex crimes prosecutor Patricia Gifford, was against him from the outset, and does not shrink in his book from suggesting an undercurrent of racism, with descriptions of Indiana as a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan.

Such arguments have been discredited and hardly do justice to the distraught letter from Washington that was read out in court. “An attack on both my body and mind occurred,” she wrote. “I was physically defeated to the point that my innermost person was taken away.”

Upon reading it, prosecuting lawyer Jeffrey Modisett claimed that Tyson “doesn’t get it” an impression hard to dispute when he was pictured, post-guilty verdict, smirking on the courthouse steps. Even on this freezing Parisian day, 20 years later, it is tempting to decide that he still does not get it. Women continue to be referenced with customary braggadocio, as when he says: “I was successful with women at a very young age. I just never had a proper chance to interact with them.”

Has he always measured himself as a man by his number of conquests? “I didn’t know much about them until I was 19. Back then it was just about winning fights, getting a whole bunch of pats on the back from people telling me that I was great.”

For all his talk of being tamed by third wife Kiki Spicer, a fashion designer, Tyson’s attitude to women has for most of his life been corrosive. As recently as 2011, he could be heard guffawing with a couple of ESPN jocks as he imagined the sexual humiliation of Sarah Palin, while revelling in his billing as the ‘Wombshifter’.

The rationalisation, always, for this kind of behaviour is that he grew up in a Brooklyn brothel where his mother, Lorna, was violently abused.

Put this connection to Tyson, though, and he shrugs. “I just don’t think my mother liked me very much. I don’t trace it to her. I had gone upstate from New York with my trainer, Cus D’Amato, and I had changed my mentality to believe that I was ‘It’.

“I came back with that frame of mind and she didn’t like it. My brother and sister were more academic but I just never grasped it. I didn’t have anything I truly embraced other than being out in the streets with the guys, robbing and stealing. But once I discovered boxing, I felt as if I could match anybody. Cus explained enough to put me under the assumption that I was going to become someone special.”

The most affecting illustration of this withholding of maternal love came as a teenager, when Tyson would show Lorna newspaper cuttings of his first amateur bouts, only for her to respond with contempt.

But D’Amato, the Italian-American bruiser from the Bronx who became his surrogate father and legal guardian, helped forge an extraordinary self-belief by preaching the power of positive thought. Tyson, implausibly for one whose formal education ended aged seven, would receive books such as Self Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion by French psychologist Emile Coué.

“Cus believed in stimulating the mind,” he recalls. “His philosophy was that if you could perceive it in your mind, you could achieve it in life. He knew a lot of big-time authors and intellectuals, too I used to meet them in his house.”

One of them was Norman Mailer, who would encourage D’Amato to teach Tyson a Zen-like thinking. The pupil would also be reminded that if he wanted to grow into a heavyweight champion, then he had to act like one. It was here that the persona of ‘Iron Mike’, a man in a seemingly perpetual state of belligerence, was born. Strangely, the memory merely exacerbates his sense of self-loathing.

“When I was fighting the only part of myself I didn’t like was this ‘I am the greatest’ business. Now I think, ‘Why did I do that? I sounded like a d—.’” It is neither the orgies nor the industrial-scale drug use that Tyson despises most about his old self, but the arrogance. He has driven to the brink of oblivion by an idea of entitlement, by the thought he could do as he pleased.

“I’ve been used to living a particular life, without any restraints,” he explains. “I confront my demons everywhere. I could say, ‘F— everybody, I can do whatever I want’. Even to my family I could say, ‘F— everybody’, and that’s basically what I’ve been doing my whole life.

EXTRAVAGANTLY ensconced in his suite here at Paris’s Raffles Hotel, Mike Tyson is still imprisoned by his past. We had been due to meet at a gym in London’s Westbourne Park before a change in UK immigration laws, barring any person who has served more than four years in prison from entering the country, brought this week’s ignominious retreat to the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe.
“So disappointing,” he sighs, conscious that his six-year sentence for the rape of beauty queen Desiree Washington has left indelible shame. “I’m emotionally attached to the UK. I remember when I did my meet-and-greets there in the late Nineties  oh man, I was financially destitute and they were just blessings in disguise. I owe a huge debt to people there I can never repay.”
Tyson would like nothing better, either today or in his searing autobiography Undisputed Truth, than to document the precise events of July 19, 1991, when Washington testified that he had taken her back to his room at the Omni in Indianapolis and raped her.
The British legal system, much to his rage, affords him no such privilege and any accounts of the incident in the memoir have had to be redacted.
“How can anybody defend themselves in your country?” he asks. “There are laws that suit or empower the government, but certain people are not going to benefit.”
For two decades Tyson has been peddling these conspiracy theories. He is convinced that the judge at his rape trial, former sex crimes prosecutor Patricia Gifford, was against him from the outset, and does not shrink in his book from suggesting an undercurrent of racism, with descriptions of Indiana as a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan.
Such arguments have been discredited and hardly do justice to the distraught letter from Washington that was read out in court. “An attack on both my body and mind occurred,” she wrote. “I was physically defeated to the point that my innermost person was taken away.”
Upon reading it, prosecuting lawyer Jeffrey Modisett claimed that Tyson “doesn’t get it”  an impression hard to dispute when he was pictured, post-guilty verdict, smirking on the courthouse steps. Even on this freezing Parisian day, 20 years later, it is tempting to decide that he still does not get it. Women continue to be referenced with customary braggadocio, as when he says: “I was successful with women at a very young age. I just never had a proper chance to interact with them.”
Has he always measured himself as a man by his number of conquests? “I didn’t know much about them until I was 19. Back then it was just about winning fights, getting a whole bunch of pats on the back from people telling me that I was great.”
For all his talk of being tamed by third wife Kiki Spicer, a fashion designer, Tyson’s attitude to women has for most of his life been corrosive. As recently as 2011, he could be heard guffawing with a couple of ESPN jocks as he imagined the sexual humiliation of Sarah Palin, while revelling in his billing as the ‘Wombshifter’.
The rationalisation, always, for this kind of behaviour is that he grew up in a Brooklyn brothel where his mother, Lorna, was violently abused.
Put this connection to Tyson, though, and he shrugs. “I just don’t think my mother liked me very much. I don’t trace it to her. I had gone upstate from New York with my trainer, Cus D’Amato, and I had changed my mentality to believe that I was ‘It’.
“I came back with that frame of mind and she didn’t like it. My brother and sister were more academic but I just never grasped it. I didn’t have anything I truly embraced other than being out in the streets with the guys, robbing and stealing. But once I discovered boxing, I felt as if I could match anybody. Cus explained enough to put me under the assumption that I was going to become someone special.”
The most affecting illustration of this withholding of maternal love came as a teenager, when Tyson would show Lorna newspaper cuttings of his first amateur bouts, only for her to respond with contempt.
But D’Amato, the Italian-American bruiser from the Bronx who became his surrogate father and legal guardian, helped forge an extraordinary self-belief by preaching the power of positive thought. Tyson, implausibly for one whose formal education ended aged seven, would receive books such as Self Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion by French psychologist Emile Coué.
“Cus believed in stimulating the mind,” he recalls. “His philosophy was that if you could perceive it in your mind, you could achieve it in life. He knew a lot of big-time authors and intellectuals, too  I used to meet them in his house.”
One of them was Norman Mailer, who would encourage D’Amato to teach Tyson a Zen-like thinking. The pupil would also be reminded that if he wanted to grow into a heavyweight champion, then he had to act like one. It was here that the persona of ‘Iron Mike’, a man in a seemingly perpetual state of belligerence, was born. Strangely, the memory merely exacerbates his sense of self-loathing.
“When I was fighting the only part of myself I didn’t like was this ‘I am the greatest’ business. Now I think, ‘Why did I do that? I sounded like a d—.’” It is neither the orgies nor the industrial-scale drug use that Tyson despises most about his old self, but the arrogance. He has driven to the brink of oblivion by an idea of entitlement, by the thought he could do as he pleased.
“I’ve been used to living a particular life, without any restraints,” he explains. “I confront my demons everywhere. I could say, ‘F— everybody, I can do whatever I want’. Even to my family I could say, ‘F— everybody’, and that’s basically what I’ve been doing my whole life.