Monteith Illingworth - Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

Copyright

Fourth Estate

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollins Publishers 1992

First published by Birch Lane Press 1991

Copyright © Monteith M. Illingworth 1991

Monteith Illingworth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780586216781

Ebook Edition © MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780008193355

Version: 2016-05-13

Dedication

For Crystal, the love of my life

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

* * *

“You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re part of all the sound and anguish and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.”

—Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: The Champion Made

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Two: The Champion Betrayed

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Part Three: The Man Remade

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

PART ONE

The Champion Made

Chapter One

Not much is known about Lorna Tyson. She was born Loma Smith in 1930, probably in the South. Like so many other blacks after World War II, she migrated north in search of work and more social freedoms. There is no account of her keeping in touch with or ever seeing her parents, siblings, or any other relatives. Mike Tyson had no recollection of such extended family on his mother’s side. He has described Lorna as around five-foot-six with a big, sturdy frame. She had medium-brown skin and dull-gray hair that waved back from her wide face. She wore glasses and had an air of quiet dignity.

At some point during her first years in Brooklyn, New York, she married Percel Tyson, of whom nothing is known. They later divorced. Lorna never remarried. She did fall in love, with Jimmy Kirkpatrick, a heavyset, boisterous roustabout who drove big cars, worked menial construction jobs, and dreamed of owning his own business. Kirkpatrick had sixteen children when he moved in, all of them living with their various mothers. He fathered three more with Lorna. The first was a boy, Rodney, born in 1961. Next came Denise in 1964. Two years later, well into Lorna’s third pregnancy, Kirkpatrick moved out. On June 30, 1966, in Cumberland Hospital, Michael Gerard Tyson was born.

Without the help of Kirkpatrick’s occasional paycheck, Lorna struggled. She worked off and on, once as a nurse’s aide, but made barely enough money to support her family. Another boyfriend, Edward Gillison, moved in. He contributed little. By the time Michael was eight years old, the Tysons had moved four times within Brooklyn. Each move took them deeper into poverty. His last home with Lorna was 178 Amboy Street, Apartment 2A, in the heart of Brownsville, Brooklyn’s most destitute section.

The Tyson family lived in perpetual crisis. Lorna began to drink. She and Gillison argued constantly, and when they fought, Lorna took the worst of it, until one day, while boiling water, she chased Gillison around the apartment and seared him. In between jobs she went on welfare. When the heating bill couldn’t be paid, they all slept in their clothes. Tyson put cardboard in his shoes to cover up the holes. Food was scarce. Meals at times were made of flour and water.

Even genetics seemed to conspire against the family. By the time Rodney was twelve, he weighed a blubbery 280 pounds. Denise also tended to put on weight. They all suffered, but it seemed that the youngest boy suffered most. “Big Head Mike,” as he was known to neighbors in the building, was ridiculed for every little oddity of appearance and character. On the streets, because of his lisp, the other children called Tyson “Little Fairy Boy.” He was bigger than most other children his age, but intensely passive. They beat him up for the lisp, for his shoes, and for whatever he had in his pocket. He wore glasses briefly, and they beat him up for that. Tyson became increasingly withdrawn around other children, and that earned more beatings.

His father had stayed in Brooklyn, and he and the Tysons would have chance meetings. “When Mike was seven, he, Denise, and Rodney were walking down the street in Brownsville and saw their father,” said Camille Ewald, the woman who would later become his surrogate mother. “He dished out a dollar for each of them. Mike threw his on the ground.”

By age nine, Tyson had started keeping pigeons in a coop on the roof of a nearby abandoned building. The family dog, a black Labrador, once killed a half dozen of the birds, piling them up in Tyson’s bedroom. Other kids would steal his pigeons, and he would steal theirs. The only taboo was death. You could steal, but not kill.

One day, Tyson found an older boy taking a bird out of the coop. They argued, and the boy ripped off the bird’s head with a single, vicious twist of his hand. Tyson went into a blind rage and pounced on the boy, punching and kicking with every ounce of strength he could muster.

For any boy, such a battle would have been a watershed event. For a boy raised in Brownsville, it would yield a sense of victory in the perennial battle against overwhelming feelings of helplessness and poverty. Years later, when Tyson became heavyweight champion of the world, that moment of rage would be constructed into an epiphany. Tyson played along. It fit ever so conveniently into his public persona as some primal force of destruction. Tyson would cavalierly recount that and other seminal events as if he had found not just liberation but, when the urges were tempered into systematic violence, empowerment as well.

When he indulged in that persona, he wanted the world to believe that he was a nine-year-old man-child wreaking havoc without a care for the feelings of his victims—a sociopath. He felt nothing and cared for no one. He wanted no one’s love. “I did evil things,” he said in early 1988. His sister, Denise, affirmed the self-portrayal. “It became fun for him to beat up kids,” she said to a reporter also that year. “Everyone was afraid of him. He stopped being called Mike. It became ‘Mike Tyson.’”