Philosopher, Broadway headliner, fighter, felon-Mike Tyson has defied stereotypes, expectations, and a lot of conventional wisdom during his three decades in the public eye. Based on these details, however, it seems some of those out-of-the-ring issues found their way into Tyson's bouts as well.A bare-knuckled, tell-all memoir from Mike Tyson, the onetime heavyweight champion of the world-and a legend both in and out of the ring. He retired with a record of 50-6 with 44 knockouts.įor as much in-ring success as the legendary boxer had, he experienced just as much controversy out of the ring. Tyson was the youngest ever to win the WBC, WBA and IFC heavyweight titles. Tyson was perpetually on the brink of 'financial ruin' even though he earned tens of millions of dollars per fight during the apex of his career. Swaine's report touches on another aspect of Tyson's roller-coaster life, including the boxer's financial tribulations.

He says continual headbutts drove him to the bizarre act.

Tyson also wrote on his infamous biting of Evander Holyfield's ear in 1997. Tyson wrote that he was in bad enough shape that Bruno should have beaten him, but he managed to emerge victorious on a fifth-round TKO. Living the fast life was impacting Tyson as early as 1989, when he took on Frank Bruno for the first time. “I looked over at him and wanted to hit the motherf***er.'Īlthough it appeared Tyson was clean after several years in rehabilitation, the 47-year-old revealed in August that he had nearly died due to his alcoholism and had been lying about his sobriety. When Tyson got into a brawl before a January 2002 fight with Lennox Lewis, he explained that cocaine was to blame for his actions, which included biting into one of Lewis' legs. He blamed a $200,000 fine for testing positive for marijuana after a 2000 fight against Andrew Golota in Detroit on the fact that he was tested before having a chance to get the 'whizzer' from a member of his team, whom he claims typically carried the device from fight to fight. said that he was high before taking to the ring for a match against Lou Savarese in Glasgow in June 2000-and came up with an ingenious method to prevent detection by the sport's official testers.Ĭonfessing he had taken 'blow' and 'pot' before the bout, he said: “I had to use my whizzer, which was a fake penis where you put in someone’s clean urine to pass your drug test.” Then there was the method Tyson used to avoid testing positive for drugs, per Swaine:

Mike tyson memoir