The date the boxing drug infiltrated my system for the very first time was 22^nd November 1986.  This was the night that Mike Tyson won his first World Heavyweight Title against Trevor Berbick.  It was the first boxing match I ever saw, and that night I felt the force and it changed my life forever.  This was the beginning of my love affair with boxing. 

After Tyson’s retirement in June 2005, following that unthinkable stoppage by Kevin McBride, various letters were printed in the Boxing News, which summed up a cross section of the general feeling towards this once great fighter.  For so spectacular was his talent in his early years that his fans still loved him, even then.  Today, many of us continue think of Tyson with warmth and love, rather than dwell on his tragic and painful decline.  So, to those who stopped believing in him a long time ago, please forgive my nostalgic viewpoint and feel free to call me a blatant sentimentalist if you want to.  But I intend to focus on the good times, and the excitement and the thrill that Mike Tyson brought to our lives and our hearts, even if only for a relatively short time. 

Cus D’Amato took Mike into his home and he and his partner of 40 years, Camille Ewald, became Mike’s adoptive parents.  Cus oversaw Mike’s training at the Catskill Boxing Club, above the local police station.  He assigned Teddy Atlas as Mike’s amateur trainer and they developed a happy working relationship.  Video footage of a young Mike Tyson growing up is always a joy to watch.  In those days the sheer ferocity of his shadowboxing skills had the power to excite more than some of today’s World title fights.  The speed of those fists as he threw arrays of hooks and jabs and that spectacular upper body movement never fails to set me on fire.  The vision of this impressionable young man travelling to the 1982 Junior Olympics in Colorado to win the Heavyweight Gold Medal is one that will remain with many of us eternally, and the naked vulnerability of his tears of insecurity before he went in to win the final will always melt my heart.  Teddy Atlas reasoned that, maybe, God had given Mike such a strong body that he would have to become strong in other ways on his own.  Mike and Atlas’ relationship broke down with an argument over a girl, and Cus displayed his unconditional love for Mike by letting Teddy go.

Mike’s knowledge of his contemporaries, past and present, has always been phenomenal.  His very first idol was Jack Dempsey.  He once said “I’m crazy about him because of his ferocious intensity.  There’s no one like him.  No one like him” and when I look back on some of my early Tyson tapes I am spookily reminded of the Manassa Mauler and his two handed, relentless hooking style.

Mike turned professional at the age of 18 and was co-managed by Bill Cayton and Jim Jacobs.  Along with Cus, Jim Jacobs became a strong and positive influence in Mike’s life.  For the record, Jacobs was a prominent athlete himself in his day, and was 1956 Word Handball Champion.  The other prominent man on the team in those days was unreserved and outspoken trainer, Kevin Rooney.  The philosophy of the team was to keep Mike busy at all times, never giving him a moment to get into any trouble.  Jim Jacobs once said “He fights everybody like they stole something from him.”

So the scene was set for future greatness and everything seemed so hopeful.  Leading up to his first World title fight, Mike had 27 straight wins and knocked out or stopped 25 of those opponents.  Cus taught him what he called ‘elusive aggression’ and, as Tyson’s style developed, the boxing world became ignited by the spark that would go on to become the blaze.  For it really looked like this new young sensation was going to become a legend, a word that is used far too easily in this day and age. 

But on the 4^th November 1985 Mike suffered a knockout blow that was more brutal than any fist could ever deliver.  Cus D’Amato died of pneumonia.  Shortly before Cus’ death, he declared on film “I often say to him, ‘You know, I owe you a lot,’ and he doesn’t know what I mean.  But I’m going to tell him now what I mean.  If he weren’t here, I probably wouldn’t be alive today.  I will stay alive and I will watch him become a success.  That’s the motivation I have to keep me alive and keep me going.”  There is now a street in New York named ‘E14^th Street and Cus D’Amato Way.’

Mike continued his ruthless and rapid climb up the ladder and, in Britain, ITV started showing his fights.  Each knockout was as devastating as the last.  Before his clinical two-round destruction of Alphonso Ratliff (the fight before Trevor Berbick), our own Reg Gutteridge OBE summed up Mike’s style with these words.  “He just strolled into the ring there, Tyson, a real old gladiator.  No socks, no robe, no fuss, he didn’t even acknowledge the crowd.  Just get down to business is all he wants to do.”  After that fight, Jim Watt declared “I’m really impressed by him, the fact that he’s not as easy to hit as I first thought the first couple of times I saw him box.  As he moves in, his hands are high.  His head moves all the time.  He can knock out with either hand.  He’s probably the only complete fighter in the heavyweight division we have in the world today.”

A year after the death of Cus, Mike won his first world title, the one that got me hooked (pardon the pun!).  His demolition of Trevor Berbick came in the second round, when Mike knocked the Canadian down three times with the same punch!  It was that famous left hook.  But the joy of this 20 year old young fighter, who was now the youngest ever Heavyweight Champion of the World, was heavily weighed down with the sorrow.  His old friend was no longer at his side and he missed him desperately.  Shortly after that fight he declared “Now that all this is happening, and he put in all the effort and all the time, and all the misery and heartbreak, he’s not around to enjoy it.” The naked bewilderment in Mike’s demeanour said it all.

But life had to go on and, along with being Heavyweight Champion of the World, came all the status and notoriety that went with it.  Mike was not happy or comfortable trapped in the media glare but, on his own terms, he became a man of the people.  He remained approachable and was always happy to stop and shake hands with the man, and woman, in the street.  He was an inspiration to the children of the world’s ghettos and he tried his best to use his fame and popularity to help those who moved him.

Despite the series of sad events that led to his boxing decline, he has always retained that philanthropic side to his nature.  For example, Finchley Boxing Club make a trip to Las Vegas to box against the local lads every year.  My great pal and Finchley stalwart, Jim Oliver, told me that they met Mike back in the early years at the gym where Jim’s son, Danny, trained as a professional with Cornelius Boza-Edwards.  When Mike learned of these amateur shows he readily agreed to turn up and present the trophies, and this is a commitment which he upheld for many years whenever possible.  Another most poignant example of Mike’s capacity for kindness was made evident by the fact that he paid thousands of dollars for Camille Ewald’s care home during the final years of her life.  Camille lived to be 96, and perhaps the unconditional love that Tyson showed her right up to the end contributed to her longevity.

Mike went on to unify the World Heavyweight Title against Tony Tucker and early in 1988, shortly after his fourth round knockout of Larry Holmes, he married Robin Givens.  Then, in March that year, Mike received another shocking body blow.  Jim Jacobs, probably the only person alive who Mike looked to for guidance and direction, died of cancer.  By this stage the notorious promoter, Don King, had firmly established himself in Mike’s life and the rest, as they say, is history.  There have been so many millions of words written about the madness that followed that I feel no inclination to put down too many more of them.  However, if nothing else, I am a realist and the following observations are foremost in my mind as I write this piece.

The shock of the Buster Douglas defeat in Tokyo, a place where Tyson was hero worshiped, was one of the biggest boxing upsets of all time.  The fallen champion on his hands and knees, desperately pawing the canvas to retrieve his gum-shield, paints such a sad picture.  And the lunacy of that facial tattoo that he had done just before the Brian Nielsen fight gave us all a shock.  We all hoped it was Mike’s little joke on the media, possibly a henna creation.  But, as time went on, we realized it was the real thing.  And it seems unbelievable that a man who once earned a quarter of a million dollars a second in his fight with Michael Spinks can now be a bankrupt.  But, on the other hand, the life of Michael Gerald Tyson has always been full of paradoxes.  

For me, the saddest image of all was that of Mike in handcuffs after he was convicted of the rape of Desiree Washington.  As he was being driven away, he raised his hands and showed the cuffs to the swarms of photographers, who were frantically flashing their cameras through the window of the car that was taking him to prison.  The look of resignation on this face said that, maybe, aside from those golden years under the protective wing of Cus D’Amato, Mike had always known that this would be his destiny and that, by this stage in  his life, he was past caring anyway.  Whatever happened in that hotel room that night, there are only two people who will ever really know the truth.  Mike was sentenced to spend six years in a jail called the Indiana Youth Centre. 

I used to have a lovely print of him on my wall and I kept it up there throughout the years he served his sentence.  Many friends who visited my flat would ask me why I had a picture of a psychopathic rapist on my wall.  I always remained defiant, and I used to tell them in no uncertain terms that it was my flat, my wall and, if I wanted that picture up there, it would remain so.  But on the 28^th June 1997, when Mike bit Evander Holyfield’s ear in their re-match, I watched the horror unfold with friends at their home and we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.  At 6 o’clock the following Sunday morning, I arrived home and took the picture down.

Some of the toughest fighters I have ever known have been the possessors of the most disarming and special ability to be so hard and so sweet at the same time, and to me Mike Tyson has been the epitome of this.  Since the beginning of organised fighting, the audience has always been drawn to the bad boys, and Mike Tyson is a classic case – a tortured soul who lost control.  Despite the fiasco that his career eventually became, he was still the biggest draw.  He had more charisma in his little finger than all the other champions put together.  His loves and losses have been scrutinised and twisted and spread naked under the harsh glare of the spotlight, and sometimes, when he’s all on his own and he thinks about everyone he has known, everywhere he has been, everything he has done, and everything that happened to him along the way, he must find it hard to contain it all inside. 

I am well aware that the majority of boxers have come from the ghettos, the council estates, the gypsy sites, and all the other places that form the tough side of this world.  Many would ask, then, what singles out Mike Tyson for my kid glove treatment?  But we should never forget that he gave us all something so very special.  He planted the seed of hope in our hearts.  For a little while, we were watching the unfolding talent of what should have been one of the greatest boxers of all time.  Many boxing fans in this country went off the boil after the decline of Muhammad Ali, and Mike Tyson single-handedly influenced a staunch British boxing revival.

After I watched Danny Williams knock Mike out in July 2004 I prayed I would never see him in the ring again.  I have not even seen the Kevin McBride fight, and I never want to.  I remember, in the mid-nineties, there were some exotic photographs published in many of the tabloids of Mike wrestling with his new pet, a young white tiger.  I will never forget something my father said to me at that time, when we were discussing the pictures.  He said “Mel, I don’t think that boy is going to live to see old age.”  My father is not often wrong, but in this case I pray that he is way off the mark. 

God Bless you, champ.  There will never be another Mike Tyson.