Undisputed Truth

November 18, 2013
Reviewed by Robert Anasi. It's been a quarter-century since Mike Tyson demolished Michael Spinks in 91 seconds to become the youngest lineal heavyweight champion in boxing history. Today, the world in which he took center stage seems impossibly distant. In 1988, boxing was the only major combat sport (UFC 1 was five years away) and American cities were trapped in a cycle of violenceâa disaster propelled by social neglect and drug wars. Pundits likened inner cities to war zones and chose incarcerating a generation of African-American men as a final solution. As a child of this blighted landscape, Tyson became the boogeyman of white-flight nightmare. It was a role he embracedâone that proved very lucrative. Boxing was in a long decline, but every one of Tyson's fights became a major event. He brought in the celebrities and high rollers, filling casinos and pumping pay-per-view buys with a charisma unmatched by any heavyweight since Muhammad Ali. From the safe remove of their television screens, America loved to hate (or perversely love) Tyson, whom they perceived as a scary black man. This fascination should have faded after Tyson lost the title to Buster Douglas, or when he went to prison for rape, but the Tyson train wreck became an ever bigger attraction, whether he was biting Holyfield's ear, wrestling his pet tiger, or turning up on yet another police blotter. As Tyson notes, "I had fought eight rounds since I got out of jail and I had earned $80 million." When he declared that he wanted to eat Lennox Lewis's children, or drive an opponent's nasal bone into his brain, he was channeling his favorite comic book villain, but the world took him at face value. As Tyson inflicted ever greater amounts of coke and booze on his fragile sanity, he too seemed to forget that he was playing a role. Later stints in rehab and devotion to a 12-step program have brought Tyson a measure of calm. Undisputed Truth contains very little of that substance. Tyson opens the book with a fervent denunciation of his rape conviction. First he's condemning his behavior, next he's bragging about how he invented the hip-hop gangsta mafioso and listing all the women he had sex with. This unreliable narrator makes the truth difficult to locate. Tyson's changing rolesâfrom gangsta to fighter, to recovering addictâare intriguing, but utterly scrambled. Sloman has cowritten numerous books with celebrities, including Peter Criss and Howard Stern, but Undisputed Truth adds up to little more than Iron Mike ranting into a tape recorder. It's a missed opportunity. The most interesting chapters come early, as he describes his difficult upbringing in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., and his equivocal salvation at the hands of Cus D'Amato, who saw a future heavyweight champion in the fists of an insecure thug. D'Amato, in fact, is the only figure who comes across as fully human, and his manipulation of the young Tyson is both fascinating and disturbing. When covering the period after D'Amato's death, the book becomes an angry, depressed blur, which may well be how Tyson experienced it. Tyson, and others, were as much victims of his notoriety as they were beneficiaries. Tyson puts it in no uncertain terms: "I hate Mike Tyson. I mostly wish the worst for Mike Tyson. That's why I don't like my friends or myself." This time, there's no doubting his words. Robert Anasi is the author of The Gloves, a Boxing Chronicle and The Last Bohemia: Scenes from the Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He lives in Long Beach, Calif.

December 15, 2013
An exhaustive--and exhausting--chronicle of the champ's boxing career and disastrous life. Tyson was dealt an unforgiving hand as a child, raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in a "horrific, tough and gruesome" environment populated by "loud, aggressive" people who "smelled like raw sewage." A first-grade dropout with several break-ins under his belt by age 7, his formal education resumed when he was placed in juvenile detention at age 11, but the lesson he learned at home was to do absolutely anything to survive. Two years later, his career path was set when he met legendary boxing trainer Cus D'Amato. However, Tyson's temperament never changed; if anything, it hardened when he took on the persona of Iron Mike, a merciless and savage fighter who became undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. By his own admission, he was an "arrogant sociopath" in and out of the ring, and he never reconciled his thuggish childhood with his adult self--nor did he try. He still partied with pimps, drug addicts and hustlers, and he was determined to feed all of his vices and fuel several drug addictions at the cost of his freedom (he recounts his well-documented incarcerations), sanity and children. Yet throughout this time, he remained a voracious reader, and he compares himself to Clovis and Charlemagne and references Camus, Sartre, Mao Zedong and Nietzsche's "Overman" in casual conversation. Tyson is a slumdog philosopher whose insatiable appetites have ruined his life many times over. He remains self-loathing and pitiable, and his tone throughout the book is sardonic, exasperated and indignant, his language consistently crude. The book, co-authored by Sloman (co-author: Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss, 2012, etc.), reads like his journal; he updated it after reading the galleys and added "A Postscript to the Epilogue" as well. At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.

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November 1, 2013

Former heavyweight champion of the world Mike Tyson has written a book. Did you know he is a vegan?

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