It was March 26, 1992. Six weeks earlier he had been convicted of raping 18 year old beauty pageant contestant Desiree Washington. At 25 he was facing sixty years in jail, but even in his ‘moment of doom’ he was ‘an arrogant prick.’
Now, in his explosive autobiography, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, published today, he has revealed that he spent the weeks leading up to that sentencing, traveling round the country ‘romancing’ his various girlfriends.
And where legal measures had let him down he had turned to ‘divine intervention,’ to bring him a light sentence.
He visited a, ‘hoodoo woman’ who said she would cast a spell to keep him out of jail if he put five hundred dollar bills in a jar, urinated in it and kept it under his bed for three days.
He sought out a voodoo priest who turned out to be a fraud, ‘I knew that guy had nothing,’ he recalls.
And he followed the instructions of a Santeria priest – going to the courthouse one night with a pigeon and an egg which he dropped on the ground as the bird was release and he yelled. ‘We’re free!’
He almost believed it would work. Because he felt invincible. ‘In my mind,’ he says, ‘I had no peers. I was the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. I was a titan, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great.’
He was sentenced to six years and served three.
Today Tyson believes that the day he was sent to jail may well have been the day that saved his life.
That life as told by Tyson is one of drama, turbulence, excess and addiction, one in which he gave in to every carnal appetite.
His early boyhood took on a relentless rhythm of crime sprees, being hauled in by police only to be taken home and brutally beaten by his despairing mother.
By the time he was 12 he was a ‘zonked out zombie’ on Thorazine and a regular attendee of reformatory school, or ‘special-ed crazy school.’ There are not many light spots in the childhood that Tyson recalls. But one that stands out happened during a stint in the Reformatory school of Sporford.
He recalls: ‘We watched a movie called “The Greatest” about Muhammad Ali. When it was over…we were shocked when Ali himself walked out on that stage, ‘ he says. ‘I thought, I want to be that guy.’
He didn’t want to be a boxer. He wanted to be great.
At 20 he won the title – he didn’t take the belt off all night. He kept it on in the lobby of the hotel, at the party that went on all night. In the days and weeks that followed, ‘Sometimes, ‘ he says, ‘Id’ get naked and put the championship belt on and have sex with a girl.’
Wherever he found a willing partner or several, he was more than game. He was only twenty and he had achieved the only goal he had ever set out to meet. He was free. And he was empty – without guidance or purpose.
Suddenly Tyson was earning millions and the girls, models, stars, hookers… were falling at his feet.
Source: SDE
“[katogoaward]”
