Fairytale fights jim sterling full#

That was ending, right here and now, already fading into history before my paper’s press run began. His rise to greatness had been a wild, exhilarating sprint that tapped into a primal bloodlust, and not just his, but the public’s, too. Any Tyson news was big in those days.īut Tyson was also right. I raced four exits up the New York State Thruway and banged out a story that led the sports section the next morning and, even in the pre-Internet age, was quickly snatched up and disseminated around the world. I felt guilty, but not too guilty not to make sure the recorder had successfully captured the conversation.

Fairytale fights jim sterling full#

My work in covering Tyson had helped get me noticed by potential employers, yet here I sat by the curb with a tape full of his insecurities and pain to transcribe and regurgitate for anyone to read. My wife was 36 weeks pregnant with our first child, and I was sitting on job offers from two New York City newspapers (the customary path to career advancement in 1988), either of which would mean leaving upstate friends and family behind while dragging my wife and baby to an unfamiliar new home. When the session ended, I walked down to the street and climbed into my ’83 Honda Civic. “Something drastic is going to happen soon,” Tyson said. I could go fight you in the street, outside this building, and somebody would pay me a million dollars for it.” (This was probably true). “Everybody’s got their hands out, waiting for something from me. “Everybody is pulling at me, this way and that way,” said Tyson. Bill Cayton, Jacobs’s longtime partner, was in New York City, ostracized, but scrapping. Rapacious fight promoter Don King was holed up in an Albany hotel. As Tyson sat unclothed and ranting, his first wife, actress Robin Givens, was staying in the Catskill Victorian home in which Tyson had lived with D’Amato and D’Amato’s longtime companion, Camille Ewald, since 1980. Tyson’s co-manager, Jim Jacobs, had died two months earlier (Tyson’s mentor and legal guardian, trainer Cus D’Amato, had been gone since November of 1985), throwing open the door to all manner of takeover strategies. Thirty-nine days later, Tyson would fight Michael Spinks to unify the heavyweight title, but here there was already a battle on for his soul and, more to the point, his growing fortune. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Imagesīut even by those standards, this moment was different. You would recognize the voice, the same one that comically menaced Zach Galifianakis in the first Hangover movie, only with fewer miles on it.

“Everything in my life was too good to be true, wasn’t it?” said Tyson. There were three of us in the room: Tyson, trainer Kevin Rooney and me. Mike Tyson, the 21-year-old heavyweight champion of the world, sat naked on a metal folding chair, fuming, desperate and angry, choking back tears. It was a primitive space, as if created for a 1930s boxing movie, which, in a sense, it was. A small, sand-filled balloon no bigger than a ping pong ball hung on a string from the exposed plumbing fighters would swing it like a pendulum and dodge it with head movement to improve defensive skills. There were high ceilings and dark walls, dust gathered along the baseboards and prehistoric cobwebs stretched across the corners.

The ride ended here, in a musty room adjacent to the second-floor boxing gym over the police station on Main Street.