Tyson reflects on sex, drugs, spirituality

From: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/
By: By Pablo S. Torre, SI.com

Mike Tyson sat down with Pablo S. Torre for a feature in Sports Illustrated's 'Where Are They Now' issue, on newsstands this week.

Howard Schatz/SI

This spring, over the course of two days and two different cities (New York and Las Vegas), I spent approximately eight hours hanging out with Mike Tyson. The final product is a feature in Sports Illustrated's annual "Where Are They Now?" issue, on newsstands this week. Here, below, is a portion of our conversation.

SI: I imagine you have a few stories from your days as a junkie.

Mike Tyson: Listen: I was in St. Tropez, in the South of France. In Ibiza, Spain. I was in Monte Carlo. I was in the Ukraine, Russia, all those places, for three months. From Russia I went to Lisbon, Portgual, from Portugal I went to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam I met this drug dealer, right? And he sees that I like getting high, and he wants to be my buddy, right? This guy goes and gets me a big rock of cocaine. So pretty soon I got a party going on. I got everything: I got these rugby players. I got these naked girls, I got all these ... everything's going on in the room. Plus I also had this girl with me that I picked up in Romania. But then [the dealer he met in Amsterdam] saw how much of a mess I was. He came in and kicked everybody out of my room! All the nude people, all the people having sex. He said, "I feel so bad I ever gave him that stuff."

SI: How about in Las Vegas? What would your typical day in Vegas be like?

Tyson: This is how the day would start: I would go to a club, at say, 2 o'clock [a.m.]. Hang out there for what, two hours, and then I'd go to the after-hours [clubs], that start at 6 o'clock [a.m.]. So I'd stay there from 6 in the morning to 7:30 at night. I'd be sitting down and drinking and doing cocaine, talking to girls ... doing anything. Everything. Then I make it home and I'm tripping out at home. I'm calling people, I'm tired, but I've got people coming in and we're making plans to go out a few hours later. We're getting high, staying up, [doing] cocaine. Somebody would be calling me: "Come hang out with me." So we would go out and get high, till 11 o'clock [p.m.] or something, then go somewhere, to a bar or somewhere. We might go to a club, then get high all day long.

SI: You got involved with prostitutes.

Tyson: Listen, I was living a crazy life. A [prostitute] would go, "There's that guy who hit me the other day, who took money from me the other day, who intimidated me." And [that guy] had to give some money up. [I'd say,] "This is my girl, man. She works for me now. This is my girl now." That's how it was. I wanted to show loyalty to these people. I was so stupid. I'd say, "If you have a problem, just let me know." And all these guys would say, "What's Mike Tyson going to do [to me]?" It was always like that until I got in their f-----' ass. I'm a nice man, but back then, I wasn't. I'm not proud of it.

SI: So your home looks pretty different now, it's safe to say...

Tyson: I'm very fortunate that I have my wife and my children. I don't know how it happened, but, man, I'm living such a different life. Listen: If I allowed my will to run riot, this house would be full, you'd hear people screaming from sex upstairs. If I allowed my mind to run riot, that's what this place would be like.

SI: How many times did you end up going to rehab?

Tyson: I was addicted to rehab. I was like the poster boy, because I would go to like five meetings a day. You were only required to go to one. I would go to five, because I'm an addictive freak. I love hanging out, the camaraderie. It's just awesome! But you know what people want, too? [Tyson leans in closer, his voice suddenly quieter.] This is what I realized, bro: It gives people family. A way of starting over. [In rehab] we start a new life with new family members. And all they gotta do to stay in this family is not get high, and you gotta try really hard. And then if you do get high? "We got your back." That's what I like.

SI: What do you see when you look back at your infamous press conferences?

Tyson: I always wanted to be that guy who said, "F--- you." When I see people doing that, trying to imitate me, these tough guys trying to emulate me, I'm sitting there thinking, like, This guy's an idiot, so I know I'm an idiot. Floyd Mayweather doesn't stand a chance as far as that idiocy. He's not even in my league as an a--hole. He's a good kid. Everyone's hard on him, but this is a great kid. He's just a kid having fun, living in a fantasy world.

Behind the Tyson photo shoot

Source: SI

SI.com takes you behind the lens during the Mike Tyson photo shoot while reporter Pablo Torre discusses what it's like to spend a day with Iron Mike.

SI: When did your wife, Kiki, really get to know you?

Tyson: She really got to know who I am, the real core, maybe two years ago, three years ago. She got to know the barometer of an individual. She never gave up on me; I gave up on me. But she would never give up. I have a great deal of respect for her as a human being for that. Me and her, we're too far gone as just human beings to try and butter each other up.

SI: What was it like to lose over 100 pounds of weight?

Tyson: I don't want to be grotesque, but when you're 330 pounds, it's hard to wipe your a--. You know? I didn't like living like that. I felt like an animal. I'm more active than I have been in years.

SI: You're a big fan of ancient history, I've heard.

Tyson: I like classical biographies. Hannibal was an awesome person. Clovis was pretty awesome, the Franks and stuff. The Khans: Genghis and his grandsons. Listen, this is pretty interesting, with this Clovis guy. Clovis was king at 15. He gets to be king at 15 with some of his father's ragtag army. Still, he would conquer people and take all their lands. He was still an evil guy. His bloodline became kings of different countries.

SI: How did you learn about all of that stuff? Do you go online now?

Tyson: Before I got involved with the Internet, I used audio books. I used to listen to them while working out, or lying down and falling asleep. [Kiki, his wife, then interjects: "He'll randomly, out of the blue, say, 'Google for me, Who is Clovis' father's first monkey's pet?' It's the craziest things."]

SI: What did you make of your time in jail?

Tyson: In a weird way, prison was the best thing that happened to me. Imagine if I was out here from '92 to '95 -- I probably would have caught AIDS, I would've got shot, I would've got into all kinds of s---. You have no idea what kind of person I was on the street, when I was in Mike Tyson megalomaniac mode.

SI: You famously converted to Islam. Are you still very religious?

Tyson: You know, people say, "My god is better than your god." But how do we prove whose god is better? And this is when it gets really interesting. This is how we prove whose god is better than whose: [by saying,] "I'm going to kill you, or you're going to kill me first." And that's real godly. That's real godly. Yeah. I bet you people think, I wonder who would win a fight with the Prophet Mohammad and Jesus? These are sick people. This is crazy, you know what I mean?

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/mma/boxing/07/28/tyson.interview/index.html#ixzz0wn9EaPgg

Mike Tyson to Host Reality Show on Animal Planet

By Ryan Wilson
From http://backporch.fanhouse.com/

An idea long overdue: a Mike Tyson reality show. On Animal Planet. SB Nation's Bad Left Hook blog has the details:

Debuting in 2011 and beginning filming soon, a new Animal Planet show starring Mike Tyson will "take audiences inside the intensely competitive and bizarrely fascinating world of pigeon racing," according to a network press release.

"I'm honored to be a part of this monumental show on Animal Planet," said Tyson. "I feel a great pride acting as an official representative for all the pigeon fanciers out there. I want people to see why we love these birds. It feels good returning to the rooftops of the city where it all started for me -- New York."

I first heard about Tyson and his pigeons in 2003, when ESPN's Bill Simmons wrote about the boxer and his birds.

The pigeons. People come and go, wives come and go, fights come and go ... but the pigeons endure. He's been flying them ever since he was a little boy in Brooklyn. After Lewis savagely destroyed him last summer, the most humiliating of defeats, Tyson returned to Harlem and flew his birds for months on end. His wife filed for divorce. The boxing world left him for dead. He kept flying those damned pigeons. Earlier in the morning, I was talking with one of the locals who cares for Tyson's birds when he's away -- a guy named Ron -- who explained, "He likes the way they fly. I think he just likes coming up here. It's his place. He relaxes up here."

I'm intrigued. Not sure if Animal Planet has decided on a name for the show but I'm pushing for the Pigeon Whisperer. It's too obvious not to happen.

Fighting for Recognition: ‘Tyson’ at Sundance

James Toback

Mike Tyson in the documentary "Tyson," which is being shown at the Sundance Film Festival. More Photos >

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

Published: January 18, 2009

PARK CITY, Utah — The Sundance Film Festival always has much on its plate. And one of the jobs served up this year involves feeding Mike Tyson.

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Shea Walsh/Associated Press

Mike Tyson on Main Street in Park City, Utah, for Sundance. More Photos »

On Saturday night, John Besh, the New Orleans restaurateur, was preparing to do exactly that at Bon Appétit’s temporary supper club, which is perched on a slight rise above the party tents on Main Street here.

The menu was built around Kobe beef short ribs stripped from the bone and cooked for 26 hours at precisely 141 degrees. “Since we’re cooking for Mike Tyson, I wanted big blows for the palate but also some food for the soul,” Mr. Besh said, shortly before pouring the soupe de poisson with blue crab and tapioca.

The idea is not so much to sate the appetite of Mr. Tyson, a 42-year-old former boxer who has been in and out of jail, as to create a bit of theater around a documentary film about him.

The movie, “Tyson,” directed by James Toback, screened earlier on Saturday to a packed house of about 450 at a the town library, where the film was screened. Mr. Tyson spoke briefly afterward, but the real event was simply his presence.

“Mike Tyson’s coming in!” Pierce Brosnan said as he left the supper club from an earlier dinner honoring his own movie, “The Greatest,” shortly before Mr. Tyson walked in through a crowd of gawkers.

The new film tries mightily to find a redemption story in Mr. Tyson’s rise, fall and reconciliation with his demons. “The regeneration, reconstruction and rehabilitation of a great spirit is always possible,” Mr. Toback said, summing up his movie’s moral during cocktail hour at the supper club.

Still, Mr. Tyson appears to remain more spectacle than morality tale, which is not altogether a bad thing as far as Sundance is concerned.

One of the festival’s jobs, bluntly put, is to sell documentaries. In one of the “Storytime” memory reels attached to the beginning of each screening here, Robert Redford, the festival’s patriarch, muses of documentaries: “What if we use the festival to promote them on an equal footing with theatrical films?”

The key word is promote, and it is not necessarily a dirty one. Despite a supposed marketplace surge that came with the runaway success of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” in 2004, documentaries generally remain a poor relation at the box office.

Many of the art form’s bigger box-office hits have been political. Those include Mr. Moore’s “Sicko” and “Bowling for Columbine,” as well as Davis Guggenheim’s “Inconvenient Truth,” the global warming film with Al Gore.

Every once in a while a nonpolitical specimen breaks the rules by doing as well as any other kind of feature film. The last such example was “March of the Penguins,” which took in $77 million at the domestic box office after Warner Independent Pictures released it in 2005.

But the record has been much spottier for most documentaries. Sony Pictures Classics, which only days ago acquired rights to distribute “Tyson,” in the last couple of years released “Waltz With Bashir,” “Jimmy Carter, Man From Plains” and “My Kid Could Paint That,” none of which has topped $1 million at the box office, although “Waltz With Bashir,” which won a Golden Globe award, is still playing.

“Nine months ago we were thinking we weren’t going to do any more documentaries,” said Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, speaking at the same reception. “Then you see a film like this.”

Where “Tyson” is concerned, Sundance has some work to do. The festival is supposed to reignite interest in a movie that’s been around for a while: It has screened at a number of festivals, including Cannes, where Mr. Tyson and Mr. Toback did some heavy selling last May.

On a large scale, Sundance is supposed to use its promotional tricks — among them, feeding the 90 movie and media types at this dinner — to convince people that there really is something appetizing about real-life stories told, on the whole, with fidelity to the facts.

For Mr. Barker, the next step is to begin releasing “Tyson” in theaters on April 24. The plan, he said, is to cultivate both the art-house crowd and African-American viewers, aiming for a crossover hit like “Hoop Dreams,” a 1994 basketball documentary that took in $7.8 million.

If Mr. Tyson caused excitement on Saturday night, the same sort of sizzle was in the air that morning, when several hundred festival-goers started lining up four hours early at the Har Shalom Temple’s theater for a look at “The September Issue,” another documentary. That one follows the fashion editor Anna Wintour as she assembles the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine.

Theatrical rights to “The September Issue” are for sale here by the Creative Artists Agency, so even Ms. Wintour, whose legendary lack of warmth is a theme in the film, had some promoting to do.

Tucked inside a jacket edged with a big fur collar, she took questions from John Cooper, the festival’s director of programming, on Saturday.

Mr. Cooper asked Ms. Wintour about the experience of watching underlings dissect her vision and decisions on screen, not always in flattering ways. “There wasn’t much in there I didn’t know before,” she said.

“Do you like it?” Mr. Cooper persisted, referring to the film, which was directed by R. J. Cutler, a producer of “The War Room,” about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.

“It’s quite hard to look at oneself in such an intense way,” Ms. Wintour said. But, she added, “I’m very glad to have a record of what we do.”