Expect Him: Thoughts on Mike Tyson’s Return
In an already insane year, far too many are dismissing the merit of a totally unusual but not irrational comeback.
These guys never fought in their damn life and still they’re gonna’ be psychologists and say ‘I’m a swami and I can look at Mike Tyson’s brain and tell by the way he’s acting, this is what he’s thinking.’ The only thing that’s unbelievable is the public believes this shit! — Mike Tyson
Those words were spoken in the lead-up to a December 8th, 1990 fight with Alex Stewart at the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Much has changed since then — Stewart, who was brutalized and knocked out in the first round, passed away in 2016 after a blood clot entered his lungs at the age of 52; and the owner of the hotel casino where the fight took place now occupies the residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. But the rampant armchair speculation Tyson took exception to nearly 30 years ago is every bit as wildfire-crazy today, especially since the news he will fight Roy Jones Jr. in an 8-round exhibition match on September 12th was announced late in July. The date has since been moved to align with American Thanksgiving weekend, on November 28th.
Tyson’s return to the ring at 54 years old may be the most intriguing development in modern sports history. I assert that he is coming back not as a shooting star, but as a comet propelled from a psychedelic dimension that will remake the world on its impact. And the exhibition is just the start.
The news of Tyson’s comeback has been met with various unenlightened takes from the sports press. An ESPN article featuring a round-table of boxing writers labelled the exhibition “a grotesque spectacle”, “a cash-grabbing circus” and “a glorified pillow fight”, among other things. There is only a passing, dismissive reference to Tyson’s recent transcendent personal journey. Which strikes me as odd: even if you completely dismiss it, how can any reporting fail to mention the toad? Do people just not know?
“You Ever Hear About the Toad?”
As haltingly confessional as Mike Tyson has been over the years in interviews and appearances (he is undeniably generous with the details of his private life), I do not recall Tyson ever describing a dream (as in a close-your-eyes-and-fall-asleep dream). So it’s been absolutely fascinating hearing him describe at great length the strange, dreamlike world he was transported to under the influence of the dried venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. Without some understanding of this trip and what followed soon thereafter, you won’t be able to appreciate the unique nature of his return to the ring.
The story goes like this: on November 27th, 2018, a shaman was invited to the temporary headquarters of Tyson’s nascent marijuana business, located at the time in El Segundo, California. He and Tyson went off to Tyson’s private office, the lone room in the building guarded by an iron door, and Tyson lay down on a bed of pillows collected from sofas nearby as the shaman prepared the toad venom. While a storm outside crackled light through the drawn windows in the candlelit room, the man formerly known as Kid Dynamite inhaled from a glass pipe held to his lips and was abruptly sling-shot into another dimension. He freaked out.
“Oh God I’m dying! Fuck.”
…but soon found himself at peace:
“I [don’t] want to come back, I [want] to stay dead.”
He visited a bizarre world of impossible animals, Aztec pyramids, someone he calls ‘The Man of Rays’ (or is it ‘The Man of Rage’?), a voice compelling him to take care of his body and a peculiar shape he later learned was that of the pineal gland (after seeing that same shape framed on a wall belonging to guru Tony Robbins).
“I had no ego and I was just dealing with my own mortality.”
And while none of the visions listed above are necessarily dissimilar from what’s been described by others recalling psychedelic trips, Tyson is so loquacious, and has provided the public with so much insight into his life, that some exciting theories about what’s happening in the present moment can be spun from a combination of those toad visions and the personal history he’s shared.
For example, in October of 1988 Mike Tyson visited Mexico to attend the christening of boxer Julio Cesar Chavez’s son. He describes experiencing one of the most transformative events of his life there, being confronted by circumstances even more severe than those of his own childhood: “I was blown away by the poverty in Mexico. I was actually mad at them for being poorer than I had been because I couldn’t feel sorry for myself anymore. More than anything else, my success stemmed from my shame about being poor. That shame of being poor gave me more pain than anything.” Despite being discouraged from giving away money by his tour guide, Tyson handed a child beggar a $100 dollar bill. He went to pat the now-jubilant boy’s head affectionately and was astonished to find his hair was “hard as a rock.”
How does this relate to Tyson’s toad venom trip? The child beggar that approached him and triggered his epiphany did so during a day trip to the pyramids somewhere near Mexico City, mirroring Tyson’s visions of Aztec pyramids in the toad dimension!
It has been reported that he’s revisited the toad upwards of 20 times, and by all accounts he has undergone meaningful, observable and lasting change. I can’t begin to tell you how or why toad venom would affect Mike Tyson (or anyone for that matter) in this way, but there is plenty of evidence that it has.
To start, I would direct skeptics to listen to Tyson’s previous podcast Bite the Mic with Mike Tyson and contrast it with the quality of meaningful engagement he shows on his present podcast: Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson. In the earlier podcast venture, Tyson was often withdrawn. The show itself tended to revisit the more outrageous Tyson content that the general public is familiar with and that mostly aligned with the latter half of his boxing career (the name Bite the Mic confirms this). In many episodes, it sounds like co-host Pete Rosenberg is actually alone, with only rare monosyllable contributions from Tyson. This is by no means a knock against the hosting abilities of Mr. Rosenberg, it’s to highlight Tyson’s recalcitrant relationship with his own podcast and his often sullen state of mind pre-toad.
The Mike Tyson who appears on post-toad Hotboxin’ is dynamic, insightful and inquisitive, overflowing with excitement and often worthy of quotation. Whatever emotional weight he’d been carrying had clearly been relieved, or at least was seemingly much more manageable. He began showing up to the office every day in a tailored suit, often accentuated with gator shoes. He stopped consuming animal flesh, as had been commanded by a voice in the toad world (although he has since resumed eating eggs in training camp). He became almost apostle-like in his praise of the toad — nearly every Hotboxin’ episode features Tyson asking his guest “you ever hear about the Toad?” before handing things over to cohost Eben Britton to provide a more comprehensive breakdown of 5-MeO-DMT (the psychedelic in toad venom).
Something real had happened. Tyson abandoned drugs and alcohol (marijuana, the focus of his company, being the only exception). Which was an astonishing development in its own right, as Tyson’s struggles with addiction are well documented. Hotboxin’ started booking younger fighters as guests, and Tyson, who’d long been reluctant to talk about fighting, was suddenly embracing his role as mentor and keeper of knowledge. And what knowledge! It was as if the capital of a lost civilization had been excavated with all of its art and history preserved wholly intact. Listening to Tyson’s unrestrained passion talking about his guest LL Cool J’s ancestor Tom Molineaux, a slave who became a champion boxer, and LL’s uncle, John Henry Lewis, a light heavyweight champion, leaves no doubt that Tyson had come back to life!
But perhaps the most intriguing of them all was still to come: Tyson started boxing again. Something he had not done since donning a tank top in a transparent cash-grab exhibition fight in October of 2006 (and arguably not pursued in earnest long before that too).
Which is why the announcement of Tyson’s comeback is wholly unlike any cliched story of a long retired fighter’s return to the ring. Nothing in the history of boxing even remotely approximates the circumstances of Tyson’s return. Even when compared to George Foreman’s own historically unprecedented comeback, the differences are exhaustive.
Foreman heard the voice of God in his locker room following a decision loss to Jimmy Young (the closest parallel I could find for any boxer to Tyson’s toad venom trip), and experienced an immediate religious conversion that eventually led to a full commitment to God and ministry. But he would not resume fighting until a decade later at the age of 38, and then in part to financially support his ministry.
By comparison, the fight on November 28th, 2020 will mark exactly two years and a day from when Tyson smoked toad venom for the first time (November 27th, 2018).
George Foreman famously regained the heavyweight title at 45 years old, seven and a half years into his comeback. If Tyson were to follow that comeback trajectory precisely, he’d regain the heavyweight title at 62 years old on July 25, 2028.
(One of George’s stated intentions at the outset of his return in 1987 was to fight young Mike Tyson, who at the time was violently dismantling the entire heavyweight division. When asked about the prospect of fighting old George, Tyson offered that he hoped it would happen before George died of “rigor mortis.” )
Perception, Prophecy & the Twinkle
I would venture that there is no public figure who has been the focus of lazier and more trite characterizations in the popular media than Mike Tyson. Ironically, to hold the belief that Tyson is a brute is perhaps the most persuasive evidence of Tyson’s deep intelligence, because beyond being a pugilist, he is first and foremost a virtuoso of identity, his projected image as “Iron Mike” and “The Baddest Man on the Planet” the result of patient and studied cultivation. The distinction people often don’t get is that one of Tyson’s primary drivers has been to emulate a certain type of guy. While there are no rigid requirements for the physical makeup of this projected guy (he can belong to any race, be short or tall, etc.), he tends to emerge from poverty and must radiate the right kind of badass energy. He can be found plainly in Jack Dempsey’s grimace. He can be seen effortlessly exuded from Harry Greb as he looks into the eyes of a female fan in the only surviving footage of him, or in the way Roberto Duran would allow his body to balloon through decadent indulgence between prize fights. He can be found in the movies, too; Jack Palance’s villainous cowboy characters who seemed to relish in their cruelty; the threat of capable violence behind the eyes of Richard Widmark; the joke that James Cagney always seemed to be in on. The fighter who had the characteristics of that guy was legendary not only because of his exploits in the ring, but because of those outside of it. Stanley Ketchel was an “ex- bouncer of lushes in a bagnio;” Greb would visit a brothel before every fight, taking on two prostitutes at a time because it left him feeling like a wild animal; Sonny Liston would get right up in a policeman’s face. They dressed immaculately and would pal around with the arbiters of culture of their day, the best writers and musicians and entertainers. It was an honor to shake their hand. These were men who fully inhabited their personas and lived up to romantic ideals, despite being capable of tremendous ferocity.
Understanding that Tyson’s main motivator all along was to be that type of guy is key. He spent nearly a decade of his early life watching reels of fight footage and documentaries about the lives of fighters in an attic in the Catskills for up to 10 hours at a time. He taught himself to read in part from a boxing encyclopedia given to him soon after his first visit to his trainer Cus D’Amato and partner Camille’s home. Just imagine the resonance those words had! To make himself worthy to be included in those pages among his heroes would become his life’s pursuit, and perhaps it was precisely Tyson’s intimate familiarity with the lives of the boxers who came before him that made him become resigned to the idea that he would share their fate.
How often does it happen that the foremost chronicler of the history of a sport is also its best practitioner and youngest champion? Boxing history has guided Tyson his entire career. The lives of fighters chronicled in young Tyson’s favorite book In This Corner taught him that all champions felt fear. When Tyson experienced his first loss as an amateur, Cus comforted him with stories of Henry Armstrong and Harry Greb, who started their professional careers with losses but went on to become legends. Similarly, when Tyson suffered the first loss of his professional career in Tokyo, he read about “how Tony Zale had come back from Rocky Graziano. How Joe Louis came back to demolish Max Schmeling. How Ali came back from exile. How Sugar Ray Robinson just bridled at seeing the word ‘former’ in conjunction with his name.”
Which is why it is doubtful that those criticizing Tyson’s return to the ring have considered the extent to which he’s looked at every conceivable angle and applicable historical precedent in making that decision. Notice how spirited Tyson became, for instance, while being questioned by ESPN’s Max Kellerman about the upcoming bout with Roy Jones Jr.: “What happened after I knocked out Larry Holmes? […] He had the greatest comeback almost in history! He went the distance with two great champions, two legendary men! Please! […] once he got active he became more potent and efficient.” The legendary men Tyson was referring to were (presumably) Evander Holyfield and Oliver McCall. Holmes had been inactive for almost two years when, at nearly 39 years old, he was demolished by a 21 year old Tyson. Holmes was 42 when he went the distance in a championship bout with Evander Holyfield, who was 29 at the time, and lost via a unanimous decision. At 45, he went the distance for a championship with 29 year old Oliver McCall, only to lose by a slim margin on the scorecards. And at 47 he was robbed in a split decision against Danish belt holder Brian Nielsen, who was 31. He got closer each time!
Of all the potential opponents that were floated for Tyson when he posted the first clip of him training to Instagram on May 1, 2020— Bob Sapp, Evander Holyfield, Tito Ortiz, Wanderlei Silva, Riddick Bowe, James Toney and Shannon Briggs were all reportedly in the mix — only one seemed to have compelling future propagandistic utility: Roy Jones, Jr. The boxing scroll may read that Evander Holyfield has two wins over Tyson, but which fighter still carries the aura? Tyson. Would the news that Evander Holyfield was back in the gym even register with the general public? Would Tyson savagely beating present day Holyfield give the current crop of heavyweights reason for pause? I would say no. Holyfield is a character in Tyson’s story, not the other way around. Ask a person on the street what their first thought is when you mention the names Holyfield, Lewis or Douglas, and the answer will almost invariably be “Tyson”. Tyson is the image of greatness those fighters are measured against.
Roy Jones Jr., on the other hand, is only a couple of years removed from his professional career. Although the quality of his competition has certainly diminished and he’s most famous for his exploits in a lower weight class (despite winning the heavyweight championship), Jones arguably still has an aura of his own when matched with another recognizable name. At the very least, his pairing with Tyson elicits a “well, that’s interesting” response from the boxing public, and had Tyson chosen any of the other opponents just listed, I would not have felt the need to write this article. What would Tyson have gained in terms of perception?
For Tyson, “the art of fighting is not fighting, it’s the perception of fighting,” and with the story of the Toad, Tyson possesses one of the most powerful tools of perception of any fighter in history. It’s perfect, because it’s baffling. How can you make sense of the mystery of his experience? Mike Tyson smoked toad venom, sat at the feet of the God of War, experienced the death of his ego, reemerged balanced and focused, died an additional twenty times and is now set on reclaiming a heavyweight title. I’m sorry, what? A topflight heavyweight would dismiss the notion that a former champion, even one as feared and mythologized as Tyson, could make a viable comeback at 54 years old. The ego of a young champion would not allow it. But this isn’t the mortal Mike Tyson, it’s an alien Mike Tyson imbued with the knowledge of another world devoid of space and time. His joints have been rejuvenated through stem cell injections, his muscles regularly shocked with the electricity of a machine that supplies a DC current. He is trained by a Cus D’Amato protege named Billy White. Losing to this Mike Tyson is more palatable, like conceding your home to a hurricane. It’s an act of God, people can’t judge you for it, your belongings just happened to be in the way. Can you imagine what Cus D’Amato would do with this storyline? The press conferences he’d stage? The doctors he’d bring forth to explain to the public that such high volumes of venom would kill mortal men, and that Tyson’s survival defies scientific reasoning? Tyson’s social media would be turned into a propaganda machine so powerful that opponents would have to be reminded to stay off their phones so as to protect their sanity.
In a brilliant piece of propaganda of his own, a very fit looking Tyson appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and spoke about how he was becoming physically aroused at the prospect of fighting and delivering punishment: “sometimes, I get the twinkle”. He even asked if Rogan could come up with a helpful explanation (“What does it mean when fighting gets you erect? What does that mean?”). This is a perfect example of Tyson playing with perception, the subtext being that if he is popping erections like a teenager, it obfuscates the image of him as an old fighter. Furthermore, him acting confused and unsure of its meaning further separates him from a normal, mortal person, as if to say: please help me, Joe Rogan, there is a monster living inside me. It’s fantastic.
(It’s worth noting that I don’t believe the story of the Toad will have any real impact on a Tyson contemporary like Roy Jones Jr., and I don’t expect Tyson will emphasize it in the lead-up to November 28th. If it does come into play it will be with impressionable younger fighters down the line.)
In a Hotboxin’ episode featuring rapper Eminem last year, Tyson explained that “if Cus was alive he’d be sayin’ ‘Mike, let’s fight’. He just believed you can fight at any age… fighting you can just do forever if you have the desire to do it. Fighting is all about spirit, if you want to do it, you can do it at any age.” Mike Tyson is a romantic, just as his mentor Cus D’Amato was a romantic. The central question of Tyson’s life has revolved around the synchronicity of his union with this man, grappling with it like a Zen koan, year in and year out. How could one expect Tyson not to believe in fate, in things divinely ordained, after becoming the fulfillment of Cus D’Amato’s boldest prophecy? And how could he not see the toad as a rekindling of that prophecy?
Why Not?
This is Mike Tyson. There’s a very short list of characters in the history of our planet who have lived greater extremes: from wretched poverty to outright opulence, from physical insecurity to a force so intimidating that his family name is shorthand for explosive violent ability. The type of guy whose prison visitors list read like a fantasy dinner party of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century. The type of guy whose actions have provoked responses (“Horrified” said Bill Clinton) and retweets from sitting U.S. presidents. The type of guy who remains such an enduring part of the zeitgeist that the current recognized heavyweight champion of the world, Tyson Fury, is named after him. Mike Tyson’s life is filled with so many contradictions, I concede it’s at least understandable that he continues to be so criminally misrepresented in the media, much of that due to his own deliberate manipulation. Tyson is above all an artist, and so fastidious a student, so romantically dedicated to his art that it totally perplexes those unaccustomed to romantic pursuits in these times. If Tyson could be the youngest heavyweight titleholder in history, he can be the oldest one, too. Age means nothing, time means nothing. There is only the source, and Tyson has been there, died, and come back.
To those who think this is merely a cash grab for Tyson, my question is: why now? Were Tyson interested in cashing in this way, he would have done so at his financial nadir, when he owed an almost impossible amount in unpaid taxes. Do they think the thought of a return never crossed Tyson’s mind as he endured meet-and-greets with disturbed fans and self-serving promoters, marathon autograph sessions at tables in convention halls, or as he checked the price of milk at the grocery store? To those cynics who question Tyson’s realistic chances competing north of fifty years old, I can offer nothing more than this: the man still gets the twinkle.
The last fights of Tyson’s professional career were in fact done to pay the bills, and it’s as if this betrayal of commitment to his romantic ideals resulted in noncompliance from his body. This is someone who was molded by Cus D’Amato, a man who believed money was for “throwing off the back of trains,” that it is glory over everything and that age meant nothing next to desire and mindset.
On the initially planned night of the exhibition, Saturday, September 12th, Tyson was to fight in front of the first empty crowd of his life due to safety measures in place to curb the spread of a global pandemic. The date is normally reserved for a marquee Mexican fighter, the first Saturday before Mexican Independence Day. Julio Cesar Chavez, the boxer who invited Tyson to his son’s christening in October of 1988, expressed irritation at the supposed hijacking of the Mexican celebration, the great irony being that all of this is happening due to the indescribable healing properties of a creature residing in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico.
So why now for Mike Tyson, if not for the cash?
Maybe the answer is actually quite simple: the restorative effects of the toad enabled Tyson to sleep after years of restlessness. And now that he can sleep, he can dream. And who dreams bigger than Mike Tyson?
Author:
Fraser Munden is a filmmaker from Point St Charles, Canada. His work includes “The Chaperone 3D” (2014), the true story of a Montreal teacher who systemically beat up an entire French Canadian motorcycle gang that had invaded his middle school dance. An original weekly animated series he created for fun alongside artist Catherine Dubeau about NFL player (and folk hero) Josh Gordon led to work with many notable athletes, including Mike Tyson. He hopes to release his short film “You Ever Hear About the Toad?” about Tyson’s toad venom trip, before the end of the year.
E-mail: fraser@thoroughbread.ca
Illustrator:
Catherine Dubeau is an animator and illustrator from Aylmer, Québec. The illustrations that appear in this article are either from the unreleased short film “You Ever Hear About the Toad?” or from the unreleased poster for the same project of which she was the principal animator / illustrator.