The Year 1988 Was a Fateful Year in the Lives of Mike Tyson and Steve Lott

Published

3 years ago

September 8, 2021

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PART TWO OF A TWO-PART STORY — The year 1988 was a fateful year in the life of Mike Tyson. On Feb. 7, Mike married Robin Givens. On March 23, two days after he knocked out Tony Tubbs in Tokyo, his co-manager Jim Jacobs died. Mike greatly admired Jacobs and the two were very close friends. On June 27, Tyson blew away Michael Spinks in 91 seconds before a star-studded crowd of 21,785 at the Atlantic City Convention Center, aka Boardwalk Hall. The event was a blockbuster, shattering all existing records for fight revenue.

Mike and Robin Givens were a strange match. Mike was a high school dropout who was 11 years old when he was first remanded to a reformatory. Robin, 17 months older than Mike, had attended an exclusive private high school in the ‘burbs, graduating at age 15, had majored in drama at Sarah Lawrence College, and was a cast member of “Head of the Class,” a TV sitcom set in the classroom of a high school for the academically gifted. When Mike married Robin, he inherited her 44-year-old mother Ruth Roper, a twice-married and twice-divorced businesswoman who made the papers herself in 1988 when she sued the married baseball star David Winfield for giving her an unspecified venereal disease. (The suit was settled out of court.)

The femme fatale is a stock character in literature. There’s an old saying that an alluring woman (I’m paraphrasing) can sink a battleship. Robin Givens came to be seen as the quintessential femme fatale. Iron Mike Tyson was the battleship.

Steve Lott subscribes whole-heartedly to this portrait of Ms. Givens. “She conned Mike into marrying her by saying she was pregnant,” says Lott, a remonstration made by many others. As to her insistence that she wasn’t a gold-digger, Lott cites the purchase of the Malcolm Forbes estate in New Jersey.

Within days after they were married, Mike flew to Tokyo to promote his fight against Tony Tubbs. “A few days later,” says Lott, “he received a phone call from Givens who informed him that she had just purchased the Malcolm Forbes mansion in New Jersey for $4.3 million. She never told Mike that she was going to do that. I could see that Mike was very unhappy when he heard the news.”

Only hours before Mike Tyson stepped into the ring to fight Michael Spinks, Robin Givens slapped Bill Cayton with a lawsuit seeking to terminate his contract on the grounds of stealing money from Mike’s purses and, moreover, make it retroactive so that Cayton couldn’t collect his share of the purse for the Tyson-Spinks fight. “Mike had no idea that Robin was doing that,” says Lott. “In fact, Mike had actually met with Cayton the day before the fight to ask Bill’s advice about starting a new merchandise business with a friend of his.”

The lawsuit triggered a Price Waterhouse audit of Cayton’s books. The examiners found that Mike had actually been overpaid.

“Robin didn’t have the assets to sue Cayton,” says Steve Lott. “Donald Trump jumped in to help her. He made his resources available to her, his attorneys and his accountants. Since Robin could not prove that money was missing, Tyson and Cayton renewed the fighter/manager agreement without going to trial. Trump then sent Robin a bill for $3 million.”

Cayton was still legally Mike’s manager, but he was kicked to the sidelines as others muscled in to exert sway over Tyson’s career. Two weeks after the Tyson-Spinks fight, Donald Trump announced that he planned to set up a corporation to manage Mike’s affairs and that he was doing it as a friend of the family. The announcement came in the ballroom of a swanky Manhattan hotel at a formal press conference orchestrated by Trump’s press agent Howard Rubenstein. Trump had ponied up an $11 million site fee to host the Tyson-Spinks fight (Boardwalk Hall was tethered to Trump’s hotel-casino) and it proved to be a smart investment as the casino drop was enormous.

In seeking to woo Tyson away from Bill Cayton, Trump was thought to be in cahoots with Don King who would pick up the cudgel from Robin Givens, suing Bill Cayton for underpaying Mike, an allegation he could not substantiate. It was no coincidence that Givens was seated next to Don King at the fight.

As we all know, Mike Tyson fell into the clutches of Don King. Steve Lott, trainer Kevin Rooney, and cut man Matt Baransky, all of whom had been with Tyson from the very beginning, going back to his amateur days, were kicked to the curb.

The Tyson-Givens marriage was short-lived. She filed for divorce in October of 1988 on grounds of irreconcilable differences and Tyson counter-sued a week later, seeking an annulment. In his suit, Tyson accused Givens of “waging a campaign to publicly humiliate him, strip him of his manhood and his dignity.”

The catalyst was the Sept. 30 edition of the popular ABC show “20/20” wherein Givens and Tyson were interviewed by Barbara Walters. On the show, Givens said that although she still loved Michael, their marriage was a “living hell” because Mike was manic-depressive and prone to acts of domestic violence. She said this as Mike was meekly sitting next to her looking as if he taken some Valium.

BAWA

“The charge that Mike was manic-depressive was BS,” says Steve Lott. “Bill Cayton hired the top psychiatrist in New York (Abraham Halpern) to examine Mike and he determined that Mike wasn’t and had never been manic-depressive.”

Six weeks before his appearance on “20/20,” Mike cracked a bone in his left hand in a street fight with former opponent Mitch “Blood” Green. The altercation happened at 4:30 am on a Tuesday morning in front of Dapper Dan’s, an all-night boutique and after-hours nightclub in Harlem.

In June of the previous year, Mike scuffled with a 20-year-old parking lot attendant after attending a rap concert at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The charges of assault and battery were dismissed by a municipal court judge but the parking lot attendant, whose nose and lip were bloodied, purportedly received a $105,000 settlement.

This incident is at odds with the narrative that Tyson didn’t become a loose cannon until after the last remnants of his original team were purged from his life. The feral child that Cus D’Amato and Jim Jacobs had supposedly molded into a solid citizen was still very much a work in progress.

Lott demurs. “When I was with Mike, he never did anything inappropriate,” he says. “Don King and his people undid all the great things that Cus did.”

Lott notes that before the separation Tyson was raking in big money in commercial endorsements. He had deals with Pepsi and Nintendo and Kodak and was a poster boy for the New York Police Department (“It takes a bigger person than me to be a New York City cop,” read the poster which was designed as part of a recruiting campaign). Tyson even did a public service announcement for the FBI encouraging kids to stay off drugs.

All those endorsements dried up in a hurry after Givens, Trump, and King entered his life and there was no going back even before he was convicted of raping an 18-year-old beauty queen in an Indianapolis hotel during the 1991 Miss Black America pageant. The conviction begat a six-year prison sentence that was cut in half for good behavior. He was released on March 23, 1995. Future co-managers, John Horne and Rory Holloway, old friends from his Catskill days who were now in the employ of Don King, were waiting at the gate. Lott believes that King had an inside man at the prison hired to keep Tyson in line. He was now a free agent as the legal wrangling between King and Bill Cayton stopped when Tyson was packed off to prison as the antagonists decided that it was better to reach a private settlement than to continue to spend thousands on legal fees when there was a possibility that Tyson might never fight again.

Looking back at his end days as Mike Tyson’s co-manager, Lott says, “we didn’t realize how vulnerable Mike was.”

“Vulnerability” is about as far as Lott will go in touching on the flaws in Tyson’s character. “He showed me many kindnesses when we were together. He will always be my friend.” And as for writing a memoir, Steve says that won’t happen: “A lot of stuff would be personal.”

Lott wrote Tyson hundreds of letters when Mike was incarcerated at the Indiana Youth Correctional Center and visited him there three times. “I told Mike, you don’t have to go back to Bill Cayton, but please don’t sign with Don King.” Lott regards King as the greatest con man of all time, an opinion likely shared by Mike Tyson who filed a one hundred million dollar lawsuit in federal court against King in 1998 to capture money skimmed from him.

Lott hasn’t seen Tyson in several years but they were reunited in 2014 when Lott became a consultant to Iron Mike Productions, a boxing promotional firm that was almost as short-lived as Tyson’s first marriage, going belly-up when Mike’s partner, the money man, ran out of cash.

Mike Tyson, who once seemed destined to die a sordid death at a young age, has reinvented himself and is doing well. All of his misdeeds and tribulations from his fighting days have been swept under the rug and now the erstwhile Baddest Man On The Planet is almost cuddly (if one can get past the marijuana haze). And Steve Lott is also doing well.

Big Fights Inc. owned the rights to more than 17,000 boxing films, including many antiquarian films that were rescued and restored. Cayton sold the library to ESPN for $73 million but with the stipulation that he or his heirs could continue to display the films, but only within the confines of a Boxing Hall of Fame.

Cayton died on Oct. 4, 2003. His son Brian became the beneficiary of Cayton’s largess. In 2010, Steve Lott was named the President of the Boxing Hall of Fame Las Vegas and began to concentrate on social media to bring the Hall to the attention of the boxing world.

For a time, the World Boxing Hall of Fame Las Vegas had a brick-and-mortar location inside the Luxor Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip where it was part of an attraction called Score!, a multi-sports interactive exhibit with memorabilia associated with legends of various sports provided by various sports’ Hall of Fame and by private collectors. Score! opened in December of 2012 but its lease wasn’t renewed and Lott’s “Hall” now exists as a web site on key social media sites such as Facebook, youtube, linkedin, twitter, and Instagram.

Lott says that the Boxing Hall of Fame Las Vegas gets more views on Facebook than all the other sports’ Hall of Fame combined. So much for the notion that boxing is a dying sport.

Editor’s Note: The Boxing Hall of Fame – Las Vegas is working with a new high-end social media company named Official Boxing Odds that specializes in boxing media and will be integrating the entire Boxing Hall of Fame library of video and photographs in all of their social media platforms.

Tyson/Lott photo compliments of Steve Lott

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Arne K. Lang

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

3 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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