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The Year 1988 Was a Fateful Year in the Lives of Mike Tyson and Steve Lott
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 âburbs, graduating at age 15, had majored in drama at Sarah Lawrence College, and was a cast member of âHead of the Class,â 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. Thereâs an old saying that an alluring woman (Iâm 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. âShe conned Mike into marrying her by saying she was pregnant,â says Lott, a remonstration made by many others. As to her insistence that she wasnât 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. âA few days later,â says Lott, âhe 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.â
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 Mikeâs purses and, moreover, make it retroactive so that Cayton couldnât collect his share of the purse for the Tyson-Spinks fight. âMike had no idea that Robin was doing that,â says Lott. âIn fact, Mike had actually met with Cayton the day before the fight to ask Billâs advice about starting a new merchandise business with a friend of his.â
The lawsuit triggered a Price Waterhouse audit of Caytonâs books. The examiners found that Mike had actually been overpaid.
âRobin didnât have the assets to sue Cayton,â says Steve Lott. âDonald 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.â
Cayton was still legally Mikeâs 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 Mikeâs 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 Trumpâs press agent Howard Rubenstein. Trump had ponied up an $11 million site fee to host the Tyson-Spinks fight (Boardwalk Hall was tethered to Trumpâs 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 âwaging a campaign to publicly humiliate him, strip him of his manhood and his dignity.â
The catalyst was the Sept. 30 edition of the popular ABC show â20/20â wherein Givens and Tyson were interviewed by Barbara Walters. On the show, Givens said that although she still loved Michael, their marriage was a âliving hellâ 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.
âThe charge that Mike was manic-depressive was BS,â says Steve Lott. âBill Cayton hired the top psychiatrist in New York (Abraham Halpern) to examine Mike and he determined that Mike wasnât and had never been manic-depressive.â
Six weeks before his appearance on â20/20,â Mike cracked a bone in his left hand in a street fight with former opponent Mitch âBloodâ Green. The altercation happened at 4:30 am on a Tuesday morning in front of Dapper Danâs, 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 didnât become a loose cannon until after the last remnants of his original team were purged from his life. The feral child that Cus DâAmato and Jim Jacobs had supposedly molded into a solid citizen was still very much a work in progress.
Lott demurs. âWhen I was with Mike, he never did anything inappropriate,â he says. âDon King and his people undid all the great things that Cus did.â
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 (âIt takes a bigger person than me to be a New York City cop,â 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 Tysonâs co-manager, Lott says, âwe didnât realize how vulnerable Mike was.â
âVulnerabilityâ is about as far as Lott will go in touching on the flaws in Tysonâs character. âHe showed me many kindnesses when we were together. He will always be my friend.â 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. âI told Mike, you donât have to go back to Bill Cayton, but please donât sign with Don King.â 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 hasnât 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 Tysonâs first marriage, going belly-up when Mikeâs 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 Caytonâs 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 sportsâ Hall of Fame and by private collectors. Score! opened in December of 2012 but its lease wasnât renewed and Lottâs âHallâ 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 sportsâ Hall of Fame combined. So much for the notion that boxing is a dying sport.
Editorâs Note: The Boxing Hall of Fame â 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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Usyk Outpoints Fury and Itauma has the âWow Factorâ in Riyadh
Usyk Outpoints Fury and Itauma has the âWow Factorâ in Riyadh
Oleksandr Usyk left no doubt that he is the best heavyweight of his generation and one of the greatest boxers of all time with a unanimous decision over Tyson Fury tonight at Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. But although the Ukrainian won eight rounds on all three scorecards, this was no runaway. To pirate a line from one of the DAZN talking heads, Fury had his moments in every round but Usyk had more moments.
The early rounds were fought at a faster pace than the first meeting back in May. At the mid-point, the fight was even. The next three rounds â the next five to some observers â were all Usyk who threw more punches and landed the cleaner shots.
Fury won the final round in the eyes of this reporter scoring at home, but by then he needed a knockout to pull the match out of the fire.
The last round was an outstanding climax to an entertaining chess match during which both fighters took turns being the pursuer and the pursued.
An Olympic gold medalist and a unified world champion at cruiserweight and heavyweight, the amazing Usyk improved his ledger to 23-0 (14). His next fight, more than likely, will come against the winner of the Feb. 22 match in Ridayh between Daniel Dubois and Joseph Parker which will share the bill with the rematch between Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol.
Fury (34-2-1) may fight Anthony Joshua next. Regardless, no one wants a piece of Moses Itauma right now although the kid is only 19 years old.
Moses Itauma
Raised in London by a Nigerian father and a Slovakian mother, Itauma turned heads once again with another âwowâ performance. None of his last seven opponents lasted beyond the second round.
His opponent tonight, 34-year-old Australian Demsey McKean, lasted less than two minutes. Itauma, a southpaw with blazing fast hands, had the Aussie on the deck twice during the 117-second skirmish. The first knockdown was the result of a cuffing punch that landed high on the head; the second knockdown was produced by an overhand left. McKean went down hard as his chief cornerman bounded on to the ring apron to halt the massacre.
Itauma (12-0, 10 KOs after going 20-0 as an amateur) is the real deal. It was the second straight loss for McKean (22-2) who lasted into the 10th round against Filip Hrgovic in his last start.
Bohachuk-Davis
In a fight billed as the co-main although it preceded Itauma-McKean, Serhii Bohachuk, an LA-based Ukrainian, stopped Ishmael Davis whose corner pulled him out after six frames.
Both fighters were coming off a loss in fights that were close on the scorecards, Bohachuk falling to Vergil Ortiz Jr in a Las Vegas barnburner and Davis losing to Josh Kelly.
Davis, who took the fight on short notice, subbing for Ismail Madrimov, declined to 13-2. He landed a few good shots but was on the canvas in the second round, compliments of a short left hook, and the relentless Bohachuk (25-2, 24 KOs) eventually wore him down.
Fisher-Allen
In a messy, 10-round bar brawl masquerading as a boxing match, Johnny Fisher, the Romford Bull, won a split decision over British countryman David Allen. Two judges favored Fisher by 95-94 tallies with the dissenter favoring Allen 96-93. When the scores were announced, there was a chorus of boos and those watching at home were outraged.
Allen was a step up in class for Fisher. The Doncaster man had a decent record (23-5-2 heading in) and had been routinely matched tough (his former opponents included Dillian Whyte, Luis âKing Kongâ Ortiz and three former Olympians). But Allen was fairly considered no more than a journeyman and Fisher (12-0 with 11 KOs, eight in the opening round) was a huge favorite.
In round five, Allen had Fisher on the canvas twice although only one was ruled a true knockdown. From that point, he landed the harder shots and, at the final bell, he fell to canvas shedding tears of joy, convinced that he had won.
He did not win, but he exposed Johnny Fisher as a fighter too slow to compete with elite heavyweights, a British version of the ponderous Russian-Canadian campaigner Arslanbek Makhmudov.
Other Bouts of Note
In a spirited 10-round featherweight match, Scotlandâs Lee McGregor, a former European bantamweight champion and stablemate of former unified 140-pound title-holder Josh Taylor, advanced to 15-1-1 (11) with a unanimous decision over Isaac Lowe (25-3-3). The judges had it 96-92 and 97-91 twice.
A cousin and regular houseguest of Tyson Fury, Lowe fought most of the fight with cuts around both eyes and was twice deducted a point for losing his gumshield.
In a fight between super featherweights that could have gone either way, Liverpool southpaw Peter McGrail improved to 11-1 (6) with a 10-round unanimous decision over late sub Rhys Edwards. The judges had it 96-95 and 96-94 twice.
McGrail, a Tokyo Olympian and 2018 Commonwealth Games gold medalist, fought from the third round on with a cut above his right eye, the result of an accidental clash of heads. It was the first loss for Edwards (16-1), a 24-year-old Welshman who has another fight booked in three weeks.
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Fury-Usyk Reignited: Can the Gypsy King Avenge his Lone Defeat?
Fury-Usyk Reignited: Can the Gypsy King Avenge his Lone Defeat?
In professional boxing, the heavyweight division, going back to the days of John L. Sullivan, is the straw that stirs the drink. By this measure, the fight on May 18 of this year at Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was the biggest prizefight in decades. The winner would emerge as the first undisputed heavyweight champion since 1999 when Lennox Lewis out-pointed Evander Holyfield in their second meeting.
The match did not disappoint. It had several twists and turns.
Usyk did well in the early rounds, but the Gypsy King rattled Usyk with a harsh right hand in the fifth stanza and won rounds five through seven on all three cards. In the ninth, the match turned sharply in favor of the Ukrainian. Fury was saved by the bell after taking a barrage of unanswered punches, the last of which dictated a standing 8-count from referee Mark Nelson. But Fury weathered the storm and with his amazing powers of recuperation had a shade the best of it in the final stanza.
The decision was split: 115-112 and 114-113 for Usyk who became a unified champion in a second weight class; 114-113 for Fury.
That brings us to tomorrow (Saturday, Dec. 21) where Usyk and Fury will renew acquaintances in the same ring where they had their May 18 showdown.
The first fight was a near âpick-âemâ affair with Fury closing a very short favorite at most of the major bookmaking establishments. The Gypsy King would have been a somewhat higher favorite if not for the fact that he was coming off a poor showing against MMA star Francis Ngannou and had a worrisome propensity for getting cut. (A cut above Furyâs right eye in sparring pushed back the fight from its original Feb. 11 date.)
Tomorrowâs sequel, bearing the tagline âReignited,â finds Usyk a consensus 7/5 favorite although those odds could shorten by post time. (There was no discernible activity after todayâs weigh-in where Fury, fully clothed, topped the scales at 281, an increase of 19 pounds over their first meeting.)
Given the politics of boxing, anything âundisputedâ is fragile. In June, Usyk abandoned his IBF belt and the organization anointed Daniel Dubois their heavyweight champion based upon Duboisâs eighth-round stoppage of Filip Hrgovic in a bout billed for the IBF interim title. The malodorous WBA, a festering boil on the backside of boxing, now recognizes 43-year-old Kubrat Pulev as its âregularâ heavyweight champion.
Another difference between tomorrowâs fight card and the first installment is that the May 18 affair had a much stronger undercard. Two strong pairings were the rematch between cruiserweights Jai Opetaia and Maris Briedis (Opetaia UD 12) and the heavyweight contest between unbeatens Agit Kabayal and Frank Sanchez (Kabayel KO 7).
Tomorrowâs semi-wind-up between Serhii Bohachuk and Ismail Madrimov lost luster when Madrimov came down with bronchitis and had to withdraw. The featherweight contest between Peter McGrail and Dennis McCann fell out when McCannâs VADA test returned an adverse finding. Bohachuk and McGrail remain on the card but against late-sub opponents in matches that are less intriguing.
The focal points of tomorrowâs undercard are the bouts involving undefeated British heavyweights Moses Itauma (10-0, 8 KOs) and Johnny Fisher (12-0, 11 KOs). Both are heavy favorites over their respective opponents but bear watching because they represent the next generation of heavyweight standouts. Fury and Usyk are getting long in the tooth. The Gypsy King is 36; Usyk turns 38 next month.
Bob Arum once said that nobody purchases a pay-per-view for the undercard and, years from now, no one will remember which sanctioning bodies had their fingers in the pie. So, Fury-Usyk II remains a very big deal, although a wee bit less compelling than their first go-around.
Will Tyson Fury avenge his lone defeat? Turki Alalshikh, the Chairman of Saudi Arabiaâs General Entertainment Authority and the unofficial czar of âmajor leagueâ boxing, certainly hopes so. His Excellency has made known that he stands poised to manufacture a rubber match if Tyson prevails.
We could have already figured this out, but Alalshikh violated one of the protocols of boxing when he came flat out and said so. He effectively made Tyson Fury the âA-side,â no small potatoes considering that the most relevant variable on the checklist when handicapping a fight is, âWho does the promoter need?â
The Uzyk-Fury II fight card will air on DAZN with a suggested list price of $39.99 for U.S. fight fans. The main event is expected to start about 5:45 pm ET / 2:45 pm PT.
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Unheralded Bruno Surace went to Tijuana and Forged the TSS 2024 Upset of the Year
Unheralded Bruno Surace went to Tijuana and Forged the TSS 2024 Upset of the Year
The Dec. 14 fight at Tijuana between Jaime Munguia and Bruno Surace was conceived as a stay-busy fight for Munguia. The scuttlebutt was that Munguiaâs promoters, Zanfer and Top Rank, wanted him to have another fight under his belt before thrusting him against Christian Mbilli in a WBC eliminator with the prize for the winner (in theory) a date with Canelo Alvarez.
Munguia came to the fore in May of 2018 at Verona, New York, when he demolished former U.S. Olympian Sadam Ali, conqueror of Miguel Cotto. That earned him the WBO super welterweight title which he successfully defended five times.
Munguia kept winning as he moved up in weight to middleweight and then super middleweight and brought a 43-0 (34) record into his Cinco de Mayo 2024 match with Canelo.
Jaime went the distance with Alvarez and had a few good moments while losing a unanimous decision. He rebounded with a 10th-round stoppage of Canadaâs previously undefeated Erik Bazinyan.
There was little reason to think that Munguia would overlook Surace as the Mexican would be fighting in his hometown for the first time since February of 2022 and would want to send the home folks home happy. Moreover, even if Munguia had an off-night, there was no reason to think that the obscure Surace could capitalize. A Frenchman who had never fought outside France, Â Surace brought a 25-0-2 record and a 22-fight winning streak, but he had only four knockouts to his credit and only eight of his wins had come against opponents with winning records.
It appeared that Munguia would close the show early when he sent the Frenchman to the canvas in the second round with a big left hook. From that point on, Surace fought mostly off his back foot, throwing punches in spurts, whereas the busier Munguia concentrated on chopping him down with body punches. But Surace absorbed those punches well and at the midway point of the fight, behind on the cards but nonplussed, it now looked as if the bout would go the full 10 rounds with Munguia winning a lopsided decision.
Then lightning struck. Out of the blue, Surace connected with an overhand right to the jaw. Munguia went down flat on his back. He rose a fraction-of-a second before the count reached â10,â, but stumbled as he pulled himself upright. His eyes were glazed and referee Juan Jose Ramirez, a local man, waived it off. There was no protest coming from Munguia or his cornermen. The official time was 2:36 of round six.
At major bookmaking establishments, Jaime Munguia was as high as a 35/1 favorite. No world title was at stake, yet this was an upset for the ages.
Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank
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