Mike Tyson Searches for the Meaning of Life in a Netflix Documentary
Netflix's Tyson series finds the root of the champion's rage: he won the world for a mother and a mentor who died before they could see it. Hollywood's legends learned the same lesson.
Mike Tyson had everything a man could want at 20. He was the youngest heavyweight champion in history, crowned in Las Vegas on 22 November 1986. Then came the money, about $300 million over his career, along with 26 luxury cars, mansions, women and the adoration of fans on every continent. And he was miserable. Tyson, Floyd Russ’s four-part Netflix series, which arrived on 13 October, finally explains why.
The answer lies in two graves.
Two empty seats at ringside
The boy from Brownsville worshipped his mother, Lorna, and wanted above all to impress her. She died when he was 16, before he had thrown a single punch as a professional. His world collapsed, and the success he was chasing lost its purpose. He found a father in Cus D’Amato, the old trainer who took him in, taught him to box and promised him the world. D’Amato died on 4 November 1985, a year before his fighter took the title.
The series lands its heaviest punch outside the ring. On the night Tyson became champion, the rich and famous of America were celebrating him. A journalist found him alone in the hotel bar, slumped beside his new belt. When asked what was wrong, Tyson said it was all meaningless. He had won it for his mother and for Cus, and neither of them was there to see it.
That emptiness turned into rage, and the rage turned into a show. The world loathed his outbursts and devoured them in equal measure, and Tyson gave the crowd more of the monster it paid to see. “I am a product,” he keeps saying in the series. Everyone around him treated him as one and made a fortune from it while the man inside was tormented. He craved love and could not hold on to it. His marriage to Robin Givens ended in public acrimony.
A convicted rapist, and still a bestseller
In 1992 he was convicted of raping Desiree Washington, an 18-year-old beauty pageant contestant, and sentenced to six years. He has always denied the crime, and critics have faulted the series for letting him and his friends pass over it too lightly. What the series does show is how little the conviction dented the product. Before he had even walked out of prison, he was being offered $400 million to keep fighting. Within a week of his release in March 1995, the MGM Grand had a six-fight deal and Showtime a multiyear contract to sell him on pay-per-view.
He came out angry, and he took it out on whoever stood in front of him. His comeback against Peter McNeeley in August 1995 lasted 89 seconds, earned him $25 million and drew a then-record $63 million in pay-per-view sales. In the series he describes his return as revenge for the injustice he believed he had suffered. By 2003 he was bankrupt.
The gentle giant in Beverly Hills
When I met Tyson in Beverly Hills in November 2013, I walked in with the same prejudice as everybody else. I expected a scary, uncontrollable brute. Behind that massive frame I found a gentle creature. He spoke softly, giggled and had the manner of a child. The series captures that same man.
He was also very sad, and at the time I could not work out why. He spoke about his younger self as a stranger. “This guy doesn’t exist in this world,” he told me in that interview. “I don’t have happy memories from childhood,” he said, laughing. He confessed to times when he grew tired of living: “I always get tired and tired of being in pain.”
He remembered going home, full of D’Amato’s lessons, to tell his mother he would be the greatest fighter in the world. “And she couldn’t understand that. But that’s all right, that’s my mother and I love her.” The champion who had won everything defined success in the humblest terms: “Success for me is not going to prison, not dying in the streets, not cheating on my wife, and leaving my kids.”
Watching the series, the source of that sadness becomes clear. The belts were love letters to two people who could no longer read them.
What Hollywood’s kings learned
Tyson’s lesson is the one I heard again and again in Hollywood, from people who have every prize the industry can give. In interview after interview, the stars told me that their happiness came from their families and the people they love.
Al Pacino and Michael Douglas both told me they regretted the years they spent stressing about career and success when they were young. As they grew older, they said, they realised that all of it was meaningless, and that love and family are what matter. Douglas leaned on his family when he was fighting throat cancer in 2010, as he told UKScreen during the release of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
Ridley Scott has spent half a century asking the biggest questions on screen. He has explored history, science, space, religion and the future, and in Prometheus he sent a spaceship across the galaxy to find the beings who made us. So I asked him whether he had found the meaning of life. His answer was his family and his loved ones.
Tyson ends with its subject a father and a husband, still searching. The series closes with Russ and Tyson taking a dose of toad venom together, a last attempt to find on a psychedelic trip what the belts never gave him. The answer was there all along, in that hotel bar in 1986: the two people he fought for were gone, and no crowd could fill their seats.
More on UKScreen
Most read on UKScreen
Get the best of UKScreen by email
New stories, reviews and interviews from the archive, straight to your inbox.