WRATH

Mike Tyson is on the clock, and always has been on the clock. It's either been three minutes (for boxing) or 50 minutes (for psychotherapy) or three years (for prison) or a split second (until his next temper tantrum), but he knows he's going to "blow" someday and we know he's going to "blow" someday, and someone not wearing a badge had better intervene. Maybe it'll be his bodyguard, or the "middle-aged Jewish man," or his live-in doctor or the white trainer, but Mike Tyson can't decide if he trusts one of them or none of them, and he has a finite amount of time to figure it out.

He always intended to box again, whether Nevada licensed him or not, but he did not always intend to face up to his anger -- or distrust, or paranoia, or hatred, or insecurity or whatever else Mass General came up with. And he still may not. He told those Mass General psychiatrists, two of whom he had angry confrontations with, that he can clearly recollect his childhood. But if that is the case, then Mike Tyson needs to remember his other name: Kirkpatrick.

At least, his father's name was Kirkpatrick. This is the same father who left him, who never spent a dime on him. This is the same father who drove Cadillacs, who died of a heart attack when Tyson was in an Indiana prison and whom Tyson remembers as a "pimp." And this is the same father who Mike Tyson never bitches about. The truth is, Mike Tyson knows his father's name was Kirkpatrick and he has even said to people, "Don't you know I'm Irish?" This is why he would name his dogs after obscure Gaelic fighters, and why, as a 20-year-old, he had one desperate question for someone who had just seen his father: "What's he look like?"

Tyson and his father eventually met in 1991, and, as Tyson said in a recent interview with Playboy, "He was always trying to explain what happened between him and my mother, but I wasn't interested. By that time, I'd been through a relationship and had children and realized that people just don't get along sometimes. And sometimes kids suffer. It just happens. I always loved my father. I never held anything against him."

So this is the genesis of a temper. Mike Tyson was abandoned by his father and now talks daily about being abandoned again, or betrayed again, or wronged again. It is always the first thing out of his mouth. But he won't blame his father. He blames everyone else instead. Everybody in his entourage walks on eggshells -- he fires them, hires them, fires them, hires them.

"I don't know what makes him so angry," says Luther Mack, the only black man on the Nevada State Athletic Commission, the five-member board that held the key to Tyson's boxing future. "He tells doctors, 'I feel like hitting you.' He said that to a psychiatrist! Look at how volatile he is. That may be the real Tyson. You ask him hard questions and he gets upset. He uses the F-word. He takes everything personal. Well, he needs to be responsible for his own actions now. Enough is enough. He doesn't need attorneys, he needs a friend. Someone he doesn't pay who can say what they think."

So, again, we wheel out the candidates: the bodyguard, the "middle-aged Jewish man," the live-in doctor, the white trainer. Or nobody at all.

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ENVY

Growing up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, reading was unfundamental. The smart kids were ridiculed and the rough kids were lionized. Mike Tyson had a choice to make. School lost.

He had his initiation when he was about 10. The story goes that another boy had ripped the head off one of Tyson's pet pigeons and Tyson beat him up over it -- and an uppercut was born. There were setbacks, of course, like when he was knocked unconscious by a baseball bat and another time by a brick, but he lived to tell about it -- and to meet his second father.

His name was Cus D'Amato, an eccentric and bitter older white man who took Tyson out of reform school in the 10th grade, took him to his home in Catskill, N.Y., and adopted him. Boxing was the only language spoken in that home. D'Amato taught him the history of the sport, and these boxers were the people Mike Tyson vowed to emulate: John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey and Sonny Liston. It was because of Dempsey that Tyson wore no robe and taupe trunks into the ring, and it was because of Sonny Liston that he began to envy fighters with police blotters, fighters who would walk down the street and see women and children scatter. That was the kind of man he wanted to be, and if he respected anybody, he respected them. He was calling D'Amato "Dad" by then, and when D'Amato died in 1985 -- and yet another father had left him -- Tyson cried and asked to be a pallbearer at the funeral. But D'Amato's lessons had been learned: Respect anyone who speaks with his fists.

About two months ago, Tyson was introduced to an older white man named Jesse Reid, who was auditioning to be his new trainer. He was showing the fighter how to be more of an unhittable object in the ring and how to fight from an angle, when he was suddenly interrupted. A man named Tom Patti, who last boxed 20 years ago at D'Amato's house, barged into the ring and said Reid wasn't using Cus' methods. And Tyson listened. Even though Patti had never trained a fighter in his life, Tyson considered him an authority. Why? Because he was from the streets, because he'd boxed once and because he'd lived in Cus' house.

So Reid left Tyson's camp, angry. The next day, Tyson ran into Reid and hugged him and kissed him on the cheek -- "Shocked me," Reid says. "I mean, he kissed me" -- and asked him to please come back. "Mike said, 'Just come along for the ride,' " Reid says. "He said, 'Even if you can't help me get better, be my trainer.' I said I can't do that. But I think he feels that everyone's there for the ride, and he can't trust them. But he's trying. When he first met me, he said, 'Don't abandon me. Don't leave me. I know I'm hard to work with, but just try.' "

Oh well. One potential mentor down ... three to go.
***

SLOTH

Tyson had been a diligent worker up until he unified the heavyweight crown at the age of 21. But after that, he would booze it up at night and spend his hangovers watching martial arts videos or gangster films. His new life required bodyguards. He's had more than two dozen of them, but only one has persevered. His name is Anthony Pitts, and he's been with Tyson from the beginning, and he is the only bodyguard who went to visit Mike in prison.

There was something about him that Tyson liked. Pitts used to cut hair in a previous job -- a 6'3'', 260-pound hairstylist -- and he used to cut Tyson's hair, too. When Tyson was in prison, Pitts went to work for Magic Johnson, but when Tyson was released, Pitts went back to work for him. "Mike feels a closeness to him," says a Tyson insider.

Bad habits die hard, and even though he converted to Islam in prison, Tyson has been back partying again. He told a visitor last month, "I've got a crazy crew around me; they've made a lot of mistakes, but I love 'em. I like to drink and party, what can I say. One side of me is a jet-setter and one part of me knows I'll lose what I've got if I don't get in there training harder." But the bodyguard finally said something. Insiders say Pitts told Tyson to tone it down. And the boxer listened -- or at least he didn't say no.

***

LUST

Tyson may deny he raped Desiree Washington, but he has more or less admitted that he and women are not on the same wavelength. He has been accused of groping and exploiting women as far back as his days living with D'Amato.

"I came from a dysfunctional household," Tyson told a magazine called TRACE in August. "Crazy s--, like your mother's boyfriend trying to [molest] your sister. Or your mother getting [beaten up by her boyfriend] and as soon as the guy brings back some liquor and cigarettes, they're best friends again. You know what I mean? You never forget that kind of stuff."

It turns out that he and his mother, Lorna Tyson, met again, after he'd been living with D'Amato for a while. She was dying of cancer, and he walked into the hospital and saw flies buzzing all around the room and he pulled the covers over her and fled. "Never went back again," he says. "I just partied every night." No one called him when she died in 1981 at age 68, nor did he want them to call. Then, in 1990, when his 24-year-old sister, Denise, died of a heart attack, there were no pertinent women left in his life. His relationships became more about lust than love, and countless women found the way he approached them obscene. One thing about Tyson: He was never subtle.

Robin Givens entered and exited -- though not without a bloody nose -- and there was the rape conviction in Indianapolis. And now, there is his pediatrician wife. Her name is Monica Turner, and she married Tyson in 1997, a couple of years after his release from prison. They are raising several children together -- he in favor of spanking them and she against it. She was once married to a cocaine dealer, but living the life of Tyson has apparently shocked her.

He told the Mass General shrinks she has been embarrassed by his behavior, and he has admitted to difficulties in the marriage. "It's a very rare thing for me to be sticking around, changing diapers, telling kids to be quiet or rocking a child to bed," he told TRACE. "That's all unchartered waters to me."

For the moment, she's an adviser to him and they are still together -- a sign that maybe he listens to her from time to time.

***

AVARICE

He owes the IRS $13 million, which is the main reason he needs to fight again. But to hear him talk, he is not at all about greed, though he owns four homes and has Harley-Davidsons for every day of the week. The truth is, Tyson has given struggling fighters like Iran Barkley money out of the blue, and he recently tried to help Roberto Duran stay afloat. He has sinned in other ways, but not with his money. He gives away BMWs to mere acquaintances, and he barely reads the fine print on contracts, which is why Don King and co-managers John Horne and Rory Holloway were allegedly able to fleece him.

He also never made Givens sign the prenuptial agreement he had drawn up -- "I was 21, rich and stupid," he says -- and he foolishly let his 61-room Connecticut mansion be purchased in Holloway's name. He thought the owners would overcharge if they knew Mike Tyson was the buyer, so he let Holloway be his front man. But this is the house he wants to leave to his children, so there are legal wranglings.

Nevertheless, giving away money is the most viable way for Tyson to make people like him, and he knows it and he's been warned about it. These are the kinds of things he talks to the "middle-aged Jewish man" about.

***

PRIDE

His name is Dr. Richard Goldberg, and he is chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School. Tyson admits he was initially "a little apprehensive about expressing my thoughts to a middle-aged Jewish man." But he has since warmed to Goldberg, who is apparently helping him understand why he still blurts out in public, "I'll kill Holyfield. I'll kill him."

Actually, it's elementary. Like it or not, Tyson has been adopted mostly by a certain antiestablishment segment of the public that believes he's been jailed and persecuted just like them -- and that he fights for them and only them. It is with that "bad boy" image that he has emerged as a hip-hop icon and purveyor of truth. But whether this is the real Tyson is debatable.

Reid, while training Tyson two months ago, noticed how the boxer would let his public egg him on. "When I first met him, alone, he was just so warm," Reid says. "Just real quiet and calling me Mr. Reid. Real gentlemanly. But he gets excited when these people come around. It's like he gets a high off of his anger, their anger. When he tells a story about himself doing something wrong or how he'll kill Holyfield, he lights up. His eyes light up.

He gets on his toes, he flexes and feels good about himself. But the next minute, he says, 'Jesse, am I fast? Do I still have it?' He questions himself, too. There's confusion."

But Mike Tyson's image has no room for confusion. He could not be head-butted by Evander Holyfield and taste his own blood and do nothing. When Holyfield opened that gash over Tyson's eye in June 1997 -- and referee Mills Lane did nothing about it -- it was Tyson's ego and Tyson's image that led him to do what he did that night: the most vile act in a ring in our time.

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GLUTTONY

What he did was bite Holyfield. It was the end of an ear -- and an era.

This article appears in the November 2, 1998 issue of ESPN The Magazine.