Mike Tyson: All I Once Knew Was How To Hurt People But I've Surrendered Now

"I surrendered," Mike Tyson says simply as the ghosts of his past swarm around us on a hazy winter afternoon in Henderson. We're only a half-hour drive from the jittery Las Vegas Strip but here, on a couch in his office, Tyson sits quietly. He rests his familiar tattooed face in the palm of his hand.

After Muhammad Ali he remains the world's most recognisable boxer, and one of sport's most infamous characters. Yet Tyson looks most like a 47-year-old man trying hard to understand his tumultuous life.

He was once a frightened little boy, beaten often by his mother in a condemned building in Brownsville, Brooklyn, who turned himself into the self-proclaimed baddest man on the planet.

Tyson made and then lost almost a billion dollars as the last great undisputed heavyweight champion of theworld whose controlled fury in the ring was eventually disfigured by madness and violence.

He has had distressing problems with women, been to jail and then imprisoned even more tightly by alcohol and drug addiction.

Now, however, Tyson taps me gently on the arm. "I surrendered to a higher power. I said: 'Help me. I can't do nothing no more. Guide me. God, whoever. I don't know what to do … '"

Tyson has long been a masterful story-teller, with his obvious intelligence and street-hustling mentality producing a spellbinding raconteur, but this is different. He is not spinning a yarn here.

Tyson, instead, is remembering his four-year-old daughter, Exodus, who died during a tragic accident in 2009 . His eyes fill with tears. "I'll never get over it," Tyson says. "I just can't … " Somehow he manages to control his crying, and he wipes his eyes.

"If I wasn't married I'd be very different. I'd still be that violent schmuck because that's all I once knew – how to hurt people.

I used to do all that stuff and I never cared about the repercussions. But I've surrendered now. I was thinking of my daughter when …[he points to his teary gaze] … but I'm just happy I'm not that same person."

Tyson has a way of opening up now that allows the darkness to pour out of him without spreading the carnage that once trailed him wherever he went.

He seems amazed he's still here, in one middle-aged piece. "What's today's date?" he asks, before recalling last Wednesday's milestone. "On the 15th, it was five months since I went straight.

I've been clean five months. I just don't want to do it no more … "Tyson admits in his relentlessly gripping autobiography, Undisputed Truth, that he is a cocaine addict whose recovery was hit by a relapse last summer. "I was sober three years," he says now, "but I wasn't living a sober life. I know guys who don't take drugs for 20 years but they still don't live a sober life.

They're bad, they're manipulative, they're not conscious of other people's feelings. A sober lifestyle needs a sober consciousness. But, still, the concept of happiness is fleeting. I read this book, The History of Happiness, and they go from Homer to Kennedy to Martin Luther King and everybody has a different definition of happiness.

Some people believe happiness is overcoming adversity or getting out of a bad situation. Abstaining from sex and then having sex is happiness to someone else. It's so weird." He said...



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