It’s Mike Tyson’s birthday today, but he’ll never have a party as crazy as the one thrown to celebrate his 30th – where the guest list included Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z and 19 “lady suitors”.
Ahead of the lavish bash, Iron Mike admitted he “spent a fortune flying in friends from all over the country and putting them all up in a nearby hotel” in his autobiography, Undisputed Truth.
“We had 13 different chefs, each one cooking in their own kitchen. Everyone from Oprah to Donald Trump to Jay-Z to street pimps and their hos were there. There was a guy hand-rolling cigars,” Tyson recalls.
“You entered the house on an actual red carpet. Once you got past the 40 big Fruit of Islam bodyguards stationed outside.
“I was so egomaniacal that I reserved the 19 bedrooms in my house for girls who I wanted to sleep with. I actually told Crocodile, ‘See all these girls? They’re mine.’”
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Tyson isn’t exaggerating his number of bedrooms. His sprawling Connecticut mansion, which was later bought by 50 Cent, boasted 52 rooms in total.
That said, even 1990s Iron Mike wasn’t quite crazy enough to have a real-life crocodile attend his party. The reptile he refers to is Steve ‘Crocodile’ Fitch, a close member of the boxer’s entourage.
By 1996, Tyson was sliding off the rails. He’d been released from prison, defeated Frank Bruno to regain his WBC heavyweight title but admits: “Now that I had my belt back, my grandiosity began to stomp all over my humbleness.”
Hence the extravagant 30th-birthday celebration, just 69 days before his scheduled fight against Bruce Seldon. Tyson also moved out Hope, a woman he was seeing at the time, just to make room for his would-be conquests.
“Hope was pissed at me,” he says, possibly with a level of understatement. “She had been staying at the house, but I moved her out and put her up at the hotel so the room would be available for one of my lady suitors.
“She was hurt. Hope was an extremely attractive woman and the girls I was sleeping with were nowhere near her stature.
“[Hope told me] ‘Mike, this woman you’re bringing in is just so atrocious and unclean, she’s going to dirty my bed. You’re gonna have to burn the mattress if she sleeps on the bed.’
Sound advice, although 19 is a lot of mattresses to burn if things had gone to plan.
With such an expensive and, frankly, barking mad birthday party less than 10 weeks before he took on Seldon, it’s no surprise that Tyson says he “hardly trained for that fight”.
Fortunately for the birthday boy, his rival lived down to Tyson’s assessment that: “I didn’t think much of Seldon as an opponent; he wasn’t much of a competitor.”
Seldon, seemingly frozen with fear, went down to punches that did not – to the untrained eye – seem particularly hard. Within two minutes of the first round, Tyson had added the WBA belt to his WBC version.
“I had fought eight rounds since getting out of jail and I had earned $80 million,” Tyson recalls of his first four fights post-prison.
At least enough to cover the next few birthday parties, you would hope.
