Mike Tyson interview: There is nothing nice about me – I am not a nice person

It is the word “nice” that truly sets Mike Tyson’s teeth on edge. He has heard it suggested that he is cultivating a nice-guy image in his dotage, that his industrial cannabis habit is turning him into a blissed-out grandfather, and he wishes to correct the record. “There’s nothing nice about me,” he says. “I’m not a nice person. I’m a decent person in that I try to do the right thing, but a nice person I am not. Anybody coming in under the impression that I’m nice is going to be disappointed.”

He almost spits the words, albeit in that incongruously high-pitched lisp. You wonder how much of this is pantomime, given his “baddest man on the planet” brand is being sweated for all it is worth ahead of his inter-generational bout with YouTuber Jake Paul. But the savage scowl on his face, warning against the wisdom of dissent, indicates the sentiment is genuine. “I don’t make people happy just for no reason. I’m just who I am. I’m not trying to gain friends, that’s basically what I’m saying. I don’t want to make friends with you, I don’t care if you don’t put me on your boat or your yacht, I don’t give a f---. I’m never going to be nice to anybody. I’ll be kind, but never nice.”

Much as it might pain him to acknowledge it, just a few days out from fighting an influencer born in the same year as his eldest son, Tyson can convince as a more sympathetic figure. He has waxed lyrical about his love of pigeons, claiming they were an escape from the bullying he suffered as a child for being overweight. He took part in a TV life-swap experiment with a male nurse from Michigan, becoming visibly moved at the struggles of those without medical insurance. And despite the unfathomable tragedy in 2009 of his four-year-old daughter Exodus, who died after being strangled by a cord attached to a treadmill, he found the inner strength not to succumb to addiction or despair.

Tyson has not boxed seriously for 19 years, since an unedifying defeat by journeyman Kevin McBride. He was so washed up it was painful to watch, lamenting that he had lost all passion for the sport and vowing to become a missionary. “My whole life has been a waste,” he mourned then. “I’ve been a failure. I just want to escape.” It is this backdrop that makes his duel with Paul in Dallas on Friday night so contentious. If he was a husk of his former self at 38, what possible logic is there in staggering back into the ring at 58, against an opponent of 27?

The most obvious rationale is financial, with Tyson poised to earn £15 million from this lurid experiment. Still, his estimated net worth of £10 million – a fraction, admittedly, of the £250 million fortune he acquired in his pomp – hardly equates to destitution. Denying any monetary incentive, he says that the conversion back to a merciless psyche has been seamless, that he craves the thrill of punching someone in the mouth again. “It just happened. I’ve been through some spiritual experiences in my life, and things changed for the better in my life, so I wanted to anticipate being involved in fighting again.”

As such, he is back to hawking a more vicious, vengeful persona, bristling at any intimations that he has mellowed. “Being a nice guy is looking for friends, going out of your way to make someone happy. I’m not going to go out of my way to kiss somebody’s ass just so that they have a great day, I’m not that guy. To neglect yourself for someone else’s happiness? I’m not going to do that. You understand that now, don’t you?”

Not quite. But then little about the absurd vaudeville unfolding in Texas makes much sense. The instinct is to condemn it, to argue that a greying Tyson – known to a younger audience less by his Eighties knockouts than by his cameo in The Hangover – is reckless even to take on a novice young fighter who, by basic laws of biology, will surpass him for stamina. Even Eddie Hearn, who would be happy selling igloos to the Inuit, calls the spectacle a “disgrace”. “That’s Eddie’s opinion,” replies Tyson, unamused. “That’s all I can say.”

For those worried about his welfare, Billy White, the trainer who studied under Tyson’s mentor Cus D’Amato, is adamant his student is looking 25 years old again. Then again, the videos of him sparring in camp are only a few seconds long. Quite how he will cope over eight two-minute rounds is the unknown. But he seeks to reassure. When I ask if he feels he is rediscovering his lost youth, he says: “Regardless of how old I am, this guy only has 10 fights. If I only fight at 10 per cent, he can’t match that. And that’s being sincere.”

There are elements of Tyson, perhaps the most mythologised boxer alive, that remain unutterably bleak. Many of his comments about women have been loathsome. In a 1989 book by Jose Torres, the former light-heavyweight champion to whom he was once close, he was quoted as saying he liked to hurt women during sex and that the best punch he ever threw was at his ex-wife Robin Givens. He served three years in an Indiana prison for raping Desiree Washington, a beauty pageant contestant, in 1992. When I interviewed him in 2013, the meeting had to take place in Paris, since the conviction meant he was still barred from entering the UK.

All of this tends to be soft-soaped whenever he appears on chat shows. The clemency comes partly from his insistence that he has changed, but also from the brutality of his upbringing, or lack of it. Tyson had an alcoholic and a pimp for parents. By the time he was six his notion of a prank was to slash his older brother’s arm while he slept.

There is no more poignant scene in the Netflix documentary on his latest fight than when he returns to the benighted streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn, to the flat where he grew up without heating and with whatever food his mother could borrow. “Sometimes I think I’m somebody,” he reflects. “But when I go through that door I realise I’m nobody.”

His is a tale infinitely more compelling than that of Paul, a straight-to-social-media sensation so entitled that he has been the subject of numerous public nuisance complaints by his Los Angeles neighbours. It is why Tyson, having left his more hedonistic days behind, will be the crowd favourite this week.

Has he, I wonder, found peace in his life now? “I’m never content, so I guess I don’t have peace. I definitely have more responsibilities. I don’t know, it’s all more practical than it was before. I have kids, I have a wife, I have chores. I have things to do. When I was champion I had nothing of substance to do. Partying, drinking, women, talking s---. There was no substance back then.”

You question whether he will find the contentment he craves against a publicity-seeker like Paul. But millions who cling to the memory of Tyson as he was – the “natural-born killer”, as he puts it – are sure to want to find out.