Former boxing champion Mike Tyson had formed a close bond with current US President Donald Trump after fighting Michael Spinks at the Trump Hotel in 1988.
After winning the fight in 91 seconds, Tyson dropped coach Bill Cayton and hired Trump as his “chief strategist”. Trump has publicly cast on his new friend, telling reporters Mike knew how to use “fear and indignation as a psychological weapon,” according to a report by Chris Ayres in April on the issue of the British GQ. Ayres even goes so far as to suggest Trump’s mockery and intimidation tactics that ultimately earned him the keys to Iron Mike’s White House.
Mike said things like, “when I hit him, he shouted like a woman” or “I wanted to push his bone back into his brain,” Trump wrote in his 1990 memoir, Surviving At The Top. “He [Tyson ed.] hoped that the reporters would print his outrageous remarks and that his next opponent would read them and become a beaten man.”
Trump noted how the press played along because such extravagant comments are getting notes and sell newspapers “like nothing else”. The same weapons used by Trump during his race in the United States, crushing Republican rivals, and Hillary Clinton with a barrage of insults.
Although it was said that Tyson had a “troubling air”, novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote that he was also compassionate and intelligent. And the difference between Trump, the privileged son of a millionaire, and Tyson, a fatherless ex-criminal raised by an abusive mother in a Brooklyn slum, could not be more austere. But there were some similarities: the two motivated themselves to conquer their chosen fields with full self-belief and the sumptuousness that followed Trump in the White House.
The President of the United States even adopted Tyson’s claims that he was a god, similar to the legendary warrior Achille, in his 1987 self-help book ‘The Art Of The Deal’.
In Surviving the Summit, Trump wrote, “He is a professional warrior, yes, but he is not a semi-human being who was born to fight. “He grew up in the nasty streets where any sign of weakness could be fatal.”
They wildly differed when it came to money: Trump wrote a strange incident where he handed Tyson a $10 million check after winning his fight against Spinks – but the boxer has never cashed. It’s unclear how the two met, but Tyson trusted the property mogul in 1988, the year he eliminated Michael Spinks in 90 seconds, to install him as his “special advisor” after firing his long-term manager Bill Clayton.
But their warm relations began to collapse when Tyson convinced himself that his wife, Robin Givens, slept with Trump. In a heated discussion, a furious Tyson would have asked Trump several times, “Are you sleeping with my wife?” Trump vehemently denied his claims that “thoughts never appeared in his mind.”
Tyson later strangely drove his BMW into the tree while he was completely sober in an alleged suicide attempt, and it is said that his paranoia about Trump was one of the causes.
