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By Root 2285 0

couch, doing absolutely nothing, totally disconnected from everything, is Mike Tyson. He looks up at me and goes, “So, are you married?” And I say, “No.” And he says, “Why not?” And I say, “I don’t know, I think I’m just working.” And he says, “Do you have a boyfriend?” I said, “No.” And still screaming, screaming, in the background. So then he says, “What are you doing later? How long are you going to be in Vegas? We should get together.” It was crazy, it was insane, it was scary. So I’m just sort of backpedaling, hoping that Charley will save me and not get into a fight with Don King. I didn’t know what to say to Mike. There was a tiny part of me—the journalist part—that wanted to say yes because I was working on this story and I knew if I went out with Mike Tyson, I would get more out of him than Charley would, but in a very different way. So that would have been interesting, very interesting, but I just couldn’t do it.

The next day when I got to the condo, now scattered on the floor are all these biographies of great African American men in history, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. We went out in the backyard and I interviewed Don King, and during the interview, he kept stopping and saying to me, “I really like you a lot, and so does Mike. I think you’d be great with us. I don’t know why you’re working with ESPN when you really should be with us, we’ve got to find a place for you.” I didn’t say a word. He just kept talking off the one question, and continued to try and hypnotize me by saying, “You should really come join us, we’ll find a job for you.”

CHARLEY STEINER:

When the Holyfield fight was postponed, we thought: “What are we going to do with this great treasure trove of video that has never been seen before, all this wonderful biographical stuff, because it was supposed to be used for the fight?” So we decided to use it in our trial coverage.

The Tyson trial was one of the high points of my career. I remember one day we figured out that Mike would go home and watch TV coverage, go to bed, and wake up pissed off. I said, “Fuck, he’s going to run. He’ll train. Let’s get a fucking crew out there!” Sure enough, the next morning, five o’clock, he’s out there as if he’s training. He’s got the wool cap on, the parka, and the whole deal. And that night, we had this video, all ours. The next morning, there were half a dozen camera crews outside; they’re bumping into one another, the neighbors are getting pissed off, it’s utter chaos. We just sat back and roared. But we were getting seven, eight, ten minutes to cover the trial each night. I had to write like a son of a bitch in the truck every day, but it worked. And again, when the conviction came in, we were the first ones on the air with it. Guys from all over the world were carrying this thing in the Marion County Court House. The next day, I was on Nightline, Good Morning America—you name it, I was everywhere. And this Aussie guy comes up to me and says, “We have a Nightline show, can you do it? We’ll pay you a thousand dollars.” Good! So I did the show, and I bought dinner for the whole crew and a bunch of others who had been covering the trial—all thirty of us at St. Elmo’s steak joint, downtown. We were drunker than skunks the whole night. It was terrific.

We won pretty near all the awards that year, including the Clarion, which is a very highfalutin one. Steve Anderson and John Walsh accepted it. I was not invited. I actually went into Steve’s office and said, “But it’s my story—how can you do this?” I never got a reply. I felt it was a curious way to say, “Thank you for a job well done.”

MIKE TYSON:

I was upset at the time by their coverage, sure. There was so much of it. But looking back on it now, that stuff doesn’t bother me. I know they were just doing their jobs. Charley Steiner was great, and he, Max and Brian Kenny were all great students of boxing. That was important. I don’t take myself that seriously now, and I don’t hold any grudges against those guys. Whatever happened in the past happened.

In the 1980s, George Grande had worked wonders