Mike Tyson

The episode begins with an accusation that is not really an accusation. Mike Tyson has never had coffee. Not once, not as a child, not in rehab, not in the years when he was consuming everything else on the menu.

I can't believe you never had a cup of coffee

that might be that might be the most outrageous thing about you

The interrogation is thorough. Not at home, not at Starbucks, not offered by anyone in a lifetime of people offering him things.

You never went to Starbucks?

His wife drinks it. He does not. The host points out the absurdity: a man who has ingested most of the pharmacopoeia at some point drew a line at the mildest stimulant available.

My wife drinks it.

all the stuff I did and all the drugs I did, you'd think coffee would be nothing

Then the conversation turns, casually, to the actual drugs. The first ones arrive at nine. The first hallucinogen at eleven.

Nine years old.

Smoking and drinking first, then acid, at an age when most children are still being walked to school. He states it without emphasis, which is what makes it land.

How old were you when you first tried acid?

The host can only repeat the number back at him.

Asked what he was doing in the years when he was destroying everyone, the answer is not a training secret. He was drinking. Heavily.

drinking a lot drinking a lot

The abstinence was professional rather than moral: clean for camp, then back to the animal the moment the fight was over.

i'm an animal

Which is where the sex question comes in. The host admits he has used Tyson as the counterexample to the oldest superstition in fighting.

you were the first guy that i ever used as an example

i don't want to be thinking about sex i'll just get it out of the way

The reasoning is not athletic at all. It is about removing a distraction from the mind, the same way you would clear any other noise before a fight.

And his verdict on the myth itself is dismissive in a way that is almost boring, because the mechanism was never plausible.

it doesn't seem to make sense.

The host then locates himself in the story: a teenager in the late eighties, watching a nineteen-year-old on the cover of a magazine, in an era when heavyweight boxing had become boring.

when larry holmes was the champ as a boxing fan

You were 19 years old, right?

The point is not nostalgia. It is that the sport changed category when he arrived, from something connoisseurs appreciated to something the whole culture stopped for.

all of a sudden, everybody's watching heavyweight boxing

It was the most crazy, exciting thing in sports.

And the economics of it were unprecedented in a specific way: nobody had ever had to decide in advance whether a fight was worth the money on the grounds that it might be over in ninety seconds.

should I pay for this?

The question is the obvious one, and the answer is more interesting than the obvious one. He does not remember it as a triumph. He remembers it as something that happened to somebody else.

Does it seem like a dream?

pretty much like a blur

What he forgets is not the fame. It is the work — that he was the person who trained that hard, who got up and did it, who became this.

I forget that I'm that guy.

Which raises the question of authorship. He does not describe the career as his own construction. He describes it as a blueprint executed on him.

Cus D'Amato, he says, had a great deal of advice about pressure, but no recipe for fame itself, because no recipe exists.

there's really no ingredients on how to handle fame

The method was diagnostic rather than prescriptive: find the specific department of fame that is currently injuring you, then work on that one.

And the bottom line is an admission that most people in his position never make.

no one knows how to conduct themselves under that kind of pressure

The distinction he draws about fame is about other people's behaviour rather than his own: the ordinary famous person is recognised, whereas he caused people to abandon their posts.

they leave their job to go say hi

His first response to it was not gracious. It was fear, expressed as hostility, because he had no script for being approached.

get the fuck away from me, man

Because I never knew how to conduct myself.

The requests were photographic and endless — a mother, a child, a picture here, a picture there, a declaration of love — and he experienced each one as a demand he could not satisfy.

What changed was not the crowd but the interpretation. He stopped treating it as an attack and started treating it as weather.

But now I understand this is just what it is.

It is what it is.

The host notes the result, which is visible at any UFC event: people grab at him and he does not recoil.

You're very calm around people.

Asked about the lightweight champion, the answer is immediate and slightly admiring of the anarchy of it.

he does whatever the fuck he wants to do

I think that guy's probably the best lightweight of all time

The projection is upward: eventually at welterweight, where the interesting fights are, and where the pay-per-view numbers would force the rest of the sport to acknowledge what it has.

Tyron Woodley, who's the champ at 170, that would be an insane fight

And the reason he is a draw is not the wrestling. It is the incongruity: a devout man who lives with his parents and destroys people for a living.

Lives with his parents.

He's rich as shit now.

His technical verdict on Khabib is unambiguous, and it is a grappler's verdict rather than a fan's.

Best grappler I've ever seen inside the 155 pound division.

Then the conversation turns to Jon Jones, and the praise changes register entirely — from dominance to craft.

The best ever at using distance.

He knows distance better than anybody.

He's a master at knowing when he can hit you and you can't hit him

The record is complicated by the suspensions, and Tyson does not pretend otherwise. But he misses watching him, which is its own kind of verdict.

i miss watching him fight

I think they'll probably fight again

On Cormier he is generous in a specific way: at heavyweight, without the cut, the man is a different problem.

He's got so much strength and just so agile.

Anybody he fights outside of John Jones, he dominates.

That's how good John is.

The regret he expresses about Jones is not about the fights he might have lost. It is about the years.

it just sucks that he's had so many controversies in his life

They have met, and talked — but never about the personal life, which he says plainly and without judgement.

never about his personal life

What worries him is the survivorship question. Some people in that situation do not come out of it, and the reason is not weakness but momentum: the party does not stop until it stops on its own terms.