MIKE TYSON reveals his plans to take down Tyson Fury after Jake Paul megafight, why he prays ‘every time I cross the street’ and why he has so many regrets

From an old pug rolling back the decades for fun and fortune in the Cowboys Stadium here this Friday night to a world heavyweight title fight next year?

Maybe, even, against the winner of next month’s rematch between Tyson Fury versus Oleksandr Usyk for all but one of the belts? Inconceivable, incomprehensible, insupportable?

Mike Tyson, 58, has a different in-word for this seemingly incredulous proposition: ‘Intriguing.’ Then he adds: ‘Nothing will be excluded after I knock out Jake Paul.’

So what was conceived as a one-off spectacle for the ages against a poster boy for the Netflix generation may be the start of something astoundingly bigger?

‘Listen,’ commands Tyson. ‘I’m taking this one fight, one person at a time. But if this one goes as well as I expect, then a full comeback is not off the table.’

The former heavyweight champion of the world claims to have his sights set on recapturing his title. Pictured (L-R): Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury

But Fury, or Usyk, or even Daniel Dubois? Seriously, Mike? ‘As I said, anything and everything would be included.’

So speaks he who was once the Scariest as well as Baddest Man on the Planet. Who wielded the heftiest punch in boxing history. Who became the youngest world heavyweight champion of all time when he knocked out the formidable Trevor Berbick 38 years ago this month at the age of 20 years and 145 days.

Who last fought for a world title when he was stopped by Lennox Lewis 22 years ago. Who hung up the gloves 19 summers past.

And who enters his 60th year next month, as he approaches the official age of seniority in America. Along with his bus pass – just in case this man who once blew three hundred million dollars in no time ever needs one.

Iron Mike may be as rusty as a discarded tin bucket in terms of activity in the prize ring but he is as quick-witted as ever and we learned long ago to expect the unimaginable from him.

If he were to become also the oldest heavyweight champion by obliterating Big George Foreman’s record of 46 years and 169 days, this would be a comeback to rank alongside the phenomenal return to the White House of Donald Trump. Who, by the way, promoted some of Tyson’s biggest fights at his long-since demolished casino on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.

Should the mother and father of all risings from the deepest of sporting retirements transpire, the only surprise to the man himself will be that he has lived long enough to make it happen.

In November 1991 he went into limbo in Hawaii while awaiting indictment for the trial in which he would be found guilty of rape. Between keeping in light training for a world title fight which would be scotched by his prison sentence and reading countless books – to the sound of the Pacific surf breaking through the window of his rented bamboo house – he found time for reflection.

Tyson became the youngest world heavyweight champion of all time when he knocked out the formidable Trevor Berbick in 1986

Iron Mike went into limbo in Hawaii while awaiting indictment for the trial in which he would be found guilty of rape in 1994

The most startling thing he said, since he was only 24, was: ‘I don’t expect to live ‘til I’m 40.’ His response when reminded of that this week: ‘Boy was I wrong. I figured I’d be shot or something in the street, Especially if I went back to Brownsville.’

That drugs-running quarter of Brooklyn was where he had to fend for himself, sometimes so violently that he wracked up the juvenile detentions. One of his 38 arrests was for beating to a pulp the older, larger youth who had torn the head off one of the pigeons, who remain one of his passions.

He scrapped his way through adolescence after his mother Laura Mae Tyson died at 55 from cancer when he was only 16. His surrogate father, a pimp, had fled the family home above a crack-house days after Michael Gerard Tyson was born on June 30, 1966.

He would say later: ‘Tragic as it was to lose my mother, in a way it was one of the best things that happened to me so far as making me a boxer. It left no one to baby me so I had to fight to survive.’

Now he says: ‘I go back to Brownsville much more often these days. Times change on the streets and all my old friends are still there.’

So never mind 40, will he make it to 60 despite the risk of trading blows with giants half his age?

‘God willing and for a start by winning this fight,’ he says. With a chuckle at those who fear for his life when he enters the ring against Paul, the hulking YouTube creation 31 years his junior.

Tyson will attempt to best Youtuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul, who is 31 years his junior

Tyson has insisted that he is not worried about taking on his compatriot in the highly-anticipated clash

So no nerves, Mike? A throaty laugh this time: ‘I ain’t worried about nothing. Because I’m prepared for anything and everything. I’m having fun.’

That includes this co-owner of a vast cannabis farm in the desert state of Nevada, teasing the world’s media by hinting that he might keep smoking joints until the moment he leaves his dressing room ‘to go back to work’ in front of a crowd nigh-on 80,000 nostalgia junkies.

That sent a tremor of alarm through the Texas authorities who have sanctioned this fight, at his age, despite other commissions baulking.

‘Nah,’ he says. ‘I had a psychedelic medicine experience when I was young which changed my life. Saved my life. Now I’m just fine the way I am. Fine in my mind and body. I’m ready to fight right now. This second. I’m in a good place in my life.’

It wasn’t ever thus. This has been a tumultuous life full of anger and menace in its youth, rife with literally stunning success in the prize ring over which he exulted in two long – and at times terrifying – reigns as the heavyweight champ.

Years of rebellion against society and authority which incurred terms of imprisonment. The longest of those following his conviction for raping beauty queen Desiree Washington, for which he maintains his innocence to this day in Dallas, albeit in this typically perverse way: ‘They finally got for me something I didn’t do, so I guess that’s the way it is given other things I have done.’

That does include admitting to hitting his first wife, the slender and sassy actress Robin Givens, even though he did say in one of his autobiographies that as that marriage neared its tempestuous end: ‘I hit her with the biggest punch of my career.’ That was disowned as he said: ‘I was lying. If I’d ever hit her she’d have been jam spread on the wall.’

Tyson claimed to have been lying when he said he had hit first wife, Hollywood actress Robin Givens, as their tempestuous marriage neared its end

Tyson’s third wife Lakiha Spicer (left) may make a rare appearance to watch the big bout

For his transformation into a comparatively tranquil life – with his third wife Lakiha Spicer and the affection of the six survivors of his seven children – he assigns credit not to marijuana but to his religious belief.

We turn our minds back to the day when dawn broke over an Indiana state penitentiary – sardonically named the Youth Center – on the clear chill morning when he was released from prison.

A limousine was waiting at the gates to speed him to a nearby mosque. By sprinting across a muddy field I arrived just in time for him to beckon me inside before the doors were slammed shut. I thank him again for what became a profoundly privileged experience.

Watching him kneel and pray was moving enough but what happened next was extraordinary to behold. We went upstairs to the dining room, where he was greeted by Muhammad Ali who had sponsored the Catholic-born Tyson’s conversion to Islam.

The Greatest was in the early grip of Parkinson’s and his hands were shaking. So for his first act as a free man after three and a half years of hard time, Mike selflessly spoon-fed Ali his breakfast.

There was widespread suspicion that Tyson had changed his religion while in jail, so as to help hasten his early release from a six-year sentence, but now he tells me: ‘I converted well before the trial. I found my true faith.’

He proceeds to pronounce on the power of Islam: ‘I’m still a practising Muslim and I always will be. I need my faith for life itself. For my existence. Without faith you have nothing. I pray for absolutely everything. For my family. I pray before crossing a street.’

He addresses the medical concerns about him pulling on the gloves again after such a long absence, at such an advanced age, following a delay occasioned by the bursting of a stomach ulcer which he was told nearly killed him: ‘You know I will pray before this fight. But this thing with Jake is very small when it comes to God.’

Tyson credits his conversion to Islam with transforming his life, claiming that ‘without faith you have nothing’. Pictured: Tyson praying at a mosque in 1998

Meanwhile, that rascally sense of humour rasps as brightly as ever.

The first interview he gave following his release from jail took place in a penthouse suite at the MGM Grand overlooking the Las Vegas Strip. Came a knock at the door and the gift of a life-size statue of him was wheeled in. It was made of white chocolate.

‘White!’ exclaimed the proud black man who struck fear into the hearts of white America. ‘Why the f*** is it white?’

‘You’d better come to London and have Madame Tussauds make one,’ I advised.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘They’d put me among the monsters in the Chamber of Horrors.’

Now the update: ‘Years later I did a waxwork for a museum in Los Angeles. Guess what. Not only the Chamber of Horrors, but in a cage like a monster in jail. Good I can always laugh at myself.’

Will Jake Paul be laughing? ‘Don’t think so. For sure he’ll be thinking I am a monster. He doesn’t look confident. Appearances can be misleading but what I do know is that I’m not worried about nothing.

I’m not nervous. Never am. Always confident. Prepared to win. Can’t wait to go.’

Much of the old aura is back. That appetite for fighting which deserted him after he took severe punishment from Lennox Lewis then tamely surrendered to Britain’s Danny Williams and Ireland’s Kevin McBride in the two fag-end fights of his career in principle. 

Much of Tyson’s aura and appetite for fight which deserted him after his defeat to Lennox Lewis in 2002 has returned

The hunger regained shows in his eagerness for this to be a fully sanctioned fight which will be added to his professional record (50 wins, six losses).

And in his insistence that the provision limiting the eight rounds to two minutes’ duration instead of the customary three has nothing to do with trying to protect him from harm.

‘We’re here to put on a show for a lot of people,’ he says. ‘Two-minute rounds will make for more intense, more exciting action. No time for all that feeling each other out. Straight to business.’

It has taken time to rekindle the keenness of youth, much of which faded after his consecutive fights with Donovan ‘Razor’ Ruddock. He won them both but says: ‘He is by far the hardest puncher I’ve ever faced.’

Not, then, Lewis, Frank Bruno, Larry Holmes or James Bone-Crusher Smith. Not Evander Holyfield, whose ear he bit off in frustration in 1997 but is now his friend.

Not James ‘Buster’ Douglas who subjected him to one of the greatest upsets of all time – as well as his first defeat – on that momentous morning in Tokyo in 1990. At the seismic climax to a week of supreme over-confidence, in which he had spent most of what should have been training time canoodling with sloe-eyed beauties.

‘Those two fights with Razor did something to me,’ he says. ‘Can’t put my finger on it but something left me after those fights.’

Since they immediately preceded his incarceration, he had three and a half years to reflect on what happened. Did those ponderings include regrets?

Tyson is determined to face Fury in the ring and defeat him because he is a fan of the Gypsy King who was named after him

‘I have many regrets about my life,’ he says. Some of which will be familiar to Tyson watchers down the years. ’I believe I’m a better person now. I do have new regrets but they are my own dilemma. Only for me to know. Personal. No one else needs to know.

‘Now it’s back to pray and fight, pray and fight, pray and fight. Not for my legacy. I don’t look at my life as a legacy. I’m just passing through. Who cares about legacy? Who cares what people think about me when I’m gone? Once you’re dead. You’re dead.’

Nevertheless, this fight against Paul and his 20million YouTube followers will be part of his history. Any fights which follow, more so. If they were to involve Fury or Usyk, manifestly more so.

He toys with that idea again: ‘Usyk is the best heavyweight in the world at the moment. But I’m going for Fury to beat him. Why? Because I’m a fan. Because his father gave him my name. I’m not abandoning him now.’

Tyson versus Tyson. The possibility will have Turki Alalshikh salivating in Saudi. Boxing along as well, however reluctantly. The money would dwarf the $10million (£7.8m) Mike Tyson is said to be receiving here.

Can it be possible? He says: ‘I feel young and strong again. Ready again.’ Watch out Jake Paul. Watch out world. The Donald Trump of the prize ring is back.

Mike Tyson v Jake Paul will be streamed live on Netflix in the early hours of Saturday morning.