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Add FightsATW on GoogleThere have been so many documentaries and narrative features on the life of Mike Tyson that three of those productions share the same title: just “Tyson.” The first was a 1995 biopic starring Michael Jai White as Tyson. The second was James Toback’s bracing 2008 documentary. Now, the third is this four-episode Netflix docuseries directed by Floyd Russ. The question to be asked is: do we need another project about Mike Tyson? While the answer is in the eye of the beholder, it’s fair to say that this 2026 Tyson series is very well done.
It helps significantly that the subject made himself so available. Tyson has always had an unvarnished charisma. A sad little boy lives inside his fearsome shell. You always get the sense that he would like to protect himself, but he doesn’t know how. Tyson breaks down multiple times during interviews with Russ. Considering the life he’s led, it’s not hard to understand why.
Russ tells Tyson’s story chronologically. His brutal beginnings in the Brownsville neighborhood have been detailed before, but the footage from his early days is so desolate that it hardly seems like a place in America. But then it’s a place America doesn’t want us to see or talk about.
“People who find their way into a boxing gym are people that have no other option.”
Tyson’s reminiscences of Brownsville are still shocking, even if we’ve heard the stories of a local kid murdering one of his birds and bringing out the fight in him. We’ve also heard of Tyson’s mother working as a prostitute. What I hadn’t heard Tyson share before was that he once dipped his thumb in Drano to make himself sick to get attention from his mother. A mother who serviced men in bed while her son lay next to her.
Tyson turned to the streets and found himself locked up in juvie more than thirty times before discovering boxing through a reform school program. From there, Tyson connects with Cus D’Amato, a legendary trainer on the outs with the sport who sees raw talent in a boy filled with rage and heartache. As touching as the relationship between D’Amato and Tyson was, the series smartly points out that while the trainer truly cares for his charge, he saw Tyson as his comeback vehicle. D’Amato would not live to see his fighter win the heavyweight championship of the world—a fact that still haunts Tyson today.
The back half of episode one is the most scintillating in terms of boxing footage, as Tyson turns pro and lays waste to a moribund heavyweight division, giving it renewed legitimacy. Tyson grows as a fighter, but not necessarily as a man. From the beginning of his career, Tyson was a commodity, a vehicle for others to attach their own hopes and dreams to, and live vicariously through him. That foreshadowing comes to bear in the next episode.
“Constant chaos”
After D’Amato dies, Tyson loses his mentor’s guidance and protection. He’s still a remarkable fighter in the ring, but bad-to-worse influences begin to move in from the periphery. I’ve always believed the management group Tyson put together, dubbed “Team Tyson,” was overmatched to guide the most significant athlete (for a time) in the world. Here, the series seems to miss an opportunity by focusing more on the friendship between Tyson and his manager Rory Holloway, while leaving out moments like the complete farce his corner was on the night of the ill-fated Buster Douglas fight.
More troubling than “Team Tyson” was the introduction to promoter Don King. It’s fair to say that if you were a major boxer from the seventies and into the new millennium, avoiding Don King was almost impossible. But Tyson did more than deal with King; he took back control of his career. Like many fighters, Tyson lost millions to King in bad deals and fraudulent business maneuvers.
Then came Robin Givens, an actress that Tyson fell for quickly, who also, as the series tells it and I believe it, became a heavy hand (along with her mother) in his life. The humiliating Barbara Walters interview with Givens and Tyson is no less uncomfortable to watch now than it was then.
Even with all this noise buzzing around him, Tyson remained dominant in the ring. Episode two covers his two most notable victories, his destruction of Larry Holmes and his obliteration of Michael Spinks to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. Holmes was well past his “sell-by” date, and Spinks was a great light heavyweight, not a true heavyweight sans the “light” precursor; those are the two best names of opponents Tyson defeated in his career.
It’s always been an uncomfortable fact for Tyson fans to deal with, but the truth is, Mike Tyson never beat a great heavyweight in or near their prime. Episode two ends with Buster Douglas on the horizon, and the beginning of the fall.
“The only two people who know are the people who were there.”
For a boxer, Mike Tyson can be unusually honest about what happened in his fights. When asked why he lost to Buster Douglas, Tyson simply responds, “He kicked my a$s.” This isn’t the last time Tyson uses that expression in the series. For his losses, he makes few excuses.
After the stunning upset loss to Douglas, a fight with Evander Holyfield was on the docket. Holyfield had just knocked out Douglas, and the biggest fight in the world was about to happen. Then Tyson took a trip on a whim to Indianapolis for a Black Expo featuring a beauty pageant that included a young woman named Desiree Washington.
One of Mike Tyson’s great weaknesses has always been an insatiable appetite for women. Early in the AM, Tyson reached out to Washington, and the two went to a hotel room and had a sexual encounter. The nature of that encounter has been debated for years and will never be resolved. Some believe Tyson raped Washington, and some believe that Washington was an opportunist. Wherever one falls on that ledger, the fact remains that Tyson ended up being a convicted rapist in the court of law, and served three years in prison for the hotly debated transgression. Tyson exited prison three years later, still short of 30, but it would soon be revealed that his best years were already behind him.
If anyone could ever claim to be an “old 30,” it is Mike Tyson.
“I’m a dysfunctional motherf*cker.”
The most interesting episode in the series is the final one. What we come to realize over the course of the series is that Tyson is a brazenly unkempt mix of ego and low self-esteem. Yes, episode 4 hits all the low notes: the two bouts with Holyfield, his suspension from boxing for biting off a piece of Holyfield’s ear, his brutal loss to Lennox Lewis, the face tattoo, and finally, quitting on his stool against a journeyman far below his class.
All of that is well-trod territory. The series digs in more effectively by showcasing Tyson’s private side. This is a man who went broke, found a woman who would stand by him, lost a daughter to a horrible freak death, and despite his own abundant worst instincts, is still alive, and still relevant. Of all the things to bring Tyson back into the world of fame, his cameo in The Hangover did the trick. From as much as one can tell, Tyson is doing reasonably well emotionally and very well financially.
At the same time, if next week we found Tyson’s name on the front pages of the newspaper for all the wrong reasons, that would be no surprise. The turbulence is always just below the surface. Early in the series, Tyson walks through his old Brownsville stomping grounds and is received as a conquering hero. At one point, with youngsters jumping up and down in front of him, Tyson is overcome by the high pulse of their attention. He recoils and shouts them down. The look on his face is terrifying.
For all the distance that Mike Tyson has come, and for all that he has survived (including himself), it is impossible not to believe that he is still a dangerous man, just one trigger click away from trouble of the worst kind.
It is that danger, that sense of unpredictability, that keeps our eyes fixed on a man well past his prime in his vocation, who, by his own words, has done many awful things, and a man for whom redemption in the eyes of the public, and in his own, will forever remain out of reach.
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