Though some of it we might not know, like Mike’s dependency on drugs and alcohol before he was even a teenager. We know most of the rest: muggings and robberies street fights and reform schools thirty-eight arrests before he was even fourteen-years-old pigeons and his fateful introduction to Cus D’Amato. Once a corrections officer in Manhattan, Lorna Tyson lost her job, earned money sporadically, and showed Mike that violence could effectuate change. Mike tells his story chronologically, from his birth in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood to his childhood in Brownsville, where he was reared by his pitiful mother and the pitiless streets. Undisputed Truth is about ghetto life, lovelessness, boxing, crime, cocaine, sex, self-loathing, cocaine, megalomania, and cocaine. The eyes in this picture belong to someone who’s been scarred by life but saved from destruction, and this is the point of placing them on the cover: Mike’s moral renaissance is written on his face. His eyes, which glisten, look weary yet serene, and evince more humility than during his heyday, when they would jolt vacantly as he launched press conference epithets at his opponents.

Over his right eye remains the Maori tattoo which he obtained in New Zealand to deface himself. His jaw is set passively and his solemn expression evokes experience and hard-won wisdom. There is no title on my cover of Undisputed Truth, only a close-up of Mike’s face. Early in his story he admits: “I always thought I was shit.” These were the early days that broke his psyche, and throughout his autobiography, Undisputed Truth, Tyson connects various problems and setbacks to the Brooklyn hellscape that taught him his worthlessness.

To say Tyson has the resilience of a cockroach draws a crude but apt association as that same insect no doubt cohabited with Mike’s family when his mother sought refuge for her brood in abandoned buildings. That he’s defied prison, drug abuse, bankruptcy, Don King, alcoholism, a litany of scandals and even mental instability to finally emerge as a person evidently at peace with himself, might be the greatest surprise of his stormy life. Never boxing’s patron saint but no longer its pariah, he might be the celebrity world’s hardiest survivor. “The only thing we knew was violence in Brownsville, even with people we love.” - Mike Tyson

Tyson undisputed truth