Mike Tyson,
Undisputed Champ Of Bloomsbury
by Con Chapman
Read
Virginia Woolf’s last letter to her husband
before she loaded her coat up with stones and
drowned herself in a river.
Mike
Tyson, former heavyweight champion, The Wall
Street Journal
Dearest,
I feel certain
that I am going mad again. I have this incredible
urge to bite somebody’s ear off. I feel we
can't go through another of those terrible times. And
I shan't recover this time, not the way I did
after Lady Ottoline Morrell decked me with a
right hook in Tokyo.
I begin to
hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I
am doing what they’re telling me to
do—get a Maori face tattoo. You have
given me the greatest possible happiness. You
have been in every way all that anyone could be.
I don't think two people could have been happier
till this terrible disease came. I can't fight
any longer, not since I fired Bill Cayton and got
in bed with Don King.
I know that I
am spoiling your life, that without me you could
work. And you will I know. Maybe three
rounds of shadowboxing, three rounds on the light
bag, three on the heavy bag.
You see I can't
even write this properly. I can't read. What I
want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life
to you—well, you and my pigeons. You
have been entirely patient with me and incredibly
good. I want to say that — everybody
knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would
have been either you or Cus D’Amato.
Everything has
gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.
I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I’m
going to load my pockets up with stones, right
after I make weight for the Mitch Green fight.
I don't think
two people could have been happier than we have
been. But that’s what they said about
Mike Tyson and Robin Givens before that awful
interview on Barbara Walters.
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