“Hello, everybody,” he said. “My name is Mike, and I've been fighting for 20 years of my life.”

The athletes took turns telling stories from the front lines of a world of hurt. The broad strokes were the same. They talked about fights, slams, falls, tackles, body checks, dead lifts. All manner of mental and physical suffering, coaches and team physicians passing out powerful anti-inflammatories and narcotic painkillers like Tic-Tacs. Trauma, and addiction. They talked about how cannabis had helped mitigate their pain.

“I was just freaking out,” Tyson says. “Too late. Couldn't stop. I thought, I'm dead. It's over.”

Mike Tyson sat quietly, sometimes looking at people but also looking at nothing. He was like one of those paintings whose eyes seem to follow you around the room. In a 1996 essay for Transition magazine, the critic Gerald Early wrote, “Tyson is not the sum of his myths; he is the remainder.” This was how Mike Tyson seemed that day—like what was left of Mike Tyson.

When he was 20 years old, Mike Tyson became the youngest world heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. In 1988, he and his then wife, actress Robin Givens, gave a joint interview to Barbara Walters in which Givens described him as an abusive husband. (Givens did not explicitly allege he hit her, but in 2009 Tyson told Oprah Winfrey, “I have socked [Givens] before, and she socked me before as well. It was just that kind of relationship.”) They were divorced in 1989. Two years later, Tyson was accused of raping an 18-year-old Miss Black America contestant named Desiree Washington in his Indianapolis hotel room. He was convicted in 1992 and released in 1995.

Even an increasingly diminished and distracted Tyson remained a powerful pay-per-view draw, and his fights against both worthy opponents and tomato cans brought in record-setting revenue. He was stripped of his boxing license by the Nevada State Athletic Commission in 1997, after biting opponent Evander Holyfield's ear during a fight in Las Vegas. His license was restored in 1998, and he continued fighting professionally until 2005, when he sat down after the sixth round of a fight with Irish boxer Kevin McBride and declined to fight on. At the post-fight press conference, he announced his retirement.

Many things have happened to Tyson since then. He eventually began telling the story of Mike Tyson, over and over, to anyone who'd listen. He became a professional narrator of his own rise and fall and rise and fall, a cauterized open wound you could walk around in. In 2008 he told his story in a documentary directed by James Toback; again in 2012, in a Broadway show written by his third wife, Lakiha “Kiki” Tyson, and directed by Spike Lee; and in 2013, in Undisputed Truth, a memoir written with celeb-bio consigliere and onetime Bob Dylan affiliate Larry Sloman. In each telling of the story, he demonstrates genuine self-abasing humility and undercuts those moments with bursts of sneering vitriol that seem equally genuine. Each account invites us into creepy, complicit spectatorship the way Tyson always has—first as a wildly successful practitioner of blood sport and then as a pop-culture train wreck. They're attempts to burnish a vexed legacy through confession.

On the issue of what happened between him and Desiree Washington that night in Indianapolis, Tyson has never wavered. He maintains that he was falsely accused and convicted, that his intentions were clear and the sex was consensual. He reiterates this assertion in the book, the stage show, and the movie. In Toback's film—a sympathetic portrait of a convicted sex offender by a director who'd later be accused of sexual misconduct by nearly 400 women soon after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke—Tyson calls Washington vile names and then recites from Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol while Toback shoots him silhouetted against a sunset.

The myth-maintenance in Tyson and Sloman's Undisputed Truth is less overtly toxic, but Tyson gloats about what seems to have been a GoodFellas-like incarceration experience, thanks to the largesse of starstruck guards; he enjoys a variety of food-delivery options and has a sexual relationship with his drug counselor. The book lays out the case for Tyson as a victim who became a victimizer, detailing the parental neglect and violent bullying he endured as a child (but not his kidnapping and molestation by a neighborhood predator, which he revealed in an ESPN interview in 2017). But Tyson's lifelong substance abuse is the book's real subject. His mother feeds him Gordon's gin and Thunderbird to keep him quiet. By age 12 he's sampled Mad Dog 20/20, Brass Monkey, cocaine, weed, hash, opium, acid, and angel dust. In the New York juvenile-offender system, he says, he's given Thorazine, a powerful anti-psychotic that makes him a vegetable.