Boxing : Tyson Is Man With Everything but Happiness

Mike Tyson is the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, a multimillionaire who figures to get much richer. He is married to a beautiful actress. And maybe best of all, he’s only 21.

Here’s a guy who’s got it all, right? We have here a young man whose income this year may approach $50 million. Just last week, in New York, he put a dent in his $100,000 Bentley--his three Rolls-Royces, the Jaguar and the Lamborghini were in the garage--and when the cops came, he tried to give them the Bentley.

But according to recent published reports, Tyson is not a happy man as he begins training for his richest appointment yet, the June 27 engagement with Michael Spinks. He’ll make at least $20 million for that one.

Tyson is said to be an angry, bitter and mostly confused young man these days. When Jim Jacobs, his co-manager and friend, died March 23, Tyson was left with Bill Cayton, with whom he was not close, and whose competence he has sharply questioned in recent weeks.

Cayton, 69, who has almost four years remaining on his New York state manager’s contract with Tyson, calls the heavyweight champion “the best-managed fighter in the history of boxing.”

Tyson, on the other hand, told Mike Marley of the New York Post this week: “They’re stealing from me! They’re stealing from me!”

Tyson wouldn’t offer specifics, but it’s known that he is unhappy that Cayton cut himself in for one-third of a million-dollar endorsement deal with a soft-drink company.

Stung, Cayton has been obliged to defend himself in New York sports sections, and he blames promoter Don King for causing the trouble between him and Tyson. Since Jacobs died, King has been seen often with Tyson and his wife, actress Robin Givens, and Givens’ mother, Ruth Roper.

Cayton says that King is not only trying to wrest personal control of Tyson from him, but is scheming to break Cayton’s contracts, as well.

“Don King knows I have two legally binding contracts with Mike, and he knows that my management contract with him has 3 years and 8 months to go,” Cayton said this week. “Why he is spending all this time with Mike is a puzzlement to me.

“If he wants to enter into litigation and try to break my contract with Mike, he’ll have to go all the way to the United States Supreme Court.”

King has promoted all of Tyson’s title fights. Now, not surprisingly, Cayton says the Spinks fight will be King’s last as Tyson’s promoter.

Cayton also says that Tyson is well on his way to being the wealthiest athlete in history.

“Jim and I invested several million dollars from Mike’s first two million-dollar fights and bought him two single-premium life insurance policies that will pay him $250,000 per year for life beginning at age 25,” Cayton said. “Under present law, that income will be tax free.”

In addition--and in Tyson’s case, he gives new meaning to that word--Tyson is midway through a seven-bout contract with HBO that pays him $26.3 million. Cayton said the champion earned $8 million from the Japanese promoters of the Tony Tubbs fight.

Tyson will make at least double that against Spinks, and the British will pay him something like $4 million to fight Frank Bruno in London Sept. 3.

Where there is big money in the heavyweight division, of course, there also is King. He has controlled the heavyweight division since the mid-1970s, when Muhammad Ali was his meal ticket. If Tyson slips through King’s grasp, he’ll have lost control of the heavyweights.

Cayton said he and Tyson had talked things out a month ago.

“Mike told me he was upset and wanted to talk about everything,” Cayton said. “We talked for most of the day. The accountant showed him all the records. We all had dinner together, and I think we showed Mike he’s been well-served by Jim and I. When Mike drove me to the train station that night, he said to me: ‘Bill, you are my manager, and you will be as long as I fight.’

“You know, years ago, Cus D’Amato (a boxing trainer who became Tyson’s legal guardian and who died in 1986) lectured Mike many times about Don King, and explained to him what a rip-off man he really was. He told Mike never to get mixed up with the man.

“Am I trying to protect my own interests in all of this? Of course I am. But I’m also trying to protect Mike’s interests, as I know Jim and Cus would have wanted me to.”

Of Cayton’s fears that King is trying to wedge himself between Tyson and Cayton, Tyson told the Post’s Marley: “Bill is just paranoid. We all know what Don King is, but if you keep a snake in a room with the lights on, you can control him.”

On the same day, Tyson told Mike Katz of the New York Daily News: “Bill is not a good guy. I’ve never in my mind thought about leaving him. But he’s done some things, and I have second thoughts. I mean, if this is the way he treats me when I’m loyal . . . “

Cayton, when asked to comment on his one-third share of Tyson’s soft-drink deal, said that he and Jacobs had “about a quarter-million dollars” invested in Tyson before he turned pro, in 1984.

“When Mike was 15, Cus wanted first-rate sparring partners for him in Catskill (N.Y., where D’Amato and Tyson lived), and we paid up to $1,000 a week for them. Jim and I subsidized Cus’ entire operation in those days. We even bought the equipment for the gym and paid the utility bills.

“Obviously, we felt Mike was a great young prospect, but there was no guarantee that he was ever going to be a champion.”

Tyson also has complained that he wasn’t told of the seriousness of Jacobs’ leukemia when his contract with Jacobs and Cayton was renewed in February.

“None of us knew how sick Jimmy was at the end,” Cayton said. “He had leukemia, but it was in remission. He was doing marvelously. Believe me, it was a shock to all of us. In fact, most of us felt I would be the first to die. I’d had endocarditis (a heart disease) a third time.”

Tyson is also angry at assertions by Cayton that King has ingratiated himself with Tyson’s wife and mother-in-law. And when it came out that an Albany television reporter had said on the air this week that Cayton had said off camera, “Mike is in love and the woman he is in love with has ideas,” Tyson hit the ceiling.

Cayton denied saying it. Still, Tyson was quoted as saying: “(He has) no concern for me, no respect for my family.”

And on it goes.