Expect Him: Thoughts on Mike Tyson’s Return
By: Fraser Munden
Tags: Boxing, Psychedelics, Mike Tyson, 2020, Sports

The news of Tyson’s comeback has been met with various unenlightened takes from the sports press. An ESPN article featuring a round-table of boxing writers labelled the exhibition “a grotesque spectacle”, “a cash-grabbing circus” and “a glorified pillow fight”, among other things. There is only a passing, dismissive reference to Tyson’s recent transcendent personal journey. Which strikes me as odd: even if you completely dismiss it, how can any reporting fail to mention the toad? Do people just not know?

“You Ever Hear About the Toad?”

As haltingly confessional as Mike Tyson has been over the years in interviews and appearances (he is undeniably generous with the details of his private life), I do not recall Tyson ever describing a dream (as in a close-your-eyes-and-fall-asleep dream). So it’s been absolutely fascinating hearing him describe at great length the strange, dreamlike world he was transported to under the influence of the dried venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. Without some understanding of this trip and what followed soon thereafter, you won’t be able to appreciate the unique nature of his return to the ring.

The Sonoran Desert Toad produces a venom that contains 5-MeO-DMT

The story goes like this: on November 27th, 2018, a shaman was invited to the temporary headquarters of Tyson’s nascent marijuana business, located at the time in El Segundo, California. He and Tyson went off to Tyson’s private office, the lone room in the building guarded by an iron door, and Tyson lay down on a bed of pillows collected from sofas nearby as the shaman prepared the toad venom. While a storm outside crackled light through the drawn windows in the candlelit room, the man formerly known as Kid Dynamite inhaled from a glass pipe held to his lips and was abruptly sling-shot into another dimension. He freaked out.

“Oh God I’m dying! Fuck.”

…but soon found himself at peace:

“I [don’t] want to come back, I [want] to stay dead.”

He visited a bizarre world of impossible animals, Aztec pyramids, someone he calls ‘The Man of Rays’ (or is it ‘The Man of Rage’?), a voice compelling him to take care of his body and a peculiar shape he later learned was that of the pineal gland (after seeing that same shape framed on a wall belonging to guru Tony Robbins).

“I had no ego and I was just dealing with my own mortality.”

And while none of the visions listed above are necessarily dissimilar from what’s been described by others recalling psychedelic trips, Tyson is so loquacious, and has provided the public with so much insight into his life, that some exciting theories about what’s happening in the present moment can be spun from a combination of those toad visions and the personal history he’s shared.

For example, in October of 1988 Mike Tyson visited Mexico to attend the christening of boxer Julio Cesar Chavez’s son. He describes experiencing one of the most transformative events of his life there, being confronted by circumstances even more severe than those of his own childhood: “I was blown away by the poverty in Mexico. I was actually mad at them for being poorer than I had been because I couldn’t feel sorry for myself anymore. More than anything else, my success stemmed from my shame about being poor. That shame of being poor gave me more pain than anything.” Despite being discouraged from giving away money by his tour guide, Tyson handed a child beggar a $100 dollar bill. He went to pat the now-jubilant boy’s head affectionately and was astonished to find his hair was “hard as a rock.”

How does this relate to Tyson’s toad venom trip? The child beggar that approached him and triggered his epiphany did so during a day trip to the pyramids somewhere near Mexico City, mirroring Tyson’s visions of Aztec pyramids in the toad dimension!

It has been reported that he’s revisited the toad upwards of 20 times, and by all accounts he has undergone meaningful, observable and lasting change. I can’t begin to tell you how or why toad venom would affect Mike Tyson (or anyone for that matter) in this way, but there is plenty of evidence that it has.

To start, I would direct skeptics to listen to Tyson’s previous podcast Bite the Mic with Mike Tyson and contrast it with the quality of meaningful engagement he shows on his present podcast: Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson. In the earlier podcast venture, Tyson was often withdrawn. The show itself tended to revisit the more outrageous Tyson content that the general public is familiar with and that mostly aligned with the latter half of his boxing career (the name Bite the Mic confirms this). In many episodes, it sounds like co-host Pete Rosenberg is actually alone, with only rare monosyllable contributions from Tyson. This is by no means a knock against the hosting abilities of Mr. Rosenberg, it’s to highlight Tyson’s recalcitrant relationship with his own podcast and his often sullen state of mind pre-toad.

The Mike Tyson who appears on post-toad Hotboxin’ is dynamic, insightful and inquisitive, overflowing with excitement and often worthy of quotation. Whatever emotional weight he’d been carrying had clearly been relieved, or at least was seemingly much more manageable. He began showing up to the office every day in a tailored suit, often accentuated with gator shoes. He stopped consuming animal flesh, as had been commanded by a voice in the toad world (although he has since resumed eating eggs in training camp). He became almost apostle-like in his praise of the toad — nearly every Hotboxin’ episode features Tyson asking his guest “you ever hear about the Toad?” before handing things over to cohost Eben Britton to provide a more comprehensive breakdown of 5-MeO-DMT (the psychedelic in toad venom).

Something real had happened. Tyson abandoned drugs and alcohol (marijuana, the focus of his company, being the only exception). Which was an astonishing development in its own right, as Tyson’s struggles with addiction are well documented. Hotboxin’ started booking younger fighters as guests, and Tyson, who’d long been reluctant to talk about fighting, was suddenly embracing his role as mentor and keeper of knowledge. And what knowledge! It was as if the capital of a lost civilization had been excavated with all of its art and history preserved wholly intact. Listening to Tyson’s unrestrained passion talking about his guest LL Cool J’s ancestor Tom Molineaux, a slave who became a champion boxer, and LL’s uncle, John Henry Lewis, a light heavyweight champion, leaves no doubt that Tyson had come back to life!

But perhaps the most intriguing of them all was still to come: Tyson started boxing again. Something he had not done since donning a tank top in a transparent cash-grab exhibition fight in October of 2006 (and arguably not pursued in earnest long before that too).

Which is why the announcement of Tyson’s comeback is wholly unlike any cliched story of a long retired fighter’s return to the ring. Nothing in the history of boxing even remotely approximates the circumstances of Tyson’s return. Even when compared to George Foreman’s own historically unprecedented comeback, the differences are exhaustive.

Foreman heard the voice of God in his locker room following a decision loss to Jimmy Young (the closest parallel I could find for any boxer to Tyson’s toad venom trip), and experienced an immediate religious conversion that eventually led to a full commitment to God and ministry. But he would not resume fighting until a decade later at the age of 38, and then in part to financially support his ministry.

By comparison, the fight on November 28th, 2020 will mark exactly two years and a day from when Tyson smoked toad venom for the first time (November 27th, 2018).

George Foreman famously regained the heavyweight title at 45 years old, seven and a half years into his comeback. If Tyson were to follow that comeback trajectory precisely, he’d regain the heavyweight title at 62 years old on July 25, 2028.

(One of George’s stated intentions at the outset of his return in 1987 was to fight young Mike Tyson, who at the time was violently dismantling the entire heavyweight division. When asked about the prospect of fighting old George, Tyson offered that he hoped it would happen before George died of “rigor mortis.” )