"Sex addiction" stopped Tyson from being the best boxer ever

Former boxer Mike Tyson. PHOTO / COURTESY

Mike Tyson was the most feared boxer on the planet, a wild animal who literally tore chunks out of his opponents.

And he could have been the greatest of all time if he hadn’t been floored by his “weakness for women”, says his former manager Rory Holloway. Instead, Tyson ended up a convicted rapist.

His lifelong friend has revealed for the first time how his team faced a constant battle to control the fighter’s sex addiction, even employing 24-hour security guards to stop him sneaking out before fights.

In Holloway’s book Taming the Beast: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, he admits that even being jailed for rape didn’t keep Tyson away from women – who queued around the block to see him in prison.

Holloway, a pal of Tyson’s since they were teenagers in New York, says: “I knew there was nobody in the ring who could stop him. The only reason he may not go down as the best is because of his ­weakness for women. Every decision he made was around women and sex.

“I knew it would catch up with him, and it did. I don’t think there is a single person alive who could’ve changed the outcome.”

Tyson was the youngest world heavyweight boxing champion in history at 20 in 1986. But just six years later he was jailed for raping 18 year-old beauty pageant contestant Desiree Washington in an Indianapolis hotel room.

Holloway says: “The rape case was inevitable. I’m surprised more girls didn’t make claims against him.”

In jail, Tyson had his pick of women. Holloway says: “All my life I’d fought to keep Mike away from women, but I’d pull up at the prison and the guards would tell me I couldn’t visit till the next day because Mike’s got women lined up to see him.

“He was getting more women in there than he was outside. I ended up sleeping in the damn parking lot.”

Tyson’s dysfunctional relationship with women dates back to his childhood, growing up with no father figure in a broken home in Brooklyn, New York. By the age of 13 he had already been arrested 38 times for petty crimes and fighting.

His lack of a male role model clearly affected him. After the first of his three marriages broke down Tyson even turned to a pimp – Iceberg Slim – for advice on handling women.

Perhaps it was a warped cry for help as Tyson’s own absent dad was a pimp.

The closest thing teenage Tyson had to a father figure was his first coach Cus D’Amato, who rescued him from a life of petty crime and taught him to box.

Yet he never set Tyson straight about women. D’Amato even refused to discipline him after he was caught messing around with his trainer’s 11 year-old niece. Instead he fired the trainer for threatening Tyson.