The Ending Of Mike Explained

The Hulu miniseries "Mike" ends as it begins, with former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson (Trevante Rhodes) on stage in a crowded theatre, pondering what exactly he is, and what his story means in the grand scheme of American life. Born into poverty and violence, Tyson's phenomenal boxing skills were discovered while he was serving time in an upstate New York juvenile detention center. Trained in his early years by the legendary Cus D'Amato (Harvey Keitel), Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history when he defeated Trevor Berbick in 1986 at age 20. 

Over the decades Tyson has been seen as pretty much everything, often all at once: A hero, a pariah, a sex offender, a sideshow attraction, an addict, a criminal. His life is arguably too large for even a four-hour miniseries, and creators Steven Rogers and Craig Gillespie ("I, Tonya") take a Wikipedia-style approach, hitting relevant details via near-constant narration before moving on to the next big event. The final episode moves through the last two decades of Tyson's life at a breakneck pace, barely stopping for major events like the death of his daughter in 2009, on the way to answering the question posed at the very beginning: Just who is Mike Tyson, really? This approach loses a lot of crucial context and leaves some moments frustratingly unclear. Let's take a look at some of the real-life details that help explain the ending of "Mike."

So in the end, does "Mike" provide an unbiased view of its subject? It's difficult to say, as the series is told almost entirely from Tyson's own perspective and in his own words. Rogers and company lean heavily on Tyson's 2013 memoir "Undisputed Truth" and the accompanying one-man show that Tyson performed in Vegas, Broadway, and on HBO. The miniseries uses a fictionalized version of that show as its framing device, as Tyson performs his life story for a rapt audience, and seems to have taken a number of specific details, especially in its early episodes, from the memoir; a scene in Episode 2 in which trainer Teddy Atlas accuses a teenage Mike of stealing appears to have been adapted directly from this excerpt reprinted in New York magazine.

Elsewhere, the series mitigates the allegations of abuse in his eight-month marriage to actress Robin Givens (Laura Harring) by focusing on his dubious manic depression diagnosis and the lithium prescription that was forced upon him (in the show's telling) by Givens and her mother. In Episode 5, "Desiree," the story of Tyson's 1992 sexual assault conviction is told through the perspective of his victim Desiree Washington (Li Eubanks), which is meant to be respectful to her experience but has the unintended consequence of distancing Tyson from the facts of his own crime. By the final episode, the series takes his claims of healing and sobriety with the support of his third wife Kiki at face value. Tyson's anger at Hulu hijacking his life is understandable, but at the end of it all, he could hardly have wished for a more supportive telling.

Much of Tyson's life is truly stranger than fiction, and it's to the series' credit that they often present his wildest moments more or less as they actually happened. The first fight of his life really was against a bully who had decapitated one of his pet birds. He really did crash his BMW into a tree in what many at the time believed to be a suicide attempt. And he really did bite Lennox Lewis in the leg during a melee that broke out in the middle of a press conference for their 2002 fight in Memphis.

After Tyson's 15-month suspension for the Bite Fight ended, he returned to the ring with a vengeance, notching six fights from early 1999 to late 2001. The spring 2002 fight against IBF, IBO, and WBC heavyweight champ Lewis was his first chance at a title since fighting Holyfield. As the press conference began, Tyson stood on stage alone, dressed all in black. When Lewis entered from the other side of the stage, Tyson advanced on him and immediately started throwing punches. Soon the stage was filled with members of the two men's teams, and as Lewis attempted to crawl out of the ruckus, Tyson grabbed him by the leg and bit his calf. The incident cost Tyson over $300,000 in fines and put the fight — the biggest in history up to that point — in doubt. In the end, the fight continued and Lewis knocked Tyson out in the 8th round to retain his championship belts. It would be the last time Tyson was ever in contention.

By the time King and Tyson settled in 2004, Tyson was still seriously in debt, but his professional boxing career was about to come to a close. After losing to Lennox Lewis, Tyson scored an easy first-round knockout of Clifford Etienne in 2003, but back-to-back losses to Danny Williams and Kevin McBride in 2004 and 2005 put him on the canvas for good. The series shows us the final moments of his fight with McBride as Tyson, now sporting his famous face tattoo, slumps against the ropes, exhausted and unwilling to go on. The scene then cuts to the post-fight interview in which he regretfully announces his retirement.

All of what is shown is true to the real fight and its aftermath, but like Tyson and King in the car, the series leaves out the fight's most outrageous moments. In some ways it was as bad a night for Tyson as the Bite Fight, with the one-time champ intentionally head-butting McBride and attempting to break his arm just as he had in his foul-laden 1999 match with Francois Botha. McBride would later claim that Tyson had tried to bite his nipple off at one point. At the end of Round 6 after falling from a push by McBride, Tyson quit in his corner, refusing to come out for Round 7. The baddest man on the planet had finally reached his limit.

Tyson has long had a troubled relationship with parental figures, both real and surrogate. The miniseries gets much of its drama in its early episodes from contrasting his bitter, alcoholic mother Lorna (Canadian actor Olunike Adeliyi, giving arguably the series' best performance) with the warm encouragement of surrogate father Cus D'Amato. But no one is all saint or all demon, and it takes a session in the final episode with another surrogate parent, therapist Marylin Murray (Patricia Bethune), to make Tyson see that.

In real life Tyson began seeing Murray, who specializes in trauma recovery, after being released from prison in 1995, but the series saves her for a key moment in the final episode in which she lays out his issues with his parental figures in a perhaps too-tidy way, noting that despite his professed hatred for his mother, he still had her body exhumed and moved to a new burial plot — essentially moving her to a nicer house once he became rich and famous. And even though Cus treated him like a son, he instilled many of Tyson's most negative qualities — his fearsomeness, his violence, his dependency. It's a moment of clarity, if for no one else but the audience; Tyson isn't quite ready to accept the truth.

So after four hours and eight episodes, has "Mike" achieved Gist's stated goal of telling "an unbiased story" about one of the most famous athletes of the 20th century? Perhaps more importantly, does "Mike" offer any further insight than the scores of books and magazine articles that have been written about Tyson over the years, the interviews and documentary features he has taken part in, the one-man show that he co-wrote and performed across the country, or even his Wikipedia page? The final episodes move so fast that they seem like a stylish reading of facts with the occasional bloody ear flying through the air, but the early episodes make an earnest attempt to depict Tyson's upbringing and the forces that shaped him into the man he is.

The finale ends with a montage of moments and characters from earlier in the series — his mother, Cus D'Amato, Robin Givens, and Desiree Washington — set to the insistent beat of Nina Simone's "Sinnerman." "Me, I'm the American dream, red state and blue," Tyson narrates. "The good and the bad, just like you." In the real "Undisputed Truth," Tyson's summary is less grandiose, focusing not on what he means as a symbol, but what it means for him to stand in front of an audience and bear his soul, "naked as I came into the world." He sounds grateful to be standing on a Broadway stage when he just as likely could have been shot dead in Brooklyn as a teen, just a few miles away. It's a simple insight, but one that "Mike" ultimately can't grasp, aside from Trevante Rhodes' transformative performance.