From the book ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME by Jeff Pearlman. Copyright © 2025 by Jeff Pearlman. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
On the night of September 7, 1996, Tupac Amaru Shakur—one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time—was hit by multiple bullets in a drive-by shooting at the intersection of Flamingo Blvd. and Koval Lane in Las Vegas. Earlier that night he had attended the Mike Tyson–Bruce Seldon heavyweight fight, after which he and several members of his Death Row Records entourage got into a brawl in the lobby of the MGM casino. The fight was started by Tupac, who was alerted to the presence of Orlando (Baby Lane) Anderson, a member of the Compton Crips (who had allegedly stolen a medallion belonging to a Death Row member) and punched him in the face. Anderson fell to the floor and was stomped on by Tupac, Suge Knight and several others. Anderson, it is widely believed, was the man who shot Shakur in the front seat of Knight’s BMW.
Three days earlier, Tupac had been in New York to serve as a presenter at the MTV Video Music Awards. At the afterparty, he and the New York rapper Nas came to a truce after months of back-and-forth threats and trash talk involving the East Coast v. West Coast rap beef that was consuming much of musical entertainment. The two stars spoke, hugged it out and reached an agreement. “We had a plan,” said Nas, “to quash it in Vegas.”
Vegas.
Tupac loved Vegas.
Everything about it. The lights. The sounds. The action. The women. Vegas wasn’t his home, but it felt like his sanctuary. In the hip-hop world, dozens of artists considered Las Vegas their go-to retreat—fly in with the crew, gamble, eat, maybe catch a fight, chase women, smoke, drink, eat some more, chase some extra women, fly out.
Since his release from Clinton Correctional Facility, Tupac had spent a good number of nights along the Strip. Las Vegas served as a Death Row satellite campus. Knight had played his college football there, fell in love with the city, and in 1994 opened a nightspot, Club 662, at 1700 East Flamingo Road. In May he purchased the Vegas mansion where Robert De Niro lived during the filming of Casino.
So when it was announced that Mike Tyson, the WBC heavyweight champion, would fight Bruce Seldon, the WBA heavyweight champion, at the MGM Grand on September 7, 1996, Knight ponied up for dozens of tickets and invited the Death Row fam to be his guests.
And Tupac initially declined the invitation. A few weeks earlier Tanya Hart, a TV host for BET, had invited him to attend Sunday services at the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles. It was a Black congregation packed with celebrity attendees, ranging from Denzel Washington to Magic Johnson to Samuel L. Jackson. “He promised me he was coming,” Hart recalled. “But then he didn’t show.”
Tupac loved Vegas.
It wasn’t just the slots and the women. It was Iron Mike Tyson, a man whose life mirrored Tupac’s. “Mike Tyson,” wrote Rob Marriott in Vibe, “is a thug’s champion.” Five years Tupac’s senior, Tyson was (like Tupac) a product of New York City whose childhood was unstable (like Tupac) and filled with trauma (like Tupac). He never had much of a relationship with his biological father (like Tupac) and his primary male role model (like Tupac’s) was a street hustler. From an early age, Tyson (like Tupac) recognized he needed to fight to survive. And even though young Mike did so with his fists and young Tupac did so with his words, they mirrored one another. Tyson and Tupac first met in 1991 at a party thrown at the Hollywood Palladium by Magic Johnson, and both lived fast, spoke boastfully, and allowed the trappings of fame to gobble them up. Tupac had even written a song (“Road 2 Glory”) to be played during Tyson’s ring entrance against Frank Bruno in March.
In 1992, Tyson was convicted of raping an eighteen-year-old beauty pageant contestant named Desiree Washington, and sentenced to six years in prison. In 1995, Tupac was convicted of sexually abusing a nineteen-year-old aspiring model named Ayanna Jackson, and sentenced to one-and-a-half to four-and-a-half years in prison. They wrote letters to one another from behind bars. In fact, before he was locked up at Clinton, Tupac paid a visit to Plainfield, Indiana, where Tyson was serving his time inside the Indiana Youth Center. The trip was arranged by Tupac’s manager, Watani Tyehimba, who wanted his charge to understand where those who behaved as he did oftentimes wound up. Tupac didn’t initially care to go, but when he sat across from Tyson, he felt brotherhood. Tyson shared some hard truths: Stop hanging around with riffraff. Look after your money. Rise above the drama. “Afterward Tupac accused me of telling Mike what to say,” Tyehimba recalled. “I assured him that wasn’t the case ... that Mike was just being real and honest with him. I wish Tupac had listened a little harder.”
Tyson exited prison on March 25, 1995, and while his return to the ring had a watch-a-midget-fight-a-bear level of sadness to it (he was fed a diet of tin cans to batter), Tupac was all in on the spectacle. He even recorded another entrance theme—“Let’z Get It On”—that Tyson promised to use for his Seldon brawl. So on the morning of September 7, two days after returning from New York, Tupac stepped into a black SUV outside his Woodland Hills home for the four-and-a-half-hour journey to Vegas.
The fight was slated for nine o’clock that evening, which allowed plenty of time to travel the 270 miles. Under normal circumstances, Tupac would have been accompanied by Death Row bodyguards. However, because of state laws, Reggie Wright Jr., the label’s chief of security, had headed to Nevada early with the other protectors to apply for temporary Nevada gun permits. As a result, Tupac was part of a three-SUV caravan that include Knight and a half dozen or so members of the Mob Pirus, the Compton street gang affiliated with the Bloods. Not one to patiently sit and watch the world pass, Tupac grew fidgety as the trip progressed. After 114 miles, the fleet of SUVs pulled off the Lenwood Road exit along Interstate 15 in sleepy Barstow, California, home to one of California’s largest In-N-Out Burgers.
When the cars reached the parking lot, Knight exited, walked through the restaurant’s front doors, and waited on line. Meanwhile, Tupac and the gangbangers hung in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes and stretching out stiff limbs. Around this same time, two buses carrying the football team from Long Beach Polytechnic High School also arrived at the In-N-Out. They had lost a road game to Las Vegas’s Green Valley High the previous night, and now—mid-return—were pausing for grub.
The first to spot Tupac was Robert Hollie, a backup quarterback for the Jackrabbits. He looked out the window and said, “Yo, it’s Pac!”
“What?” a teammate asked.
“It’s Tupac!” he yelled. “It’s Tupac!”
A slew of players rushed toward the windows, then were herded off the buses by a coach and into the restaurant. Two players, Hollie and a nose tackle named Gary Barnes, led a dozen or so teammates toward the SUVs. Tupac and the Pirus were facing the opposite direction, and were caught off guard. A pair of gangsters spun and pulled out their Glocks.
“Bloods,” Tupac said, “you can’t be walking up on me like that!”
He cursed the boys out, but took stock of their collective youth. These were high school kids. Zits and peach fuzz.
“Where are all y’all little n----s from?” he asked.
“Long Beach,” Hollie replied.
“Oh, so y’all know my homie Snoop?” Tupac said.
With the temperature lowered, Tupac chatted for a few minutes, then dismissed the athletes with a nod. As the buses pulled out of the lot, a few Cal Poly players yelled toward Tupac, who was well out of shouting distance.
“Go f--- yourself, Pac!” one said.
“F--- you, Pac!” said another.
“There was one guy coming on our bus, and I won’t give up his name,” said Larry Croom, a running back who went on to play in the NFL. “But he screamed, ‘That’s why you got shot! And the next time I hope you die!’
“That stuck with me,” Croom said. “It really stuck with me.”
Bruce Seldon and Mike Tyson were originally scheduled to meet in the ring on July 13, 1996. That was the date the camps for both fighters agreed upon, and in the lead-up, Seldon—aka “The Atlantic City Express”—worked his ass off.
An elite athlete who, at 6'1" and 229 pounds, could walk across a basketball court on his hands, Seldon’s greatest flaw was flagging motivation. That’s why a pugilist with George Foreman–esque talent was a boxing afterthought. “We went out to Vegas eight months before the fight, and Bruce was all in and in peak condition,” said Rocco DePersia, his manager. “He was ready, and I’m pretty certain he would have given Tyson all he could handle.”
On July 3, however, Don King, the fight’s promoter, announced that Tyson had come down with bronchitis, and the event would be pushed back to September 7. Seldon was crestfallen. DePersia, for his part, was skeptical. “It seemed kind of fishy,” he said—and when Seldon publicly questioned the postponement, an angry Tyson said he would deliver his opponent “the worst beating of his life.”
Whatever the case, the delay changed everything. Without it, Bruce Seldon and Mike Tyson would have fought on July 13. Without it, Tupac Shakur—in the midst of filming Gridlock’d that summer—wouldn’t have attended.
Once he arrived in Las Vegas, Tupac met up with his girlfriend, Kidada Jones, who drove out on her own and checked into their room at the Luxor hotel. This was around 1:00 p.m.—five hours before the undercard bouts were slated to start, eight hours before the main event. Although he wasn’t anticipating any type of violence, Tupac was aware that the fight scene—especially when Death Row was involved—could turn unsightly. In addition, this wasn’t really a plus-one affair. Knight wanted his guys there. His guys. Kidada hung back.
Before the fight, Tupac, who loved to gamble, headed down to the Luxor’s casino and found his way to the twenty-five-dollar craps table.
He was wearing a rust-colored silk shirt and a thirty-thousand-dollar diamond-studded Euphanasia pendant around his neck. After an hour or so, he and a bunch of Death Row guys walked the 1.1 miles to the MGM, where—according to Frank Alexander, one of his bodyguards—his fortunes changed for the better. “He began winning big,” Alexander recalled. “He was covering all the odds and was coming away with $1,400 to $2,000 a roll. Winners always attract a crowd, but as soon as people started figuring out who he was, the crowd got more serious. Tupac loved the attention. What better place for a high-roller gangsta to be seen rolling high than in Vegas at a craps table?”
Tupac gambled, roamed Vegas, gambled some more, returned to his room, changed into a baggy gold shirt and even baggier jeans. He and Alexander were supposed to meet Knight inside the MGM Grand roughly an hour before Seldon–Tyson, but the Death Row CEO was, as was the norm, late. Ever fidgety, ever agitated, Tupac paced back and forth. “I’m gonna get my own goddamn tickets!” he snapped. This was mere talk.
The best seats ran a thousand dollars. When Knight finally arrived, it was 7:30 p.m. and someone named Desi (“Please welcome the talented Horn Records recording artist ...”) was brutalizing the national anthem.
Knight and Tupac entered and walked toward their Row E near-ringside seats. Standing nearby was Butch Lewis, the veteran boxing promoter. Tupac tapped him on the shoulder and asked, “Mr. Lewis?”
Butch Lewis nodded.
“You don’t know me, but I’m Tupac Shakur,” Tupac said.
“Of course I know you, Negro,” Lewis replied. “How are you?”
“Your daughter—her name is Sita, right?” Tupac asked.
Lewis nodded reluctantly. Sita Lewis was, indeed, his daughter, as well as a BET producer who had briefly met Tupac years earlier. Devoutly Christian, Sita felt compelled by the Lord to send a note to Tupac while he was inside Clinton, accompanied by several religious books.
“She wrote me a letter when I was locked up,” Tupac said. “I just want you to know that letter held me down. Please tell her.”
Overcome by the moment, Lewis hugged Tupac.
“Thank you, brother,” he said. “Thank you.”
By the time Seldon and Tyson met at center ring to hear referee Richard Steele’s instructions, Tupac—one of approximately nine thousand in attendance—stood ready. He was a bit high, a bit drunk, buzzing off his casino triumphs, and amped for an entertaining battle.
Alas, Seldon–Tyson lasted one minute and forty-nine seconds—one of the shortest title bouts in heavyweight history. Tyson first dropped Seldon with a left hook seventy-two seconds into the fight, then nailed him again with a phantom left hook moments later, knocking him back to the ground. “I swear he never hit him,” said Tim Neverett, a Los Angeles Dodgers announcer who attended the fight. “Watch the replay from every angle. He didn’t connect.” Seldon rose, but wobbled, and Steele ended the fight. Boos rained down, with chants of “Fake! Fake! Fake!” filling the arena. “It was as one-sided as a shipwreck,” wrote Jim Murray in the Los Angeles Times. “The Titanic put up a better fight against the iceberg.”
People anticipating a classic battle left angry. Tupac, however, left giddy. He and Knight exited into a corridor, and Tupac was ecstatic. “Did y’all see that?” he bellowed toward a BET news cameraman positioned backstage.
“Fifty punches! I counted ’em! Tyson did it to him. We bad like that. Come out of prison and we runnin’ s---!”
Then he entered the MGM casino.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Fight That Changed Pop Culture History.
