Video Vault: 1988 split with Robin Givens brings Mike Tyson to Cleveland

CLEVELAND - It seems like boxer Mike Tyson has always been big news, and when he split with wife Robin Givens he became really big news.

In an infamous interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters, Givens talked about the difficulties of being married to Tyson as if he weren’t in the same room. She called being married to Tyson in the September 1988 “20/20” segment, ''torture, pure hell, worse than anything I could possibly imagine.”

So after the split, where did Tyson go? Cleveland, of course.

Saturday evening on Oct. 8, 1988, we here at WEWS got word Tyson and Don King were flying to Hopkins. King was bringing him to train at hiss training facility in northeast Ohio.

But another man meeting them was quite a surprise: longtime Cleveland City Council President George Forbes.

The three men walked side by side down concourse C larger than life, yet not really talking to the assembled reporters.

I shot this story and let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve backpedaled the entire concourse with more than 40 pounds of equipment. It’s a game of cat and mouse around the airport, but we catch up with the trio, and find out Tyson and Forbes have met only one time before this 1988 meeting.

WEWS reporter Clif Caldwell finally gets “Iron Mike” to talk, but it’s at Caldwell’s expense. Caldwell does get to ask the big question about their divorce.

“Perhaps maybe it was a blessing in disguise,” Tyson says adding, “It’s not how much you love somebody, it’s how much they love you and I wasn’t receiving the amount of love I was giving.”