Whoever saw the incriminated video from the plane, you probably would like to slap the young man too. But conflicts should be resolved differently. And so one of the best boxers of all time, the 55-year-old “Bad Man” Mike Tyson, has another potential troublemaker. Nothing new, he already had hundreds.
Every other guy would like to be Mike Tyson, a heavyweight champion and perhaps the most furious professional fighter ever, for a while. But few would like to live his life. If Tyson didn’t know what he really was, he would probably have it easier. The problem is, he sometimes gets it.
His Brooklyn was not a good place
To better understand everything, let’s first go to the time and place where Mike Tyson was born. It was in 1966 in Brooklyn, New York, where he spent the first years of his life in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, which was close to the naval docks. During the war, a large number of blacks withdrew for work there. And there were more and more of them, as the former Jewish and Italian strata moved elsewhere. It was in 1966 that the docks were abolished. And shortly afterwards, they also dismantled the Myrtle Avenue overground train. If by then it had been worth living here and commuting to Manhattan, then not.
My whole life has been wasted – I have failed. I just want to run. I’m really ashamed of myself and my life. I want to be a missionary… People took me so high, I wanted to take the picture down.
Mike’s mother, Lorna Mae Tyson of Charlottesville, wasn’t exactly honest, she drank and changed guys. Mike didn’t know his real father, taxi driver Purcell Tyson of Jamaica. When he was born, she lived with a certain Jim Kirkpatrick. He was a pimp hanging out in the pool halls playing games of chance. “My father was an ordinary street guy trapped in a street world,” Tyson said of him. But he couldn’t remember him from that time either. Kirkpatrick left when Mike was born, leaving the mother alone with her three children.
When the boy was 10 years old, the family had to move to a suburb of Brownsville due to its poor financial situation. But it was even worse there. Just for fun, in 1956 the black population was 57% and the white population was 43%. Seven years later, 72% of the population was black, 15% Puerto Rican, and the ghetto had the highest per capita arrest of any housing estate in New York.
Mike Tyson was a street kid, moreover, a high-crime part of town. In an interview with Details magazine, he recalled the first duel with a much larger boy who ripped off the head of one of his pigeons. At that time, Mike was repeatedly caught committing petty thefts, violence and fights. Some mocked his high-pitched voice. At the age of 13, he had 38 arrests and his mother died at the age of 16. “I’ve never seen her happy and proud to do anything,” the boxer recalled. “She only knew me as a wild boy running through the streets and coming home with new clothes she knew I didn’t pay for. I’ve never been given the opportunity to talk to her. “It’s overwhelming emotionally and personally.”
Box actually saved him
Fortunately for Mike, there was still a box and he saved him from the worst. It started 200 miles north of home at the Tryon School boys’ institute at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. It was not a school, but a trap. And here Mike’s boxing skills were discovered by a certain Bobby Stewart, a juvenile correctional worker and former boxer. He trained him for several months and then introduced Cus D’Amat, a well-known boxing manager and coach. He took the young man, literally. When Mike’s mother died, he adopted him and continued to work on his boxing rise.
If Mike Tyson ever had anyone as a father, it was D’Amato. He led him to gold medals at the junior games in 1981 and 1982. Over the next two years, Mike won Golden Gloves – the highest amateur competition in the United States. Within a year, he was with the pros and went from victory to victory.
D’Amato died in 1985, but Tyson was not stopped. It was in the hands of coach Kevin Rooney. And then it came on November 22, 1986. Against Trevor Berbick, he became the youngest heavyweight champion (WBC) in history at the age of 20 and 4 months. The following year, he added WBA and IBF titles and began calling him an “invincible champion.”
Mike Tyson couldn’t stand the passenger’s provocation on the flight from San Francisco to Florida and struck him several times.
But the good times did not last long. Undoubtedly, this was influenced by her personal situation and her wild first marriage to actress Robin Givens (he was married three times and has seven children). They were married in February 1988 and after a year they were divorcing. Givens described life with Tyson as torture, pure hell, worse than anything she could have imagined. Tyson was described as a manic-depressive person, which was later confirmed by doctors.
It was a period that Mike Tyson is said to have lost the right direction. He broke up with manager Bill Clayton, fired coach Rooney, and then everything bad came together in one important moment. On February 11, 1990, he suffered a shocking KO defeat with “nýmand” Buster Douglas in Tokyo.
It was one of the biggest surprises in the history of modern sport. Tyson commented surprisingly when he said the loss was the biggest moment of his career. “I needed that fight to make me a better person and a warrior.” Perhaps a harder, a better man. He was sentenced two years in prison to rape the beauty queen Miss Black Rhode Island, 18-year-old Desire Washington.
Three years in prison
He was given six years, not even after three. He converted to Islam in prison and rose for the last time. 10 years after his first big victory, he won first the WBC title and then the WBA. But another fall soon came. First, he again unexpectedly lost defending the WBA title to Evander Holyfield. When repeating the match after half a year, Tyson caused perhaps the biggest boxing scandal in history. At first he protested that Holyfield had hit him in the head several times, and finally bit his opponent’s ear. He was disqualified for that – which hasn’t happened in the heavyweight title in 50 years.
The last time “Bad Man” competed for the heavyweight title was in 2002 with Lennox Lewis, but he lost KO in the eighth round. The end of his career was approaching. After years of financial trouble, he went bankrupt and retired in 2005 after losing three of the last four battles.
At the end of his career, he tried everything possible and again it was like on a swing. He did a little drug, the courts dealt with it. He bred pigeons in Paradise Valley, Phoenix, Arizona, starred in a few movies, such as Vegas Party, and participated in television shows and exhibited boxing tours. He became a vegan and then returned to the masses – at least in white, he supported Donald Trump’s candidacy, he praised the Russian audience for the MMA tour in Chelyabinsk. He once said that the more he looked at all the churches and mosques, the more he saw the devil. And he soon suffocated that he was grateful that he had become a Muslim and that he needed Allah for his life. It is most recently promoting its marijuana brand, Tyson 2.0.
It was as if two lives were perpetrating in him, perhaps several. He would have preferred to run away from everything, but on the other hand, he could not, because in time his evil selves always reigned. And he had to pay off debts.
“My whole life has been wasted – I have failed. I just want to run. I’m really ashamed of myself and my life. I want to be a missionary… People took me so high, I wanted to take the picture down, ”he said in an interview with Time magazine in 2005.
Nevertheless, he deserves at least recognition for his box. That’s why he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame on June 12, 2011. And experts still argue about whether they are among the biggest fighters of the boxing ring or not.
