"When I was champ of the world, I was 20 years old I had friends who were 15 years old," Tyson, now 53, said. "I was hanging out with 15-year-old kids, 17-year-old kids. It was just a bunch of kids hanging out with a lot of money."
When we started running, the huge crowd in the park opened up like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was a good thing they did, because, boom, one of my friends opened fire. Everybody scrambled when they heard the gun.
A fighter should possess a number of qualities being diligence, commitment and discipline etc. But one very significant quality a fighter must possess is to be able to do the thing he hates and do that thing with passion as if he enjoys doing the certain thing. We must do what we love or learn to love the thing that needs to be done!
Behind the scenes, however, things were not as happy and stable as they seemed. The passing of Cus D’Amato in 1985 hit the fighter particularly hard. Shortly afterward, renowned boxing manager Don King ingratiated himself into Tyson’s favour, eventually becoming his manager.
19. "Once we get the things we are striving for, we rarely remain satisfied with them. The things are just the bait. Chasing after them forces us to evolve, and it is the evolution and not the rewards themselves that matters to us and to those around us. This means that for most people success is struggling and evolving as effectively as possible." – Ray Dalio
Boxing legend Mike Tyson is one of the few boxers who has had success in creative endeavors outside the ring. The former heavyweight champion has found a lot of success in acting making his Hollywood debut with a cameo appearance in ‘The Hangover’. Moreover, he has continued to find success in Hollywood, often playing exaggerated versions of himself.
Mike Tyson is arguably one of the greatest boxers in the sport’s history. The legendary boxer won many titles during his prime and beat several great champions along the way. As a result, he became famous as the ‘Baddest Man on the Planet’. However, he has revealed what the real success of his life was.
In 1964, Ip Man is diagnosed with throat cancer due to his history of chronic smoking. After his rebellious son Ip Ching fights back against a bully and is expelled from school, Ip Man decides to travel to San Francisco in order to look for study opportunities. After Ching and his father get into a heated argument that ends with the older Ip striking his son in the face, he entrusts Ching to his friend, Fat Bo.
TYSON: Yeah, this is true. But that quickly changed when my parents moved into this neighborhood called Brownsville, Brooklyn, which was just totally different than the neighborhood we lived in before. The people in Brownsville were very aggressive. It was like a dog-eat-dog world. So I had to get familiar with it.
Tyson’s influence on boxing is undeniable. He burst onto the scene in the 1980s and quickly became the youngest heavyweight champion in history. His speed, power, and aggressive style of fighting captivated audiences around the world and brought a new level of excitement to the sport. Tyson’s dominance in the ring inspired a new generation of fighters to emulate his ferocity and determination.
All this talk about dedication and discipline and hard work wasn’t enough to keep me from going back to Brooklyn and doing my jostling and robbing. I was playing two heads of the same coin. I’d be up in Catskill and be the choirboy and then I’d go down to Brooklyn and be the devil. Thank God that I never got arrested for anything. That would have broken Cus’s heart.
After hitting rock bottom, Tyson began to rebuild his
life is beautiful mike tyson with his wife and family front and center. "I wanted to be courageous and try to be a man and raise a family and respect a woman and never cheat. But I'd never done that," the boxer said, per the New York Post.
On February 11, 1990, the ground in Tokyo shook so violently that its reverberations—at least metaphorically—were felt in the small upstate town of Catskill, New York, some 6,650 miles away. It was early afternoon in the Tokyo Dome when boxer Mike Tyson, favored to win 42 to 1, was knocked out for the first time in his professional career. The undefeated heavyweight champion, with a 37-0 record, Tyson began his fall from grace at the hands of underdog James "Buster" Douglas, a talented fighter who had been branded as "lacking heart" in his career. Tyson went down at 1 minute, 23 seconds in the tenth round and did not get back up.
The Nevada State Commission withheld Tyson’s paycheck and suspended his license. Tyson appeared before the press on Monday after the fight and apologized for his behavior, but the public was outragedper-haps more so than when he was convicted for rape. "He wasn’t up for another beating," Holyfield explained to Time magazine’s Richard Lacayo. "He realized he couldn’t whup me, and he got frustrated." Reaction poured in from all over the world and Tyson quickly became a punch line on the late night comedy shows. At the Hollywood Wax Museum his likeness was moved from the sports section to the Chamber of Horrors next to Hannibal Lector, the cannibal from the movie Silence of the Lambs. In the end Tyson was banned from boxing for one year and fined $3 million.
