From Vegas to vegan, Tyson’s life comes full circle
The boy is also near-sighted and suffers from asthma. He is terrified by the aimless violence at street level and retreats to the top floors of abandoned buildings where old men are breeding and flying pigeons. He joins them daily and soon is a pigeon breeder and fancier himself. He breeds and flies tippers and rollers.
Mostly he loves the deep roller pigeons. They fly straight up towards Paradise and then roll over on their backs and drop like stones towards earth again, pulling up (generally) just in time.
But the boy finally hits the street too. By the time he is 12 years old he has notched up almost 40 arrests and is sent to juvenile prison. The local police learned the name of Mike Tyson long before the world became aware of the existence of the elemental heavyweight boxer described as The Baddest Man On The Planet, a rapist and drug addict and convict, a fearsome presence both inside and outside the ring for more than a decade. The world rejoiced when journeyman Irish heavyweight Kevin McBride from Clones knocked Tyson into the middle of next week and retired him finally a decade ago in his 56th fight.
Tyson is 44 years old now and has had a roller-coaster retirement to date. There have been periods when he was bankrupt to drug dealers, periods he does not clearly remember, years of a life on the sharp edge behind that lurid Maori tattoo that covers one third of his face. The life of this complex man could change again next month but an article by American journalist Ivan Sololaroff shows intriguingly that Iron Mike is in a good place just now with the money flowing in from a new media career, a contentment with his third wife Larissa and, according to Sololaroff, a new found ability to look into the crazed jungle of what he was in his fighting heyday and what he may be in the next decade. It’s a fascinating insight.
Incredibly, the man who was once such a carnivore that he chewed off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear in the ring has become a total vegan, a convert to Islam, is contemplating leaving the Las Vegas scene which both made him as a fighter and destroyed him as a man, and has become some kind of media star as a cameo actor in a series of films such as The Hangover and an acclaimed documentary about his life called Tyson. He even got a standing ovation at the recent Cannes film festival! And, most fascinating of all, Tyson’s major passion in his retirement is again the pigeons of his Brooklyn youth! They occupy much of his time. The birds that are the very symbol of peace fly back home to the huge but gentled hands that were once the most fearful fists of the heavyweight boxing world. And the man who owns them looks back over the dreadful years of his crime-riddled youth and can say to the journalist -“I don’t know who I was. I don’t know who I am. I was a tornado. I was like a hurricane blowing through town, leaving a lot of destruction behind me. Who am I?”
There are interesting elements in the interview which Sololariff conducted on the set of another documentary on a flawed life. The two men met in the tough ghetto where Tyson grew up. It has changed greatly over the years. The change is for the better. As they talked the fighter was approached by a white local woman asking if he was indeed Tyson the fighter. He responded by asking if she was 100% white. She said she was. An amazed Tyson said that back in his boyhood, in that area, she would have been raped, robbed, maybe even murdered if she had appeared on the streets of Brownsville! Another of many interesting elements in the interview was his opinion of the legendary fighters who had preceded him on the world stage.
Ali visited him when he was a boy in prison. He rates Ali, amazingly, as the meanest fighter he ever encountered. Ali, in his view, was so mean that he liked to take all the punishment that was handed out to him, shake his head, and then hand it back with interest. According to Tyson, Ali was much meaner than Frazier. That would not have been the general view I think.
Another mean and vicious fighter was Sugar Ray Robinson, more noted for his peerless skills. But Tyson says that Sugar Ray was vicious, liked to torture his opponents in the ring, hand out as much punishment as possible.
The former champion who was retired by Kevin McBride, having thrown away millions, is now in the lap of luxury again because of his burgeoning media career. There is an entourage around him again in the luxurious hotel suite in New York in which he is religiously eating his entirely vegan meals in between shooting sessions. He is about to leave Las Vegas behind, after a hectic quarter-century as resident, to relocate to New Jersey, much closer to the refurbished Brownsville where he bred and flew his first pigeons.
The fat asthmatic boy threw his first ever punch at an older boy in Brownsville who had deliberately killed one of his pigeons! Now, as the History channel puts the finishing touches to the programme about his life, he is going back under the same skies from which his first deep -roller pigeons launched themselves into their incredible dives from which they do not always manage to pull out of in time. And he asks aloud- “Who was I? Who am I”.
Ar least for this winter it seems that the former rapist and criminal and fighter has pulled out of his dive just in time too...
