A man has accused boxing legend Mike Tyson of robbing him when he was younger. The former world’s most dangerous man responded to the news by demonstrating how far he has come since his turbulent, criminal upbringing.
Tyson, the undisputed heavyweight champion from 1987 to 1990, will take on YouTuber Jake Paul on Friday night in Texas.
Iron Mike, 58, has been working hard in the gym for his comeback to the ring for the most of this year. It will be his first professional bout in 19 years.
When Tyson returned to his hometown of Brownsville, one of the roughest neighbourhoods in New York in the 1980s, for a Netflix special previewing the fight, he ran across a man who wanted a picture with him.
“On Amboy and Pitkin, which is the intersection of Pitkin Avenue and Amboy Street in Brooklyn, you robbed me when I was eight years old,” the man remarked.
That comment startled Tyson, who said, ‘I robbed you?’ ‘Now he’s accusing me for robbing him,’ he said, turning to the camera.
Tyson apologised to the man and grinned.
“I apologise,” he said.
With no ill will, the man returned the smile and added, ‘No, don’t worry about that, darling.’
In his autobiography Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, published in 2013, Tyson talked candidly about his challenging upbringing.
Tyson was born in 1966 at Cumberland Hospital in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, but he never had a close relationship with his father, Percel.
Additionally, Jimmy “Curlee” Kirkpatrick Jr., the man his mother Lorna Mae claimed to be his “biological father,” was rarely present in either of their lives.
When Tyson was seven years old, his mother and her kids were evicted after she lost her job as a matron at the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan.
At the age of seven, the future champion started a career in petty crime, breaking into homes through windows that were too big for older boys to fit through and stealing anything he could find.
Early in life, he developed an unrelenting pattern of criminal outbursts that resulted in the police dragging him in before his distraught mother took him home and severely beat him.
He was a frequent participant of reformatory school, sometimes known as “special-ed crazy school,” and a “zonked out zombie” on Thorazine by the time he was twelve.
Tyson can’t think of many positive memories from his early years, but one in particular from his time at Sporford’s reformatory school sticks out.
“We saw a movie called “The Greatest” about Muhammad Ali,” he recalled. At the end, we were taken aback when Ali himself appeared on stage.
“I realised that I wanted to be that guy.”
