How Mike Tyson Conquered the World and Paid the Ultimate Price of Fame

Early Life and Childhood

Michael Gerard Tyson was born on June 30, 1966 in Brooklyn, New York. His father left when Mike was barely two years old and that was basically the end of that relationship. His mother Lorna was left alone raising three kids in one of the roughest parts of America with very little to work with.

When Mike was ten the family moved to Brownsville, Brooklyn. If you know anything about New York in the 1970s you know what Brownsville was. Violence was not something that happened there occasionally. It was just the daily weather.

Mike was small as a child with a high pitched voice and a lisp. In Brownsville that made him an easy target. Older boys robbed him and pushed him around regularly. Then one day someone pulled the head off one of his pet pigeons right in front of him. He attacked the boy without thinking. That was his first real fight. Something switched on inside him that day that never fully switched off again.

By eleven he was running with a street gang. By thirteen he had been arrested over thirty times. Most people who knew him back then would not have bet a dollar on his future.

The Man Who Changed Everything

In 1980 a counselor at a juvenile detention center named Bobby Stewart noticed something in fourteen year old Mike that nobody else had thought to look for. Stewart was a former boxer and started training him. A few months later he introduced Mike to a legendary trainer named Cus D’Amato in Catskill, New York.

When D’Amato saw Tyson for the first time he told people around him that this kid was going to be heavyweight champion of the world. Not might be. Was going to be.

Tyson moved into D’Amato’s home and that house became the first stable environment he had ever experienced in his life. D’Amato was in his seventies and became something close to a grandfather to him. He gave Mike structure, discipline and for the first time someone who genuinely believed in him without wanting anything back.

When Mike was sixteen his mother died of cancer. He had nobody left from his original family. D’Amato became his legal guardian. The gym and the old man who ran it were everything he had.

The Rise

Tyson turned professional in 1985 at eighteen and what followed was something the boxing world had genuinely never seen before. He won his first nineteen fights by knockout. Twelve of those came in the first round. He did not just beat his opponents. He broke them before the first bell even rang.

On November 22, 1986 he fought Trevor Berbick for the WBC heavyweight title and stopped him in the second round. At twenty years old Mike Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. That record still stands today.

By 1987 he had collected all three major heavyweight titles at the same time, something no heavyweight in history had managed before him. Then in 1988 came the Michael Spinks fight. Spinks had never been knocked out in his entire career. The fight lasted ninety one seconds. The arena was still filling up when it was over.

Cus passed away in November 1985. Mike was nineteen. The man who had pulled him out of Brownsville, given him a home and told him the truth his whole life was suddenly not there anymore. Nobody who came after played that role. Nobody even tried.

The Fall

Nobody who flew to Tokyo that night in February 1990 expected what happened. Tyson was supposed to be unbeatable. Buster Douglas was supposed to be a warm up. Douglas knocked him out in the tenth round in front of a stunned arena and a stunned world. Looking back at it now the loss made sense. The preparation had been sloppy, the people around him had stopped pushing him the way Cus used to, and Douglas on that particular night wanted it more than anyone had expected.

In 1992 he was convicted of rape and sentenced to six years in prison. He served three years before being released in 1995. He has always maintained his innocence. Whatever the truth of it those years took something from him that never fully came back.

The Comeback

After prison Tyson returned to boxing and won back two heavyweight titles in 1996. But the man in the ring was not the same fighter who had terrified the division in the late 1980s. In 1997 he bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear during their rematch and was disqualified. That image followed him everywhere for years. In 2002 Lennox Lewis knocked him out in the eighth round.

By the mid 2000s Tyson was broke despite earning somewhere around 300 million dollars during his career. He filed for bankruptcy in 2003. The money had disappeared through bad management and people around him who were taking rather than giving.

What His Story Comes Down To

Mike Tyson came from a place that does not produce many success stories. No father, a struggling mother, the streets of Brownsville as his school. He was heading somewhere very dark and everyone around him could see it.

One man looked at that same kid and saw something completely different. What Tyson did with that belief between 1985 and 1988 was something boxing had never seen before and has not seen since.

What happened after D’Amato died says something uncomfortable about what happens when someone who grew up the way Mike did suddenly has more money and attention than they know what to do with and nobody genuine left beside them.

At his peak there was nobody on earth more frightening inside a boxing ring than Mike Tyson. But outside that ring he was still in many ways the same scared kid from Brownsville who had never really been taught how to exist in a world that was not trying to hurt him. The boxing he figured out. Everything else was always the harder problem.