On November 22, 1986, 20-year-old Mike Tyson made history when he was crowned boxing's
youngest heavyweight champion of the world.
But despite his fame and place in pop culture, there's a lot many people don't know about
him, like his traumatic upbringing, and some heinous things he's admitted he's done.
Battling addictions
Before becoming a trained and accomplished boxer, Mike Tyson lived with his mom and sister
in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York.
And he was less than a year old when his vices began to take shape.
He told DNA India that his mother would give him liquor and drugs to help him fall asleep.
When his first boxing manager, trainer, and legal guardian, Cus D'Amato, died in 1985,
Tyson was pushed to the point of no return.
It was then that he began abusing drugs and alcohol to battle the grief, as he told Oprah
Winfrey during a candid interview.
Later, while on Howard Stern's SiriusXM radio show, Tyson attempted to explain how it feels
to battle addiction.
"Think about you're starving, think about you're starving, you're absolutely famished.
And that drug, heroin, cocaine, that's food."
Though he said he was clean, he added that staying sober was a constant fight, one of
the toughest battles of his life.
"This is a constant fight.
Eventually that dark entity's going to knock on the door."
Downward spiral
Mike Tyson's behavioral issues began at an early age.
In the eighth grade, he assaulted a teacher, as just one example of the problems he would
cause.
Because of his behavior, he spent most of his time in school in special education classrooms
before eventually dropping out of school entirely.
In 1991, at the age of 25, Tyson was locked up behind bars and faced trial on a rape charge,
for which he was found guilty.
He was sentenced to ten years in prison at the Indiana Youth Center, with four of those
years set aside for a suspended sentence and probation.
During his incarceration, he finally had the time and an incentive to obtain his General
Equivalency Diploma.
He was reportedly given a deal: If he passed the GED exam, the authorities would agree
to shave three months off of his sentence.
He ended up flunking the GED exam, but Tyson wound up getting released after three years
for good behavior anyway, and was placed on probation for the remainder of his punishment.
'Full-blown cokehead'
Mike Tyson reportedly first tried cocaine at the age of 11 and continued to abuse the
illicit drug for many years.
During his heyday, the dynamic pugilist was unmatched and unstoppable, and, little did
we know, he was high on drugs most of the time.
So how did he manage to pass the sport's mandatory drug tests before his bouts?
Apparently, he used an apparatus full of someone's else's clean urine, which he referred to as
a "whizzer."
He went on to describe himself as a, quote, "full-blown cokehead" in his memoir Undisputed
Truth, and he confessed that, during his June 2000 matchup against Lou Savarese, he had
used cocaine and marijuana beforehand.
He also confessed to using cocaine before a televised press conference with his opponent
Lennox Lewis in January 2002, which led to an onstage brawl between the rival camps.
Tyson ended the press conference with an offensive posture, hurling violent threats at a member
of the press.
A traumatic assault
Mike Tyson told Opie Radio that he was 7 years old when an "old man" snatched him off the
street and sexually assaulted him.
Tyson said it was a one-time incident, and he was able to escape from his attacker by
running away.
He didn't report the crime to anyone at the time, and said he never saw the man again.
He kept the traumatic incident a secret for many years, saying on the program, quote,
"It was nobody's business to know."
During the revealing and heartbreaking interview, one would assume the once-electrifying athlete
hadn't fully come to terms with the assault.
He stated he wasn't sure if the incident drastically changed him or not, but the memory of that
frightening day would stay with him always.
Either way, Tyson says that he's neither embarrassed nor ashamed of what happened.
Who was Mike Tyson's father?
In his one-man show, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, the boxer stated he wasn't exactly
sure who his real father was.
A man named Purcell Tyson is listed on his birth certificate, but growing up, he knew
Jimmy "Curly" Kirkpatrick as his father.
He said during his show,
"Curly was a pimp.
And, you know, Purcell was a humble Jamaican cab driver.
I so desperately wanted to be the son of a pimp because, in my neighborhood in Brownsville,
that carries weight."
Nonetheless, Kirkpatrick would abandon Tyson when he was just 2 years old.
He eventually reappeared in 1991, at the height of Tyson's boxing glory days.
He told Playboy magazine.
"He was always trying to explain what happened between him and my mother, but I wasn't interested.
By that time, I'd been through a relationship and had children and realized that people
just don't get along sometimes.
And sometimes kids suffer.
It just happens.
I always loved my father.
I never held anything against him."
Kirkpatrick would eventually die from a heart attack in 1992 while Tyson was behind bars.
He was said to be "distraught and upset" over Kirkpatrick's passing, though he didn't ask
for permission to briefly leave the facility so he could attend his dad's funeral, according
to the Los Angeles Times.
A 'dysfunctional household'
Describing his upbringing, the former heavyweight champion told TRACE magazine that he came
from a dysfunctional household, before going on to describe some of the harrowing incidents
that shaped his formative years.
"Crazy [stuff], like your mother's boyfriend trying to [molest] your sister.
Or your mother getting [beaten up by her boyfriend] and as soon as the guy brings back some liquor
and cigarettes, they're best friends again.
You know what I mean?
You never forget that kind of stuff."
In an interview with The Guardian, he went into greater detail about his traumatic childhood
and an incident with a man his mom was involved with.
"Eddie knocked out [my mom's] gold tooth and me and Denise [my sister] are screaming.
But my mother's real slick.
She puts on a pot of boiling water.
The next thing I know she's pouring boiling water over Eddie.
He was screaming, his back and face covered in blisters."
He could still remember giving the man a quarter to help comfort him after his sister popped
his blisters with a sterilized needle.
He said the man used the money to buy alcohol for Tyson's mom.
Back-to-back tragedies
Although his trainer Cus D'Amato became his legal guardian, Mike Tyson reconnected with
his mom, Lorna Tyson, later in life.
At that point, her health was declining as she was dying of cancer.
ESPN reported that Mike went to visit her in the hospital.
Upon walking in, he saw flies buzzing all around her hospital room, pulled the covers
over his ill mother, and left.
As he put it in an interview with ESPN the Magazine,
"Never went back again.
I just partied every night."
Sadly, no one even bothered to call him when his mom died in 1981, and tragedy would soon
come knocking again in 1990 when his sister, Denise Anderson, died of apparent cardiac
arrest at the age of 24.
To recap: Mike lost his mother in 1981, his beloved trainer in 1985, his sister in 1990,
and his father in 1992.
Sadly, his dad's death wouldn't be the last time he lost someone close to him.
Another unexpected death
In 2009, Mike Tyson's 4-year-old daughter Exodus was found dead in the Phoenix, Arizona
home she lived in with her mom and older brother.
The child had reportedly been strangled by a cord connected to the family's treadmill.
Following his daughter's passing, Tyson told Oprah Winfrey he wasn't sure of what really
happened on that fateful day, but, if he were to find out the truth, he could certainly
point fingers.
As he put it,
"If there's somebody to blame for it, there will be a problem."
The former boxer later shared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that he really wanted to raise
hell when he rushed to the hospital upon hearing the news.
He told the talk show host,
"Once I got [to the hospital] and saw other people there with either children who already
died or were dying, they were handling it with dignity and I didn't want to be the psycho
parent up there.
I wanted to handle it with dignity, as well."
Farewell to fortune
The Washington Post reported that the millions of dollars Mike Tyson earned during his career
were spent on a bunch of lavish purchases, including six homes, one of which was a Connecticut
estate with 61 rooms and 38 baths.
He even splurged on Mercedes-Benz cars for his bodyguards and plopped down $410,000 on
a birthday party for his then-wife, Robin Givens.
By 2003, Tyson had apparently squandered his fortune, close to $400 million, and was forced
to file for bankruptcy.
He was reportedly in debt to the IRS, the British tax authorities, and the mother of
one of his children, who was owed more than $51,000 in child support.
The boxer's debt totaled more than $27 million.
As he claimed at the time in an affidavit,
"I have been in financial distress since 1998.
Since that time, although my fight income, various asset sales and litigation recoveries
have enabled me to pay a lot of my debt, I am still unable to pay my bills.”
Bullying's 'profound effect'
Two things that stand out about the erratic former athlete are his high-pitched voice
and his lisp.
As an adult, Mike Tyson's learned to embrace his speech impediment, and he even sold shirts
that poked fun at himself with sayings like "Thuns out guns out."
But as a child, the bullying was no laughing matter.
Even after joining a street gang at the age of 12, his fellow gang members reportedly
called him "Fairy Boy" because of his lisp.
He later told GQ that, as a kid, the bullying became more than he could handle.
"It had a profound effect on me, being bullied.
I wish it didn't but it's had a real profound effect."
Deface yourself
Mike Tyson popped up in 2003 with a massive tattoo on the side of his face.
At the time, his behavior was becoming increasingly erratic, so most people attributed the new
facial ink to his odd antics.
It wasn't until a 2014 interview with The Guardian that he explained the true reason
behind his body art, saying,
"I just hated myself then.
I literally wanted to deface myself."
Initially, he wanted the tattoo artist to cover his face in stars.
When the artist refused and suggested a Maori tribal design instead, Tyson rolled with it.
Even though he got inked during a low point in his life, he still has no regrets.
He told The Guardian,
"It looks awesome.
That tattoo is me.
In the beginning, some people were scared by it.
But the bikers would shout out: 'Oh, that's beautiful man, great ink!'"
Abuse and violence
During Mike Tyson and actress Robin Givens' ill-fated marriage, their relationship became
the source of tabloid fodder.
After rumors of alleged abuse, Tyson later admitted in the book Fire and Fear: The Inside
Story of Mike Tyson that his attack on Givens was, quote, "the best punch I've ever thrown
in my entire life."
Another alleged argument during the then-couple's one-year marriage occurred in 1988 when Givens
reportedly chose to attend the U.S. Open Tennis Championships instead of spending time with
Tyson at his Upstate New York training site.
Sources shared with the Daily News that Tyson allegedly told Givens, quote, "I'm going to
go out and kill myself."
Tyson later suffered a concussion and amnesia when he crashed his car into a tree outside
a friend's home.
When Givens showed up at his hospital room, sources said he reportedly told her,
"I told you I'd do it.
And as soon as I get out of here, I'll do it again."
Finding love
With two failed marriages underneath his belt, Mike Tyson took the plunge once again in 2009,
shortly after the death of his daughter Exodus.
The lucky lady was his on-again, off-again flame, Lakiha "Kiki" Spicer.
In an interview with DNA India, Tyson claimed that prior to meeting her, he had, quote,
"no concept of love."
Looking back on his decision to get married for a third time, Tyson opened up to Oprah
Winfrey, saying,
"I reached a stage where I'm 43, and I'm just tired.
I'm just tired of being alone and tired of not having that intimacy."
Despite having a supportive wife in his corner, he still couldn't seem to shake the deep-rooted
issues that had destroyed many of the relationships from his past.
He told Oprah,
"I don't like being loved.
I like loving.
I don't feel like being loved.
I have too much love to give and none to accept."
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