Until he was 11, Mike Tyson had never cared about how he looked. Then they took him to a neighborhood party, and everything changed.
They made fun of his clothes. He laughed, he said, but inside he was crying. “From then on, I started committing crimes to buy nice clothes, and no one ever laughed at me again”, he recounted on This Past Weekend, Theo Von’s podcast, in a nearly two-hour conversation.
Tyson described the home where he grew up in Brooklyn this way: “I grew up among criminals and prostitutes, it was the house of crime”. According to his memoirs, he was arrested 38 times for misdemeanors before turning 13.
Today he is 60 years old and says one of his biggest priorities is making sure his children don’t repeat the cycles of violence and suffering that marked his story. What matters more in a child’s life: the clothes they wear or the laughter they can’t forget?
