On the podcast “This Past Weekend”, Mike Tyson told Theo Von that he grew up “among criminals and prostitutes” because his own home was, in his words, “the house of crime”.
His mother drank and prostituted herself, but he remembers her taking care of him “in her own way”. He slept on the floor, covered by a single blanket, alongside his siblings.
Tyson also revealed the exact moment everything changed: at age 11, he went to a neighborhood party, they made fun of him because of his appearance, and after that humiliation he began stealing to buy clothes.
Today, nine years sober, he looks back and even jokes that if he had had the discipline for drug trafficking, he would be a millionaire; the problem, he said, was that he used his own merchandise.
A difficult life that shaped him into the fearsome boxing champion he became over the years.