During a live taping of Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast, Mike Tyson made an admission about how his difficult childhood shaped his path to becoming one of boxing’s most feared champions.
When Von asked Tyson whether he would have still become heavyweight champion if he had grown up with the things every child needs, Tyson answered without hesitation.
“No,” Tyson said flatly. “[Maybe] the heavyweight b**ch of the world.”
Tyson went on to explain why he believed a more stable upbringing would have changed everything for him.
“My mother would baby me, wouldn’t allow me to compete and all that stuff,” he said. “It wasn’t meant for me to have my mother.”
Tyson’s mother passed away when he was young, and while the loss deeply affected him, he now sees it as part of what forced him to become self-reliant at an early age.
Reflecting on her struggles, Tyson said she “was a dr*nk, was a pr**titute, but she was who she was.”
Von said he could relate and also spoke about the emotional distance he felt from his mother as a child and connected it to the behavior of his grandfather, whom he described as mentally unstable.
“Her dad would make them put his food under the door,” Tyson recalled. “He would not talk to my mom for like months at a time, and he would go in and out of their house through the window.”
Growing up in that environment forced Von to mature almost immediately.
“Early on I realized I got to take care of myself,” he told Von. “I don’t know if that was the truth, but inside of myself I made that decision.”
Despite everything, Tyson no longer views his upbringing purely through bitterness. He explained that his wife helped change the way he thinks about his past through her spiritual beliefs.
“My wife is kind of Shamanistic, and she believes that we ask for our parents,” Tyson said.
That idea eventually led him to reevaluate his entire life story.
“And then when I started believing, I said, ‘If I didn’t have the parents I had, I would never be me,'” he explained. “I feel she might have something.”
Tyson admitted he had never fully shared that thought with his wife before.
“I never tell her,” he said. “I’m saying it now. I feel she may have something there.”
He ultimately concluded that the painful experiences he endured were inseparable from the person he became.
“I did pick those parents,” Tyson said. “If I didn’t have those parents, I would be messed up. She might be right.”
Tyson also shared one rare warm memory from his childhood: a Christmas celebration that also happened to fall on his birthday. Somehow, despite the chaos surrounding his family life, there was food on the table and relatives gathered together.
“We had never had that much food before,” Tyson recalled. “I don’t know how they got the money.”
Even inside what Tyson described as “a house of cri me,” moments of joy still managed to break through.
