Cus D’Amato said I have the potential to be heavyweight champion.

Bobby Stewart started taking me to Cus D’Amato. So I went to another facility, I learned how to box with these other kids. One time Muhammad Ali came to visit the kids and I said wow, holy moly, I want to be like that. And I was in a lot of trouble, going to juvenile detention centers.

Learning to rob and steal at a young age, learn to fight at a young age. You were capable of seeing one human being do anything to another human being. I’m living in a different situation now, it’s unbelievable. I can’t believe I lived in a situation like that. It was below the starvation level, it was just a dog-eat-dog world. I grew up in Brownsville in a very poverty-stricken area. It was all about making the fighter obsolete and making the person and how the fighter existed because of the person.Ĭan you talk about the influence of your childhood in Brooklyn and your trainer, Cus D’Amato? That made me the fighter that I was so the fighter became obsolete. The show and film focus on your personal life rather than what you were doing in the ring. Thank god she’s part of my life to write about it. She didn’t want to write about Robin to give her more press. Was there anything in particular that was hard?Ībout my daughter dying. I said you gotta write what’s real, they’re gonna know if it’s bull… because they know the stories. She didn’t want to write about somebody she loves like that, even if it’s true. And she wrote it just as I told her to write it.įor her it was. I told her what I did and said this is how it happened. You’re writing about somebody you love so you’re not going to write he did this and that. She watered it down so I wasn’t a bad guy. She had to write it raw for what it really was. It focuses almost entirely on the boxer’s life outside the ring, including his brief but tumultuous marriage to Robin Givens and a comical encounter with an allegedly stoned Brad Pitt who feared Tyson would beat him up for romancing his ex. Instead, the film plays like a 90-minute highlight reel of the former champ’s most outrageous, tabloid-friendly moments. (Presumably, he delves into some of his more controversial moments with greater depth in his just-released autobiography of the same name.) Mike Tyson made a n unexpected splash on Broadway last year with his one-man show, “The Undisputed Truth,” directed by Spike Lee, written by Tyson’s wife, Kiki, and inspired by Chazz Palminteri’s “A Bronx Tale.” A film version of the play, taped this summer in New York, premieres Saturday night on HBO.Īs Times critic Mary McNamara notes in her review, “The Undisputed Truth” is, despite its title, not really about coming clean - Tyson, for instance, issues a curt denial of the rape charge that sent him to prison for three years in 1992.

Mike tyson undisputed truth 2013