Who doesn’t know Mike Tyson? Even if you are not an ultimate boxing fan, there’s no chance that you did not even heard his name because of his world wide popularity. Tyson is a well known retired boxing star who is already considered as one of the greatest boxing legends. His popularity started when he became the youngest heavyweight champion of the world. At 20 years, 4months and 22 days old, he won the WBA, WBC, and IBF heavyweight titles making him the youngest boxer to ever win these titles.
We have listed below some more interesting facts about Mike Tyson that you probably didn’t even know.
- Mike Tyson won his first 19 fights as a professional boxer via knockout and 12 of them are during the first round only.
- Tyson may be fit and muscular during his boxing days but during one of his interviews, he talked about him being overweight when he was still a child.
- He was always being bullied as a kid thus results to his criminal activities. In fact, when he was still 13 years old, he had been arrested many times already.
- He did a lot of sacrifices to become a champion including his avoidance from sex for 5 years because he believed that doing it before a fight can make him weak.
- Tyson received an honorary doctorate in 1989 that was given by the Central State University.
- Though Tyson won his first 19 professional fights, he came from 2 amateur losses and he said that these fuel him to become a champion.
- He has a parody character in Simpsons named Drederick Tatum. They have some similarities with this Simpsons’ character.
- He was the highest paid athlete in 1990.
- During his fight with Holyfield in 1997, he bit Holyfield’s ear maybe because of extreme anger and frustration that makes him lost the match. This incident leaves a big mark on his career.
- Tyson love pigeons and animals. In fact, he has 3 Royal Bengal Tigers and hosted an Animal Planet show about birds.
- He had his last fight in 2005 with the Heavyweight champion Kevin McBride that he lost by a technical knockout.
- Tyson was included in the WWE Hall of Fame.
- His Islam name is Malik Abdul Aziz when he converted to Islam.
- With his 3 marriages, Tyson have 3 children all in all.
- He is now a boxing promoter.