Mike Tyson appeared on “Jesse Watters Primetime” Tuesday night and offered a wide-ranging look back at his life, touching on his years keeping a pet tiger and his rough upbringing in Brooklyn, including a stint in juvenile detention as a 12-year-old.
Tyson told Watters that caring for a tiger demanded constant attention. “A lot of responsibility,” he said, explaining that bonding with the animal meant showing up every day without exception. “So the name of the game, normally, you have to be with a tiger for two years every day. Can’t skip a day or nothing.”
Moving the tiger across the country was its own ordeal, Tyson said. “So when I had to travel across the country, I had to get an 18-wheel van to take my cat. So if I’m in Vegas and I gotta go to New York, I gotta get an 18-wheeler for that cat to be driven to New York from Vegas.”
The conversation then turned to Tyson’s childhood in Brooklyn, where his reputation for fighting developed long before he ever stepped into a professional ring. “Well, listen, my friends saw me in some fights and they saw me hit some guys who were bigger than me, and I knocked out some of them,” Tyson said.
According to Tyson, his neighborhood friends recognized his ability and recruited him for a street scheme. “So they said I was gonna be the punch guy to knock the guys out, and they were gonna go in the guy’s pockets. And that’s what they had me do,” he recalled.
That activity eventually led to Tyson being sent to juvenile detention as a child. Rather than dwelling on hardship, Tyson recalled the experience with a joke about the food. “That I could keep coming back and eat some good food,” he said of his main takeaway from the time.
Tyson described his arrival at the facility in detail. “When I went there, listen, I went to juvie, and when I first got there, they gave me two cookies, a milk, and two cigarettes. I’m 12 years old,” he said.
Asked whether he smoked the cigarettes he was given, Tyson said he had other priorities even at that age. “No, I traded them for cookies.”
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