In an interview with Elvis Mitchell (
interviewmagazine) Mike Tyson talks about many things,
ELVIS MITCHELL: One of the things that amazed me about the Jim Toback
documentary is the part when you talk about having asthma. I mean, you
basically went into the ring every time with the idea of trying to win
the fight quickly because you were afraid that you wouldn’t be able to
breathe. It’s interesting, too, how you were talking about having these
memories of being in the hospital as a kid. What’s your first memory of
that?
MIKE TYSON: Asthma? Couldn’t breathe one day. I was real young. I don’t know how old I was—probably about three.
MITCHELL: And you had an attack and needed to go to the hospital or something?
TYSON: Yeah.
MITCHELL: It was interesting to see in the documentary how you were actually kind of a shy, sensitive kid.
TYSON: Yeah, this is true. But that quickly changed when my parents
moved into this neighborhood called Brownsville, Brooklyn, which was
just totally different than the neighborhood we lived in before. The
people in Brownsville were very aggressive. It was like a dog-eat-dog
world. So I had to get familiar with it.
MITCHELL: You’ve talked about how other kids were robbing people and stuff.
TYSON: Yeah. I was just a little kid, and I watched these guys . . .
They would come back around the neighborhood later, and -people would
be slappin’ them five and talking about what they did. Or the older
criminals would say what they should have done. It was like they’d come
back and have a press conference. [
laughs] I was like, Wow. This is exciting!
MITCHELL: Do you feel like you ever really got over your -shyness at all?
TYSON: I don’t know. Maybe a little.
MITCHELL: Because you still seem like you’re kind of reticent about talking in a lot of ways.
TYSON: I don’t know. I don’t feel much like talking about my past. I can’t believe I was expressing it on tape like I did.
MITCHELL: But when you were fighting, you talked about yourself more,
and in different kinds of ways, than any other boxer I can remember.
TYSON: Muhammad Ali was pretty open with the public.