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57-year-old Mike Tyson has had one of the most unique lives a person can possibly have.
Undisputed world heavyweight champion at the age of 20. Convicted of rape and spent three years in prison. Returned to fighting after his release and broke both pay-per-view viewership and revenue records. Became the unified heavyweight champion a second time. Got disqualified from a fight for biting Evander Holyfield in both ears. Then appeared in the main event at WrestleMania XIV during his suspension for the biting.
And that only brings us to 1998.
Throughout all of that, Mike Tyson made somewhere between $400 million and $685 million, according to a 2016 Forbes estimate.
Amazingly, Tyson also filed for bankruptcy in 2003 with a reported $23 million in debt.
On Wednesday, Iron Mike made an appearance on Good Trouble With Nick Kyrgios and talked about losing his entire fortune with the tennis star.
Tyson stated that when he first became champion he didn’t handle the fame very well.
“That’s when I first started getting in trouble because sometimes I might be walking the streets, they don’t know if my mother died, my brother died, or something about my family,” he said. “I’m hurt and they just jumping in, ‘Hey man, give me a picture. Hey man this. Hey man. I love you. Give me this.’
“And I might not be in the mood, so I used to be violent about it. And then, I started getting quite a few lawsuits and I stopped. I’m a glutton for pain, but I stopped. I couldn’t sign anymore checks so.
“I was always being sued,” Tyson continued.
“I constantly blew my money away from being sued and going to court and just associating with the wrong people and making bad business decisions. And it was just the whole caboot, pretty much. That was just me getting caught up in a vortex of destroying myself.”
One of the craziest things about Mike Tyson going broke in 2003 is that he made $35 million for fighting Lennox Lewis in June of 2002 after their fight became the highest-grossing event in pay-per-view history at that time.
“What got me into that stuff was self-hate,” he continued. “Not loving myself and taking care of myself. But once I got some kind of inclination of showing myself self-love and stuff, things start to change.”
Mike Tyson did also add, “I trained hard, and I partied hard. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be Mike Tyson. That makes me who I am now. … That’s because I have flaws. Life is about flaws, and learning from our flaws. Life is not perfection … it doesn’t work like that.
“This whole planet is one big school, and we’re students. And just like school, some people learn quicker than others, and some learn really, really late. Everybody learns, even if appears that they don’t.”