Mike Tyson

📍Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York, NY 11212, USA

“Mike Tyson was born in Brooklyn, New York, in June 1966, and when he was about ten, his family moved to Brownsville, then one of the poorest and most dangerous neighbourhoods in New York, a district of public housing towers, abandoned buildings and street crime. His father was absent, and his mother, Lorna, struggled to raise him and his older brother and sister. He has described being a chubby, shy, lisping boy who was bullied every day. His refuge was pigeons. Older boys in the neighbourhood kept birds in coops on the rooftops, and they brought young Mike up to clean the coops; he fell in love with the pigeons, and he has kept them all his life. But he also fell in with street gangs and began stealing and fighting, and by thirteen he had been arrested many times. He was sent to the Tryon School for Boys, a reform school in upstate New York, where a counsellor named Bobby Stewart, a former boxing champion, agreed to teach him to box if he worked hard at school. Stewart introduced him to the legendary trainer Cus D'Amato, who saw extraordinary talent in the thirteen-year-old. D'Amato took him into his home in Catskill, in upstate New York, gave him love, discipline and a vision, and trained him every evening. When Tyson's mother died, D'Amato became his legal guardian. In 1986, at twenty, Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history. He has spoken openly about his troubled Brownsville childhood, and his pigeons have stayed with him through everything.”

Sources: si.com avclub.com Wikipedia: Mike Tyson