Percel Tyson, of whom nothing is known. They later divorced. Lorna never remarried. She did fall in love, with Jimmy Kirkpatrick, a heavyset, boisterous roustabout who drove big cars, worked menial construction jobs, and dreamed of owning his own business. Kirkpatrick had sixteen children when he moved in, all of them living with their various mothers. He fathered three more with Lorna. The first was a boy, Rodney, born in 1961. Next came Denise in 1964. Two years later, well into Lorna’s third pregnancy, Kirkpatrick moved out. On June 30, 1966, in Cumberland Hospital, Michael Gerard Tyson was born.
Without the help of Kirkpatrick’s occasional paycheck, Lorna struggled. She worked off and on, once as a nurse’s aide, but made barely enough money to support her family. Another boyfriend, Edward Gillison, moved in. He contributed little. By the time Michael was eight years old, the Tysons had moved four times within Brooklyn. Each move took them deeper into poverty. His last home with Lorna was 178 Amboy Street, Apartment 2A, in the heart of Brownsville, Brooklyn’s most destitute section.
The Tyson family lived in perpetual crisis. Lorna began to drink. She and Gillison argued constantly, and when they fought, Lorna took the worst of it, until one day, while boiling water, she chased Gillison around the apartment and seared him. In between jobs she went on welfare. When the heating bill couldn’t be paid, they all slept in their clothes. Tyson put cardboard in his shoes to cover up the holes. Food was scarce. Meals at times were made of flour and water.
Even genetics seemed to conspire against the family. By the time Rodney was twelve, he weighed a blubbery 280 pounds. Denise also tended to put on weight. They all suffered, but it seemed that the youngest boy suffered most. “Big Head Mike,” as he was known to neighbors in the building, was ridiculed for every little oddity of appearance and character. On the streets, because of his lisp, the other children called Tyson “Little Fairy Boy.” He was bigger than most other children his age, but intensely passive. They beat him up for the lisp, for his shoes, and for whatever he had in his pocket. He wore glasses briefly, and they beat him up for that. Tyson became increasingly withdrawn around other children, and that earned more beatings.
His father had stayed in Brooklyn, and he and the Tysons would have chance meetings. “When Mike was seven, he, Denise, and Rodney were walking down the street in Brownsville and saw their father,” said Camille Ewald, the woman who would later become his surrogate mother. “He dished out a dollar for each of them. Mike threw his on the ground.”
By age nine, Tyson had started keeping pigeons in a coop on the roof of a nearby abandoned building. The family dog, a black Labrador, once killed a half dozen of the birds, piling them up in Tyson’s bedroom. Other kids would steal his pigeons, and he would steal theirs. The only taboo was death. You could steal, but not kill.
One day, Tyson found an older boy taking a bird out of the coop. They argued, and the boy ripped off the bird’s head with a single, vicious twist of his hand. Tyson went into a blind rage and pounced on the boy, punching and kicking with every ounce of strength he could muster.
For any boy, such a battle would have been a watershed event. For a boy raised in Brownsville, it would yield a sense of victory in the perennial battle against overwhelming feelings of helplessness and poverty. Years later, when Tyson became heavyweight champion of the world, that moment of rage would be constructed into an epiphany. Tyson played along. It fit ever so conveniently into his public persona as some primal force of destruction. Tyson would cavalierly recount that and other seminal events as if he had found not just liberation but, when the urges were tempered into systematic violence, empowerment as well.
When he indulged in that persona, he wanted the world to believe that he was a nine-year-old man-child wreaking havoc without a care for the feelings of his victims—a sociopath. He felt nothing and cared for no one. He wanted no one’s love. “I did evil things,” he said in early 1988. His sister, Denise, affirmed the self-portrayal. “It became fun for him to beat up kids,” she said to a reporter also that year. “Everyone was afraid of him. He stopped being called Mike. It became ‘Mike Tyson.’”
The stories tumble out from Tyson. There was the time he and Denise played doctor on a sleeping Rodney. Tyson took a razor black, sliced his arm, and poured in alcohol into the wound. Tyson stopped going to school. He joined a gang, the Jolly Stompers. He drank cheap liquor and smoked cigarettes. He stole from fruit stands. He beat up other kids without provocation. He would offer to carry a woman’s grocery bags, then run off with either the food or her purse. Tyson became an expert pickpocket. He particularly enjoyed ripping gold chains from the necks of women at bus stops. As Tyson once said, he relished a concept of himself as Brownsville’s own Artful Dodger.
Whether those stories were true or not didn’t seem to matter to him. Tyson’s life as champion would reach the point where appearance and reality—what people wanted to believe about him, and who he really was—became hopelessly blurred. He would be raw material to feed cultural curiosity about the nature and origins of sociopathic viciousness. By early 1988, Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith, taking his lead from such stories by Tyson, would succumb to literary romanticism and equate the rage in Tyson with social ethics. “He is justice!” Smith wrote about Tyson after being told about the rooftop battle. “Instincts haven’t made him fight. Outraged innocence has.”
The idea that Tyson became a fighter in order to right the wrongs done to his person, family, neighborhood, class, and race ignored what was probably the most significant point about what really happened on that rooftop. Tyson reveled in a perverse romanticism about his past, to disguise rather than reveal.
The rage was rooted in feelings of confusion about his life—about where his next meal would come from, what his future might be, who would care for him, and most important, whether his mother, or anyone else, loved him. The rage set in motion a vicious cycle in which rage only pushed farther away the people closest to him. It also alienated Tyson from himself. When rage is your only friend, all the other qualities of human nature—kindness, pity, affection—wither. No human being can live that way for long, and Tyson, if ever he was as far from human as he wanted others to believe, surely didn’t. Rage and a life of systematic violence meant death. Within Tyson there was always a whispering voice that sought life. He was a survivor.
By the age of eleven, Tyson was going in and out of juvenile detention centers in Brooklyn. Tyson escaped as often as he could. By the age of twelve, he had graduated to Spofford, a medium-security facility in the Bronx. A dozen times he went there for short stays, until the family courts, and his mother, realized that he had to be sent out of New York. Just thirteen years old, Tyson went to the Tryon School for Boys, two hundred miles upstate in the town of Johnstown. There he would either straighten out or they would keep him until the age of sixteen.
Many of the kids who end up in places like Tryon go on to become adult felons and do a stint or two in prison before making an effort to go straight. Tyson, to the amazement of everyone who knew him then, started his reform early.
In comparison to Spofford, Tryon was a country club. “Instructors” referred to it as a “campus.” The boys lived in “cottages.” There were no chaotic dormitories, fences, barbed wire, or barred windows. Boys lived one to a room. The food was plain, and starchy, but it came three times a day, 365 days of the year. There were movies, school classes, trade instruction, and sports. It was not unusual for some boys to run away a few days before discharge so that they could enjoy the punishment of staying longer. The alternative, after all, was a return to the streets of New York.
There are two different versions of what happened to Tyson soon after he arrived. In the first one, he got locked up in the “secure” cottage called Elmwood after some violent outburst. While there, he found out that one of the supervisors, Bobby Stewart, was a former professional boxer. He pleaded to see him, begged for a lesson, got it, and was discovered.
The second version makes more sense. Muhammad Ali visited Spofford once. Tyson marveled at the man, but more than that reflected on the living, breathing symbolism of his life. Ali was a cultural icon of the black man making it his way in a white world. The allure of Ali promised the acquisition of money and power without compromise. For the boy who had learned to be alone, the idea of Ali, regardless of the realities, promised that, if he so chose, he would never need