A fancy for pigeons has made former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson the baddest man on Animal Planet.
The ex-fighter with the nasty past and fearsome tattoo on his face is the star of the six-part series Taking On Tyson that documents his life-long relationship with the most urban of birds and his passion for pigeon racing.
The show debuts in Canada on Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET on Animal Planet.
It takes Tyson back to his old haunts, including the roof of the building next to the New Jersey boxing gym where he once trained, and where he and some friends have kept pigeons since his fighting days.
But his love affair with the birds goes back to his childhood in a rough section of Brooklyn, N.Y., where he was picked on by other boys for wearing glasses and being overweight.
”One day I was walking around school and three or four guys approached me,” Tyson recalled this week. “They started checking my pockets, asking for money and then they asked me: ‘Do you want to fly with us?’
“This was pigeon terminology. I didn’t know. I said OK because I didn’t want them to think I was scared. So I go on the roof with these guys there’s a big box and there’s pigeons in there.”
The bullies sent Tyson from roof to roof, scaring pigeons back to their roosts, and doing other chores for an afternoon, then sent him on his way. They were surprised to see Tyson back again the next day, volunteering for more.
“That’s how I started flying pigeons,” he said. “Unfortunately, I didn’t go back to school, but that’s how I started.”
He once said his first fight was with a boy who killed one of his pigeons.
A troubled youth and frequent arrests led Tyson to a reform school in upstate New York, where a coach placed him under the wing of legendary fight trainer Cus d’Amato. The rest was history.
Tyson became known as Iron Mike and The Baddest Man On The Planet as the muscular five-foot-10 heavyweight pounded opponent after opponent.
In 1991, he was sentenced to six years in jail for rape, serving three years.
Later, he battled drug problems and a conviction for cocaine possession. In 2003, he filed for bankruptcy even though he had earned about US$300 million in his career. Along the way, he fathered eight children through a variety of women, including three wives.
He retired from the ring in 2006 and his last public outburst getting into a scuffle with a photographer in 2009, but he has since vowed to lead a quieter life and atone for past misdeeds.
To stay afloat, he lent his name to a boxing video game and went into acting, taking a part in the hit comedy Hangover. He also appears in a Hangover sequel to be released soon and hopes to do more acting in the future.
And there is the series on pigeons, which shows a softer side to the brutal knockout artist who terrorized opponents through a 20-year career in the ring.
At times, the show is as much about his own search for mental peace as it is about the birds.
In the first episode, which details his first race, Tyson says of his pigeon passion that: “I need to be focused and connected. If not, I fall to pieces.”
But the show is about more than Tyson. It takes viewers into the little known subculture of pigeon fanciers, in this case, on rooftops in some of the grittier areas of greater New York.
Tyson calls pigeons “the first animal I ever connected with.”
“How many people can get a job doing something they loved to do since they were a little kid?” he asked. “People all over the world are going to see it and it’s going to broaden people’s understanding of pigeons.
“They’re not disease-infested rats with wings. People don’t catch diseases from pigeons. This is a mini-documentary, where you learn the ins and outs of pigeons, the history of pigeons. They’ve been man’s feathered friend for a long time.”