Mike Tyson’s cold response to a gift from Jake Paul left fight fans feeling shook.
On Friday, November 15, the ‘Baddest Man on the Planet’ will return to the boxing ring for his first professional bout in nearly 20 years. Emanating from the 80,000-seat AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, ‘Iron’ will square off with Jake Paul in a fight expected to be one of the most watched combat sports events of all time.
With their epic encounter only a few days away, Tyson and Paul went face-to-face, and needless to say, things got a little intense between the two.
Trying to lighten the mood a bit, Paul gifted Tyson a pigeon — a bird the legendary pugilist has loved dating back to his days as a child growing up in Brooklyn.
“This looks like a low-budget pedigree,” said Tyson as he handled the pigeon. “I’ll feed him to my falcon” (h/t talkSPORT).
Tyson’s stone-cold response sent a shockwave through commenters online.
“Mike since young has always looked after his pigeons so that comment from Mike means night night for Jake now,” one user wrote in response.
“He is not in a making friends mood,” another added.
“Poor pigeon,” a third said. “I got emotional seeing the pigeon and knowing it will be dead any second.”
Mike Tyson’s long history with pigeons
Tyson has kept pigeons as pets ever since he was nine years old. In the book IRON AMBITION: My Life with Cus D’Amato, Tyson revealed that pigeons were an escape from the bullying he endured as a child for being overweight. He grew to love the birds so much that the first fight he ever got into was over one of them.
“My first fight happened by accident,” Tyson recalled in the book. “I had used some of my pilfering money to buy my own pigeons. I kept them in an abandoned building next to mine. This guy stole one of my birds and when I confronted him to get it back, he pulled it out of his coat and twisted its neck off, and rubbed the blood on me.
“I was furious but I was scared to fight until one of my friends egged me on. ‘You’ve got to fight him, Mike.’ So I hit with a right and he went down and I was stunned. I didn’t know what to do. Then it dawned on me how cool I looked doing the Ali shuffle so I just started shuffling and everybody started clapping. My first taste of applause.”
