The legendary Mike Tyson describes the troubles he had with tiger breeding!

Mike Tyson’s career as a world-class boxer has given him a lot of money, which he has used for various exhibition extravaganzas. One of them was certainly the breeding of white tigers, which at times got out of hand.

Mike Tyson made an incredible fortune during his career as a professional boxer

Mike Tyson was one of the most feared boxers in world history, despite various media excesses and run-ins with the law. At one time, he carried the status of the scariest man on the planet, terrifying his opponents before they even stepped into the ring with him. Adding to the insane feats between the sixteen ropes was a special aura around his person that always seemed very raw to the point of being frightening.

At the height of his powers as the heavyweight champion of the world, Mike Tyson could afford pretty much anything money could buy. It must be added that the income of a young boy who grew up in poor conditions suddenly soared to astronomical heights after becoming the youngest heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

But as it happens, a combination of youthful immaturity and the wrong people in his environment meant squandering all his financial resources. As a result, he had to deal with more than one difficult financial situation after his career ended, and even today, at the age of 56, he has to turn around to support himself. Thus, we can still see him being very active in the media space, and two years ago he even had an exhibition fight with Roy Jones Jr.

In one of his interviews, he went back to the time when he was stirring up the media with various fads and when he was throwing money around like a treadmill. Between 1999 and 2000, he kept three white tigers in his house, which he said he was not prepared for. The cubs grew into predatory beasts. But how did he get into breeding rare animals?

In his podcast, he reminisced about tiger breeding

“Black Market,” he revealed the origin of the animals on his Hotboxin’ podcast. “One guy was selling them and said I could get an adult tiger for $70,000 or a cub for $50,000. So I took the cub, fed it with a small bottle like a baby and soon it was 180 kg. Then, of course, there was the question of how I was going to get rid of the girl,” he recalled.

In the years he was breeding tigers, he was just returning from a two-year layoff after a famous rematch with Evander Holyfield in which he bit off his opponent’s ear. While he was putting his opponents at risk of injury in the ring, how dangerous was tiger breeding in a domestic setting? “They were never aggressive with me,” he said firmly.

Iron Mike got into a run-in with the law years later when his tiger allegedly attacked a woman. “It happened a little differently,” the former world champion clarified. “A woman jumped over my fence where my tiger was. She jumped into his habitat and started playing with him. But he didn’t know the lady, so then the unfortunate accident happened. They tried to sue me, but then they found out that she was the one who jumped the fence,” recounted his troubles with the law.

“But when I saw what the tiger did to her hand, I had a lot of money at the time, so I gave her $250,000 or whatever. She was very na**ed,” he added. He then surrendered two of the three adult tigers to the sanctuary and was left with one. But he kept that one for a respectable 16 years before the aforementioned accident happened and Tyson had to get rid of it.

Source: Youtube – The Hotboxin’ podcast, Wikipedia, Twitter