Mike Tyson, where to begin?

There’s the time he chewed off a bit of Evander Holyfield’s ear and got a Maori face tattoo on a whim, and then there’s the time he was filmed wrestling his Bengal tiger in a tennis court.

There’s stories of how he kicked promoter Don King in the head while he was driving, offered a zoo keeper £9,000 to let him fight a silverback gorilla and blew a fortune to the tune of £55million in one year.

+16
View gallery

Mike Tyson was once the biggest star in boxing but controversies affected his career

There’s been drug addictions, prison sentences, brutal knockouts, Hollywood movie appearances and an ongoing fight with mental illness.

Tyson’s life, it’s fair to say, has been more turbulent than most.

It was boxing that made Tyson a household name but that part of his life is only an episode in his story; You don’t get a Wikipedia page as long as his for just being good at fighting.

Tyson retired 15 years ago and yet his name has never truly faded from consciousness.

+16
View gallery

Tyson has lived a life most can’t imagine and used to wrestle with his Bengal white Tiger

Mike Tyson finally gives Evander Holyfield his ear back.

Still, even now he’s a pretty big deal. In a business where putting bums on seats is the game, Tyson was always a master.

Boxing has had charismatic champions, eloquent trash talkers and intimidating brutes before but no fighter has ever held intrigue like Tyson did.

He was like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, and that was part of the charm.

But there was a good reason he was known as the ‘Baddest Man on the Planet’. Tyson had an unruly penchant for violence and was a volatile soul who fell prey to temptations.

+16
View gallery

Tyson was known for his devastating power and became youngest heavyweight champ in 1986

Inside the ring he achieved greatness, becoming the youngest ever heavyweight champion at 20, and the first man to hold the WBC, WBA and IBF belts, but it was also in the confinements of the same four corners that he experienced some of the lowest points of his life.

While outside he was often writing his own headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Few, if any, have scaled comparable heights from such depths and then plummeted back down again like Tyson.

And perhaps no one can define Tyson’s life better than the man himself: ‘Came, saw, conquered, got conquered, bounced back.’

Tyson’s journey began on the gun-and-drug-addled streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn.

In his autobiography, Undisputed Truth, Tyson relived tales of chasing a rival gang with an M1 rifle at 10 years old, living in a house with no heating or water and being relentlessly bullied by older kids.

He remembered the toxic environment in which he grew up in, being evicted from a house almost every week, and witnessing his mother Lorna and her boyfriend Eddie constantly fight.

He even recalled a time when his mother heated up water in a pan until it was boiling and threw it over her boyfriend after one particular argument.

+16
View gallery

He grew up in Brownsville and was sent to juvenile prison as a teenager for petty crimes

In his book Tyson wrote: ‘That is the kind of life I grew up in. People in love cracking their heads and bleeding like dogs. They love each other but they’re stabbing each other. That’s why I was so sexually dysfunctional.’

Tyson was already involved in crime by the time he was seven after being introduced to it by a man called Barkin.

Barkin and his friends were slightly older than Tyson and had ordered him to look after their pigeons, who they were intending to race around Brooklyn.

‘It was like a sport,’ Tyson wrote in his autobiography. ‘I loved working with the birds up on the top of abandoned buildings. It was fun and felt like this is what I should be doing.’

Tyson eventually joined a gang called the Rutland Road Crew where he continued to steal, smoke marijuana and keep pigeons.

+16
View gallery

Cus D’Amato (R) took Tyson under his wing and transformed him into a world champion

By this point, he was yet to discover his ability to fight. One day a guy by the name of Gary Flowers found out that Tyson kept his own birds and decapitated one with his bare hands in front of him.

Tyson was urged by his friends to fight and floored Gary with a wild hook. Everyone from his neighborhood witnessed Tyson’s ‘moment of glory’ and it earned him a newfound respect in Brooklyn.

After that day, Tyson would start fighting older kids, sometimes men for money, and began exacting revenge on those who had bullied him in earlier years.

Mike Tyson the fighter was born.

Tyson was sent to juvenile prison, having been arrested more than 30 times for petty crimes by the time he was 13.

Bobby Stewart, a juvenile detention centre counselor and former boxer, discovered Tyson’s huge potential when he worked with him on a boxing programme at Tryon School for Boys in New York.

It was there that he first learned his craft before Stewart called boxing Svengali Cus D’Amato to tell him about Tyson.

Tyson was a teenager when he first met Cus in 1979.

D’Amato, who had handled the careers of Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres, was in his 70s at this point but was an astute trainer and remoulded the delinquent Tyson into a man.

+16
View gallery

D’Amato died before Tyson reached the pinnacle of the sport – and then went off the rails

D’Amato trained Tyson to harness the power of fear and mind at the Catskill Boxing Gym and developed his Peekaboo fighting style with the help of his protege Kevin Rooney and Teddy Atlas.

The experienced trainer would later guide him to gold medals at the 1981 and 1982 Junior Olympic Games but his influence on Tyson extended far beyond the boxing ring.

In his autobiography, Tyson wrote: ‘Cus wanted the meanest fighter that God ever created, someone who would scare the life out of people before they even entered the ring. He trained me to be totally ferocious in the ring and out.’

Cus later adopted Tyson following the death of his mother.

He had taken this kid from the ghetto under his wing and trained him to be a champion, but died a year before the ambition was realised.

It is an understood and accepted narrative that it was after D’Amato’s death that Tyson began to go off the rails.

Until 1990, Tyson was an unbeatable monster, destroying everything in his path.

He was the unified world heavyweight champion, had won all 37 of his professional fights with a knockout ratio of 89 per cent and was the biggest star in the sport.

But underneath the surface was a troubled man struggling to control his drug addiction and depression.

James Buster Douglas was supposed to be a knock-over job, but he would prove to be the man who would bring his era as an indomitable warrior to a sudden halt.

+16
View gallery

James Buster Douglas shocked the world by ending Tyson’s era of dominance in 1990

Tyson arrived for their fight in Japan overweight and without his long-term coach Rooney, who he had sacked.

Douglas went into the ring a 42/1 outsider and left a world champion in one of the sport’s most shocking upsets after leaving the Invincible Man sprawled across the floor after 10 rounds.

The monster was well and truly slain.

Tyson later revealed he spent much of the build-up to the fight partying and having sex with geisha girls while his wife went out.

After that, victories and defeats in the ring became almost irrelevant in the chaos and swirling mania that encircled and consumed Tyson.

Just two years after his defeat by Douglas, Tyson was sentenced to six years in prison for the rape of Desiree Washington.

After being paroled, Tyson made his comeback in Las Vegas against Peter McNeeley in 1995.

More than 1.5million purchased the fight, grossing $63m for PPV television, a United States record at the time – proving the fascination with Tyson was still very much alive.

+16
View gallery

Tyson was convicted for the rape of Desiree Washington and got six years in prison in 1992

By this point Tyson’s titanic cocaine habit was out of control. In his autobiography, he confessed to wandering round with a big bag of cocaine and ‘a straw coming out of it like it was a milkshake’.

He recaptured the heavyweight title in 1996 but tasted defeat again for the second time in his professional career at the end of the same year, being stopped by Evander Holyfield.

In the rematch seven months later, Tyson lasted just three rounds and was disqualified for biting Holyfield’s ear twice.

After the fight was called off, Tyson attempted to charge towards Holyfield and swung punches in the direction of anyone trying to stop him.

+16
View gallery

Tyson was disqualified for chewing a bit of Evander Holyfield’s ear off in their rematch

‘It was like a Dracula bite. I have never seen anything like this in boxing,’ a stunned commentator said in reaction. ‘Just an awful display by Tyson. Mike Tyson has apparently lost his reason, his rationale. He seems possessed right now. He cannot be brought under control.’

‘I am starting to believe more and more that Mike Tyson is a confused individual,’ one of the co-commentators added.

In 1999 Tyson was sent to prison again for punching a 62-year-old man in the face during an assault of two motorists in a road-rage attack.

Tyson would not fight for the world title again until 2002. This time his opponent was Lennox Lewis.

+16
View gallery

He also started a brawl at the press conference ahead of his fight with Lennox Lewis

There was bad blood between the two heavyweights and it came to a head at the pre-fight press conference when Tyson ran over to Lewis and tried to punch him before a brawl erupted on stage.

A reporter shouted that Tyson should be put in a straitjacket and the American retorted: ‘I’ll f*** you in your ass in front of everybody. I’ll f*** you until you love me – faggot!’

Lewis would dominate Tyson over eight rounds before knocking him out to retain his title.

Tyson won his next fight but then lost successively by knockout to Danny Williams and Kevin McBride before retiring in 2005: Tyson the fighter was spent… as was all of his money.

+16
View gallery

Tyson blew £55m in one year and was declared bankrupt in 2003 – two years before he retired

He left the sport in financial turmoil after burning his way through an unbelievable fortune and racked up huge amounts of debt.

Two years before his final fight, Tyson was declared bankrupt.

Tyson claimed that Don King had stolen $100m from him while promoting him after he was released from prison in 1995 but dropped his lawsuit in exchange for a settlement fee of $14m.

In 2003, he had taken a private jet to Florida to make amends with King and spent the entire journey doing drugs.

Tyson went into a rage and attacked King during negotiations over a $20m deal for him to promote the heavyweight again.

+16
View gallery

He tried to sue promoter Don King (left) for stealing some $100m during his boxing career

He said about the incident: ‘Don picked us up at the private airport in his Rolls Royce. We were driving down to Miami from Fort Lauderdale on the I-95. Don said some innocuous thing and all that jealousy and rage spilled out of me and I kicked him in his f****** head.’

Tyson later admitted to being on drugs during several fights in his boxing career and said that he would use what he referred to as a ‘whizzer’ in order to pass drug tests, which was a fake penis filled with clean urine.

Following his retirement in 2005, Tyson said during an interview with USA Today: ‘My whole life has been a waste – I’ve been a failure. I just want to escape. I’m really embarrassed with myself and my life. I want to be a missionary. I think I could do that while keeping my dignity without letting people know they chased me out of the country. I want to get this part of my life over as soon as possible. In this country nothing good is going to come of me. People put me so high; I wanted to tear that image down.’

Tyson has remained in the public eye since hanging up the gloves and appeared in the 2009 Hollywood film The Hangover.

He recently opened up on his battle with mental health and admitted to being ’empty’ and feeling like he was ‘nothing’ because he is no longer the most feared fighter in the world.

+16
View gallery

Tyson recently showed his emotional side when discussing retirement and his mental health

‘I’m a f****** student of war. I know all the warriors. From Charlemagne to Achilles – the No 1 warrior of all warriors – and then Alexander and Napoleon, I know them all,’ he said. ‘I read about them all. I studied them all. I know the art of fighting, I know the art of war, that’s all I ever studied.

‘That’s why I’m so feared, that’s why they feared me when I was in the ring. I was an annihilator. It’s all I was born for.

‘Now those days are gone. It’s empty, I’m nothing. I’m working on the art of humbleness.

‘That’s the reason I’m crying because I’m not that person no more, and I miss him.’

Mike Tyson the fighter will always be a boxing myth, but the mesmerism around the man has never frayed.

+16
View gallery

Even though Mike Tyson the fighter is no more, the fascination with the man has remained