To Brownsville, Brooklyn, where once again the tragedy of Mike Tyson's childhood interweaves with less edifying chapters in this most ferocious fighter's history.
Back in the day, Brownsville was the ghetto said to make Bedford Stuyvesant look like Beverly Hills, where as a bullied young boy Mike tamed and tended racing pigeons until a local hood ripped the head off one in front of him. Artistic licence declares that was the moment "Mike Tyson" was born.
Anyway, it is the pigeons – always the pigeons – that recently brought Mike back to the neighbourhood, along with the inevitable TV crew filming for his new reality series. "Brownsville's all upscale now," a bewildered Tyson explains to this month's Details magazine. "This white woman come up," he recalls of the visit, "and I'm thinking: Wow. When I was a kid, she would've been robbed and raped, left for dead. This is a real strange scenario, and I just wanted to cry. I'm like: 'Who am I? Where's my heritage?'"
A timely reminder that sexual violence is a conservation issue – though we can only hope that Mike's reality TV show avoids the temptation of prodding a quote like this out of the old freakshow more than six times between each commercial break.
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