10.14.2008

Mike Tyson Sports Illustrated article from 1988



http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1067130/1/index.htm


Its 13 Pages long but its still the most interesting thing you're gonna see all day.

"What society gives me doesn't mean anything to me, because I know when I go it will be like I never existed. I don't want celebrity. It's disrespectful, coming up and asking me for autographs while I'm eating. What does a 70-year-old white person have in common with a 21-year-old black man? Nothing. Nobody is going to come up to me and say they love me now, when he has no reason to love me. Where was he when I needed someone to love me?


"I know that basically I'm not wanted here. Americans aren't civilized people. I love the freedom of speech and opportunity here...but sometimes, I'm embarrassed by America. We should be a great enough country to take care of the weak. If there wasn't poor, there couldn't be rich. If there wasn't sickness, there wouldn't be health. Suffering is the only way we don't take life for granted, it makes us realize how good we have it. I love retarded people, animals, kids—they're innocent. But people take affection for weakness. When people do that, I get very upset, I don't know what I might do."


"I'm not an athlete, don't call me an athlete. How can you compare me with Billie Jean King or Magic Johnson? They're athletes. Athletes have careers. Athletes have to prepare. At any moment, I'm ready. I never liked sports. Sports are only social events. I'm a warrior, a missionary. What I do is an obsession. If I wasn't in boxing, I'd be breaking laws, that's my nature."



2 comments:

Lank Sinatra said...

too many quotables

samflutch said...

We’re talking about the man who graced the cover of Sports Illustrated with the headline “Kid Dynamite,” the youngest Heavyweight Champion in the illustrious history of the sweet science and, at the time, the “Baddest Man on the Planet.
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Samflutch

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