Mike Tyson Names Only Fighters Who Humbled Him

Mike Tyson has named two boxing legends who has made him realized he’s not the greatest fighter in the world.

Legendary boxers such as Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis may have managed to stop Tyson inside the ring. However, those fights never broke the ego and machismo of “The Baddes Man on the Planet.”

In an episode of “Hotboxin’ With Mike Tyson” earlier this year, Tyson made a bold admission about the boxers who have put him in his place. Surprisingly, none of his past rivals did.

According to “Iron Mike,” he was always impressed by pugilists from eras before him like “Sugar” Ray Robinson and Henry Armstrong.

For Tyson, Robinson and Armstrong were the “monsters” who have put a man like him “in check.”

“Sugar Ray Robinson had 40 fights, went 40-0,” Tyson pointed out. “And then he lost one fight, right? After he lost that first fight, he went 80 fights undefeated. You get a guy like Henry Armstrong. He defended his welterweight title 20 times – in two years. Five times in one month.”

“Those are some monsters in the past,” he continued. “They put people like me in check. They put our egos in check. There’s talk that [Tyson] is the baddest man on the planet, the greatest fighter God created, and then I look in the history books and I’m just talk.”

Honed in the tough neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York, Tyson really is hard to humble. But apparently, there was someone who has managed to instill fear in him.

As per Tyson, the only person who frightened him was not a huge and strong guy. Instead, it was his late mentor Cus D’Amato, who was already an old man at the time.

“I was petrified when I was alone with him,” Tyson wrote in “Iron Ambition: My Life with Cus D’Amato.” “If he called me–‘Mike, I need to talk to you’–I didn’t feel good going over to him.”

Tyson added that behind the peaceful and graying appearance, D’Amato was a vicious and relentless person.

“Cus [D’Amato] made me feel two inches tall, when he asked me ‘am I wasting my time with you? I’m an old man. you’re a phony’,” the former world heavyweight champion recalled. “The man I worshipped was telling me I was a phony. It was crushing. I soon learned to walk on eggshells when I was around Cus.”