Boxing legend Mike Tyson talks going to juvie and trading cigarettes for cookies as a young boy

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Boxing titan Mike Tyson swung by Jesse Watters’ show Tuesday night to chop it up about his past, covering everything from managing exotic cats to growing up in Brooklyn.

First up was the tiger. When you have Tyson on the couch, the famous tiger era is bound to come up. As Tyson tells it, keeping a massive tiger was a real grind.

“A lot of responsibility,” Tyson on “Jesse Watters Primetime.”

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He explained that building a bond with a big cat requires showing up every single day without fail.

“So the name of the game, normally, you have to be with a tiger for two years every day. Can’t skip a day or nothing,” he said. And if you think traveling with a pet is tricky, try moving a tiger across state lines.

Tyson broke down what it actually took to move his pet around.

“So when I had to travel across the country, I had to get an 18-wheel van to take my cat. So if I’m in Vegas and I gotta go to New York, I gotta get an 18-wheeler for that cat to be driven to New York from Vegas.”

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From there, the conversation shifted back to his childhood in Brooklyn. Long before he was fighting in packed arenas, people on his block realized he could throw hands.

“Well, listen, my friends saw me in some fights and they saw me hit some guys who were bigger than me, and I knocked out some of them,” Tyson said.

His neighborhood friends saw an opportunity and quickly put young Tyson to work on the street.

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Mike Tyson during an open workout session

“So they said I was gonna be the punch guy to knock the guys out, and they were gonna go in the guy’s pockets. And that’s what they had me do,” he recalled.

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That work landed him in juvenile detention as a kid.

Looking back, Tyson didn’t offer any heavy life lessons about his time behind bars. Instead, he joked that his main takeaway was “that I could keep coming back and eat some good food.”

“When I went there, listen, I went to juvie, and when I first got there, they gave me two cookies, a milk, and two cigarettes. I’m 12 years old,” Tyson said.

When asked if he ended up smoking those cigarettes, Tyson showed he had his priorities sorted out early on.

“No, I traded them for cookies.”

Just your average stories from a guy who has seen a little bit of everything.