“I never saw my mother happy with me or proud of me doing something. I never got a chance to talk to her or know her. Professionally, that would have no effect on me, but emotional and psychologically, it was crushing. I would be with my friends, and I’d see their mothers kiss them. I never had that. You’d think that if she let me sleep in her bed until I was 15, she would have liked me, but she was drunk all the time.”

–Mike Tyson on his mother, from his book excerpt in New York magazine. Read more on boxing in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: patman0623, Flickr

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