Mike Tyson- new show, boxing and mma

Just read this on yahoo earlier today. It was about this show he is doing on Animal Planet but he also talks a little mma and boxing. Kind of sad to see him losing touch with boxing.

boxing and mma
He still loves the fight game – he enjoys both boxing and mixed martial arts – but isn’t nearly as close to the sport that made him one of the world’s most recognizable figures as he once was. Only a few days before a highly anticipated bantamweight bout between Nonito Donaire Jr. and Fernando Montiel at the Mandalay Bay Events Center that is just a short distance from his home, Tyson asks if any good matches are coming up.

But when the Donaire-Montiel bout is mentioned, Tyson is puzzled.

“Are they good?” he asks. “Excuse me for asking, but I’m not familiar with them. Is it going to be a good fight?”

Tyson is still a fixture at fights in Las Vegas, but says he believes the Ultimate Fighting Championship has surpassed boxing because of the way it promotes and stages its events.

“It’s just more entertaining than going to a boxing match now,” Tyson says of going to a UFC card. “When you go to a boxing match, once the fight is over, you’re waiting for another match and there is nothing going on. We’re just sitting there with an empty ring and nothing is happening. We might as well stand up, because the audience is the show there. If you go to UFC, ‘Boom, boom, da, da, da, da,’ it’s like we’re in a club, we’re partying. Everybody’s passing their drinks and it’s a party.

“When the fighters come out, there’s more music and they build a story up about the fighters and then there is the fight. The fights are awesome – they’re awesome, really – and then, ‘Boom,’ the fight is over and then there is more music. It’s a party and a fight at the same time. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what it is.”

He chuckles and explains what he’d do if he were a promoter. He clearly has been paying attention, because everything he says makes sense.

He doesn’t have an MBA but he has a sense of what moves people.

“You know, people will spend their last dime to be entertained,” Tyson says. “They’ll steal a meal and pay for their entertainment. When I was fighting, people watched because they thought I was nuts. They didn’t know what might happen next. There was an entertainment aspect to that, that they wanted to see the unexpected, so to speak. They didn’t know what might happen, but they thought something would and they wanted to see it.

his new show
He’s starring in a docudrama series for the cable channel Animal Planet called “Taking on Tyson,” that begins on March 6 at 10 p.m. ET and PT. The show is about racing pigeons and Tyson challenges some of the best pigeon racers in the world.

The former champion has long had a fascination with pigeons. He fought on the streets for the first time as a 12-year-old when a neighborhood bully in the tough, gritty Brownsville section of Brooklyn grabbed his favorite pigeon and snapped its neck, throwing the dead bird at him, its blood spattering him in his face.
“With this show, yeah, people are going to watch it because of me and because they want to hear me talk and find out what I have to say. That’s part of it. But these other characters on this show are fascinating. I don’t want to say their personal business, but when you see these guys, they’re little, dumpy white men, fat and stuff. But if you ever get to know them, they’re fearless. They’re not afraid of nobody, with a gun or without. They don’t look like those kind of people, because it’s not stamped on their foreheads like it is with me. But you watch and you’ll see.”