The Origin Behind Mike Tyson’s Infamous ‘I Want to Eat His Children’ Interview Revealed

Mike Tyson has said some outlandish things in his boxing career spanning two decades.

There’s the “I try to push the bone into the brain” quote after his fight with Jesse Ferguson. His addiction: “I’m addicted to perfection. Problem with my life is I was always also addicted to chaos. Perfect chaos.”

Tyson also once proclaimed, “I can sell out Madison Square Garden masturbating.”

But perhaps the quote that immediately conjures up in the mind of the boxing purist — maybe even the casual observer — is Tyson’s post-fight rant on June 24, 2000. It was directed at Lennox Lewis, and Showtime’s Jim Gray had no idea what he was up against trying to get Tyson to focus and elaborate after he pummeled Lou Savarese in just 38 seconds at Hampden Park Stadium in Glasgow, Scotland.

“I’m the best ever. I’m the most brutal and vicious and most ruthless champion there’s ever been. There’s no one can stop me,” Tyson said. “Lennox is a conqueror? No, I’m Alexander, he’s no Alexander. I’m the best ever. There’s never been anybody as ruthless. I’m Sonny Liston. I’m Jack Dempsey. There’s no one like me. I’m from their cloth. There’s no one that can match me. My style is impetuous. My defense is impregnable, and I’m just ferocious. I want your heart. I want to eat his children.”

Yes, he said that:

I want to eat his children.

Former World Champion Mike Tyson takes on fellow New Yorker Lou Savarese in their Heavyweight boxing match at the Hampden Park stadium in Glasgow. (Photo by David Cheskin – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

David Cheskin – PA Images/Getty Images

Some 20 years later, Tyson explained the objective behind such a quote by insisting on his Hotboxin’ podcast that, as a fighter, he always sought to portray the perception that he enjoyed hurting people.

If perception is reality, then Tyson’s reality was rooted in deception. As Mark Kriegel, author of the new book, Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, explains to Men’s Journal, Tyson was actually in pain and wrestling with survivor’s guilt that night in Scotland.

“That infamous or famous post-fight interview with Jim Gray — for the lack of a better term — ‘Eat your children interview’ — was actually Mike in pain,” says Kriegel, the ESPN boxing analyst and biographer of Joe Namath and Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, among others. “He was completely out of sorts over the killing of a friend. A guy who is not just a renowned street guy but had also come to his aid in Spofford [Juvenile Detention Center], when he was in detention as a kid.”

That “street guy” was Darryl Baum, whose memory Tyson evoked moments before his “eat his children” rant. Tyson dedicated the fight to his “brother” Baum, who was murdered exactly two weeks before the 38-second fight.

Photo by Albert Watson (Courtesy: Penguin Press)

Tyson and Baum were childhood friends. They were also locked up at Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, a notorious, “rat-infested hellhole” in the Bronx that operated for 54 years before its 2011 closure. Years and years later, Tyson hired Baum, who went by the moniker “Homicide,” to be his bodyguard. The gig didn’t last long. Baum returned to the street life. And if his name rings a bell, it’s because he’s the infamous gangster who shot 50 Cent nine times in May 2000 outside the Get Rich or Die Trying rapper’s grandmother’s house in Queens in a failed murder-for-hire plot.

Baum was killed weeks after the 50 Cent shooting reportedly in a drug war-related shooting. Baum’s death shook Tyson to his core. And he lashed out, grieving the only way he knew how.

“Whatever you want to say about Darryl ‘Homicide’ Baum, he was certainly loved and respected on the streets. And I think there’s something that runs through Tyson’s story that is not unlike survivor’s guilt,” Kriegel tells Men’s Journal. “He came of age with all these legendary stick-up kids, not many of whom survived. Those that did, went away. Those who went away, tended to go away for an awful long time. And here he is rich and famous.”

Photo by Linda Platt (Courtesy: Penguin Press)

Tyson was a quote machine because he was a fighting machine first. He made his professional boxing debut in 1985. And as Kriegel notes in Baddest Man, Tyson fought a now-unfathomable 15 times in the year leading up to his first title shot. Not only did he become the youngest Heavyweight champion in 1986 at 20 years old, 4 months and 21 days, Tyson went on to unify the belts and defended them against grown, powerful men that shriveled at the mere thought of fighting him.

And they shriveled after agreeing to fight him and right before leaving the dressing room to face the music.

Kriegel recalls a veteran matchmaker literally having to push boxers out of their dressing rooms to fight Tyson. They were frightened because Tyson talked a scary game.

But it was all an act.

“Some of what you hear coming out of Tyson’s mouth is jailhouse talk, and it’s designed to scare the hell out of the opponent, and it worked more often than not,” Kriegel says.

Intimidation became essential to Tyson’s persona, derived from legendary late trainer Cus D’Amato, who “raised his last best hope to be a bully,” Kriegel writes in his book.

“He was raised as a fighter by a trainer who had a whole theology of fear and how one should stand up to a bully,” Kriegel tells Men’s Journal. “The irony is that Tyson used fear to project on to his opponent. He’d scare the shit out of professional fighters in a way that very few guys ever have.”

In Baddest Man, Kriegel, who has covered Tyson since 1988 as a former columnist and writer for the New York Post and Daily News, marvelously weaves in and out of Tyson’s complicated life, a rise and fall accentuated by accolades in the ring and the tragedies outside of it. He deconstructs the unscrupulous characters in and out of his life, fueled by his longing to be, well, a mama’s boy, following the death of his mother, Lorna Smith, in 1982.

At 58, Tyson remains a constant in the pop and sports culture lexicon. That he’s alive in and of itself is both marvelous and heavy-hearted.

“I’m sure he feels pretty lucky and pretty astonished by his good fortune just to be alive,” Kriegel says. “But by the same token there’s gotta be some survivor’s guilt.”

Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson is available now.