Other than Muhammad Ali, hardly anybody is as synonymous with boxing as Mike Tyson. The five-foot-eight-inch brute from Brooklyn terrorized his opponents only to become the youngest heavyweight champion in history. But what was the key for Tyson? Well, longtime UFC commentator Joe Rogan claimed to have a few reasons he thinks made ‘Iron’ the kind of legend that he became.

Mike Tyson is returning against Jake Paul for another boxing match, which will be streaming on Netflix. Some believe that the move to the most subscribed OTT platform could be credited to ‘Iron’s involvement given how big of an icon he is. That tag of an icon isn’t bestowed on every athlete and as far as Joe Rogan is concerned, he believes certain environmental factors and the people who surrounded Tyson were the reason why he became a big name in the boxing world.

Joe Rogan cites the reasons for Mike Tyson’s legendary career

It’s an already known fact that Mike Tyson did not have the best of childhood, and he grew up in a neighborhood full of crime and illegal activities- Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. It was such a bad area that even today, study suggests that there crime rate there is 24 percent higher than the national average of the United States. Also, most of them are violent crimes.

“First of all, there was his upbringing, right? So he had a horrible, horrible upbringing. Just crime and violence in the worst neighborhood in Brooklyn. He lived in Bed-Stuy… terrible neighborhood,” Joe Rogan told guest Chad Daniels on the JRE podcast. Mike Tyson was lucky enough to have been able to get out of that predicament after Cus D’Amato came into his life. After deciding to adopt ‘Iron’, Cus D’Amatio did all he could to make Tyson, who already had a good physical build, the greatest boxer of all time, including the use of some serious psychological tools.

“At 13 years of age, he gets adopted by this guy Cus D’Amato, who’s one of the greatest boxing minds of all time and he’s also a hypnotist. So from age 13 on, he’s hypnotizing Mike and telling Mike he’s the greatest of all time,” Joe Rogan further stated. “On top of it, you [Tyson] have crazy genetics. I had Teddy Atlas in, he told me that when Mike was 13, he was knocking out grown men and they wouldn’t believe he was 13… He was a freak.”

In addition to all the physical talents Mike Tyson had, he had one important individual by his side, whose unique habit helped him learn a lot more than other boxers in his time. Jimmy Jacobs, a close friend of Cus D’Amato and ‘Iron’s manager, played an instrumental role in the Brooklyn native’s growth as a boxer.

The consequential contributions of Jimmy Jacobs

As we all know, this is the age of the internet, isn’t it? And things can easily be found on the internet, including footage of previous fights for boxers to watch and learn. But in the 70s and 80s, things weren’t that easy, and that’s where Jimmy Jacobs comes in as his knack for collecting reels of old fights acted as a great inventory for Mike Tyson.

“He was also managed by this guy Jim Jacobs… he had all the film footage of like some of the greatest boxers of all time… he had all these old footage on reels and he was like the biggest collector of old boxing footage and Mike was being managed by him. So, Mike would sit there all day and watch Jack Dempsey fight, watch Jack Johnson fight… watch these old, old killers,” Joe Rogan added.

People have come to believe that Mike Tyson, as fearsome as he was and even shows hints of it today, could put an end to Jake Paul’s boxing endeavor. On the other side, some are concerned that a 58-year-old man with certain medical issues getting inside the ring. But what do you think? Should Tyson fight Paul? Let us know in the comments below.