The set of “Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson” has a black and white checkered wall, two studio mics on long arms and not much else. In 2023 Prince Jackson took the guest’s seat there, wearing a black cap from Heal Los Angeles, his charity, and settled in across from the former heavyweight champion.
Prince is Michael Jackson’s oldest son, and the episode runs well over an hour. They covered his childhood, his family and the work he does with his foundation. Michael’s name came up again and again, as it was always going to.
Then, at about 42 minutes in, Prince turned the conversation around to Tyson himself. “I was born in ’97,” he told Tyson on the podcast, “but my dad used to talk about you.”
That’s not a small thing to hear from a guest. By 1997 Tyson had been one of the most famous men on the planet for more than ten years. He’d won his first heavyweight title in November 1986, at 20, and he’s still the youngest man ever to do it. Michael spent much of that year on the road with the HIStory World Tour, playing stadiums across Europe. Two very busy men, and yet Tyson’s name came up at home often enough that a little boy remembered it. Prince said his father had two things to say about the champ, and he kept coming back to them.
Prince Jackson tells Mike Tyson what Michael said about him
This is the full episode on the show’s official YouTube channel. Prince starts the story at about 42:46, and Tyson answers him straight away.
The first thing was how Michael saw him. According to Prince, his dad thought Tyson was “a scary joker.” Feared in the ring and funny out of it, at least in Michael’s eyes.
The second thing was the birds. “He always talked about your pigeons,” Prince said.
Anyone who follows Tyson knows how much those birds mean to him. He’s kept pigeons since he was about nine, growing up in Brooklyn, and in 2011 he raced them in his own Animal Planet series, “Taking on Tyson.” EssentiallySports, writing about this episode in September 2023, noted that the pigeons helped him get through a rough childhood. He even put his name on a trading card game about them, “Iron Pigeons.”
Michael, it turns out, had noticed. And Prince had a theory about why it stuck with him. “I think he felt a similar kinship in that,” Prince told Tyson, “because he had the rats and you had the pigeons.”
The rats weren’t a figure of speech. Near the start of the same episode, at about 2:10, Prince tells Tyson that Michael’s very first pets were two rats. Tyson knew the reference. “That’s Ben,” he said, a nod to the song Michael sang for the 1972 movie “Ben,” about a boy and his pet rat.
So the King of Pop, who grew up in Gary, Indiana, and the heavyweight from Brownsville had the same soft spot all along. One started with two rats and the other with a flock of pigeons in Brooklyn. In 2023 it was Michael’s son who finally put the two side by side, sitting a few feet from Tyson.
Tyson didn’t argue with any of it. He went straight to the latest news from his own coop. “That’s just my life,” he said. “I just got some new birds. I love birds.”