Don't be a Plum

This movie was about Mike Tyson’s life to try and get people to understand who he is. I think it’s a good lesson not to judge a person because you don’t know where their life has taken them and you don’t know how you would react if you were in their shoes.

The things that I had heard about Mike Tyson before the movie were:

1. He was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
2. He was married to Robin Givens who was an American actress and who he was abusive towards.
3. He bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear while he was boxing with him.
4. He was accused and convicted of raping a woman named Desiree Washington.

All these things make him seem like a really bad guy. I wasn’t sure if I would like the movie but I read a review of it on the website Sunset Gun, and I got really interested in the movie. There were a lot of things I didn’t know about his life though.  Here are some of those things:

1. He didn’t have a good relationship with either of his parents, which makes him very sad even now. His dad left the family when he was really small, and his mother died when he was only 16.
2. He started fighting because he kept being bullied.  He was always overweight and he had a high pitched voice as a little kid. His first fight was because he had lots of pet pigeons and some older boys were killing them in front of him. He just got really upset because they were pulling their heads off –  he went for it and won the fight.
3. He began boxing in a juvenile detention center that he was in because he was arrested over 30 times before he was 13.  His trainer said he wanted him to do something with his life, and he was Tyson’s hero and he said he’d do anything for him. All his old friends from when he was growing up are either dead, on drugs or in jail.

This just goes to show for me that you can never condemn someone outright, because you never know what their life story is, the things they’ve gone through, and the choices they’ve had to make.

–Plum

[image: collegian.psu.edu]