Mike Tyson was once hit with $1,000 bill after pigeons POOED all over luxury hotel room and lost cars worth over $1m

MIKE TYSON’S weird and wonderful life included losing $1MILLION worth of cars to being billed a grand after his pigeons POOED all over a hotel room.

Tyson is believed to have earned over $300m (£230m) during his superstar heyday – but he somehow blew through it all.

Legendary boxing manager Shelly Finkel – who first met Tyson when the boxer was a teenager – was there to witness the extraordinary spending.

Finkel was Tyson’s manager during the late 1990s up until Iron Mike retired in 2005 – just two years after filing for bankruptcy.

Tyson admitted to having an unhealthy spending habit during his volatile prime – splashing the cash for those around him.

Finkel told SunSport: “Of course we had discussions about it.

“But he’s one of the few people who I’ve ever met who I really don’t believe that the money matters except for the moment to get him the satisfaction he wants.

“Whether it be clothing, buying a car for a girl. It’s not like, ‘Hey, I gotta be wealthy.’ It was just the satisfaction at that moment.”

Finkel recalls wild jewellery sprees in Manchester and shopping malls in Denmark having to be CLOSED just for Tyson.

He said: “I remember, he’d spend $100,000 in one visit. I saw cars he had that were over $1million.

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“When I took him over I had to do all kinds of searches, he didn’t even know where some of his cars or motorcycles were!”

Tyson threw the towel in on his career in 2005 after quitting on his stool against Kevin McBride – who also worked as a tree surgeon.

A year before that, Britain’s Danny Williams upset boxing’s youngest heavyweight champion of all time with a fourth-round knockout.

But what Finkel remembers most about that bout in Louisville was being hit with a hefty hotel bill after Tyson’s pigeons pooed all over the room.

He said: “There was always something. In Kentucky, he had flown in special racing pigeons from Europe, couple of $1,000 pigeons.

“They come in, we’re at this hotel and he says to me, ‘What are we gonna do with the pigeons now?’

“I said, ‘What do you mean? You’re the one who brought them here!’ I said, ‘Keep them in your room’. He said, ‘I can’t do they’ll fly over the road.’

“I said, ‘Let’s rent a room for them.’ We rented the room and going to sleep, they s*** on everything. On the bed, everywhere.

“A couple of weeks later, I get a bill for $1,000 from the hotel and I call them and say, ‘What is this for?’ They said, ‘Did you see that room? It was for cleaning it!’

“Again, crazy, fun things but always something.”

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Finkel remains in touch with Tyson, 58, and his team, including third wife Lakiha Spicer ahead of his controversial boxing comeback.

The two-time champ – who did face Roy Jones Jr in a 2020 exhibition – takes on 27-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul on Friday in Texas.

It will be a professionally-sanctioned bout competed over eight two-minute rounds – opposed to the usual three – with bigger 14oz gloves.

It comes almost two decades after Finkel watched Tyson’s career come crashing to an end in a bout which was lost way before the first bell.

He said: “Before his fight, he said, ‘I just don’t have the desire.’

“I said, ‘Well, you trained already and should be able to beat this guy anyway’. And he didn’t. And he said, ‘That’s it.’

“But now he’s 58 and he’s stepping into the ring with someone, that at any other time earlier, would have been something easy.

“It may not be easy anymore.” 

Source: Boxing - thesun.co.uk