Most tragic beginnings in boxing?

Roy Jones was tortured by his father. Basically.

 

Johnny Tapia

 

Throughout his childhood, Tyson lived in and around neighborhoods with a high rate of crime. According to an interview in Details, his first fight was with a bigger youth who had pulled the head off one of Tyson's pigeons. Tyson was repeatedly caught committing petty crimes and fighting those who ridiculed his high-pitched voice and lisp. By the age of 13, he had been arrested 38 times. He ended up at the Tryon School for Boys in Johnstown, New York. Tyson's emerging boxing ability was discovered there by Bobby Stewart, a juvenile detention center counselor and former boxer. Stewart considered Tyson to be an outstanding fighter and trained him for a few months before introducing him to Cus D'Amato. Tyson dropped out of high school as a junior. He would be awarded an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Central State University in 1989.

 

Jake Lamotta was forced by his own father to fight other neighborhood kids for money. Jake's father would use the money to pay the rent.

Sonny Liston worked picking cotton as a very young boy and was severely beaten by his own father. When the family mule died, his father told him he was the new mule.

These are just two examples. Unfortunately, this sport is littered with broken men that were abused as children.

 

Sunny Listons child hood is cartoonishly sad

 

Michael Bent is another, didn't even want to be a boxer

 

Matthew Saad Muhammad. His mother died when he was very young, his aunt who raised him, made his brother take him far away & leave him (pretty much for dead) when he was 5 & he was then taken in by catholic social services.

 

This. Literally dropped him off on a street as a child and abandoned him.

Wasn’t his last name Franklin because he was found on Franklin Street?

 

Yes. The nuns who took him in named him Franklin.

 

Most boxers had this life. It's what make them hard
enough to deal with the pain and suffering of
the boxing ring, so Mccellean wasn't alone in
that type of childhood.
But their are just as many happy stories where
the sport of boxing has actually saved individuals
from that type of environment abuse and poverty.
The list would go on almost forever of men saved
by boxing.
Even stories like mine, the discipline of the sport
gave me the strength to avoid the pitfalls and
disadvantages of a terrible childhood.
It's one of the reasons for my success today.

 

Orlando Salido. His family slept on DIRT. So sad.

 

Kassim Ouma has to be up there, kidnapped by a guerrilla warfare unit when he was 6 (? may have age wrong). Can't do his story justice so I'll just post the doc.

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Kassim Ouma is probably the worst story I’ve heard, and there’s been a lot of bad ones.

 

The Spinks brothers had an awful upbringing.