For people born with bad cards, the American Dream deals from the bottom of the deck. With a pimp for a father and a mother who turned tricks for drugs and food for her family, Tyson was groomed from birth for the red light district of sports, a place where sex and violence are never very far apart, or very far under the surface. For most of the last three decades of his global fame and infamy, Mike Tyson has existed in the popular imagination in existential free fall.