Mike Tyson Illustration by TOM BACHTELL

In a list of adjectives likely to be ascribed to Mike Tyson, the former world heavyweight champion, “tender” falls somewhere well below “ferocious.” It is surprising, then, to watch the first episode of “Taking on Tyson,” a new series on Animal Planet, in which Tyson, who once bit off a chunk of another man’s ear, gently kisses a pigeon on the beak before lofting it into the air. The show follows Tyson, who raised pigeons before he started boxing, in his attempt at homing-pigeon racing. The sport clocks birds at speeds upward of sixty miles an hour as they fly home from hundreds of miles away. Fastest pigeon back wins.

Last week, Tyson was on a rooftop in Brooklyn, along with several childhood friends and his pigeon coach, Vinnie Torre, the Cus D’Amato of homing-pigeon enthusiasts. They were visiting one of his pigeon coops, where he keeps some of the three thousand birds he owns—he has two other coops, in Jersey City and Las Vegas. Like Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy, he spoke of the birds wistfully.

“It took my mind off the world I was living in, people bullying me and stuff,” Tyson said. It was sunny but cold on the roof, and he wore a black hunting cap with ear flaps that hid his Maori-style facial tattoo. “I’d just go on the roof and fly my birds.”

“Escape the world,” Torre said.

“It’s like being at sea.”

“It’s like therapy, actually.”

Suddenly, Tyson looked up, focussing on something in the distance. A flock of pigeons from a neighboring coop was flying in circles. “Man, that hawk is hitting this guy’s bird!” Tyson sprang out of his chair and hobbled across the roof—boxing was not good to his body—bobbing between satellite dishes and piles of two-by-fours.

“See the pointed wings,” Torre said, catching up to Tyson. “That’s a falcon.”

“He’s gonna score,” Tyson said. “Two hundred and fifty miles per hour . . . Boom!”

The falcon, some thousand feet in the air, began to circle above the pigeons, and suddenly dived.

“He’s going for something!” Tyson yelled. “He got him! He got him!” A pause. “Oh, I thought he had him.” Another falcon appeared. “They’re fighting! Ooh, they’re fighting!”

“It’s like that pair by the park that’s eating the squirrels,” Torre said, referring to Pale Male and Ginger, Central Park’s hawks. “They’re eating eight or nine pigeons a day.”

The falcons eventually left, hungry, and Tyson’s friend David Malone, who shares the coop, started shooing his pigeons into the air. “He wants to steal some of this guy’s birds,” Tyson said, explaining that Malone’s flock would attract the stray birds that had been chased by the falcon. Malone grabbed a long bamboo pole with a black trash bag on the end and swatted at the birds—PETA has asked the Kings County district attorney to stop production of the show—coaxing them skyward.

The former champ picked up a bird and held it firmly in his fists, fondling its feathers. He walked toward the edge of the roof and tossed the pigeon, underhanded, into the sky. It took a moment to right itself, banked to the left, and then burst upward to join the rest of the flock. Tyson thought back to the first punch he ever threw, when he was ten years old. “I was with my friends and we robbed this person’s house,” he said. “I had, like, sixteen hundred bucks in my pocket, and I was in this pigeon shop, and I wanted these birds so bad.

“Back then, birds cost seventy-five cents to a dollar, but these birds cost two-fifty. I bought up the whole cage. Seven hundred dollars’ worth of birds! I would drag the crates four blocks to the train station, take the train four or five stops to Rockaway Avenue, carry the crates three blocks, and then I’d say, ‘Here’s five bucks,’ and some alcoholic would help me carry them back into the abandoned building where I’d keep the birds. I was too small to keep them on the roof ’cause these big guys would come and take them.” He paused. “And then I told somebody where I kept my birds, which you never do.”

“Yeah, you keep it quiet,” Torre said.

“So they brought some guys around to steal my birds,” Tyson went on. “I was screaming for my mother: ‘Mommy, Mommy, they’re taking my birds!’ And one guy had one under his shirt and ran—you know how they do that, Vinnie.”

Torre nodded.

“So I said, ‘Gimme my bird back,’ and he said, ‘You want it back?’ and took it, like”—Tyson mimicked a decapitation—“and put the blood in my face and hit me with it.”

“Ripped its head off,” Torre said.

“Some guy said, ‘Fight him back.’ So I started fighting. I couldn’t fight, but I was flailing away. I hit him more than he hit me,” Tyson said. “So I guess I won.” ♦