Not bad lats on the old fella.
Was Mike a roider? I'm not familiar. Heard only the cheque drops story.
Unlikely. He displayed above average muscularity at a very young age, see my previous post in this thread. He was already significantly bigger than his peers at age 13 or 14. At 15 after just one year of bog standard boxing training he was between 200 and 210 lbs very lean.
Now post prison tyson might be a different story. We saw him at 230lbs looking carved from stone. The 1990s
seems to be when steroid usage in boxing really took off, with obvious abusers such as evander holyfield who was even peripherally tied to the bust of one of those 'anti aging' drug fronts. Roy Jones Jr was also implicated for testosterone abuse in a story that seems to have evaporated from the internet. Given some of the people he was hanging around with after hooking up with Don King, i certainly wouldn't put it past him to have gotten on the sauce, probably thinking he needed every helping hand he could get to regain his title. That said, tyson in his post boxing life has been remarkably candid about all the dirty shit he got up to, including being high on coke and weed before a fight. He never once mentioned steroids. That doesnt mean he didn't do them of course, but I just find it unlikely.
when you look at tyson's bone structure, he's a true heavyweight in spite of his height. Whereas a lot of the 90s juiceheads were cruiserweights blown up artificially with the drugs, such as holyfield who was a skinny cruiserweight before his miraculous physique transformation credited to a suspicious doctor and physical trainer.
The dead giveaway is usually the fist size. Natural heavyweights have very big hands. Theres a great old video where James Toney's former trainer and mentor talks about why James was delusional about moving up to heavyweight, and points out that his fists are indicative of a natural middleweight, which Toney was until he let his eating disorder get out of control and ballooned up in size, and of course would later also become a steroid user pissing hot once or twice for winny. James was a remarkable fighter in spite of his shortcomings, and even did fairly well at heavyweight for a time, but you can only go so far on talent alone and reality is a 5'9 fat guy just isn't going to be competitive with the roided up giants that started dominating the division in the 2000s.
