Boxer Packs a Lunch

JWire

Former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson has visited Our Big Kitchen in Sydney, Australia.

The champ spoke to a special group of young people of whom only a few were Jewish who are considered to be at high risk of falling out with the law and to some who already had.

Special arrangements had been made to allow young people serving time in prison to be released and allowed to travel to Bondi in Sydney for the specific purpose of hearing the lessons Tyson has to teach.

He told the group: “I had a great deal of fame and fortune but I did not have the discipline to handle it.”

Tyson spent his early years in Brooklyn not far for the area in which Our Big Kitchen’s executive director Rabbi Dovid Slavin grew up.

Rabbis Slavin told J-Wire: “He became emotional when he spoke of the good work the Kitchen does in the general community, telling the group that he had come from ‘a difficult family background’.”

He admitted openly that by the time he had turned 13 he had been arrested ‘tens of times’.

Tyson pleaded with the offenders and those who could become entangled with the law to get on the straight and narrow and not to make the same mistakes he had.

He explained that there was a point when they reached “a fork in your life” and that they should be sure to take route which would produce a crime-free life.

Rabbi Slavin told J-Wire: “When I talk to youngsters in trouble they see a rabbi and there is little connection. When he spoke not as a rabbi but as a superstar…they listened.”