Mike Tyson

At age 50, his baddest-man-on-the-planet persona long shed, Tyson 2.0 (3.0? 6.0?) talks about diets, finding Zen onstage and loving life as a tennis dad.

- L. Jon Wertheim

MIKE TYSON WEARS New Balance shoes. The blazingly white kind, accessoried with white socks and blue jeans. The man who famously went to work wearing only black trunks, black shoes and a gap-toothed sneer now dresses like, well, the 50-year old suburban husband and dad that he is. He gets the symbolism— really, he does—but it’s all about comfort. “You move around the house, you pick up your kids, you run errands,” he says. “Wouldn’t you want your feet to feel good?”

This now is Mike Tyson—and it’s Mike; he doesn’t answer to Champ or Iron Mike anymore. He couldn’t name you the best pound-for-pound fighters today, but he knows the roster of his two kids’ Kumon instructors. His six-bedroom home high above Las Vegas is tasteful by any definition, but hardly the Doge’s Palace befitting a man who, during a particularly sybaritic stretch, spent $1,500 a day on food for his pet tigers. Once the most fearsome man on the planet, the heavyweight champ for more than three years, Tyson, by his own reckoning, has been rendered “a weak schmuck” by his kids. “They ask for Popsicles,” he says with a sigh of resignation, “and I drive to the store and say, ‘What flavour?’ ”