‘Sometimes I Mistake Myself for a God,’ Mike Tyson Says

Former boxing champion Mike Tyson has come a long way from his post-glory days when, reports had it, he had serious trouble even finding a job to pay off debts. Still, something of the grandeur and the ego of yore is still around, he proves in a recent interview.

Now a father again and a movie and reality star, Tyson is working hard to work through his anger issues, a thing he’s been very open about in the past as well.

Still, there are times when he still thinks himself better than the rest of the world – a god, if you will.

“Sometimes I mistake myself for a god because that’s what I was told as a kid. I believe you had to think that,” he says in a recent interview cited by the British tabloid The Sun.

“You know, sometimes it feels good to stroke my own ego,” the star admits.

In the same interview, Tyson also proves that, while his ego may still be as inflated as it was back in the day (at least occasionally), he’s making real efforts to change other things about himself that were more harmful than that.

“It’s very difficult to suppress it,” Tyson says of his anger. “Every now and again it flares up but I suppress it now because I know otherwise it will allow my will to run riot.”

“Once that happens I can no longer have a beautiful relationship. I always come to a situation now on my knees, now that I’m married,” the former champ adds.

In another recent interview, this time with talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, Tyson again talked about his anger problem and how hard it was to get a grip on it as he dealt with the death of his 4-year-old daughter in a home freak accident in the spring of 2009.

Eventually, he realized that getting angry and lashing out wasn’t helping anyone (himself included) and that it was certainly not making things any better for his family – so he learned to let it go, he said, as we also reported at the time.