Brin-Jonathan Butler owes his life to Mike Tyson.Butler was a battered and bullied teen afraid to leave the front door of his house when he heard the enigmatic former heavyweight champ in a televised interview talk of also being bullied and of the famous authors he was reading while in prison for rape.
Never good at school, Butler raced out to buy five Tyson biographies and all of the novels Tyson had suggested. Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea was a revelation. In the years that followed Butler wrote half a million words in three novels he'd rather forget. He left his Vancouver home at 18 for Spain, then went to Cuba at 20. “I thought I had to lead a life worthy of writing about,” he says.
But first there was the Vancouver boxing gym a frightened Butler entered at age 15, all 5' 2” and 115 pounds of him. He'd never kissed a girl, but he'd soon learn to take a punch. “If you're out of shape or new, the ring is one of the loneliest places in the world,” Butler writes in his memoir The Domino Diaries. “The worst blow, for my money, is the first big one that hasn't hit you yet, it's just hanging there on the way to hitting you.”
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