The process of reinvention is often misunderstood. It is not about forgetting the past or leaving the past behind. 

It is instead about using the past to inform a better present and, hopefully, future.

Mike Tyson, the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of the sport and one- time baddest man on the planet, has more reason than most to forget a past fraught with rage, excess, drug abuse and imprisonment. 

Now 42, the man formerly known as Iron Mike seems happier and more content than he ever has, comfortable in his own skin as he tours his one-man show around the world, makes regular appearances on chat shows and waxes lyrical about the dark days. 

Tyson’s rise and fall is more than worthy of the plethora of books, documentaries and column inches that have been devoted to it over the years. 

Dysfunction and emotional retardation proved devastating both in and out of the ring during a boxing career which saw him rise to the heights like the proverbial comet, only to crash almost overnight as soon as he arrived. 

Along the way he amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in ring earnings and blew it all in an orgy of spending. 

Here was a fighter supposedly living the dream at the pinnacle of a sport he’d been immersed in since the age of 13, lacing up the gloves for the first time while incarcerated in a juvenile correction facility in New York, when in truth he was locked inside a nightmare. 

Though Mike Tyson remains an icon, no-one should underestimate the demons he has had to battle to survive what by any reckoning has been a chaotic life. 

His 1992 conviction for rape marked a low point and though he maintains his innocence to this day it has followed him around. 

Only recently, during a live appearance on breakfast television in Canada, Tyson directed a tirade of abuse at the interviewer when he dared remind him of it. 

For Mike Tyson, regardless of his attempt at reinvention, it is just as Oscar Wilde said: “No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”