Mike Tyson once offered a zoo attendant $10,000 to do what?

Mike Tyson once offered a zoo attendant $10,000 to do what? He offered the attendant $10,000 to let him fight a gorilla. Tyson later recounted the story as an episode from the period when he visited a New York zoo with Robin Givens, then his wife.

According to Tyson's account, he paid for the zoo to be reopened privately and noticed a large silverback gorilla bullying the other gorillas. Impressed by the animal's power and frustrated by its behavior, he asked the attendant to open the enclosure so he could confront it. The attendant refused the offer.

The story is often retold with slightly different wording: some versions say Tyson wanted to “fight a silverback,” while others simply say “fight a gorilla.” Those phrasings describe the same answer. There is no credible account that Tyson actually entered the enclosure or fought the animal.

The anecdote became part of Tyson's public mythology because it matched his fearsome boxing image. It should be understood as a story Tyson himself reportedly told, rather than as a documented sporting or zoological event.