Meet the man who taught Mike Tyson how to box as a tearaway in jail

They couldn’t call themselves ‘guards’. Their official title, Bobby Stewart makes clear, was ‘counselors’ and their job was to keep a lid on the tearaways at Tryon School for Boys, a juvenile jail in the woods north of New York.

Back in the late 1970s, Stewart worked the afternoon shifts in ‘group confinement’, where the doors were locked and ‘the worst kids’ were housed.

‘I was the smallest guy - like 5ft 10ins and 180lbs,’ Stewart says. As for his colleagues? ‘Monsters’ with ‘big beards’ - and traditional ideas about discipline. ‘Intimidation works,’ Stewart says. But he had his own methods for keeping kids in line.

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