The legendary boxer Mike Tyson has been through quite a lot in his life, but nothing could prepare him for his encounter with killer sharks as part of Discovery’s annual “Shark Week” programming lineup.

“I was scared all the way through and was just trying to get through it alive,” Tyson, 54, told The New York Post. “I’m a scary guy but not when it comes to adventurous stuff.”

“One shark kept bumping me and I’m like, ‘What the hell do you want?’” he added.

Tyson’s experiences with sharks can be seen in “Tyson vs. Jaws: Rumble on the Reef,” which premieres on Sunday at 9pm EST. In the special, Tyson spends a week-and-a-half in the Bahamas training to go face-to-face with the killer predators, getting some help from “ringman” Paul de Gelder, an Australian Navy diver who lost and arm and a leg in a 2009 shark attack.

“I said, ‘Listen, this is not a good time to make me feel confident in there, seeing this guy who’s got an arm and a leg missing,’” Tyson said.

Making matters worse is the fact that Tyson hates water.

“I’m scared of anything in the water — I won’t even put my foot in the water,” he explains in the show.

That’s why he had to do tons of prep before getting in the water with the sharks. First, he trained with de Gelder in a pool using an animatronic shark. Then he descended underwater in a cage, with a microphone capturing his reactions to the sharks swimming around him.

“I was more nervous in the cage than I was outside the cage,” he said. “It’s so claustrophobic in there. But it got easier and the desire to do it more overcame me as well. After I went down the first couple of times I didn’t have that fear.”

After a few underwater dives, Tyson got out of the cage and had the chance to touch a few sharks in what is called “tonic immobility,” where the shark’s nose is rubbed until it falls into a state of natural paralysis.

“That was fun,” he said. “I was looking forward to that. [The shark] felt like one big muscle. It was so powerful.

“I was looking forward to meeting a tiger shark but he never showed up,” Tyson added.

This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com and is used by permission.

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