Last week, during the Television Critics Association press tour, Tyson chatted about his wrestling past with Total Nonstop Action wrestler Ken Anderson. Anderson promptly shared the news with his fans on Instagram, posting a vintage photograph of a young Tyson with this caption: “During our chat last night Neil Degrasse Tyson showed me this pic and revealed that he was an amateur wrestler in high school and college.”
In an interview last year with wrestling website Flowrestling, Tyson explained that he’d been an undefeated wrestler in high school, where he served as captain of the wrestling team. He went on to wrestle at Harvard as an undergraduate.The lessons he learned as a wrestler, he said, made an indelible impression on him.
“Anyone who has wrestled knows that it’s the hardest thing in the world to do,” he told Flowrestling. “Anyone who says something else is the hardest thing has never wrestled. That’s what I have found. … You don't wrestle because it's easy, you wrestle because it's hard. I don't do astrophysics because it's easy, I do it because it's hard. And I juxtapose the two in my mind, body, and soul all the time.”
Beyond wrestling, Tyson was apparently quite an athlete in his youth. He ran a 4-minute, 25-second mile as a youngster and even joined the rowing team at Harvard.