Tyler Dodd Rides The Wind by Michael Kinney
In 2020 Tyler Dodd found himself sitting face to face with boxing legend Mike Tyson in Los Angeles. At the time Tyson was training for his comeback exhibition fight against Roy Jones Jr., but was carving out time from his schedule to meet with Dodd. Dodd, who is the CEO of Arco Bellum, was brought in to meet with the iconic boxer to pitch him on how he could help Tyson Ranch, a packaging and licensing company founded by Mike Tyson, find a home in Oklahoma. However, there was a problem. According to Dodd, there was a mix-up and his meeting hadn’t been scheduled and the executives who run Tyson Ranch had no idea why Dodd was there. According to Dodd, the pitch he and his team had worked on for days was all but forgotten. As he put it, he was choking in what may have been the biggest moment of his business career. “My entire team put in a lot of hours on this pitch, we did a very elaborate pitch with slides and graphic designs. It was very personalized for Tyson Ranch,” Dodd said. “I just instantly choked. I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to talk about.” That is when Dodd fell back on what he knows best. He started to tell the room of his life journey and the remarkable tale of how he was not supposed to even be alive right then. “I just started to talk about my story,” Dodd said. “That’s really all I had in my tool belt in that moment. “I’m completely aware of absolutely absurd my story is. I’ve seen it all. It’s the wildest thing you’ve ever heard. I say this not with ego, but disbelief. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a story, fiction or non-fiction that compares to mine.” Dodd was born and raised in and around Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Early on in life he quickly found he was drawn to the street life. Dodd said by the time he was 15, he had the makings of being a really talented boxer. However, he was still living the street life and everything that went along with it. “I couldn’t really get separated from it,” Dodd said. “I ended up, like a lot of people, a causality of the opioid epidemic. It started off with prescription pain meds back when I was 15. By the time I was 21, I was completely homeless, living under bridges, shooting heroin.” Dodd said a major turning point in his life came in 2002 when his father died of Cancer. The family was so engrained in poverty, they didn’t have the money for his cremation. “That is when it went downhill,” Dodd said. “I was certain I was going to die on streets.” Dodd said starting in 2003, for almost a decade, his existence was that of a homeless man and drug addict on the streets. From Oklahoma to Florida, he was living day to day panhandling for money to get his next high. “That was my existence,” Dodd said. “I thought I was going to die like that way.”
