“My father never told me, ‘I love you.’ My mother never told me she loved me,” Oscar explained. “She never really gave me a hug. When I would cry, she would start hitting me. That is how bad it was.”
So, at the time, the heavyweight champion felt it was best for Travis and Shanna—who divorced after four years in 2008—to raise Atiana, due to his trauma. (The musician and former beauty queen are also parents to Landon, 19 and Alabama, 17.)
“You convince yourself that you are not worthy of giving love,” Oscar noted. “Then you start feeling sorry for yourself. Life starts just spiraling and you’re lost. All you want to do is drink and do drugs and escape. Luckily for me, when I was boxing, all the way to the end, it kept me in line. I always felt I wasn’t worthy of anything, that I wasn’t worthy of love.”