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"Remarkable . . . Do not think of this as a boxing book, but boxing does make a colorful and primal backdrop for a uniquely American book, filled with enough mentors and monsters to do any Dickens novel justice.” —Chicago Tribune

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author whose coverage of Mike Tyson and his inner circle dates back to the 1980s, a magnificent noir epic about fame, race, greed, criminality, trauma, and the creation of the most feared and mesmerizing fighter in boxing history.

On an evening that defined the "greed is good" 1980s, Donald Trump hosted a raft of celebrities and high rollers in a carnival town on the Jersey Shore to bask in the glow created by a twenty-one-year-old heavyweight champion. Mike Tyson knocked out Michael Spinks that night and in ninety-one frenzied seconds earned more than the annual payrolls of the Los Angeles Lakers' and Boston Celtics' players combined.

It had been just eight years since Tyson, a feral child from a dystopian Brooklyn neighborhood, was delivered to boxing’s forgotten wizard, Cus D’Amato, who was living a self-imposed exile in upstate New York. Together, Cus and the Kid were an irresistible story of mutual redemption—darlings to the novelists, screenwriters, and newspapermen long charmed by D’Amato, and perfect for the nascent industry of cable television. Way before anyone heard of Tony Soprano, Mike Tyson was HBO’s leading man.

It was the greatest sales job in the sport’s history, and the most lucrative. But the business of Tyson concealed truths that were darker and more nuanced than the script would allow.

The intervening decades have seen Tyson villainized, lionized, and fetishized—but never, until now, fully humanized. Mark Kriegel, an acclaimed biographer regarded as “the finest boxing writer in America,” was a young cityside reporter at the New York Daily News when he was first swept up in the Tyson media hurricane, but here he measures his subject not by whom he knocked out but by what he survived. Though Tyson was billed as a modern-day Jack Dempsey, in truth he was closer to Sonny Liston: Tyson was Black, feared, and born to die young. What made Liston a pariah, though, would make Tyson—in a way his own handlers could never understand—a touchstone for a generation raised on a soundtrack of hip hop and gunfire.

What Peter Guralnick did for Elvis in Last Train to Memphis and James Kaplan for Sinatra in Frank, Kriegel does for Tyson. It’s not just the dizzying ascent that he captures but also Tyson’s place in the American psyche.

Review

“Remarkable . . . Do not think of this as a boxing book, but boxing does make a colorful and primal backdrop for a uniquely American book, filled with enough mentors and monsters to do any Dickens novel justice.” —Chicago Tribune

“A sweeping biography of the uniquely talented, troubled and troubling boxer, written with some of the voice-y flavor of New Journalism.” —Washington Post

“Mark Kriegel has done it again. Baddest Man is the Mike Tyson book all of us (and not just boxing fans) have been waiting for, a biography as nimble and powerful as its subject. Unforgettable.” —Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life and Ali: A Life

“This book, which is a masterpiece from an author who long ago entered the pantheon of the true greats, cements Mark Kriegel as the greatest chronicler of fighting and fighters, even ahead of such lions as W. C. Heinz and William Nack and Norman Mailer. This book is literature, a wonder of the English language sentence to sentence, bound up with such deep reporting that you'll feel at the end like you've crawled into Mike Tyson's skin, tunneled into his soul, until the iron myth slips away and a man in full, broken but also intact, claws off the page.” —Wright Thompson, New York Times bestselling author of The Barn, Pappyland, and The Cost of These Dreams

“Now comes Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, a new book from longtime New York fight scribe Mark Kriegel. Like Tyson himself, Baddest Man is a throwback to an era of words over pictures, paragraphs over video, insight over memes. It’s not just a reminder of what Tyson once was, it’s a reminder of how good sports journalism can be . . . It’s a hell of a portrait of a singular era in boxing and in America, one whose echoes are still resonating today.” —Jay Busbee, Yahoo Sports

“Themes of race, power, and wealth are prevalent in Tyson’s life, especially when others, realizing his potential, began making decisions on his behalf. Love him or hate him, Tyson's story is interesting, and Kriegel highlights the man behind his public persona. An obvious choice for Tyson fans and readers interested in boxing, who will appreciate Kriegel's focus on the sport’s history and the fighters who influenced it.” —Booklist

“This sinewy biography from journalist Kriegel (The Good Son) traces Mike Tyson’s early life and career . . . [A] nuanced portrait . . . An unflinching glimpse into the formative years of a troubled boxing great.” —Publishers Weekly

“Mark Kriegel, one of America's finest living sportswriters, has found the perfect subject in Mike Tyson, a figure of endless fascination and yet enduring mystery. Who else but Kriegel—an old-school reporter with a novelist's touch and feel for the human condition—could peel back the decades of villainization, self-mythology, and shtick that have obscured the story of the rise of the most famous fighter since Muhammad Ali? Gritty, soaring, searing, and funny, Baddest Man is the best sports biography I have read in years.” —Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning

“In clear, tough, impassioned prose, Mark Kriegel, who understands the sausage factory of professional boxing better than anyone on earth, gives us the deep inside of Mike Tyson's psyche, and of the needs and fantasies of all who have clung to him: the lovers, the operators, the hangers-on, the sportswriters, and us, a public feasting on what we imagine him to be.” —James Kaplan, author of 3 Shades of Blue, Sinatra: The Chairman, and Frank: The Voice

“Few events represented the grandiosity and excess of the 1980s more than a Mike Tyson prizefight. Where else could one find Don King and Donald Trump vying for the same microphone? Tyson did not craft his legend alone. Mark Kriegel delivers a book that only he can by introducing the facilitators, backslappers, and those who looked the other way to capitalize on Tyson's rapid rise. This is an experience Kriegel lived as a reporter and one brought to life for the reader—you can smell the sweat of a decaying gym and hear the thud of a sharp Tyson body blow throughout the lively pages.” —Jonathan Abrams, New York Times bestselling author

About the Author

Mark Kriegel, a former sports columnist for the New York Post and the New York Daily News, is a boxing analyst and essayist for ESPN. He is the author of Namath: A Biography, Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich, and The Good Son: The Life of Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini. He lives in Santa Monica, California, with his wife, the screenwriter Jenny Lumet.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PROLOGUE

A copper‑skinned girl in tennis whites works diligently on her forehand, a teaching pro feeding her a basket of balls. There’s a beat to their ritual: a happy velvet thump. One’s gaze can’t help but be drawn to the solitary figure in the bleachers. He sits still as a sculpture.

It’s been so long he may have forgotten how his mere presence inevitably distorts the setting, how things rearrange themselves around him. As the scene is related to me by another young pro, an unmistakable aura emanates from the man in the bleachers. A shimmery gasoline haze, I imagine from the description. Or smoke? Maybe he lit a fatty? No, I’m assured. His was the practiced gaze of a tennis dad. It didn’t swivel with the ball but remained fixed on the girl’s determined stroke. She is the sixth of his seven surviving children. His stance—elbows on quads, clasped hands supporting that great Roman urn of a head—suggests a compact Thinker. But the elements apparent on closer inspection—that sad slice above the eye, a nose and mouth from which could be cast a mask of Melpomene, and the tattoo that emerges under the shadow of his baseball cap—might evoke a kind of gargoyle.

Of course. He was a monster, not just ours but his own, too. The tattoo was meant to acknowledge and signify exactly that, a surrender to his supposed fate. But in the years since, his attempt at mocking self‑disfigurement has become, of all things, a logo, the markings of his brand. Mike Tyson has reconstituted himself as an avatar of bro culture.

It’s the greatest comeback I’ve ever seen—not his booming, eponymous marijuana business or the fawning celebs who appear on his podcast, but the idea of him here, so at home in the land of wealth and whiteness, a grand duchy of eternal sunshine and good dentistry, elective surgeries and German cars.

Like most of the locals, he’s become an avid devotee of self‑care. His morning constitutionals take him on a trail overlooking the very edge of America, a vista that soars past equidistant palm trees to the aptly named Pacific. His mental‑hygiene regimen calls for periodic psychedelic trips on the venom of warted frogs. I don’t quite understand what it is that he claims to have seen during these journeys, God or Death. But I do know that psychic distance pales in comparison with the vastness he’s traveled to arrive here from the point of origin, the place that birthed his dirty shadow self, Brownsville, Brooklyn.

In 1988, the year of his first public crack‑up, I was a general‑assignment reporter at the New York Daily News and trying, without much success, to write a novel. It was about a kid—an ambitious thug who makes it big and tries to outrun his fate, which he finally meets with the aforementioned ocean at his back, by the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier. As my protagonist also hailed from Brownsville, I fancied myself retelling the story of Murder, Inc., as a parable of what would come to be known as the hip‑hop generation. Never mind that I didn’t yet have the skill to write such a book, or that today it would qualify as an act of cultural appropriation. Eventually, my agent broke the news (more gently than some of my colleagues) that the conception itself was a nonstarter. All perps weren’t created equal. Italian gangsters? He could sell that for sure. But Black kids from Brooklyn? They didn’t sell.

There was a name for those kids—that ilk, if you will—all of them inevitably lumped together, as if they constituted an urban phylum. You’d hear it in the police precincts, in the newsroom, and the bars where we’d retire after putting the paper to bed: Piece a shit.

They were chain snatchers, pickpockets, muggers, dope slingers, and vandals. They prowled the subways and Times Square, armed with box cutters or posing as bait for chicken hawks, and were typically alumni of the notorious Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, 1221 Spofford Avenue, Bronx, New York.

They were Tyson.

Before he was Tyson, of course.

He was a Grandmaster Flash lyric come to life. Tyson was “The Message.”

If Bernie Goetz had capped him on the 2 train, no one would’ve much cared. Actually, more likely there’d have been a smattering of applause.

And don’t let anyone tell you he was saved by the nice old white man. That, too, was a form of commerce, an existential bargain. The old man was a kind of wizard, half sage, half kook. He didn’t merely make the delinquent child his ward but inhabited his innermost thoughts, making the boy believe he was “a scourge from God.” In return, Tyson was to consecrate his reputation, allowing the old man to live forever.

“And did I not?” Tyson tells me. “As long as people know my name, they’re going to know his. My existence is his glory.”

Glory is a long shot in any boxing story. I cover fighters, and all but the rarest of them feel as though they were born to be destroyed. They tend to get used up—physically, neurologically, financially, and spiritually. I don’t know if it’s because they’re typically born into violence or be‑ cause their craft itself is violence, albeit an artful form. Whatever the case, fighters who end up ruined seem the rule, not the exception.

Even as Tyson became boxing’s greatest‑ever attraction, his doom seemed a lock. In fact, before too long it was the very prospect of impending doom that became the attraction itself. At any juncture in his career, the smart bet on Tyson’s mortality was always the under.

I’ve written more than my share of nasty things about Tyson—many of them justified, some of them not, some of them shameful. But I’ve also learned it’s better to judge fighters not on their record but by what they’ve survived. And by that measure, the image of him watching his daughter smashing forehands, so steadfast in her task, grabs at my throat.

Tyson has withstood most of the urban plagues, those particular perils endemic to a time and a place. But also the death of a mother and the absence of a father.
Incarceration.
Molestation.
Booze.
Coke.
Boxing.
Don King.
The death of a child.

And perhaps most treacherous of all, fame. His wasn’t the kind that got you a good table at Elaine’s. Rather, it was a lethal dose of a peculiarly American disease, a form of insanity whose victims include Elvis, Marilyn, and Tupac.

But Tyson lives, ever defiant of the prophecy that foretold his early demise.

And that brings me, in a roundabout way, back to the kid I tried to invent in 1988. He would make it out of Brownsville (an impossibility, I was assured) only to die at the edge of America.

Compared with my stillborn novel, Tyson’s was the meanest of fairy tales, full of dungeons and wizards, archvillains, wicked witches and fairy godmothers. There would be lion tamers and movie stars, warriors and whores, pimps and spies. And still the erstwhile piece of shit—I mean that with unvarnished admiration—forges ahead. He is at once the vic‑ tim and the victimizer, a convicted rapist beloved in the age of #MeToo, the monster transformed into a tennis dad with a goldendoodle, whose morning walks afford him an ocean view.

Tyson surpassed my capacity to imagine. Well, not just mine, but ours. His own, too. What follows began as a kind of essay—an attempt to explain the Tyson phenomenon—and became, perhaps inevitably, biography. There’s a distinct anatomy to his fame. For even among those with no recollection of his prime, the sheer idea of him, the planet’s Bad‑ dest Man, remains as potent as ever.

Which brings me back to my informant, the twentysomething tennis pro. He finds Tyson in the parking lot with his daughter. She’s almost twelve. At her age, Tyson was locked up. But this girl has the face of an Egyptian princess.

Is she beaming at him? Not sure. Let’s just say she has delighted eyes. “Dude,” says the awestruck pro.

Dude. Jesus.

Beneath the shade of his brimmed cap, Tyson’s squint dissolves into a grin.

“Dude. Much respect.”

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