Latest news with #BaddestMan
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Why Mike Tyson remains fascinating after all these years
In our shattered-attention-span, zero-common-ground era of endless distraction, it's impossible to get across how powerful the words Heavyweight Champion of the World once were. It's impossible to convey to a modern, celebrity-saturated audience how massive and all-encompassing a shadow Mike Tyson once cast over all of American culture. To see Tyson now — bro avatar, cuddly tough guy, weed magnate — is to see someone who has shed and transcended every element of what made him so fascinating, and so dangerous, in the 1980s. He was a boxer and a criminal, a philosopher with a knee-buckling uppercut. He was a content-generating machine decades before the concept of 'content' was invented, a constant, churning swirl of scandal, controversy, ferocity, triumph. He was, in short, the baddest man alive, and he remains endlessly fascinating as a result. Advertisement Now comes 'Baddest Man: The Breaking 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. To start, Kriegel answers the question of why even publish a book on Mike Tyson in 2025. There's the economic angle — he owed his publisher a book, and Tyson always sells. But that begs a bigger question: Why, exactly, does Tyson still draw such interest? 'First, the fact that he's alive,' Kriegel says. 'I don't think that was to be expected, that he would see this year. But even the greater anomaly, I think, is that he remains economically potent — almost as economically potent now as he was in his prime. He can still generate so much damn money today. … He's the most lucrative attraction in the history of combat sports.' Advertisement 'Baddest Man' begins with the unlikeliest of images — Mike Tyson as doting tennis dad in an exclusive Newport Beach community. It's a sign that he's a survivor, of course, but it's also a sign that Tyson has fought his way into the rarest of air, into gated neighborhoods and social circles he never could have imagined as a juvenile. Kriegel and Tyson first crossed paths early in Kriegel's career as a crime reporter for the New York Daily News. On the job barely a month, Kriegel got the call from an editor at four in the morning: Mike Tyson was in a fight with Mitch Green at a clothing store. Get up there. A few weeks later, Kriegel got word that Tyson had been trashing the mansion he shared with girlfriend-turned-wife-turned-ex Robin Givens. And then came another Tyson story, and another, and another after that … none of which had anything to do with his ever-increasing win total in the ring. Kriegel understood that Tyson was at the center of a new kind of celebrity culture. 'It represents the genesis of what we have been calling 'tabloid culture' for the last 40 or so years,' he says. 'Really splashy, really voyeuristic, and we couldn't get enough of it.' Advertisement Kriegel moved over to the sports desk at the New York Post in 1991, and from then on Tyson — whose career was on a long, slow decline — became what he called a 'designated villain … When you're a 30-something-year-old columnist in New York, nuance is not the first priority.' In 1988, Mike Tyson knocked out Michael Spinks in the first round in one of the most anticipated fights of all-time. (Getty Images) (Bettmann via Getty Images) It would be decades before Kriegel would begin to have empathy for Tyson — empathy for the struggles he went through, the obstacles he overcame, the personal and psychological and spiritual challenges that bedeviled him. None of that excuses the crimes Tyson committed or the pain he caused others, but that empathy nonetheless gave Kriegel the perspective necessary to tell the story of 'Baddest Man.' 'There's so much goodwill directed at him,' Kriegel says. 'I think at some level there's an acknowledgement of the virtue of just having survived the [stuff] he survived — being assaulted as a kid, mom dying early, the dad splitting, the degree of violence in the neighborhood. … His persona is the victimizer, but he's also the victim as well.' Advertisement 'Baddest Man' covers Tyson's earliest days growing up in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, his life-saving relationship with trainer Cus D'Amato, his devastating charge upward through the ranks of professional boxing. This volume — there will be another — ends with perhaps the most consequential fight of Tyson's career, the June 27, 1988 beatdown of Michael Spinks. At that point the most expensive fight in history, hosted by an Atlantic City real estate magnate by the name of Donald Trump, the fight was 91 seconds of pure brutality, devastation and excellence. 'It's hard to overestimate how heavy the hype was for that fight at that time,' Kriegel says. 'It's the height of Tyson's boxing career. It's a certain very neat cultural moment where Trump is ascendant, Tyson is ascendant. You don't have to be a prophet to read between the lines — like, this is not headed in a great direction — but in that moment, he is invincible.' 'Baddest Man' is now on shelves wherever books are sold. It's a hell of a portrait of a singular era in boxing and in America, one whose echoes are still resonating today.
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Mike Tyson's mom had sex with men as he lay sleeping in bed next to her... years later he asked his therapist an agonizing question
As Father's Day gifts go, Mark Kriegel's new book 'Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson ' may not be the most obvious choice. After all, Tyson didn't really know his dad growing up. He was first told his father had been a Jamaican-born cab driver, only for his mother Lorna to later point to Jimmy 'Curlee' Kirkpatrick, a known pimp around 1970s Brooklyn. Tyson naturally preferred the latter explanation because a pimp's son had more 'status' than a cabbie's, as he explained in his 2013 one-man show, 'Undisputed Truth.'
San Francisco Chronicle
25-04-2025
- Sport
- San Francisco Chronicle
Warriors' Steph Curry is the NBA's Baddest Man, and his reputation is on the line
He's got four rings and two MVP trophies, but it's time to give Stephen Curry an award that would say the most about his career: Curry is, by a unanimous vote of this column's one-person panel, the NBA's Baddest Man. Not the meanest or dirtiest or chippiest. Just the baddest. In order for the Golden State Warriors to beat the Houston Rockets and advance to the Western Conference semifinals, Curry will have to live up to that title. This was written before Game 3 of the series, but there are signs that the Rockets can effectively counter Curry's badassery with their own. The Rockets' relentlessly aggressive defense of Curry held him to 20 points in Game 2. Earlier this month they held him to three points in a regular season game. With Jimmy Butler knocked out of action early in Game 2, the Warriors needed more than 20 from Curry. So, yes, Curry's title is on the line. Being the NBA's Baddest Man is like being heavyweight champion of the world. You have to constantly defend your title. That won't be easy, but neither was winning that Baddest Man title in the first place. Of the eight first-round playoff series in progress, Warriors-Rockets might be the roughest. It's let-'em-play time, say the refs, and that's the Rockets' wheelhouse. Discomfort is their comfort zone. Working away from the ball on offense, Curry looks like a skydiving instructor wearing a first-time jumper on his back. Only close relatives and lovers should be hugged that enthusiastically. That won't change. Curry knows he's not going to get the calls. What tells him that? The past decade. Sure, Curry yaps at the refs. He is one of the league's 400 biggest complainers. But he knows that crying to the refs is as effective as yelping after you stub your toe. In the first two games of the series, Curry played 77 minutes and shot six free throws, and one freebie was on a technical foul. It's part of a larger problem, though not everyone sees it as a problem. In the playoffs, the refs call the game more loosely. Hey, let 'em play, right? Sure, I want to let my kids play, too, but when their ball rolls onto the freeway, it's time to apply some adult supervision. Guys play harder in the playoffs, and you don't want to bog down the games with whistles. But players are smart. If you called games 5% tighter, players would adjust and play 5% less dirty. They would have to. Players will do exactly whatever they are allowed to do. The refs allow more in the playoffs because the Association seems to believe that fans want Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. Cool, this ain't croquet. But shouldn't there be some recognition at the league level that basketball is not football or wrestling? That there is an element of athletic art that can get wiped out when the refs become innocent bystanders? The league bosses want theater, so they allow unlimited yapping at refs, unlimited flopping and industrial-strength defense, while ignoring the fact that great basketball can also sell tickets. Curry shot 4.3 free throws per game this season. Among guards who shot a lot more freebies than that: Trae Young (7.4), James Harden (7.3) and Damian Lillard (6.8). Yes, I have joined the crybabies. For years I scoffed at people whining that Curry gets no calls. Perspective is hard, I preached to the whiners. Look, I coached CYO basketball for a few years, and my teams got royally screwed by the refs every single game. It looks like the NBA refs ignore the freestyle mugging of Curry, but there's no way (I explained to the crybabies) that can be true. Hey, it takes a big man to admit he's wrong. There should be no star treatment, but there should be recognition of the fine line between good, tough defense and illegal search and seizure. Meanwhile, Curry's only recourse is to do what he has done for the last decade, which is to go the Bruce Lee/Peter Pan route. Beat the bigger, meaner, dirtier guys with courage, cool and dazzling artistry. That is an increasing challenge. As Curry grows older, his foes grow younger, quicker and stronger. And smarter. As Warriors' assistant coach Bruce Fraser recently observed here, the newish tactic against Curry is to 'send in the linebackers.' Bigger guys, defending with more force. The Rockets have linebackers up the wazoo. Fred Van Vleet and Dillon Brooks are classic tacklers, and Amen Thompson is a gritty, athletic octopus. It will be harder for Curry if Jimmy Butler is out, or is limited by his injury. Butler not only eases the burden on Curry stylistically, by spacing, moving the ball and picking, but Butler adds a level of toughness the Warriors need against the hyper-aggressive Rockets. Curry knows the deal. After Game 2, he said, 'There were a couple (accidental) crashes that happened out there, but we know what they're trying to do — use their size advantage at times to try to bully us.' The forecast calls for stormy weather for as long as the Warriors are in the playoffs. Their umbrella is Curry, until further notice the NBA's Baddest Man.
