Latest news with #Kriegel
Yahoo
4 days 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.
Fox News
4 days ago
- Business
- Fox News
Former 'hater' reveals how Mike Tyson became America's unlikely beloved figure
Long before Mike Tyson became a beloved American figure, he was a teenage wrecking ball engineered for success, haunted by chaos. Author Mark Kriegel, a self-confessed former "hater" of Tyson, pulls the curtain back on the boxer's "apocalyptic" life in his new book, "Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson," detailing how he pulled off one of the most dramatic public turnarounds in modern celebrity history. "His haters, like me, and his acolytes and Tyson himself could have agreed on in the late 80s and 90s was that he was not long for this world. That day when I met him in 2012, I asked, could you imagine being this old? He was 45. He says, no, never, never even occurred to me. His life was apocalyptic," Kriegel said during an appearance on the "Brian Kilmeade Show." Born in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Tyson was, as Kriegel put it, "raised on the street." He made his professional boxing debut in 1985 at 18 years old and quickly gained a reputation for his power and knockout ability. He won 26 of his first 28 fights by knockout or technical knockout, and by age 20, became the youngest world heavyweight boxing champion in 1987. Tyson's dominance in the ring and insatiable personality catapulted him into pop culture fame. Donald Trump, then a real estate tycoon and significant figure in Atlantic City, New Jersey, also had an interest in Mike Tyson, playing a role in his mainstream success. "One of the things that Trump wanted from Tyson was, I mean, it was a pretty astute business move. He was the piece that Trump needed to take boxing away from Las Vegas and move its center to Atlantic City. Didn't ultimately work out like that. But that was the calculation," Kriegel, the "New York Times" best-selling author continued. "There's always this huge economic imperative with Tyson." "He's an incredible economic engine, and it's because of the knockouts, the Genesis story," Kriegel argued. "And wrestlers call it a promo, but as soon as he touches the microphone, it's like, wait, what did he say? And how did he say it? It's not like anything else you've heard before." By 1990, the wheels began to fall off, and Tyson's life fell into disarray. In 1992, Tyson was convicted of rape, and spent the next three years in prison. After being released, he went right back into the ring, earning his first post-prison win in 1995. Four years later in 1999, he went back behind bars and was sentenced to nine months in prison for assaulting two motorists after a traffic accident. By 2003, Tyson filed for bankruptcy, with reports saying he was $23 million in debt, despite having earned $300 million throughout his career. He launched the "Mike Tyson's World Tour" to pay off his debts, but the tour was canceled after a single exhibition match. "This guy who was a villain, is now pretty much universally beloved. How the hell did we get here?" The public pendulum of Tyson had quickly swung against him. During his interview with Fox News' Brian Kilmeade, Kriegel admitted that he was reluctant to write the book, saying that when his publisher broached the idea, he said, "No way, I can't do Tyson." "I've written more bad stuff about Tyson than anybody. And I started to think about it. I'm an older guy. I've been through my own stuff. And I start to think about what he had survived. Boxing, which is a pretty treacherous thing to survive in and of itself. The death of a child. Booze," Kriegel said. "No dad," Kilmeade chimed in. "Cocaine. No father. His family was the street, as one of his next-door neighbors told me. Incarceration, all of it, on and on… it made me respect the guy. And I think that there is some virtue in having survived. And there's this, finally, there's this idea that this guy who was a villain, is now pretty much universally beloved. How the hell did we get here?" Kriegel asked.
