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    Home»Local Boston Sports»Of fighting and surviving, ‘Baddest Man’ is a soaring biography of Mike Tyson – Boston Herald
    Local Boston Sports

    Of fighting and surviving, ‘Baddest Man’ is a soaring biography of Mike Tyson – Boston Herald

    BostonSportsNewsBy BostonSportsNewsJuly 16, 2025No Comments6 Mins Read
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    Of fighting and surviving, ‘Baddest Man’ is a soaring biography of Mike Tyson – Boston Herald
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    You can not, without the assistance of the internet or its loud new voice called artificial intelligence, name the heavyweight champion of the world.

    OK then, his name is Oleksandr Usyk, a 38-year-old Ukrainian. He unified the WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO titles when he defeated another heavyweight in May 2024. That boxer’s name was Tyson Fury, his first name given to him by his father, a former boxer named John Fury, in honor of the boxer Mike Tyson.

    You might have recently seen that name when Tyson made $20 million fighting, so to speak, Jake Paul on Netflix last November, or as a wildly successful owner and chatty advocate in the legal marijuana business.

    That he is alive and active amazes. But remember when he was young and fighting and going to prison and his name was as prominent as any on the planet? Tyson’s fame was, as writer Mark Kriegel puts it, “a lethal dose of a peculiarly American disease, a form of insanity whose victims include Elvis, Marilyn and Tupac.”

    Those words come early in Kriegel’s remarkable new book, “Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson,” which moves from the boxer’s birth in 1966 to 1988, what Kriegel calls “the year of (Tyson’s) first public crack-up.”

    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.

    I suppose that somewhere, someone is writing about Usyk, because writers have long been drawn to boxing and boxers. The physical and emotional drama that is inherent in the sport has attracted writers as far back as Homer and Plato. Jack London wrote a lot about boxing and so did George Bernard Shaw, Hemingway, Mailer and A.J. Liebling, who called it the “sweet science of bruising.” Novelist Joyce Carol Oates once called it “the drama of life in the flesh.”

    Tyson attracted Mailer and Oates, as well as Gay Talese and Pete Hamill, all neatly represented here, and with whom Kriegel holds his own, as when he writes, “Tyson surpassed my capacity to imagine. Well, not just mine, but ours. His own, too. (This book) began as a kind of essay — an attempt to explain the Tyson phenomenon — and became, perhaps inevitably, a biography. There is a distinct anatomy to his fame. For even among those with no recollection of his prime, the sheer idea of him, the planet’s Baddest Man, remains as potent as ever.”

    The only other boxer who comes close to Tyson’s stature was, of course, Muhammad Ali, deserving of our admiration in the ring and out of it. He appears momentarily in “Baddest Man,” the ravages of his ring career heartbreakingly apparent, as when he appears at a Tyson fight and Mailer sadly writes, “Ali now moved with the deliberate calm of a blind man, sobering all those who stared upon him.”

    There is so much to savor in the book that it is understandably getting lavish praise — though the antics and dark intentions of such people as promoter Don King, actress Robin Givens and her mother Ruth, the current president of the United States Donald Trump, and Tyson himself are vile and often disgusting.

    Kriegel, who spent his early career as a crime reporter for New York City tabloids, has written such previous biographies of Joe Namath, Pete Maravich and Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini. He has been called “one of America’s finest living sportswriters,” and this book has been deemed “a masterpiece from an author who long ago entered the pantheon of the true greats” by writer Wright Thompson.

    Michael Spinks goes down after receiving a knockout by Mike Tyson during their 91-second heavyweight fight, June 27, 1988 in Atlantic City. (Richard Drew/AP)
    Michael Spinks goes down after receiving a knockout by Mike Tyson during their 91-second heavyweight fight, June 27, 1988 in Atlantic City. (Richard Drew/AP)

    Kriegel’s research is exhaustive. I had no idea or didn’t remember that before she hooked up with Tyson, actress Givens had a relationship with Michael Jordan, or that after attending the 1988 NBA All-Star game at the Chicago Stadium, Givens and Tyson took a limo ride to Father George Clements’ home.

    “After 10 minutes of premarital counseling,” he married the couple. Well, not exactly, since they had neglected to obtain a marriage license. They did so when they got back to New York and married in a civil ceremony.

    Kriegel interviewed dozens of people and read dozens of books. One of them was Jonathan Eig’s stunning “Ali: A Life,” published in 2017. Eig lives and works here, so I called to find out if he had read “Baddest Man.” Of course, he had and says, “Mark’s book on Tyson is one of the most exciting, satisfying and nuanced portraits of an athlete that I’ve read in years. I think I understand Tyson better than ever now, and that’s saying a lot, because I’ve been fascinated by him since he first emerged as a young fighter. I get the feeling that Mark did a lot of old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting on this, and he’s a fantastic writer.”

    So is Eig, whose most recent book, “King: A Life,” about Martin Luther King, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

    "Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson" by Mark Kriegel. (June 2025, Penguin Press)
    “Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson” by Mark Kriegel. (June 2025, Penguin Press)

    It is much to Kriegel’s credit and to your enjoyment that he does not focus on the ferocity of Tyson’s fights. They are, of course, mentioned, but delivered without the sensationalism or look-at-me literary fireworks that mar much sportswriting.

    The book ends immediately after Tyson’s destruction of then-reigning heavyweight champion Michael Spinks, at Trump’s Atlantic City hotel and casino, with Tyson, “his arms outstretched, palms up, not a gladiator now as much as an emperor.”

    He was just shy of his 22nd birthday. There are troubles ahead, a lot of them, but we know that he survived.

    Or, as Kriegel writes at the beginning of his spectacular book, “Glory is a long shot in any boxing story … 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.”

    rkogan@chicagotribune.com



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