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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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