Mike Tyson will always be my generation’s heavyweight GOAT. Before the scandals, before the prison time, before the financial ruin and the infamous bite, Tyson stood for something elemental: fear, power, inevitability. His fights weren’t just wins. They were executions. He didn’t box, he demolished.
Tony Tucker was the first I remember. He made it the distance—just—but looked like he’d survived a plane crash. Tyson stalked him for twelve rounds, every punch a message: there’s nowhere to run. Then came Larry Holmes. Holmes had been great in the seventies, but in 1988 he was brought out of retirement like a lamb to slaughter. Tyson floored him three times in the fourth round. It wasn’t a contest, it was an exorcism. Then came Tony Tubbs, dispatched in two, and Michael Spinks. The undefeated, lineal champion. Knocked out in 91 seconds. 91 seconds. Spinks never fought again.
Each Tyson entrance was a statement: black trunks, black boots, no robe, no socks. Just gloved fists and the sense of something unstoppable entering the ring. He didn’t perform for the crowd. He came to end you. And then came Frank Bruno, our great hope, carrying the battered pride of Britain into the ring. Bruno trained like a Spartan but looked like a man waiting for fate. He held out as long as he could, but Tyson beat him down twice—once in 1989, again in 1996. Both times, it was clear who the event was built around.
These were more than sporting events. They were ritual sacrifices, broadcast from Las Vegas or Atlantic City, with Don King forever lurking in the background. Hair high, grin wide, ready to monetise every drop of sweat and blood.
There’s a moment in Mark Kriegel’s Baddest Man that lands like a body shot. We’re not in a ring, but on a tennis court in Newport Beach, California, “a grand duchy of eternal sunshine and good dentistry,” where a “copper-skinned girl in tennis whites works diligently on her forehand.” Watching from the bleachers is her father, “still as a sculpture,” his “great Roman urn of a head” lowered in quiet concentration. That father is Mike Tyson. “Of course. He was a monster, not just ours but his own, too.” And now he’s a tennis dad. The transformation is grotesque, miraculous, and, as Kriegel insists, deeply American.
Kriegel isn’t the first to write about Tyson, but he might be the first to do so without flinching. His book is not just a biography; it’s a reckoning with what Tyson became and what he reveals. This is not the story of a great athlete. It is the story of a system that builds myths out of trauma, commodifies violence, and sells back to us the very monsters it manufactures. Tyson is the “Baddest Man,” but also the “original child,” shaped not by destiny but by structural abandonment: the carceral state, post-industrial decline, and the racialised spectacle of American sport. “His wasn’t the kind that got you a good table at Elaine’s,” Kriegel writes of Tyson’s fame. “Rather, it was a lethal dose of a peculiarly American disease.”
The Making of a Myth
The book begins not with Tyson’s fists, but with his distance: from Brownsville, Brooklyn to coastal California; from the “dirty shadow self” to the smooth veneers of Newport Beach. Kriegel is obsessed with this gap. Not just geographic, but ontological. Tyson, he suggests, should not exist. “He surpassed my capacity to imagine. Well, not just mine, but ours. His own, too.”
Kriegel writes with the swagger of a sports columnist and the reverence of a fallen romantic. The mythic tone is deliberate. Tyson becomes a figure out of epic: “a Grandmaster Flash lyric come to life,” “a scourge from God,” “the Message.” His story, like any myth, is about survival. But Kriegel is also honest about his own complicity. He recounts his time as a Daily News reporter, trying and failing to write a novel about a kid from Brownsville. The manuscript, his agent told him, would never sell. “All perps weren’t created equal. Italian gangsters? He could sell that for sure. But Black kids from Brooklyn? They didn’t sell.”
That admission sets the tone for the book’s real subject: the economy of suffering. Tyson doesn’t transcend it; he embodies it. And Kriegel, to his credit, makes himself part of the system he’s critiquing.
Brownsville as Prologue
Brownsville isn’t just a setting; it’s a condition. Kriegel sketches it with noir precision. The buildings are burnt out. The rats move in tides. The housing projects are described as “Soviet”—dead zones where capitalism has exhausted itself and left only concrete. Tyson, born in 1966, enters this world already marked.
“Mike had no family,” recalls Lloyd Daniels, a childhood friend. “Mike’s family was the street.” By eight, Tyson was drinking Bacardi 151 and robbing houses. His mother, Lorna Mae, dosed him with gin to stop him crying. He watched her beaten by boyfriends, heard her having sex through thin walls, and understood instinctively that intimacy was just another transaction. “There was nothing you wouldn’t do to survive,” Tyson later recalled.
Brownsville becomes the mythic origin point, not just for Tyson but for a whole era of American decline. Kriegel draws a line from Margaret Sanger’s birth control clinic on Amboy Street to Irving Shulman’s The Amboy Dukes to the burned-out housing and teen gangs of the 1970s. “Brownsville wasn’t a case of urban blight,” he writes. “It was full-on dystopia.”
A Culture of Violence
Violence, in Kriegel’s telling, isn’t pathology. It’s pedagogy. Tyson is a quick learner. He begins as victim—mocked for his lisp, his unwashed clothes, his “fairy voice.” By ten, he’s become what he fears. “He trafficked in fear,” Kriegel writes. “Not the bully but what he had been: the vic, the bitch, the punk.”
The transformation is punctuated by one of the book’s most memorable stories. A kid steals one of Tyson’s pigeons, snaps its neck, and throws the bloody carcass at him. Tyson, enraged, attacks. It’s his first fight. The bird, the blood, the bystanders: this is Tyson’s baptism. He discovers that fear is currency. That violence is power. That people watch.
Boxing becomes the extension of this logic. It doesn’t redeem him. It packages him. Tyson fights in parking lots, then gyms, then on TV. The arena changes, but the stakes don’t. Every bout is a performance of trauma. The crowd cheers. The money flows. The damage accumulates.
Kriegel doesn’t shy away from the system’s complicity. “Fighters who end up ruined seem the rule, not the exception,” he writes. Boxing, like capitalism, is a machine that runs on bodies. Tyson’s, for a while, was the most valuable body on earth.
Monster and Mascot
This is where Kriegel’s book becomes more than biography. He confronts the contradiction at Tyson’s core: the victim who became a predator. The abused who became a rapist. The working-class Black boy from Brownsville who now microdoses toad venom and walks his goldendoodle by the sea.
Kriegel quotes Tyson’s therapist, who describes his “pool of pain,” his constant fear, his sense of abandonment. But he also quotes the rape conviction. He does not excuse it. Nor does he linger. The result is a kind of tension. Tyson is not redeemed. He is rebranded. “A convicted rapist beloved in the age of #MeToo,” Kriegel writes, “the monster transformed into a tennis dad.”
There is something disturbing about this rebranding. Tyson becomes an influencer, a meme, a lovable rogue. But the violence is never far. It has simply changed format.
The Economics of Redemption
By the end, Tyson is a brand. His podcast was lucrative. His weed business thrives. The tattoo that once signified shame1 becomes a logo. “His attempt at mocking self-disfigurement has become, of all things, a logo, the markings of his brand.”
This is the logic of capitalism: take the wound and sell it back as narrative. Turn pain into merchandise. Tyson’s story is not exceptional. It is exemplary. He is the product of an economy that creates monsters, then puts them on stage.
Conclusion: The System Survives
Kriegel ends as he began: watching Tyson watch his daughter. The monster lives. Not slain, but tamed. Not punished, but profitable. The book is a tragedy, but also a warning. Tyson was not an accident. He was the logical outcome of a society that brutalises its poor and racialised boys, then finds ways to monetise their rage.
The factories are gone. The projects are still there. The cameras now fit in our pockets. There are a thousand Tysons out there—podcasting, boxing, fighting for status in an economy that still believes trauma is a shortcut to truth.
Kriegel doesn’t offer redemption. He offers recognition. And that is the book’s strength. Baddest Man is not about boxing. It’s about what happens when a society gives up on people, and then turns their pain into spectacle. Tyson was never meant to survive. That he did is not a victory.
Footnotes
- Tyson’s facial tattoo, inked in 2003, was initially seen as a public act of breakdown. A visible symbol of chaos and marginality. Over time, however, it has become synonymous with his public identity, featured in everything from merchandise to media appearances. As Kriegel notes, what began as “mocking self-disfigurement” has been reappropriated into a kind of personal trademark: a logo that packages pain into recognisable, profitable form. ↩︎
