You wouldn't expect a biography of Mike Tyson to be boring.
But put it in the hands of a skilled reporter and writer like Mark Kriegel, and you truly have something special.
That's a short description of "Baddest Man," which in itself is a shortened version of the phrase "The Baddest Man on the Planet" - one of Tyson's nicknames during the course of his career. Such a description used to come automatically when someone was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, which Tyson was back in the day. An old-fashioned way of saying it was "He can lick any man in the house."
These days, no one has been able to say that without a possible argument. There are three or four heavyweight boxing champions these days, and none of them at a given moment can be identified by most sports fans. The greed that caused boxing officials to split up the title into parts in an attempt to have more title fights caught up with the sport quickly.
Therefore, it's a little easy to become nostalgic about Mike Tyson, although the accompanying noise that came with his years in the spotlight. were overwhelming for all concerned at times. Especially Tyson. He had quite a run, keeping the public's attention from 1985 until 2005 even as parts of his life were crumbling.
Tyson came out of Brooklyn with a father that dropped out of sight pretty quickly, and with a mother who was willing to do almost anything to keep the family together in some form or another - even if meant a spiral downward in their living conditions. Mike was much more interested in an education from the streets than he was from the schools. Tyson was said to be arrested 38 times by the age of 13. The fact that he was built like a fire hydrant made it easy in some ways to take liberties with others, and he ended in the government system that tries (and often fails) to straighten out the lives of teens.
An unhappy life and a young death usually is the end product of such a combination, but Tyson received an unexpected lifeline in the form of an invitation to spend time with legendary boxing manager Cus D'Amato in upstate New York. D'Amato had heard that Tyson had some boxing ability, and brought him into his home.
There Tyson fine-tuned his boxing skills, with D'Amato telling anyone that would listen that Mike was destined to be a great champion. Once he got in the ring for formal matches, people started to understand D'Amato's enthusiasm. This was someone who could clobber almost anyone who was matched up with him. Certainly he had a chance to rank with the great sluggers in heavyweight history, like George Foreman and Sonny Liston. Those are the types of fighters who generate buzz, which leads to ticket sales, which leads to dollars floating around.
This being boxing, of course, people flocked to take advantage of that situation. The history of the financial side of the sport is one where others try to take money away from those who actually earn it, while the fighters themselves usually aren't financially sophisticated enough to fend them off. Tyson made plenty of money ... but not as much as he should have earned. The in-fighting in that sense was tougher for Tyson than it was in the ring itself. He won three championship belts. The book comes to an end just as the champ needs about 90 seconds to knock out Michael Spinks - the only legitimate threat that was left to him. As we know now, Tyson had few new worlds to conquer, and he let the ones he had get away eventually.
The research here is extraordinary. There are several details in Tyson's life that come out here, and the reader must ask the question, "How did Kriegel find that out?" He tracked down almost everyone, and also has a variety of other sources available - such as Tyson's own volumes of his autobiography. The authenticity is present throughout the book.
The Mike Tyson we meet here has some contradictions built into his mind. At times he's a bully and a narcissist, but at other times he capable of loyalty and kindness. Tyson obviously knew he missed out on a more normal childhood, and it sounds like he was longing for one that era. It's also clear that Tyson was not unintelligent but simply uneducated. It would be easy to wonder what might have happened to him had he grown up in better circumstances.
Along those lines, Kriegel starts his book with something of a final chapter. Mike is in the present day, playing tennis dad while watching a daughter practice. It couldn't be more "normal." But who could have predicted it?
Kriegel wrote superb biographies of Joe Namath, Ray Mancini and Pete Maravich. He told a former coworker of his and mine that he enjoyed probing the father-son relationship in his books. It wasn't present in Tyson's life, so "Baddest Man" is a slight change of direction for the author. Even so, this book might be even better than his other three works.
Five stars
Learn more about this book from Amazon.com. (As an Amazon affiliate, I earn money from qualified purchases.)
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