BADDEST MAN

A controversial champ’s beginnings.

Kriegel opens with a striking set piece, which characterizes the ex-fighter, who once threatened to eat a ring opponent’s children, as “a tennis dad with a goldendoodle.” This 2020 scene is our only contemporary glimpse of Tyson, whose first 22 years are the book’s subject. Kriegel, a New York tabloid veteran, deftly recaptures “the snowballing phenomenon” of fame and wealth that Tyson earned with his singularly “destructive right uppercut.” His early bouts weren’t always televised, so his team made VHS highlight reels for news broadcasts. These showed a teenaged Tyson flattening “grown-ass men.” Thus did he become boxing’s youngest heavyweight champ and “greatest-ever attraction.” As the author notes, “Iron Mike” left battered adversaries tottering like “vaudeville clowns.” Because the narrative ends in 1988, Tyson’s 1992 rape conviction gets only passing mention. But Kriegel doesn’t downplay Tyson’s misdeeds. Rather, his catalog of Tyson’s transgressions foreshadows worse things to come. Accepting the book on its terms, this is a first-rate effort, brisk, irreverent, and astute about its mercurial protagonist and his opportunistic advisers. Tyson, whose heroes included 1920s heavyweight Jack Dempsey, was a “husky” Brooklyn kid who was bullied and got into street fights, landed in a youthful offenders home, and learned his craft from legendary trainer Cus D’Amato, a model for the Burgess Meredith character in Rocky. D’Amato has sometimes been depicted as a “secular saint” for his role in Tyson’s life, Kriegel notes, but here he’s seen wielding 16-year-old Tyson’s “future earnings” as a bargaining chip. Perpetuating a sordid boxing tradition, more than one of Tyson’s much-older advisers took huge chunks of the Black fighter’s paychecks. It’s difficult, in an on-demand era, to evoke the mystique that accompanied Tyson’s ascent, but this book does an exemplary job.

The origin story, grippingly told, of a transcendent, troubled athlete.