Verwandte Artikel zu Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson

Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson - Hardcover

Kriegel, Mark

 
9780735223400: Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0735223408 ISBN 13: 9780735223400
Verlag: Penguin Random House, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

"Remarkable . . . 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. Chicago Tribune

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author whose coverage of Mike Tyson and his inner circle dates back to the 1980s, a magnificent noir epic about fame, race, greed, criminality, trauma, and the creation of the most feared and mesmerizing fighter in boxing history.

On an evening that defined the "greed is good" 1980s, Donald Trump hosted a raft of celebrities and high rollers in a carnival town on the Jersey Shore to bask in the glow created by a twenty-one-year-old heavyweight champion. Mike Tyson knocked out Michael Spinks that night and in ninety-one frenzied seconds earned more than the annual payrolls of the Los Angeles Lakers' and Boston Celtics' players combined.

It had been just eight years since Tyson, a feral child from a dystopian Brooklyn neighborhood, was delivered to boxing s forgotten wizard, Cus D Amato, who was living a self-imposed exile in upstate New York. Together, Cus and the Kid were an irresistible story of mutual redemption darlings to the novelists, screenwriters, and newspapermen long charmed by D Amato, and perfect for the nascent industry of cable television. Way before anyone heard of Tony Soprano, Mike Tyson was HBO s leading man.

It was the greatest sales job in the sport s history, and the most lucrative. But the business of Tyson concealed truths that were darker and more nuanced than the script would allow.

The intervening decades have seen Tyson villainized, lionized, and fetishized but never, until now, fully humanized. Mark Kriegel, an acclaimed biographer regarded as the finest boxing writer in America, was a young cityside reporter at the New York Daily News when he was first swept up in the Tyson media hurricane, but here he measures his subject not by whom he knocked out but by what he survived. Though Tyson was billed as a modern-day Jack Dempsey, in truth he was closer to Sonny Liston: Tyson was Black, feared, and born to die young. What made Liston a pariah, though, would make Tyson in a way his own handlers could never understand a touchstone for a generation raised on a soundtrack of hip hop and gunfire.

What Peter Guralnick did for Elvis in Last Train to Memphis and James Kaplan for Sinatra in Frank, Kriegel does for Tyson. It s not just the dizzying ascent that he captures but also Tyson s place in the American psyche.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Kriegel, a former sports columnist for the New York Post and the New York Daily News, is a boxing analyst and essayist for ESPN. He is the author of Namath: A Biography, Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich, and The Good Son: The Life of Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini. He lives in Santa Monica, California, with his wife, the screenwriter Jenny Lumet.

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PROLOGUE

A copper skinned girl in tennis whites works diligently on her forehand, a teaching pro feeding her a basket of balls. There s a beat to their ritual: a happy velvet thump. One s gaze can t help but be drawn to the solitary figure in the bleachers. He sits still as a sculpture.

It s been so long he may have forgotten how his mere presence inevitably distorts the setting, how things rearrange themselves around him. As the scene is related to me by another young pro, an unmistakable aura emanates from the man in the bleachers. A shimmery gasoline haze, I imagine from the description. Or smoke? Maybe he lit a fatty? No, I m assured. His was the practiced gaze of a tennis dad. It didn t swivel with the ball but remained fixed on the girl s determined stroke. She is the sixth of his seven surviving children. His stance elbows on quads, clasped hands supporting that great Roman urn of a head suggests a compact Thinker. But the elements apparent on closer inspection that sad slice above the eye, a nose and mouth from which could be cast a mask of Melpomene, and the tattoo that emerges under the shadow of his baseball cap might evoke a kind of gargoyle.

Of course. He was a monster, not just ours but his own, too. The tattoo was meant to acknowledge and signify exactly that, a surrender to his supposed fate. But in the years since, his attempt at mocking self disfigurement has become, of all things, a logo, the markings of his brand. Mike Tyson has reconstituted himself as an avatar of bro culture.

It s the greatest comeback I ve ever seen not his booming, eponymous marijuana business or the fawning celebs who appear on his podcast, but the idea of him here, so at home in the land of wealth and whiteness, a grand duchy of eternal sunshine and good dentistry, elective surgeries and German cars.

Like most of the locals, he s become an avid devotee of self care. His morning constitutionals take him on a trail overlooking the very edge of America, a vista that soars past equidistant palm trees to the aptly named Pacific. His mental hygiene regimen calls for periodic psychedelic trips on the venom of warted frogs. I don t quite understand what it is that he claims to have seen during these journeys, God or Death. But I do know that psychic distance pales in comparison with the vastness he s traveled to arrive here from the point of origin, the place that birthed his dirty shadow self, Brownsville, Brooklyn.

In 1988, the year of his first public crack up, I was a general assignment reporter at the New York Daily News and trying, without much success, to write a novel. It was about a kid an ambitious thug who makes it big and tries to outrun his fate, which he finally meets with the aforementioned ocean at his back, by the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier. As my protagonist also hailed from Brownsville, I fancied myself retelling the story of Murder, Inc., as a parable of what would come to be known as the hip hop generation. Never mind that I didn t yet have the skill to write such a book, or that today it would qualify as an act of cultural appropriation. Eventually, my agent broke the news (more gently than some of my colleagues) that the conception itself was a nonstarter. All perps weren t created equal. Italian gangsters? He could sell that for sure. But Black kids from Brooklyn? They didn t sell.

There was a name for those kids that ilk, if you will all of them inevitably lumped together, as if they constituted an urban phylum. You d hear it in the police precincts, in the newsroom, and the bars where we d retire after putting the paper to bed: Piece a shit.

They were chain snatchers, pickpockets, muggers, dope slingers, and vandals. They prowl

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Verlag
Penguin Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735223408
ISBN 13 
9780735223400
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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