An acclaimed New York Times bestselling author whose coverage of Mike Tyson and his inner circle dates back to the 1980s offers a magnificent noir epic about fame, race, greed, criminality, trauma, and the creation of the most feared and mesmerizing fighter in boxing history. Illustrations.
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 boxings forgotten wizard, Cus DAmato, who was living a self-imposed exile in upstate New York. Together, Cus and the Kid were an irresistible story of mutual redemptiondarlings to the novelists, screenwriters, and newspapermen long charmed by DAmato, and perfect for the nascent industry of cable television. Way before anyone heard of Tony Soprano, Mike Tyson was HBOs leading man.
It was the greatest sales job in the sports 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 fetishizedbut 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 Tysonin a way his own handlers could never understanda 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. Its not just the dizzying ascent that he captures but also Tysons place in the American psyche.
