Baddest Man
By
Mark Kriegel
Read by
Mark Kriegel
Release:
06/03/2025
Runtime:
13h 11m
Quantity:
This book, which is the masterpiece from an author who long ago entered the pantheon of the true greats, cements Mark Kriegel as the greatest chronicler of fighting and fighters, even ahead of such lions as W.C. Heinz and William Nack and Norman Mailer. This book is literature, a wonder of the English language sentence to sentence, bound up with such deep reporting that you'll feel at the end like you've crawled into Mike Tyson's skin, tunneled into his soul, until the iron myth slips away and a man in full, broken but also intact, claws off the page.
Wright Thompson, New York Times bestselling author of The Barn, Pappyland, and The Cost of These Dreams
"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.
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.
Release:
2025-06-03
Runtime:
13h 11m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9798217072392
Praise