Why Mike Tyson remains fascinating after all these years

In our shattered Attention span, zero-communal basic era of endless distraction, it is impossible to come across how powerful the words heavyweight champion of the world were once. It is impossible to convey a modern, saturated audience by celebrities how massive and all -embracing a shadow Mike Tyson once thrown over the entire American culture.

To see Tyson now – Bro Avatar, cuddly sturdy guy, weed magnate – is to see someone who has thrown every element and transcended him so fascinating and so dangerous in the 1980s. He was a boxer and a criminal, a philosopher with a knee -buckling uppercut. He was a content-generating machine decades before the concept of “content” was invented, a constant, churn of scandal, controversy, cruelty, triumph. In short, he was the worst man alive and he remains endlessly fascinating.

Now comes “Bathdest Man: The Breaking of Mike Tyson”, a new book from the old New York Fight Scribe Mark Kriegel. Just like Tyson himself, “Bathdest Man” is a return to an era of words about photos, paragraphs about video, insight into memes. It is not just a memory of what Tyson once was, it is a reminder of how good sports journalism can be.

To begin with, Kriegel answers the question why even a book publishes about Mike Tyson in 2025. There is the economic perspective – he owed his publisher a book and Tyson always sells. But that raises a bigger question: WhyExactly, did Tyson draw exactly so much interest?

“First, the fact that he lives,” says Kriegel. “I don’t think that was to be expected that he would see this year. But even the bigger anomaly, I think, is that he remains economically powerful – almost as economically powerful now that he was in his prime. He can still generate so much damn money today. … He is the most lucrative attraction in the history of combat sport.”

“Bathdest man” starts with the most unlikely images – Mike Tyson as loving tennisvad in an exclusive Newport Beach community. It is a sign that he is of course a survivor, but it is also a sign that Tyson has fought his way in the rarest air, in gated neighborhoods and social circles that he could never have imagined as a juvenile.

Kriegel and Tyson crossed early in Kriegel’s career as a crime reporter for the New York Daily News. At work barely a month, Kriegel received the call from an editor at four in the morning: Mike Tyson was in a fight with Mitch Green in a clothing store. Go there. A few weeks later, Kriegel received a message that Tyson had thrown the mansion away that he shared with girlfriend who was awakened with wife, Robin Givens.

And then there was another Tyson story, and another, and another one after that … None of them had anything to do with his ever-increasing victory in the ring. Kriegel understood that Tyson was central to a new kind of famous culture.

“It represents the origin of what we call ‘tabloid culture’ in the last 40 years,” he says. “Really smashing, really voyeuristic, and we couldn’t get enough of it.”

Kriegel moved to the Sportdesk in the New York Post in 1991, and from that moment Tyson-Wiens career became a long, slow decline-what he called a “designated villain … When you are a 30-year-old columnist in New York, Nuance is not the first priority.”

(Originally Caption) 6/27/15 ATLANTIC CITY, New Jerseyreferee Frank Capuccino waves Mike Tyson to a neutral angle after he had eliminated Michael Spinks in the first round. — In 1988, Mike Tyson Michael Spinks played in the first round in one of the most expected battles of all time. (Getty Images)

(Bettmann via Getty Images)

It would take decades for Kriegel to start empathy for Tyson – empathy for the struggles he went through, the obstacles that he conquered, the personal and psychological and spiritual challenges that he was pilgriming him. None of this apologizes the crimes that Tyson has committed or the pain he caused others, but that empathy nevertheless gave Kriegel the perspective needed to tell the story of ‘worst man’.

“There is so much goodwill aimed at him,” says Kriegel. “I think at a certain level there is a recognition of the virtue to just the [stuff] He survived – attacked as a child, mother who died early, the father splits, the degree of violence in the neighborhood. … his persona is the victim, but he is also the victim. “

“Bathdest man” includes Tyson’s earliest days growing up in the Brownsville district in Brooklyn, his life -saving relationship with trainer Cus d’Amato, his devastating load up through the ranks of professional boxing. This part – there will be another – ends with perhaps the most consistent fight by Tyson’s career, the Beatdown of 27 June 1988 by Michael Spinks. At that time, the most expensive fight in history, organized by a real estate magnate of Atlantic City with the name Donald Trump, the fight was 91 seconds pure brutality, destruction and excellence.

“It’s hard to overestimate how heavy the hype was for that fight at the time,” says Kriegel. “It is the highlight of Tyson’s boxing career. It is a certain very neat cultural moment where Trump is ascendant, Tyson is Ascendant. You don’t have to be a prophet to read between the lines – such as, this is not in a large direction – but at that time he is insuruous.”

“Bathdest man” is now on shelves where books are sold. It is a great portrait of a single era in boxing and in America, a whose echoes who are still resonating today.