Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Let's continue our biography and memoir week here on All Of It. The story of boxing champion Mike Tyson is a New York story. Born in Fort Greene in 1966, Tyson was raised in Brownsville in the turbulent '70s. As an adolescent, he caught the attention of legendary boxing coach Cus D'Amato. He ended up moving to D'Amato's home in Catskill, New York, to train under him.

In some ways, Tyson's story is a triumphant one. He rose out of poverty to become the heavyweight champion of the world. He became a household name, a very wealthy man, but Tyson's story is also a complicated one. He was a troubled kid who often resorted to violence and theft. As an adult, he could be sweet, but he could also turn violent. Tyson was convicted of rape in '92 and has been accused of domestic abuse. Sports writer and author Mark Kriegel has spent years covering Mike Tyson's career. Now, he captures the boxer's early years in his new biography, Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson. It is out now. Mark, welcome to All Of It.

Mark Kriegel: Thank you so much, Alison.

Alison Stewart: You've been covering Tyson for many, many years. Before you wrote the book, before you had the idea for the book, what was your opinion of Mike Tyson?

Mark Kriegel: My opinion? Well, he was a large part of my tabloid education. When I became a columnist, he became my designated villain. It's a role he performed admirably. I don't know. I might have been less admirable, but he certainly fit the bill. [laughs] I found myself drawn back to Tyson again and again and again because I had the misfortune of covering boxing or a fascination with boxing and writers and fighters. He provided a great deal. I will say that this particular book, as it began, I was more than a little reluctant to do. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: What changed after the time you spent on a biography?

Mark Kriegel: Again, the editor had to convince me. He goes, "Would you consider Tyson?" My first reaction was, "Absolutely not. I'm not going to revisit the brash, young genius." I use that term advisedly that I was as a young newspaper columnist. I didn't want to really see my own excesses or have to answer to them. I guess everyone has his or her own process. At some level, I have to fall in love with the subject.

Not to be uncritical, but Tyson was someone I certainly did not love. I spent most of the '90s villainizing him. You get older. You get beaten down a bit and humbled. What became apparent to me is that he's the greatest comeback I've ever seen, just by virtue of his being alive at any juncture in the Tyson story. It was something that both his acolytes and his detractors like me could agree on.

Wherever you were in the Tyson story, the smart bet when it pertains to his mortality was you take the under, because he could have gone at any time, and it was an expectation that he himself had. He didn't imagine living beyond 30, then 40, then 50. The idea that he's in this very peculiar place in American culture now, where he's, of all things, beloved, I'm not entirely sure I can explain it, but it's an extraordinary comeback.

Even if you look, as I do habitually, at the lives of fighters, it's the third act where the tragedy typically strikes. In both make-believe fighters and real-life fighters, they're compromised neurologically. Physically, they're broke. They're busted out. It's the basis for boxing mythology. Tyson, of all things, is thriving. The book begins with a scene watching him in Orange County, California, of all places, watching him watch his daughter-

Alison Stewart: Play tennis.

Mark Kriegel: -play tennis. What I think about is that he went beyond my capacity to imagine, which, to me, was profound. I did find something, if not to love, then certainly to admire by what he had withstood.

Alison Stewart: You had perspective. It sounds like you grew to have a wider perspective.

Mark Kriegel: He outlasted boxing, which is a considerable accomplishment in itself. Bankruptcy, Don King, booze, cocaine, incarceration, both as a juvenile and an adult. Again, I said boxing, but his mother was really a destroyed, impaired figure from the beginning. His dad was absent. You spoke before about Brownsville. I'd done a lot of reporting in Brownsville, Brooklyn, mostly covering cops and drug dealers. It was a mythical place to me because it's really the original home of Murder, Inc. When I began covering Brownsville as, essentially, a police reporter, late '80s, the same streets had produced yet another Murder, Inc. That's what Tyson came out of. The big crack dealers and all those stick-up kids were his contemporaries.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Well, somebody in the book says that Mike's family was the streets.

Mark Kriegel: Yes, and this was a guy who was himself a famous ballplayer and a recovering drug addict. He goes, "Hey, man, I had it lucky. I had all my drunk uncles. I had my grandma," and Mike's family was the street. When I look back at Brownsville, it's passed in the '20s or in the '30s, may seem romantic, but what it had become by the '70s, it was just block after block of rubble-strewn lots. Then, in the middle of it, some genius urban planner said, "Let's stick the greatest concentration of housing projects outside the Soviet Union right in the middle of Brownsville." What it really was to me in rediscovering the neighborhood, ghetto seems insufficient. It's a full-on dystopia.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Mark Kriegel. He is the author of the new biography, Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson. Now, you interviewed Mike Tyson twice for this book, but not a regular interview. What were the purposes of these conversations for you as a writer?

Mark Kriegel: Yes, there's a pretty voluminous record of what he said when. Point of fact, I actually wanted to rely less on remembrances, unless they were spectacular or really reconstructed something substantial in the narrative. I'm an ex-newspaper guy. There's this incredible record of day-by-day, who said what when. I try never to ask the subject for too much cooperation because I'll be seduced. I'll be corrupted.

Again, I had no expectation he was going to volunteer to tell his life story once again from Mark Kriegel for free. Just don't interfere. Let me do it. He was more than amenable. Typically, what would happen is a source who was on the fence would call his wife, Kiki. She'd say, "Yes, it's okay to talk to Kriegel." I was more than grateful for that. There's one point in our conversation where I do quote him.

In the prologue, he had this legendary trainer, Cus D'Amato, and this is on point with the whole book, who had really nourished several generations of writers, newspaper columnists, magazine writers who loved to write about boxing. Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, a guy who was like my rabbi in the newspaper business, Pete Hamill, but also Robert Lipsyte, who wrote a spectacular young adult novel, The Contender. It's all taken from the Cus D'Amato, almost theology of fear and how to deal with bullies. I asked him in recasting Cus, the tendency among writers is to mythologize Cus and to love on him.

I saw something different. What I saw was a guy who takes a kid who's 13 years old out of a juvenile lockup, and he's saying, "You can get anything you want. You can have anything you want, but you're going to be the biggest, the baddest, the best. You're going to go down in history as that." What he's really saying to him is, "You're going to make me, the trainer, live forever." This is largely a story set into motion, A, by the trainer's ego and by the writer's mythologizing that trainer. Tyson pushes back. He gets a little upset. He goes, "Well, didn't I?" I think that he did. The question is, at what price?

Alison Stewart: There's a list of people that you interview in the back of the book. There are some women, like Rosie Perez is interviewed, but it's largely men. Now, is that a boxing thing or is that a Mike Tyson thing?

Mark Kriegel: I thought that, almost as a rule, the women I spoke to, kid from high school, Rosie, a female boxer, really early boxer, became a trainer. Their take on Tyson was almost invariably more perceptive than the guys. You're dealing with, especially at that time, a largely male universe. The cast of characters is male. I think that because there are very few female voices heard from. I'm not trying to sound like Freud here, but Tyson's central conflict has to do with his mom. It's a problem in the book. I don't know if it's a problem in the book because it is what it is.

Alison Stewart: It is what it is.

Mark Kriegel: It's a problem for Tyson.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Mark Kriegel: This book ends in 1988, before the rape trial. You can see where things are headed. He hears almost exclusively male voices, and they're always giving him permission. The central wound is his father leaves his mother. For whatever reason or for a variety of reasons, his mother is broken. He can never fix that. By the time it's clear he's going to become Mike Tyson, the famous boxer, there's nothing he can give to her that's going to change the course, or nothing he can give to her that will get her recognition. It's this hole he can never fill.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the book, Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson. It's by Mark Kriegel. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Mark Kriegel. He is the author of a new biography, Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson. What was Mike Tyson's reputation around Brownsville?

Mark Kriegel: He was feared. At first, he was, as they say, punk. He was known as Dirty Mike. Later, as he found this facility with his hands, he became terrifying. A lot of what this book is about is reputation. It's Tyson's reputation as the scary guy. It certainly doesn't help him in his life. I think it's one of the reasons why he became healthier after he stopped fighting. He uses it to great effect as a fighter.

I think it has to do not just with Brownsville, where he acquired this reputation and everything, especially in boxing, is your street rep. He also cultivated it in jail. I think that the periods of incarceration as a kid were actually central to his formation. The irony and Tyson's peculiar genius as a fighter was that D'Amato had this beautiful, elegant, almost theological conception of fear and how the noble fighter stands up to the bully. Again, it made him a darling of so many writers.

The irony is that Tyson's genius was not so much overcoming his fear but becoming the bully, and the way he refracted fear and made his opponents scared to death. There's a passage in the book where a veteran matchmaker recalls, and this is Tyson when he's 18, 19 years old, having to literally push guys, push opponents out of the locker room to face him. It goes to something central in D'Amato's theory, which is that the idea of the scary guy, if you let it germinate in your head, is infinitely more frightening than the actual guy.

I've seen this from male, female fighters across the board. In the fight construct, there's you, there's the other guy or the other woman, and there's the audience. This is all being played out for the audience. The audience might as well be the street. The audience is your reputation. What fighters actually fear more than anything, it's not getting beat up. It's not being hurt, but it's humiliation in front of the audience. Tyson was a master at that.

For a variety of reasons, the visuals of him knocking people out, this is just as we discovered. "Oh, there's a VCR. We can make a tape and send this around to every news director and sports editor around the country." They were neatly packaged knockouts, and they were unique. They were unique in their theatrics, in their brutality. When he wins the title, the other guy, Trevor Berbick, who was not an inconsequential champion, falls in every corner of the ring. What that did visually was scare to death all prospective opponents.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about his audio. Let's talk about his lisp, because that's a really big issue. For people who haven't heard it or need to be reminded of it, let's listen to this 1985 interview with Bryant Gumbel, and we can talk about it on the other side.

Bryant Gumbel: Are you going to be heavyweight champion one day?

Mike Tyson: Excuse me. Say that-- what's what--

Bryant Gumbel: Are you going to be heavyweight champion one day?

Mike Tyson: Most definitely. As good as I know, Tuesday follow Monday.

Bryant Gumbel: Really?

Mike Tyson: Yes.

Bryant Gumbel: Do you think you're unbeatable?

Mike Tyson: No one's unbeatable.

Bryant Gumbel: What's it going to take to beat you?

Mike Tyson: It's going to take what's not around today, and it's going to be a long time, I believe, for anyone here to come up and beat Mike Tyson.

Alison Stewart: He had a high voice. He had a lisp.

Mark Kriegel: A lisp.

Alison Stewart: What was his sensitivity to that?

Mark Kriegel: Well, when he was a kid, early on as Dirty Mike, it was reason alone to question his masculinity, to make fun of him, to cast him aside, to humiliate him. What it does as a fighter and what it does in a broadcast situation, when he comes to HBO, when he comes to ABC, there weren't an infinite number of channels, but what happens with the audience is there's a term in wrestling, "to get over." It means just become a star. You break through. It's not something that can be calibrated or quantified, but you know when it happens.

It happens to me, not just with the knockouts, but when the mic is put in front of Tyson, and he begins to talk. You hear the lisp, and you hear the high pitch. You're trying to reconcile what you're listening to and what he's saying with the terrible theatrical knockout that you've, let's be honest, just been thrilled by. In reconciling that, you have a completely unique character on television, which there are not that many unique characters on network television at that time.

The result of it, it wasn't a downtime for boxing, but it was a downtime for heavyweight boxing, which is the money division. HBO recognized what they had in Tyson in terms of demographics and cable subscriptions, which was the game then. They invested again and again in Tyson to do-- Tyson did for HBO in the '80s what Tony Soprano would do in the late '90s, which was conquer the male demographic. It was worth a whole hell of a lot of money.

Alison Stewart: He was a real celebrity. I remember growing up, he was a huge celebrity. That was a little bit different.

Mark Kriegel: Yes, it was different in that-- I don't remember. I was born in New York. I know the history of New York fighters. There was nothing like this. There were so many permutations to it. I didn't want to write. This did not start as a biography. I wanted to write a slim, elegant essay, which apparently is beyond my ability. It becomes more biographical because, unlike anyone I've ever covered, he generates so much story.

There are so many elements of it that are unexpected. For instance, the Rosie piece. Much to his detriment, the one word he never hears is "no," except in these peculiar times. He hits on Rosie, and Rosie just shuts him down. She smooshes his face. It's a cute scene. Rosie is written, I think, pretty well of her own childhood. I said, "Rosie, everyone else was scared to death of him." She just shut him down. I can't say it on the air.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Mark Kriegel: It's kind of cute. I said, "How did you know?" She says to me, "You know the phrase," and it's a phrase in sports, "game knows game."

Alison Stewart: Game knows game.

Mark Kriegel: It's a bit of a cliché, but then she says to me, "Well, abuse and dysfunction knows abuse and dysfunction." At some level, she knew who he was at that core because of her history. It's like she sparked it out immediately. I thought that, again, this was consistent but unique to most of the women I interviewed. They had a quicker and deeper insight into Tyson than the guys who were carried away by all the usual knockout stuff.

Alison Stewart: Well, what did you make of his marriage to Robin Givens then?

Mark Kriegel: To me, as I remember it and as I have reported it, I started at the Daily News in 1988. My first Tyson assignment was, woken up in the middle of the night. Editor says, "Go up to Harlem. He just got into a fight with this guy named Mitch Green." "Where?" "Dapper Dan's." I'm like, "Who's Dapper Dan's?" "No, it's a clothing store. Just get up there. Go, okay?" It was a great story. Great front-page story.

It was kind of funny. Punched Mitch Green. Mitch Green performed for the cameras. When I look back on that, it was a guy coming apart. Certainly didn't have the capacity to deal with this type of fame. When he really started to come apart was with his marriage. It's interesting to think that today, where there seems to be no stigma to anything, his then-manager wanted him to be married immediately because they thought that he was having a child out of wedlock.

Mike was first marketed as a kind of retro figure and certainly not a villain. He was a hero. He was going to be this generation's Jack Dempsey. He was the fighter your father and your grandfather had rooted for. It was something that harkened back to when America was more innocent or more virtuous or whatever it was, but that was the sell with Tyson, so they were loath to have him-- Robin's mother told Jimmy Jacobs, Tyson's manager, "She was pregnant, so you better get on the stick."

There's great evidence to the contrary, but Tyson was certainly in love with her. There's something about her that, I don't know, it seemed unattainable. What I submit is that Robin and her mother, who's really an extraordinarily formidable woman, for a Black woman to succeed as she did in business in the '60s and '70s and '80s, was extraordinary. She did it with no one doing her any favors, but she was driven. She was also driven for her daughters to marry well.

I believe with all my heart that as much as Tyson loved Robin, he also loved the idea that she came in as a package with her mother because, again, he keeps trying to fill this mommy hole. He falls for Robin, not despite the fact that she has a domineering mother, but in large measure because of it. Even as a kid on the amateur circuit, whenever he befriended a fighter who traveled with a family, he would always sidle up to the mother.

There's a story I have early in the book when he just gets out of lockup. There's this woman I told you about before. Her name is Nadia, who became a fighter and a trainer. She remembers him falling asleep on the couch. He looks up at her, 13 years old, and he says, "Will you tuck me in?" I'm wondering if there's a terrible punchline to this. She goes, "No, he just wanted me to tuck him in."

Alison Stewart: We've got about a minute left, but I'm curious. Fame activates something in certain people. What did fame activate in Mike Tyson?

Mark Kriegel: That kind of fame to me is a particularly American disease, or can be. It's the kind of thing that killed Elvis and, to my mind, should have killed Tyson. I think he would agree with that. It made him unfathomably wealthy, but it also insulated him from consequence. Again, the word he never heard until it was too late is "no." Everybody had a hand in keeping the train running, no matter how dysfunctional it got. People became addicted, not just to the fame, but to the famous villainy of it. For a guy who was marketed and cultivated to be America's hero, he found great peril in being a villain.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson. My guest has been Mark Kriegel. Thank you for your time.

Mark Kriegel: Thank you so much, Alison. It was a pleasure, really. Thanks.

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It on the way. The indie folk band, Lord Huron, has a new album. It's titled The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1. Coming up, they will perform in WNYC Studio 5. That's happening right after the news.