OPINION:
I went back to my old neighborhood in Brooklyn last week, having left there 60 years ago, nearly to the day.
I showed my family the landmarks from my childhood — the corner where I saw a kid stabbed; the bushes on the grounds of the Brooklyn Museum where I was beaten and robbed; the third-floor apartment window I watched from as two cops thrown through a bar’s plate glass window on the street below; my Uncle Sal’s second-floor pool room above the street where my mother got caught in a shootout; and the neighborhod where I used to play stickball and once saw one of the kids who beat and robbed me riding by on a bike before I smashed him in the face with my stickball bat.
And my childhood was like the Magic Kingdom compared to the childhood of Mike Tyson, who grew up a decade later, a few blocks away.
“Baddest Man — The Making of Mike Tyson” (Penguin Press) is a new book by former Daily News columnist and author Mark Kriegel, who earlier wrote definitive biographies on two sports icons, Joe Namath and Pete Maravich. This time, he chose a subject that has been well-documented in Tyson, the former heavyweight champion who is among the highest-profile celebrities of his time.
There are a multitude of books about Tyson, including several by Tyson himself. I haven’t read all of them. This one seems special because it is a study of Tyson’s DNA, the damaged building blocks that led to such a tortured and triumphant life.
And yes, it is triumphant, if for no other reason than at the age of 59, Tyson is alive. No one is probably more surprised about that than Tyson himself. He grew up admiring former heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, the ex-con who died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 40. Tyson likely expected a similar outcome.
Yet there he is, as the book opens — a tennis parent sitting in the stands at an exclusive tennis club in Newport Beach, California, in the summer of 2020, watching his daughter — then nearly 12 — take a lesson.
“He was a monster, not just ours but his own, too,” Kriegel writes. “The tattoo was meant to acknowledge and signify 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 happiness, a grand duchy of eternal sunshine and good dentistry, elective surgeries and German cars.”
It’s a long way from the streets of Brooklyn.
“Tyson has withstood most of the urban plagues, those particular perils endemic to a time and a place. But also the death of a mother and the absence of a father. Incarceration. Molestation. Booze. Coke. Boxing. Don King. The death of a child.
“And perhaps the most treacherous of them all, fame,” Kriegel wrote. “His wasn’t the kind that got you a good table at Elaine’s. Rather, it was a lethal dose of a peculiarly American disease, a form of insanity whose victims include Elvis, Marilyn and Tupac.
“But Tyson lives, ever defiant of the prophecy that foretold his early demise.”
He still lives in our psyche, just nine months removed from the Jake Paul con job — Tyson stepping back in the ring and making more than $20 million, convincing people that this AARP-eligible grandfather was still the baddest man.
“He is at once victim and victimizer, a convicted rapist beloved in the age of #MeToo, the monster transformed into a tennis dad with a goldendoodle whose morning walks afford him an ocean view,” Kriegel writes.
The book goes into a deep dive about the developmental stages of Tyson’s life — his years in his crime-ridden neighborhood as the son of a prostitute and then the voodoo priest of a boxing trainer, the legendary Cus D’Amato, who saw Tyson as a world heavyweight champion when he was 13 and did all he could to program Tyson on that path — including having him hypnotized with commands, such as “your intention is to inflict as much pain as possible” — often at the expense of the young fighter’s emotional growth.
“When Mike was seven … [his family was] evicted from their Bed-Stuy apartment,” Kriegel writes. “Their existence became nomadic, each move taking them deeper into Brooklyn and poverty. They slept in clothes for lack of heat. Fires from adjacent apartments were a constant threat as tenants or squatters lit them for heat and landlords for insurance money. ‘My mother would do whatever she had to do to keep a roof over heads,” Tyson recalled. “That often meant sleeping with someone that she didn’t care for … this is what I hate about myself, what I learned from my mother — there was nothing you wouldn’t do to survive.’”
Kriegel talks to those who had a front-row seat to these formative, destructive Tyson years, others who may have caught a glimpse and those who were intimately familiar with the environments, whether it was Brooklyn or D’Amato’s Catskills home.
There was a science-fiction film in the 1960s called “Fantastic Voyage,” where a spaceship is shrunk to capsule size and injected into the bloodstream. This book is a version of that — a trip inside Tyson’s bloodstream.
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