Speaker 1: My next guest is an Emmy Award winning television broadcaster
Speaker 1: and journalist and a New York Times bestselling author of
Speaker 1: sports biographies on Pete Merrivitch, Joe Namath, and Ray Boom
Speaker 1: Boom Mancini. He's out with a new book, Baddest Man,
Speaker 1: The Making of Mike Tyson. Please welcome, my buddy. I
Speaker 1: haven't talked to him for a long time, but it's
Speaker 1: great to see him. The one and only Mark Kriegeler
Speaker 1: is right here.
Speaker 2: What's up, big time? How are you man? Long time?
Speaker 2: How you been I'm good. It's great to see you too. Man,
Speaker 2: the hardest working man in the sports business. Just on
Speaker 2: the grind, Just on the grind, man.
Speaker 1: Let's get right to this because there's a lot that's
Speaker 1: going on. You are a young reporter at the New
Speaker 1: York Daily News in the eighties when you were swept
Speaker 1: up into Mike Tyson Hurricane per se. How did y'all meet?
Speaker 2: Let's get that out the way. What was that like?
Speaker 2: My first Tyson assignment was shitty. Editor me up about
Speaker 2: four in the morning. He went up to haulm go
Speaker 2: to tap of Dan's my will? What's tap it dance like? Well?
Speaker 2: But no it's a clothing store. Go get up there,
Speaker 2: and as you said, I got caught up in that
Speaker 2: that swirl. A couple of weeks later, I get a
Speaker 2: call he'd torn up the place in Bernrangeville. He was
Speaker 2: living with. Robin Gibbings write that I covered his trial,
Speaker 2: covered his fights. I didn't become columnists until ninety one.
Speaker 2: If you remember when we met, we used to talk
Speaker 2: about basketball. You were covering high schools, yeah, and I was.
Speaker 2: I was a city side report. I mean we talked
Speaker 2: about like Fly Williams. I'd spent a lot of time
Speaker 2: in Brownsville as a police reporter. Anyway, I covered his stuff,
Speaker 2: but it wasn't until and I'm ashamed to say this,
Speaker 2: twenty twelve. And he had been the villain in my
Speaker 2: column for years, both at the Post and the News.
Speaker 2: Wasn't until twenty twelve that I actually looked on him
Speaker 2: as something different. I covered his one man show in
Speaker 2: preview in Vegas and it was not polished up yet.
Speaker 2: It was still raw. And I listened to it and
Speaker 2: it was fully confessional and eviscerating. But I found myself
Speaker 2: like holding back tears, and this is a guy I
Speaker 2: just killed. I was having a bad day, like well,
Speaker 2: I got Mike Tyes in the bash and we met
Speaker 2: after the show and I told him about you know,
Speaker 2: Mitch and running around with all the robing craziness, and
Speaker 2: he says to me, how'd that make you feel? And
Speaker 2: he was, I think, newly sober and vegan in that
Speaker 2: time or whatever. I said, what do you mean how
Speaker 2: to make me feel? What was that like? And he
Speaker 2: meant like chasing him around? Thought about it, and I
Speaker 2: thought about the the adrenaline of it, and I told
Speaker 2: him it was like it was it was a form
Speaker 2: of getting high. And he nodded at me, not disapprovingly,
Speaker 2: but just in sort of recognition. And to me, that
Speaker 2: was the day he became like fully human to me,
Speaker 2: not an abstraction, a real real guy. And I didn't
Speaker 2: the publisher broke this idea, would you do Tyson? Because
Speaker 2: I owe the publisher money on something else, and the
Speaker 2: publisher broch this idea, and I was like, I don't.
Speaker 2: Hell no, I ain't doing Tyson because my feeling has
Speaker 2: always been whether they cooperate with me or not, I
Speaker 2: don't care, but I have to love them. And I
Speaker 2: didn't love Mike Tyson. I kind of do now. But
Speaker 2: I didn't then, And I said, no, I ain't doing
Speaker 2: Mike Tyson, I torn my hamstring. So what made so?
Speaker 2: What made you decide to do it? What made you
Speaker 2: decide to do it? I thought about him. I wasn't
Speaker 2: I torn my hamstring. I'm not in my right mind.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking about it. That god friend of mine says,
Speaker 2: you can't give money back to the publisher at your
Speaker 2: duty as a writer. I started thinking about, like who
Speaker 2: I was then, who I am now? And I thought
Speaker 2: about that day in Vegas and what the guy had survived,
Speaker 2: and how I wasn't necessarily wrong, but I was pretty
Speaker 2: pig headed in vain about a lot of the stuff
Speaker 2: I wrote in the nineties, not proud of all of it.
Speaker 2: And I started thinking about what he had survived, woos drugs, Brownsville,
Speaker 2: that that whole generation of like stick up kids just
Speaker 2: blown off the face of the earth, got it boxing
Speaker 2: itself fain. He was famous in a kind of way
Speaker 2: that will kill you. That you know, that killed Elvis,
Speaker 2: that probably killed Tupac.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but Mark, let me go here, let me go here.
Speaker 1: We thought we've heard everything about Mike Tyson, like when
Speaker 1: you're talking about drugs, fame, you know, alcohol, women, whatever
Speaker 1: it is. You know, we heard it all before in
Speaker 1: our eyes. What is it about Mike Tyson that we're
Speaker 1: gonna learn in this book that we don't already know?
Speaker 1: Considering the fact that he was an open book, he
Speaker 1: was on Front Street. In terms of the fame, we
Speaker 1: saw him doing his his his you know, like you said,
Speaker 1: in Vegas, Broadway and other places. Spike Lee was producing
Speaker 1: these one man shows. We seem to have known everything
Speaker 1: about him. What is it that we're gonna learn? Give
Speaker 1: us a nugget of what we're going to learn in
Speaker 1: this book that we haven't already heard about Mike Tyson.
Speaker 2: I think to be human, human like you know, there's
Speaker 2: there's an incredible loss there that I don't think he
Speaker 2: can ever feel. I think probably the closest thing he
Speaker 2: came to filling it is right now. He got his
Speaker 2: life right with with Kiki, his wife. But you know,
Speaker 2: the loss of his mother was some It was a
Speaker 2: hole he couldn't fill the relationship with his father. I
Speaker 2: think that the idea, the way that this fame was constructed,
Speaker 2: the way he was built as a fighter, it's still
Speaker 2: relevant today. He drew one hundred, one hundred and eight
Speaker 2: million people saw him live stream with Jake Paul. Jake
Speaker 2: Paul's pretty good promoter, but he could have only done
Speaker 2: that number with Tyson. The question is why why we
Speaker 2: addicted to him? Why did he come back? Why was
Speaker 2: you know, the third act of a fighter's life is
Speaker 2: almost inevitably the tragic one. He's disproved everything, So I
Speaker 2: think you're going to find that that he's a human
Speaker 2: being in this and a lot of it has to
Speaker 2: do with accavating his past as an amateur as a kid.
Speaker 2: You know, there are certain things that run through this.
Speaker 2: One of the first people I spoke to was was
Speaker 2: his brother. His half brother was a running back at
Speaker 2: Purdue quit went off to go find himself. Really bright guy,
Speaker 2: and you could see certain things like that run through
Speaker 2: the Tyson family. First, the guy was a great athlete.
Speaker 2: Second of all, he's really really bright and he was searching.
Speaker 2: And I think that was that's not unlike Tyson. The
Speaker 2: other element to it. I think that there'll never be
Speaker 2: another fighter that comes up like this. He had literary
Speaker 2: cachet before he had street credit. The all the writers,
Speaker 2: some of them great, some of them were like my rabbis,
Speaker 2: my teachers, guys like Pete Hamill were so in love
Speaker 2: with custom Model that this fable cussing the kid cus
Speaker 2: to Model was the original trainer took him out of
Speaker 2: a juvenile pension and saved him. You know, I think
Speaker 2: that there's something to that that deserves more nuanced, that
Speaker 2: deserves to be deserves to be looked at again.
Speaker 1: Go on, what do you believe or when do you
Speaker 1: believe that Tyson?
Speaker 2: In your eyes?
Speaker 1: What was the point when we talk about him being
Speaker 1: humanized per se? He talked about needing to be animalistic,
Speaker 1: needing to be the kind of individual that he needs
Speaker 1: to be in order to be a boxing champion in
Speaker 1: the heavyweight division. When do you think the side you know,
Speaker 1: where his humanity is being shown? What do you think
Speaker 1: it hit and does the book reveal that? Was it
Speaker 1: the whole Robin Gibbons affair. Was it having to deal
Speaker 1: with Don King? Was it the fact that he looked
Speaker 1: at his own mortality, particularly in the aftermath of losing
Speaker 1: to a Vander Holyfield and biting Evander holy Field's ear?
Speaker 1: What was the defining moment for the transformation per Se
Speaker 1: that you believe is in is in Mike Tyson's head
Speaker 1: where he reached the point where he said, Yo, I
Speaker 1: can't I can't be this person anymore.
Speaker 2: I need to be better. I think. Look, this book
Speaker 2: is the first of two volumes. This ends with with
Speaker 2: with the Sphinx fight. But I think it came. I
Speaker 2: think the reformation, you know, the final blows came with
Speaker 2: losing a daughter, marrying Kiki and getting sod. But you
Speaker 2: talk about you know, he talks about wanting and needing
Speaker 2: to be an animal. His words, not mine. But the
Speaker 2: irony is that custom mottol was And this is this
Speaker 2: is why I think the history needs to be re examined. Cuts.
Speaker 2: The motto was famous for almost a theology of the bully.
Speaker 2: How do you beat a bully? When? When? When? When
Speaker 2: Ali was fighting Foreman, he consulted with custom motto and
Speaker 2: it was the mottola that you run across the ring
Speaker 2: and you smack him in the mouth, hit him with
Speaker 2: the right hand. Okay. The irony is that Cuts, whether
Speaker 2: by design or it just happened, Cuss rays might to
Speaker 2: be a bully. There's never been a guy that was
Speaker 2: that scared. Uh scary, I mean he was scared too.
Speaker 2: But that the way that he used a fear to
Speaker 2: inflict on other fighters. There's as a passage in the
Speaker 2: book as a matchmaker, a pretty good matchmaker named Ron Katz,
Speaker 2: and he remembers early in his career he'd have to
Speaker 2: push guys out of the dressing room in order to
Speaker 2: fight Tyson. So somewhere along the line, I mean, Custo
Speaker 2: motto was famous for making Troy Patterson the youngest heavyweight
Speaker 2: champion until Mike. Until Mike Tyson, no one wanted anything
Speaker 2: to do with Sonny Listing. But somehow Mike became the
Speaker 2: studdy listed and somehow the way I think people wanted
Speaker 2: a Sonny listen at that time, the rules changed. The
Speaker 2: other thing with Cus, let me just if I could
Speaker 2: one more thing about Cuss and if Mike. Mike pushed
Speaker 2: back on this with me. When I said, hey, maybe
Speaker 2: it's not like the smartest thing in the world to
Speaker 2: take a kid who's been in and out of spot
Speaker 2: right and put him under hypnosis and tell them you're
Speaker 2: going to be a scourge from God. I go, maybe
Speaker 2: that's not like the way the way to do it.
Speaker 2: And I said to me, what Cuss was asking you
Speaker 2: to do is make him live forever. It was a
Speaker 2: Faustian bargain. Make make the coach immortal. And he's and
Speaker 2: you know, I think he credits Cus was saving him
Speaker 2: and getting it. He goes, well, well didn't die, didn't
Speaker 2: I make him immortal? And yes he did. My question
Speaker 2: is at what price? At what price?
Speaker 1: And that's a very legitimate question because I got to
Speaker 1: ask you this. First of all, did Mike Tyson authorize
Speaker 1: this book?
Speaker 2: So he did not? I don't know you had these
Speaker 2: don't do it like that. I mean we spoke a
Speaker 2: couple of times to get some ground rule. He was
Speaker 2: not to me. He was very generous, you know, never
Speaker 2: been antagonistic. And you know when people typically what would
Speaker 2: happen is people calling me, see if it's okay, So
Speaker 2: go called keekey. She'll tell you if it's cool or not.
Speaker 2: And most of the time it was yes, we have
Speaker 2: the same we have the same agent as it as
Speaker 2: it happens. But uh, anyway, I to answer your question, no,
Speaker 2: but but but he was could give me everything, every
Speaker 2: everything I needed. But that's what I'm wondering.
Speaker 1: So if he's ghibing you everything that he needed that
Speaker 1: you needed to write the book, on him.
Speaker 2: Why would he authorize it? But I mean what I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't want to be in business with him. I
Speaker 2: mean I don't. I've never asked any in other words
Speaker 2: like like for instance, I want to do a book
Speaker 2: about Joe Namas, and I understand like like Joe thought
Speaker 2: of it in his world as as a as a
Speaker 2: licensing deal. He wanted money, he wants I don't want
Speaker 2: to be in busines this Maravich passed away man Cen.
Speaker 2: He cooperated fully. I had no expectation that Mike Tyson
Speaker 2: understood retell his life, you know from Mark Kriegle for
Speaker 2: for free. I just was like, hey, let's let me,
Speaker 2: let me do what I got to do. And he
Speaker 2: was okay, and I was more than I could have
Speaker 2: totally understand, totally understand.
Speaker 1: Did Mike Tyson ever speak about the Michael Speakes fight,
Speaker 1: because if you remember, I know you remember this, I
Speaker 1: remember this that I believe it was Butcher Lewis the
Speaker 1: late promoter God rested, so I think it was him.
Speaker 1: Speakes was in the locker room crying because he had
Speaker 1: to come out and fight Mike Tyson. But Mike didn't
Speaker 1: know that, and he was punching walls because he thought
Speaker 1: that Spinks was, you know, using it as a delay tactic,
Speaker 1: when in fact it was Spakes was scared to death
Speaker 1: that Mike Tyson never talk about that at all.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, it ends it ends on that. That's that's
Speaker 2: a pretty well known incident. But he does, he does
Speaker 2: put his hand, he does put his hand through the
Speaker 2: wall waiting. But there was a controversy because Butch Lewis
Speaker 2: started some stuff. Thought he was get in Mike's head, okay,
Speaker 2: and Butch Lewis comes back there and says retape he
Speaker 2: wants him to repay because I ain't retaping anything. I'm god.
Speaker 2: And it gets into a whole thing with the New
Speaker 2: Jersey Athletic Commission. Yeah, there were there were reports that
Speaker 2: Sphinx was scared by the way Spinx was like, no Trump.
Speaker 2: Spinx was a great courageous fighter. Yeah, Mark, you're talking
Speaker 2: to me. You're talking to me. Mark.
Speaker 1: Spink was a light heavyweight that moved up. He was
Speaker 1: not too heavyweight.
Speaker 2: Come on, Mike, no, but hold up. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2: Eddie Fudge had a plan. Mike fades after six rounds,
Speaker 2: stick and move, Stick and move. Have to be disciplined,
Speaker 2: and butch Lewis the Genius City Was goes right across
Speaker 2: and tells Michael listen, man to get that man. You
Speaker 2: gotta get your respect immediately. And that's what Sphinx does.
Speaker 2: And that was I mean, look, it was only a
Speaker 2: matter of time anyway. But Sphinx runs across, tries to
Speaker 2: throw a right hand, and he just gets smoked because
Speaker 2: he went to engage immediately. He listened. He listened instead
Speaker 2: of listening to Eddie Futch. You know, he might have
Speaker 2: had a shot for a little bit. Look at Mark Kriegel.
Speaker 1: I gotta get my glasses because I don't see what
Speaker 1: the hell you saying in that guy. I didn't see
Speaker 1: Spink walk over to the ring and try to engage Mike.
Speaker 1: He looked scared.
Speaker 2: From opening tap. I mean, he wasn't on.
Speaker 1: His bicycle, but he tried to engage Mike.
Speaker 2: Mike Tyson, come on down. I didn't see that. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying he wasn't scared. I'm not saying he wasn't scared,
Speaker 2: but he does go to engage him, and he tried,
Speaker 2: and he tried. Even when he tried to get up,
Speaker 2: he comes right back after him. And he's throwing the
Speaker 2: right hand when he receives the crew de grap got
Speaker 2: you last question was you?
Speaker 1: Because I gotta get ready to go and I can't
Speaker 1: wait to see I can't wait to read this book.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna ask you this question any end. Who is
Speaker 1: Mike Tyson today? And is he happy?
Speaker 2: Happier than he's ever been, happier than he's ever been,
Speaker 2: and for the first time in his life, he's his love.
Speaker 2: That that's not anything that I could have imagined. And
Speaker 2: I think like the great victory And this is where
Speaker 2: people like I had been his consistent you know, detractors
Speaker 2: or haters, and people who adored him and even Mike
Speaker 2: himself could agree on he was never supposed to be
Speaker 2: long for this world. His doom was like that was
Speaker 2: the safest bet, you know, if you're gonna bet Mike
Speaker 2: Tyson's life expectancy, you're gonna bet the under And here
Speaker 2: he is, He's beloved, and I think that's that's really
Speaker 2: the beauty of the story. And it's a destination that
Speaker 2: I mean, no one I know could have imagined.
Speaker 1: Wow, Mark Kriegel, the Baddest Man. The Making of Mike
Speaker 1: Tyson is out tomorrow, June third, wherever you buy your books.
Speaker 1: Mark Kriegel's good to see you, man, it's been a
Speaker 1: long time man, Happy to see you.
Speaker 2: What'll take you these? All right? All right one only
Speaker 2: Mark creegl right here with Steven Ales.