- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been provided by Seton Hall University.

Inspiring great minds to greater purpose since 1856.

The New Jersey Education Association.

New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities.

Providing New Jersey residents tools to save money on energy costs.

PSE&G.

Powering progress.

Hackensack Meridian Health.

Keep getting better.

Delta Dental of New Jersey.

We love to see smiles.

Johnson & Johnson.

The Fidelco Group.

And by NJM Insurance Group.

Serving New Jersey’s drivers, homeowners and business owners for more than 100 years.

Promotional support provided by CIANJ, and Commerce Magazine.

And by NJBIZ.

Providing business news for New Jersey for more than 30 years, online, in print, and in person.

- This is One-On-One.

- I'm an equal American just like you are.

- The way we change Presidents in this country is by voting.

- A quartet is already a jawn, it’s just The New Jawn.

- January 6th was not some sort of violent, crazy outlier.

- I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, there is always something to learn.

- I mean what other country sends comedians over to embedded military to make them feel better.

- People call me 'cause they feel nobody's paying attention.

_ It’s not all about memorizing and getting information, it’s what you do with that information.

- (slowly) Start talking right now.

- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone, Steve Adubato.

Iron Mike Tyson, that was just one of the many names he went by, but the baddest man on the planet.

Mark Kriegel knows a little bit about Mike Tyson.

He's a great reporter, journalist, writer, author, and understood, and understands Mike Tyson better than most, and there's still more to understand.

Author of the book, "Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson," we are honored to have Mark Kriegel with us.

Mark, great to have you with us.

- Thank you so much, Steve.

I'm glad to be here.

- You've been covering Tyson since '88, 1988, right?

- Mm-hmm, as a police reporter, the general assignment reporter.

Like my first Tyson job, a city editor of the Daily News in New York, wakes me up, I don't know, three, four in the morning, get up to Harlem.

He just got into a fight.

- Was that with Mitch?

- Mitch Green, yeah.

- Mitch Green?

- So I was like, "Where?"

Like Dapper Dan's.

I'm like, "Is that a club?"

He goes, "No, it's not, it's a clothing store.

Get outta here, go."

And it was my first couple months at the Daily News, and you know, you were young, you were a kid.

You're full of adrenaline and ambition.

And so I just, I was always juiced up in those days to run out.

And in a certain way, it was a kind of perfect tabloid story.

It was Tyson getting into a fight.

It was gossipy.

It was all sorts of stuff.

But what I didn't realize at the time, is that I'm looking at a young guy having his life implode through some fault of his own.

But I think, really, looking back on this, these huge forces were converging on a guy who was still, even though in a way we didn't understand, still a very young man.

He was I think, he's 22 years old.

His marriage was imploding.

His, who owned him in a certain sense, you know, was it Don King?

Was it his former managers?

The kid wasn't prepared for this.

And that's what we were really seeing.

- You know, I've been obsessed by Tyson, along with millions of others for so long.

I remember going to a, when my friend Dave, we were going to see a Tyson fight at Madison Square Garden, but we're hanging out, you know, in Madison Square Garden.

In the old Felt Forum, right?

- Yeah.

- You're hanging out, we're having a couple of beers, hanging outside.

And I'm thinking the Tyson fight hasn't started yet.

And we waited a little too long, Mark.

'Cause you know what happened, right?

We hear the crowd, we walk in.

He knocked the guy out in the first round.

So we missed Tyson.

I never got to see him fight.

Here's my point.

Mike Tyson, I'm gonna, let's play a little word association and I hope I won't get too inside here.

'Cause I'm obsessed by Tyson.

And all you need to know is in this book.

Mike Tyson, Cus D'Amato, the late great Cus D'Amato and fear.

Talk to us, fear.

- One of the reasons that Cus was so charismatic were the writers around him, were the writers.

- Mark, I screwed up.

- Yeah.

- Cus D'Amato, up in the Catskills, trainer.

Mike Tyson is 13 when he meets him.

13, 14, 15, something like that.

- He's 13, and he is, and he is, you know, Cus gets him out of a juvenile prison upstate.

- And Tyson comes out of Brownsville, Brooklyn, involved in gang violence, stealing, all kinds of stuff.

Cus gets him at 13, pick up the story.

- Cus gets him at 13.

And you talked about fear before.

One of the things that made Cus so incredibly attractive, especially to the literary class, is guys like Norman Mailer and Gates Elise.

And a guy who was my rabbi in the newspaper business, a great, great columnist by the name of Pete Hamill, was that he had an almost theological conception of fear and what it would take to beat the bully.

So there was always, in addition to Cus being a fight trainer, he was kind the poet that all the sports writers really wanted to make them feel, you know, what they wanted to feel about boxing.

Tyson comes out, he sees Tyson fight, and the first time he sees Tyson fight, and he's brought to him by a guard at this place.

First time he sees Tyson fight, he says, this is gonna be the youngest heavyweight champion ever, even younger than his previous youngest ever heavyweight champion.

- Was that Floyd Patterson?

- Floyd Patterson.

Which is extraordinary to think that for all of Cus's great theories, he actually did develop the two youngest heavyweight champions in history, at times when being the heavyweight champion of the world really, really meant something.

But he tells Tyson right there, you're gonna be the greatest, the biggest, the baddest, the best.

That's not the way these things are meant to happen.

I mean, one of the most extraordinary and potentially poetic or exploitive elements about boxing is the relationship between the trainer and the fighter.

With Cus and Tyson, there are all those elements there, good and bad.

But usually, you tell a kid out of a juvenile lockup, you tell him, "Hey, listen, we're gonna, we'll put you in the gloves.

We'll see what you got, kid."

- You mean, the golden gloves.

- Right, yeah, I want you to do your homework.

But Tyson, there wasn't any of that.

It was from the beginning, you are going to be the biggest, the baddest, the greatest.

You're gonna make history.

And to my mind, and Tyson pushes back on this when I run it by him, to my mind, D'Amato was asking Tyson, "Hey, make me live forever."

Because Cus had fallen out of favor.

Cus was essentially living in Catskill, New York.

He'd been out of the scene for a long time.

And his ambition, his ego was so extraordinary, again, that he's asking this kid to live forever.

My question here, and Tyson says, well, didn't I?

Okay, you did.

My question is, at what price?

- At what price?

- When you take a kid, when you take a kid who's accustomed to violence of all kinds, who's been.

- To be clear folks, sorry for interrupting, Mark.

Mike Tyson, who's a complex, interesting figure.

You see him in movies now and he's just, he's Mike Tyson.

He walks into a fight, an MMA fight, a boxing match, people go crazy.

Mike Tyson, as a kid, was beating up, quote unquote, little old ladies for their purses, to be clear.

That's part of the story, but pick it up from there.

- He look, he was beating up everybody.

- He was beating up everybody.

Other kids, older kids.

He was beating up men for money.

He was mugging little old ladies.

He was sort of indiscriminate in his mugging, in his criminality, in his violence.

My point with Tyson was, you take a kid like this, do you really want to put him under hypnosis as Cus D'Amato did, and tell him you're a scourge from God?

You're, you know, you're Alexander the Great?

You're a battering ram?

You're this, you're that?

I mean, that's not gonna really make the kid the most healthy guy in the world.

And one of the peculiarities of boxing, it's, I mean, I think you need this to a certain extent in all sports.

Basketball's a little different because it's an ensemble and the game is fluid.

You have to be.

- It's one-on-one, one-on-one.

- You, right, but you have to be able to control your ego.

In boxing, you need a monumental ego just to step up the steps into the ring.

I mean, you basically, if you think about it, you're fighting another guy or another woman as the case may be now, and you're almost physically, but certainly metaphorically, naked.

And there are three characters in this.

There's you, there's the other guy, and there's the audience.

And the audience changes everything.

And one of the most potent elements in the way Tyson was constructed, was how he reacted with the audience and how especially, and this holds today, how the audience reacts with him.

And he had this huge ego and Cus kept filling it, it was like a furnace.

He's just throwing in, you know, more, more, more stuff to be burned.

And that's why you wind up with this very peculiar creation.

Very distinct creation, Mike Tyson.

And it was those knockouts that you referred to before.

I went to go get a beer.

I come back, it's done.

- Yeah, how about to explain to folks Marvis Frazier, how quick?

- I, a matter of seconds, but it was the quality with which Marvis Frazier fell in front of his father.

He looked.

- In the corner.

- Yeah, he just slumped.

He gets hit with an upper cut and he slumps, but he slumps in a particularly, I don't know how else to put it, tragic way.

So it's not a death, but it's a mock death.

It's a symbolic death.

And you're watching that thing, and this is on network television.

That was on ABC, by the way.

- And this is the great Joe Frazier, one of the greatest all time champions who fought Ali.

We'll talk about in a second.

This is his son, his protege.

Boom, Tyson destroys him.

Pick it up, Mark.

- He is, Joe Frazier said, "Oh, my kid can handle Tyson."

No, he couldn't.

And again, that's an example of the fighter's ego.

And this is, this requires a different type of ego than the other sports.

So the way that he slumps, the way that those knockouts were captured on video, this is the first, this is like the VCR generation.

I mean, it's not like, hey, I know I have a hard time explaining it to kids.

It's not like you can just punch it up on your phone and go, oh, I saw it.

But what Tyson's handlers would do, first of all, everyone was appointment viewing.

This particular fight was on, I think it was on the afternoon on ABC.

- It was on ABC.

- Everybody saw it.

But what they would do is, they would compile Tyson's knockouts, and they fit perfectly into a video reel.

And they would send VCR tapes to every sports director, news director, magazine editors, sports editor in the country.

They put a tape in the VCR.

They go, oh my god, you see this?

So a lot of those clips of the knockouts were on local news.

And you and I remember when your local news sports guy, he gave you all your news.

That was a position of great distinction.

- Mark, there's so much in the book, and we're leaving so much out.

Get the book, read it.

But I'm gonna pick up a point here, and I know I'm gonna leave a lot of stuff out.

But fast forward, Tyson becomes the youngest heavyweight champion at 20, correct?

- Yeah.

- Okay, fast forward to 1990.

I remember watching with my friend Tommy on, and we're watching HBO.

1990, you know the fight, it doesn't take place in the United States.

Let's just say it's in, was it in Tokyo?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, and we're getting ready to watch another Tyson beat down of Buster Douglas.

What happens to the bully, to the fear that Tyson engendered in so many people who were beaten before they even started the fight?

Because it was Tyson who comes out in black shorts, black boxing shoes, and no socks.

He's Tyson, towel around his neck.

He's Tyson.

What happens when Tyson gets hit by Buster Douglas, and he's no longer the bully, the aggressor?

What happens, do you think, and you write about this in the book, to Tyson mentally, all the stuff you built up of Cus D'Amato, Cus D'Amato telling him, you're Alexander the Great, you can't be beat, you're gonna be the best.

What happens in that moment?

- Well, he gets destroyed, but he's not destroyed in the fight so much, as he destroys himself going into the fight.

He doesn't train.

You know, he's sitting around.

He's drinking, he's screwing around.

There are women leaving, he's coming and going from his room.

He doesn't really train.

He thinks he's, on one hand, he thinks he's invincible.

But on the other hand, and this I think is important, that process that I first saw with Mitch Green, with a kid whose life is coming apart in a very, very public way, continues to that point.

I mean, his divorce to Robin Gibbons, whatever, I'm not defending him as a husband or anything else.

But it was devastating to him, the loss of that marriage in ways that I think people don't understand, really, really screwed him up even more.

He was in a state of depression for a while.

- You saw it on the Barbara Walters interview with Robin Gibbons and Mike Tyson.

But go pick up your point.

So he's mentally lost at this point.

- Yeah, I mean, that's what happens.

I mean, I'm not diminishing anything that Buster Douglas did.

Buster Douglass, Buster Douglass had just lost his mother.

And Buster Douglass, whatever the knock on him at that time, was an excellent athlete, had been a basketball player.

He had size, he knew what to do.

He was, unlike many fighters today, he was a classically trained American heavyweight.

He knew what he was doing, but because he had just lost his mother, he, like I got nothing to lose.

And he fought courageously.

And he did something that other fighters like Marvis Frazier had been unable to do.

It was not just technically, but he kept his composure.

There's a line in the book, where I quote a matchmaker.

I literally had to push guys out of the dressing room to face Tyson.

And one of the peculiarities of Tyson.

- Meaning they did not wanna face him.

They didn't wanna face him in the ring.

- Correct.

One of the peculiarities of Tyson was the way, you know, D'Amato had this whole theory of beating a bully and what to do with your fear, but Tyson was the bully.

The irony in the way that D'Amato raised him as a fighter, was that he was the guy that made the other guy scared.

And some of these guys were literally, as I mentioned before, disabled with fear before the fight.

That's not supposed to be in professional fighting.

That's not supposed to be a professional heavyweight.

But I think that Douglas got in this place where he goes, I don't care.

What can you do to me now?

My mother's dead.

- Right?

- Fought with composure.

The additional irony of that is that Mike has this theory that the real tough guys are inevitably Mama's boys.

And that would include, as you read in the book, Lennox Lewis was a Mama's boy.

The Evander Holyfield was a Mama's boy, and Buster Douglas was a Mama's boy.

- Tyson loses his mom, I think he's 16.

He never knew his dad, if I'm not mistaken.

- Right.

- Tyson had and Tyson's mom, was she engaged in prostitution?

- I think in some matter or form.

Yeah, but I want, let me just pick up.

- I'm sorry, I apologize.

Mark, go ahead.

- No, no, no.

The irony here is that, you know, Tyson wants desperately to be a Mama's boy, but in fact, he's rejected by his mother.

When his father leaves his mother, something breaks in her.

She just gets crushed and turns mostly to alcohol.

But, you know, was there some selling of herself?

By Mike's account, yeah, but she was a broken woman.

And every time he comes back to show her her trophies, or Mom, I'm gonna be this, or Mom, I'm gonna be that, she's basically like, yeah, there's always someone that's gonna take care of you.

He can, the central thing in Mike's psychological life is wanting his mom.

It's one of the reasons why the loss of Robin Givens' mother to him was devastating.

And I'm not trying to be a shrink here.

I'm just, I'm telling you what, what I know from the work here.

So Tyson wants to believe he's a Mama's boy.

In fact, he's rejected by his mom.

But the guys who beat him, Buster Douglas, Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis are in fact Mama's boys.

And I find the irony, it just blows me away every time.

- Let me, oh boy, I know our producers are thinking I'm going way too inside with this, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

Tyson fights Evander Holyfield.

You know the part about biting his ear off.

He was losing the fight.

God knows why he did it.

Likely to end it because he knew he was losing.

Fair to say, Mark?

- Yes, I think so, yeah.

- Okay.

Tyson today, you have written, you're shocked that Mike Tyson is alive.

- Mike Tyson's shocked that Mike Tyson's alive.

Anyone's shocked.

The one thing, I mean, when I started covering Tyson regularly as an athlete, I was first a columnist at The Post, columnist at the Daily News.

And I was maybe his number one hater.

I probably written more bad stuff about Tyson as a columnist than anyone else.

'Cause by the time I came on him on the beat, he was just getting in trouble every day.

So I'd like.

- Had the rape charge.

He had the rape charge.

He served time.

- Covered his trial, yeah.

- Yep.

- So I just killed him every day.

And I, you know, sometimes I was wrong looking back, I went overboard.

Sometimes I was right.

But the truth is somewhere in between.

But I mean the one thing that his haters like me and his acolytes could agree on, he wasn't long for this world.

So wherever you were in Tyson's life, the smart bet on the over under of his mortality, take the under and I mean, I remember asking Tyson 2012.

He did his one man show, and I caught it in preview in Vegas.

I said, did you ever think you'd be here?

He goes, no, I never thought I'd be alive.

And he's part of this generation of, I don't know whether this is apocryphal or just something else, but I remember covering crack dealers in the late eighties, and the word was like, detectives would talk about guys who prepaid for their funeral.

So they could go out big, you know, like Al Capone or something.

He's part of that generation on the street in places like Brownsville, that kids never expected to live that long.

Tyson on top of everything, had every sort of, every sort of urban apocalypse visited upon him.

There's no way he thought he was gonna live beyond 30, beyond 40, beyond 50.

And now like to a place where he's here and he's adored?

It's the craziest thing.

- Tyson, hold on, Mark.

Tyson is adored.

- It's crazy, crazy.

- He's convicted of rape, serves in jail, bites Holyfield's ear, all kinds of stuff.

And complex, loved, adored, respected.

- But for the first.

- Go ahead.

- First time since he was a kid.

So when he comes up, I think, I think you can understand America, certainly presidential politics.

And I don't mean to veer off into politics.

- By the way, he apparently likes Trump.

Fought in Atlantic City a lot of times.

Has a Trump relationship.

I'm trying to figure it out, but go ahead.

- The book ends with Trump ascending in Atlantic City.

And to my mind, Trump, Trump wasn't tough enough.

Trump might have been tough enough to make it in politics, but he wasn't tough enough to make it in boxing and get past Don King.

- It's really, it's really interesting what Trump did and what was ultimately unable to do with Atlantic City.

But nevertheless, as far as Mike is concerned, no one expected him to live.

No one expected him to be a good guy.

He came up, he was adored, but then as his life implodes, he becomes a villain.

I think that one of the things that wrestling shows us is that the fact of the matter is people love the bad guy, the villain, the heel, a lot more than the good guy or the baby face.

And Tyson's return, he's almost like a wrestling figure.

- A pro wrestling figure, yep.

- Pro wrestling figure.

There's this eternal cycle from humiliation to ecstasy.

And right now he's riding, he's riding a high point.

But I think that there's something about the scary guy made cuddly, that people find irresistible.

As far as him going away and the rape case, that was a long time ago.

I mean, I don't know how many of your producers even remember that.

That's 1992.

I mean, I'm an old guy here.

There's also.

- They know him movies with, they know him from movies with Bradley Cooper, right?

- Right.

Hangover.

- Like Tyson's the guy in the movie.

- But I also think that- - Got a minute left.

Go ahead, Mark.

- But his one man show.

- He's amazing, amazing.

- But look, I spent my whole life knocking the guy, but it drew a tear.

It made me cry.

And if you can explain your story, if you can make your, you know, people like to see, first of all, he did his time.

But the other part, if you can overcome drugs, booze, this terrible relationship with your mother, an absent dad, Brownsville, which is just a dystopia, wasn't calling it a ghetto, is entirely unsatisfactory.

It was crazy as a kid just living on the street.

And if Bernhard Goetz, the subway vigilante, had shot him in whatever it is, 1983 or two or four, whatever it was, no one would've given a damn about the kid.

He would've just been another street criminal, another kid, you know, trying to rob people.

40 seconds on the subway, gone.

No one would've cared.

But he's allowed people, he's opened an avenue of empathy in the way that he's viewed.

Not many people can do that.

It wasn't by design, it just happened.

- You know, my frustration is that there are 20 more things I wanna talk to Mark about because.

- I'll come back, Steve.

- Will you?

And by the way, I'm a fan of something called emotional intelligence that Dr.

Daniel Goldman talks about.

Emotional intelligence is largely about knowing oneself, being self-aware.

Mike Tyson strikes me, regardless of his formal education lacking, as one of the most self-aware human beings on this planet.

The other guy who knows him very well and understands his fascination with Tyson is a guy who's been writing about him since 1988.

Mark Kriegel is the author of the book, "Baddest Man, the Making of Mike Tyson."

We will have Mark back 'cause there's so much else we need to talk about, including the Don King relationship, including a whole bunch of other stuff.

Hey Mark, thank you for the book.

Go out and get it folks.

Thank you my friend.

You're an honor to our profession.

Thank you.

- My pleasure, Steve, thank you.

- You got it, I'm Steve Adubato.

The Great Iron Mike Tyson and Mark Kriegel right there.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Seton Hall University.

The New Jersey Education Association.

New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities.

PSE&G.

Hackensack Meridian Health.

Delta Dental of New Jersey.

Johnson & Johnson.

The Fidelco Group.

And by NJM Insurance Group.

Promotional support provided by CIANJ, and Commerce Magazine.

And by NJBIZ.

- (Inspirational Music) - (Narrator) Great drive fuels the leaders of tomorrow and today.

Great vision paves the way for a brighter future.

Great ambition goes places, moving onward and upward.

Great empathy finds strength in kindness and in each other, working together to create something bigger than they ever imagined.

Great minds can change the world and great minds start at Seton Hall.