Exclusive | New Mike Tyson book goes inside the molding of Iron Mike as street culture made him a phenomenon
Edited and adapted from the book “Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson” by Mark Kriegel.Copyright 2025 by Mark Kriegel.
From Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.Reprinted by permission.Going back several fights, Mike Tyson had developed alopecia, a condition that manifested itself with a bald spot on the right side of his scalp about an inch above the hairline.
He attributed it to stress — not just the pressure of being heavyweight champion but also the unforgiving pace of his training schedule and the gladiator-like sparring.What’s more, Tyson’s courtship with Robin Givens was a turbulent one: passionate, tempestuous, full of fits and starts.
He’d push; she’d pull.There was also an incident that summer at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles: Tyson tried to kiss a parking lot attendant, then smacked around the guy who came to her defense.Jimmy Jacobs and Bill Cayton took care of it, of course — for a total of $105,000 and an admonition, for anyone who cared to listen, that “the little guy” was now a target for gold-digging litigants everywhere.What followed was a difficult camp, training for his final unification bout with IBF champ Tony Tucker.
Robin showed up.They fought.
Tyson informed Steve Lott he was retiring, then flew to Albany to hang out with Rory Holloway.That he was AWOL for the better part of a week led to a spate of columns by Don King’s go-to reporter (and eventual publicist), Mike Marley of the New York Post.There were questions as to whether trainer Kevin Rooney could handle the now-twenty-one-year-old champ.
Jacobs and Cayton even had a sit-down with the venerable trainer Eddie Futch in Las Vegas.They denied it, of course.
But Marley only came back harder, writing on “the summer of Tyson’s discontent” and opining that Rooney and Lott had him under a kind of house arrest in Vegas.“They even grab his mail,” said Marley’s source, whom I’d bet was King.It was a grievance that Robin had alread...