In our shattered-attention-span, zero-common-ground era of endless distraction, it’s impossible to get across how powerful the words Heavyweight Champion of the World once were. It’s impossible to convey to a modern, celebrity-saturated audience how massive and all-encompassing a shadow Mike Tyson once cast over all of American culture.

To see Tyson now — bro avatar, cuddly tough guy, weed magnate — is to see someone who has shed and transcended every element of what made him so fascinating, and so dangerous, in the 1980s. He was a boxer and a criminal, a philosopher with a knee-buckling uppercut. He was a content-generating machine decades before the concept of “content” was invented, a constant, churning swirl of scandal, controversy, ferocity, triumph. He was, in short, the baddest man alive, and he remains endlessly fascinating as a result.

Now comes “Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson,” a new book from longtime New York fight scribe Mark Kriegel. Like Tyson himself, “Baddest Man” is a throwback to an era of words over pictures, paragraphs over video, insight over memes. It’s not just a reminder of what Tyson once was, it’s a reminder of how good sports journalism can be.

To start, Kriegel answers the question of why even publish a book on Mike Tyson in 2025. There’s the economic angle — he owed his publisher a book, and Tyson always sells. But that begs a bigger question: Why, exactly, does Tyson still draw such interest?

“First, the fact that he’s alive,” Kriegel says. “I don’t think that was to be expected, that he would see this year. But even the greater anomaly, I think, is that he remains economically potent — almost as economically potent now as he was in his prime. He can still generate so much damn money today. … He’s the most lucrative attraction in the history of combat sports.”

“Baddest Man” begins with the unlikeliest of images — Mike Tyson as doting tennis dad in an exclusive Newport Beach community. It’s a sign that he’s a survivor, of course, but it’s also a sign that Tyson has fought his way into the rarest of air, into gated neighborhoods and social circles he never could have imagined as a juvenile.

Kriegel and Tyson first crossed paths early in Kriegel’s career as a crime reporter for the New York Daily News. On the job barely a month, Kriegel got the call from an editor at four in the morning: Mike Tyson was in a fight with Mitch Green at a clothing store. Get up there. A few weeks later, Kriegel got word that Tyson had been trashing the mansion he shared with girlfriend-turned-wife-turned-ex Robin Givens.

And then came another Tyson story, and another, and another after that … none of which had anything to do with his ever-increasing win total in the ring. Kriegel understood that Tyson was at the center of a new kind of celebrity culture.

“It represents the genesis of what we have been calling ‘tabloid culture’ for the last 40 or so years,” he says. “Really splashy, really voyeuristic, and we couldn’t get enough of it.”

Kriegel moved over to the sports desk at the New York Post in 1991, and from then on Tyson — whose career was on a long, slow decline — became what he called a “designated villain … When you’re a 30-something-year-old columnist in New York, nuance is not the first priority.”

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It would be decades before Kriegel would begin to have empathy for Tyson — empathy for the struggles he went through, the obstacles he overcame, the personal and psychological and spiritual challenges that bedeviled him. None of that excuses the crimes Tyson committed or the pain he caused others, but that empathy nonetheless gave Kriegel the perspective necessary to tell the story of “Baddest Man.”

“There’s so much goodwill directed at him,” Kriegel says. “I think at some level there’s an acknowledgement of the virtue of just having survived the [stuff] he survived — being assaulted as a kid, mom dying early, the dad splitting, the degree of violence in the neighborhood. … His persona is the victimizer, but he’s also the victim as well.”

“Baddest Man” covers Tyson’s earliest days growing up in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, his life-saving relationship with trainer Cus D’Amato, his devastating charge upward through the ranks of professional boxing. This volume — there will be another — ends with perhaps the most consequential fight of Tyson’s career, the June 27, 1988 beatdown of Michael Spinks. At that point the most expensive fight in history, hosted by an Atlantic City real estate magnate by the name of Donald Trump, the fight was 91 seconds of pure brutality, devastation and excellence.

“It’s hard to overestimate how heavy the hype was for that fight at that time,” Kriegel says. “It’s the height of Tyson’s boxing career. It’s a certain very neat cultural moment where Trump is ascendant, Tyson is ascendant. You don’t have to be a prophet to read between the lines — like, this is not headed in a great direction — but in that moment, he is invincible.”

“Baddest Man” is now on shelves wherever books are sold. It’s a hell of a portrait of a singular era in boxing and in America, one whose echoes are still resonating today.

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