The Press Box - Farewell to the NBA On TNT. Plus: Mark Kriegel on Mike Tyson and the Future of Sports Biographies.

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Hello media consumers! This week, Bryan and David discuss a bevy of “now they tell us” stories, some from the NBA and some from Washington (1:00), before coining a new segment called the “Pulled Punch Effect” (26:00). Then, they share a few more listener-submitted “sliding doors” metaphors (30:00), before Bryan is joined by Mark Kriegel to discuss 'Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson,' the state of the sports biography, and the present and future status of Mike Tyson in the sports and wider world (45:00). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, the Media Piss Test, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And together we host The Big Picture, The Ringers Film Podcast for New Releases, career retrospectives, director interviews, movie drafts, top fives, and so much more. Twice a week,

we break down the latest releases, argue about whether movies are doomed, and debate our modern film canon. Listen to The Big Picture on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David? Yes. What a weekend for a press box favorite.

The Now. They tell us story. Oh, this was an all-time now they tell us. First, we had the NBA version, the more common specimen of Now They Tell Us. James L. Edwards III and Fred Katz dropped a Knicks story in the athletic. Would you say seconds after the Knicks walked off the court in game six? I'm not sure that it wasn't already up before the game was over. But yes, it was just as immediate as anything.

By the way, they discussed it on Bill's podcast today. I say, for better or worse, this might be the first time that neither Bill nor Rosillo referenced your name with the Now They Tell Us when they brought the Now They Tell Us story, but I think that's become,

because it's become so much of an institution, it's already on your Wikipedia page. You don't have to just, like, demand your residuals from it, but they're usually very, very good about that. But this was an all-time Now-they-Tal-E-Tal-Undtis. This was a pure Colombian, Now-They-Tel us.

Was this a Now-They-Tel-S on steroids? It was. It definitely was. Because like it was all the stuff in it was like, you know, the McHale Bridges experiment didn't quite work. Carl Anthony Towns's defense communication issues. Like some of that stuff would have been nice to know while the Knicks were actually playing basketball. Indeed. Yep.

This is not what we do, right? We take our acorns and put them in the hole in the tree. And when the Knicks are eliminated from the playoffs, then we're like, ooh, look at these tasty items that you might have enjoyed while the Knicks were playing basketball. basketball. We got some bigger now they tell us stories too this week, David. Oh, yeah. The Elon Musk now they tell us. What a now they tell us that was. The first one came from Kirsten Grind and Megan Tooy in the New York Times. Uh-huh. Megan Tooe, you remember, Jody Kanner's reporting partner in all those amazing Harvey Weinstein stories. Yeah. They reported that Musk was also using drugs more intensely than previously known,

according to people familiar with his activities. And here is the graph that had most of the big stuff in this story. Mr. Musk's drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. he took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms and he traveled with a daily medication box

that held about 20 pills including ones with the markings of the stimulant adderol according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it this seems that's such a hilarious reporting tick by the way it's like we can legitimize through our reporting we can verify that these were pills that had the engraving marks of adderol on them and the coloring of adderol on them

but we cannot call them Adderall unless what? We have someone take one. We're like we send one to a lab. The implication being, of course, that he could have other different drugs that are marked as Adderall to fool people. You make a fascinating point because all three of those sentences had different kinds of evidence.

Right. We've seen a thing that looks like Adderall or has the markings. He told people he took ketamine. Yeah. And then one sentence is just flat out. He took ecstasy and psychedelic questions. He had sexity and psychedic. I guess that means he would have pointed to them or something and said what this is.

I don't know. That's very bizarre. Yeah. Being also very, very careful. Yes. But careful in it. Careful in an odd way. This sentence was also in the Elon now they tell us.

It is unclear whether Mr. Musk 53 was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year. So this is happening during the campaign when he's supporting Donald Trump. But they're saying here's a story we maybe couldn't get yet, but we'd love to get. Yeah. Was all this happening when Elon was dismantling the government as we knew it or as we know it? Well, there's been plenty of videos floating around line of him standing behind Trump and the White House and the Oval Office and just like acting as if looking like somebody who is under the influence of things. And it's easy to tweet that. Yeah.

But getting it down with sentences like that, a much, much harder task. Also, Times PR had some real big pushback online when Elon inevitably started. making fun of this story or denying this story and says Elon is just lashing out because he didn't like our article. Sentence, I did not expect New York Times PR to run. The other now they tell us, or maybe you should say now they tell Musk, was in the Wall Street Journal, Josh Dossie, Annie Linsky, and Dana Madioli. It begins this way.

President Trump recently posed an evocative question to his advisors about billionaire. Elon Musk promised to slash one trillion dollars in government spending. Was it all bullshit? Trump asked. And then it goes on from there. This piece was very, very good. And it reminded me of the papal conclave story that the journal ran a few weeks ago in the sense that it was really well written,

which is to say not written like a traditional newspaper article. And the journal, you know, is kind of the hot paper right now. after the fall of the Washington Post. Well, yeah, the Post sort of eliminated itself from the competition for a while. But it's hot as one of those weird journalism scoreboards where you're keeping track of scoops in a way that no normal reader of the paper would keep track of them. And also just a general level of quality. And I would say that the journal's hotness is directly tied not just to the scoops, but to the fact that they are running stories that are taking off the handcuffs of newspaper style.

Yeah. Like when you read this must story and Josh Dossy put a gift link up on Twitter if you want to, it doesn't stop every four paragraphs with a mandatory quote, said one Republican advisor, said one academic who has studied this and that, stuff we just don't need at all. And, you know, sometimes, as we saw with the earlier story about Musk, you need some of that because you're really trying to, you know,

make your story libel proof and not get sued and all that kind of stuff. There's sometimes a newspaper is like, just write the information. Just give it to it. There's nobody out there who's like, you know what? I want to read a newspaper story in high newspaper style. Nobody thinks that. No one in the world thinks that. Sometimes you have to do it because you're writing quickly or again, you're worried,

you want to make sure that you got everything locked down. But if you don't have to, you can just write the story. and sometimes it comes out very, very well. Anyway, congrats to the journal on that one. All right, David, coming up with the press box, a ton of notes about Thursday's NBA finals, including the final teary moments of pro basketball on TNT, Reggie Miller hate,

in my case that inside the NBA will survive, just fine on ESPN. Plus, the latest Tom Cruise effect, how you know the crazy fact about John Tyler's grandson. We've got more sliding doors metaphors. My interview with Mark Creagle about Mike Tyson and a goodbye to our beloved producer. All that and much more on the press box.

A part of the Rigger! Podcast Network. Hello media consumers, Brian, Curtis, David Shoemaker and producer Bobby Wagner here. David, on Saturday night, we said farewell to the NBA on TNT. It has gone fishing forever. Well, sort of. And yeah.

So that brings me to point number one. It was kind of a weird funeral, wasn't it? Yes. On media Twitter. Yeah, reassuring to hear everybody else say, I thought we already did this because I thought it was being anything I was going crazy. Yeah. It's like, didn't we do this during All Star Weekend when we said goodbye to a show that's not actually going away?

Well, the first one was last season. You remember? I mean, we got into the whole like succession drama of what would have inside the NBA a year. the last TV or TV. It was during the last season. So we said goodbye to the show during the playoffs. And it felt like it must be the end. And then it just came back.

The only person that I have heard mused publicly about ending inside the NBA is Charles Barkley. Everybody else is like, this is a great show. Let's keep it going. What do you think the average viewer? And by average, maybe I'm, maybe I mean below average. But what do you think if you're just a TV viewer that doesn't pay attention to any of this, any of the media news and doesn't pay attention to Twitter and you don't pay attention to anything. If you're just watching basketball because you like the basketball playoffs or whatever, you like the NBA. And the next season,

you turn it on and inside the NBA still exists, but is on ESPN instead of T&T. Let's say you realize it pretty quickly flipping through channels. I'm thinking of somebody with an old cable box here. Would there be any level of shock or discomfort? Or do you think it's just going to be like, oh, it's on a different channel? Like so many of my favorite shows of switch channels and everything's normal. I think it's the latter. Unless like the theme music changes and you're like, oh, that's kind of weird. I miss the old theme music. I miss the old graphics. But your overall feeling is everything is going to stay the same, everything is going to be okay. Like, where are you? I think there's a bullish case to make that it's going to be the same show.

Well, Bill and Ryan talked about it today and Van, and I only heard part of it, but they made the case that it has to stay the same where people are going to be mad. I think that is the easiest free pass. that any programming director has ever had. It's like, yeah, we have to keep it the same. That's part of the deal. And then you just do keep it the same. I mean, maybe different percentage of commercial interruption or whatever.

But in terms of content, in terms of overall vibe, I don't think you really, I think you'd be, I think you can rest easy that like, that changing something would be the bad decision. I mean, there are certainly like producers

that get anti- you know, and they want to make things different just for the sake of making them different. But I think there's a lot of people who would just be like liberated by the fact that they shouldn't, they don't, they're not supposed to change anything. Completely. And what has ESPN created under the current regime that would make you think they could make this show better? They don't care about this stuff. I mean, I don't even mean that as a knock like some people do. It's like this isn't, this isn't what they're focusing on, you know?

Yeah. So have we gotten a good NBA pregame show from them? Have we gotten a good Monday night booth that they didn't just import from Fox? Nope. Have we gotten a good Sunday night baseball booth? A lot of people tuned in for Dodgers Yankees last night. Nope. We could just go on and on and on.

Like the good stuff has come from like Omaha and Fox and now Turner. Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing would be to put like the inside the NBA people in the same room with the Omaha people and just say, why don't you guys figure out five changes to make to the show. You know, just like, you know, just like let's brainstorm here. Or something else for those guys to do, like if you really want them to do something else. Sure, sure. Like is there a manning cast thing that would be fun to roll out twice a year that you could get those guys interested in it? I mean, that sounds like a layup, right?

I mean, it's just so it's so great. But Charles, who swore he wasn't doing any interviews also answers every call, so you could also just have them on the manning cast. That's also part of this. My one thing that I'm worried about is that the show will not just go on forever into the night. like TNT is just kind of an empty vessel. Like what are we really getting to here? Whereas ESPN, there is the Scott Van Pelt Sports Center that they are justly proud of. But like what are you, what, you know, there's stuff you might need to, to happen and you can't just have inside just roll into infinity, which is part of its charm.

Well, yeah, I'm Bill pointed out today. We've discussed it before. The fact that ESPN wants to push things to SportsCenter as seamlessly as possible. possible to help the Sports Center ratings, right? I mean, those are their best ratings nights when the game

leads right into Scott. Because it's the post-game show. Yeah. It is the only good ESPN post-game show because it's Scott Van Pelt interviewing, you know, having a guest on,

a Legler or Ryan Clark. Well, listen, part of what makes Van Pelt so such a great, what made him such a great fit for this job, which he created, basically,

was that it didn't necessarily seem like the most desirable job, right? He was the person who had the vision for it. And part of that was like, I mean, dude, there's going to be some nights where there's nothing happening. You know, this is like, it's more like Conan O'Brien than it is like, you know, the postgame show.

And he's really made it a must-watch situation anyway. I'm sure they'll find ways to lead in. I'm sure they'll have Barclay appear on SVP is just to segue into that show and make it, you know, and give it even more oomph on those nights or whatever. But, you know, that will be an interesting. That'll be the only, I don't know that there will be much tension. My guess is how all of that managed and worked out way before any of it, you know, inside appears on ESPN. But that's what viewer, that's what people like Gus will be paying attention to, right?

Just the, like on MSNBC, just like the level of joviality and the handoff between shows, you know? Also, we got to throw in the Pat McAfee, Stephen A. Smith part of this equation. Which is we've seen the current ESPN regime, give them maximum. flexibility to do whatever they want. So why would you do that and then be like, hey, greatest pregame show of all time, post game show of all time, with Charles Barkley truly a Rushmore figure in sports

broadcasting, you're the ones we try to rein in? Like there's a template here at ESPN, which is that if you are in this elect, you can do whatever it is. And McAfee might use that power in a way that Charles Barkley doesn't and vice versa, but again, I would just, I don't know what they would do it.

And again, there would be so much negative publicity, so many nasty tweets for a group that, like I said, doesn't know how to do this stuff anyway, at least consistently. So why would you mess with it? The other part of this is the inside the NBA guys, especially Charles Barclay, they're not going to go along with it. I don't know if you heard this sound from Shaq as they were signing off on Saturday night, but here is Mr. O'Neill, declared. learning his intentions for the future of Inside the NBA.

We're a family. I'm glad we're sticking together. And like I said, even though the name changes, the engine is still the same. And to that new network we come into, we're not coming to F around. And since this is the live show, I'm going to say it. We're not coming to fuck around. You kick an ass. It's ironic because a lot of people would say that what Inside the NBA does best is fuck around.

but I understand the point that he's trying to make. By the way, Kenny Smith used the F word afterwards. He repeated Shaqs. Well, it just felt like hearing your dad cuss. Like, whoa, whoa. Shack Barclay, okay, but you too, sir? Yeah. You're going to go there on live television?

That's a curse too far, yeah. I actually think when Inside gets to ESPN, we just need to monitor how big these heresies actually are. Like Charles Barkley making fun of ESPN. That's something David Letterman was doing in 1985 on NBC. That is just completely harmless. Like Jimmy Pitar, Burke Magnus, they laugh at that and go back to their jobs. Yeah.

When they have the conversation about a Daryl Morey Hong Kong tweet, that's when we're getting the good stuff. Yeah, for sure. That's the real heresy that I want to hear. By the way, it's such a funny send-off for T&T. So they had Kevin Harlan and Reggie Miller and Stan Van Gunz. at the table before they threw to inside talking about memories of the network and they started showing all these old booze and I'm like Dick Stockton and Chuck Daly. Wow, I thought I knew TV man.

I could not have given you that off the top of my head. Kevin Harlan, Danny Aange and John Thompson. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, the John Thompson era was fantastic. And that's what's so funny about T&T signing off because it's like, I don't think many people could give you chapter and verse of stuff like that. or tell you anything about how they produce a game that's different than ESPN.

But it's almost these just sense memories, like the way a cereal box was designed when you were a kid, like the specific art on it, it just reminds you of times in your life. And you're on the air for 36 years doing the NBA. I think it just vacuums up a lot of memories. And that's kind of to me what people are really reacting to here. Because really, other than the people who,

are losing their jobs behind the scenes, which is terrible, there's not a lot that's going away. You're going to have Kevin Harlan. You're going to have inside. You're going to have Reggie Miller. By the way, what a topic Reggie Miller was on Twitter. Oh, my God. That I was not expecting. Okay, so I have some theories here. The loudest people in my life about Reggie Miller were Nix fans. Yeah, that's a big deal. I understand that. And by the way, if I was a Knicks fan or just, I don't know, Cowboys fan and like Cowboys are. arch villain was announcing my demise on television, I think I would lose my mind. Well, I mean, what if you're an Eagles fan or a commander's fan and Troy Aikman is the color guy on your games every time you're on five?

That's a shame. Yeah, I'm just saying, there's a precedent for this, right? I mean, it's not like, it's not like they pulled Reggie Miller. It's not like they pulled Reggie Miller in off the street just to antagonize Nick's fans in the playoffs. Like, this is his job, right? And even if they had, by the way, even if they had pulled him in off the street as the lifelong pro wrestling fan that I am, that would have been wonderful television, you know? I mean, that's exactly what you need.

Get the, get the heels and get the heels manager to sit at the booth to give you a little color, you know? That's fantastic stuff. I mean, that is the reason Reggie Miller's on TV. Yeah. Because of this against Nick. Not because this series is going on, you're saying, because of his history with the Knicks, because he's made himself into a. character. Yes, that is why he is a color commentator of summer now. That's why he got the job to begin with because he was Reggie Frickin Miller in the garden. Like that, that's what had that,

that's a thing that happened. That's why he is famous. And I'm with you. Lean in. You know, he doesn't have to be like, you know, a pro Pacers Yahoo on TV, but it's fun. It makes it, it gives it a little edge. I've got a Kevin Harlan sound bite of the week for you. is the Eastern Conference Finals, game four, O.G. Anobey dies for a loose ball and commits a foul

and see if you hear an unexpected adjective pop out of Harlan's mouth. I think I knew that word is cattywampus. Let's accept catterwampus. Let me check. it out because I feel like this is this is not this is not a colloquialism it's catawampus catawumpus um CATA you want to define catawampus yeah those at home who don't know

going badly awkwardly are in the wrong direction I mean it just it's my oldest son is studying for the SAT now so I just have this is this is very firmly in the John Hamilton SAT prep course category yeah catawampus what he's a Caterwampus Cat or wampus. The thing is catawampus does not, I don't, is not necessarily, doesn't have anything to do with a cat or it's not directly related to catty corner, although maybe it is. But there is that sort of like there is the sort of thing. I think it just sounds enough like catty corner that you feel like you're able to just freelance on it, freestyle on it as much as you want. You know, it's kitty corner.

That's cat's cat's corner. Yes. It says it's related to word catamount. Catamount. You know what catamount means? No. Is it like, we are really a third level. No, we're really in third level

A medium-sized or large wildcat, especially a cougar. So maybe it is related to a cat somewhere in the etymological past. Catawampus. Never heard an announcer say that before my whole life. Oh, cattywampus with a Y had a variety of meetings,

including as an advert meaning completely utterly and avidly. A name for a fantastical imp-in-like creature or mountain lion. an adjective meaning askew. That's just how we know it today. Yes. How Kevin Hurland knows it in particular.

Yeah, taken from the Greek prefix Kata, meaning downward or toward. That's very strange. Keep those sliding doors metaphors in your pocket for just one more second here. I do have some media headlines for you. Great story in NBC News that had five bylines on it. That Tulsi Gabbard, who is National Intelligence Director, is trying to get Donald Trump to read his intelligence briefing. Yeah. Donald Trump has been reading his briefing NBC reports on an average of less than once a week since he became president. So they report one idea that has been discussed is to transform the PDB so it mirrors a Fox News broadcast according to four of the people with direct knowledge of the discussions.

It's fantastic idea. Under that concept, as it has been discussed, the National Intelligence Director's Office could hire a Fox News producer to produce it and one of the network's personalities to present it. Trump and avid Fox News viewer could then watch the broadcast PDB whenever he wanted. First of all, this is a great idea. I mean, given the limitations of what you're working with here. But I just wish more people, I feel like somebody would have done this for me at some point. I could have taken in a lot more news to read the newspaper. You know, just like have a, you know, Reggie Miller and I and Eagle scream it at me. as I'm doing something else, you know,

I could take it in way better. Too badly. Too bad Bobby already committed to something. There's been an opportunity there for him. Could we have the inside the NBA crew just read us the news every day? How much would you pay for that substack video? Like, how much would you pay for that newsletter? That's an incredible idea.

Barkley hadn't already struck out with CNN. I would say that that would have been a great opportunity for him. I don't want them to have a show. I don't want them to have to do like a news broadcast. I just want them to be like, Like basically at gumpoint have to read us the headlines and a brief rundown of what the story is about. You but do it. You want the side discussions, right?

No, I mostly just want the ad read and then the reactions to doing the read, basically. I don't need their opinions. I just want them to do it because like, you know, it's just a hilarious like, you know, money making venture. Vladimir Zelensky. I wasn't familiar with your game. Yeah. Et cetera, et cetera. uh yeah according to peter white a deadline mark merrin's podcast is ending that's crazy i mean podcasts

podcasts podcasts of that size you'd be forgiven for thinking that it probably reached its like epistemological ending a long time ago we all had moments with big podcasts we all have moments where like it's the main podcast in our life you know that it sort of fades away everybody has but i feel like a lot of people still listen to marron um but you know a show like a show like that it starts out pretty specific and there's a lot of episodes to be done and then it gets bigger and bigger and eventually you're interviewing the president or whatever there's like oh you get to a certain level of just like holy shit status and then kind of where do you go from there is the question he's kept it going for a long time through multiple tv shows through you know like a lot of iterations

of his life um and he's a radio guy before he was doing radio before i think he's more of you call him a comic, not a radio guy, but like, you know, this is the sort of thing that some people would have just kept going forever, limping along in various states. I mean, it is sort of interesting to see him just sort of like closing the, just closing the, just shutting it down. There's a, you know, it's sort of, you get a little respect for somebody who does something like that. 2009 is so early in podcasting time. Well, yeah. It's also just the name of the show. I mean, it's not like, it's not glaring,

but it's always sort of stuck with me. It's like the WTF podcast. It's like, like the idea of what you'd name something before the form really existed. Not that some of the, all the other names that came after that are utterly different or better or anything, but WTF is just sort of like, it has nothing to do with Mark Marin or the subject matter. You know, it's just sort of like a name that you would give something when it's just,

you're just, not even the literal meaning, not knowing what it was. It's just sort of a, it just never quite made sense except in this 1.0 sort of way. and yeah, I mean, it is, it's been around forever. And the original, like the original greats, not the originals, but the original grates of the form in any form, you know, they can't last forever.

And most of them don't hold on with as much for as long and with as much value as Mark Merrins did. So, I mean, I think it's a pretty impressive run by him. Thank you for giving us epistemological to go with Eddie Elamola. etymological? What did I say? Etymological? Yeah. Etymological. Yeah, we're really, uh, we're doing some word.

Adjured thesaurus today, folks. Uh, good night and good luck. The Broadway show. Oh, I thought you were finishing the bit of, I thought you were finishing the Mark Merrin segment. All right, go on. That's all how Olberman ends his shows. Yeah.

Uh, it's going to be on CNN this Saturday, June 7th. They're going to show us the second to last version of the, play. Oh, really? Which is at the Winter Garden in New York, where young Brian once upon a time saw cats with his mom and has never quite forgotten it. Seat geek prices, David, for this past Saturday, $1,700 to sit, center orchestra. I can't deal with sea geek anymore. $1,000 in the mezzanine. So we get to see the show now on television.

Yeah. I also thought there's a little bit of a Tom Cruise effect with good and good luck. Mm-hmm. Because James Panoazik had a piece about it in the Times, and he said, you know, it's kind of like a cable docudrama level show. Mm-hmm. But it's so important. Yeah. The message is so right on.

Like, not only it's the media, you know, trying to figure out how much power it has and how much footing it can stand on when it's reporting on politicians, but this is literally happening at CBS right now. Yeah, it's true. With the 60 Minutes stuff that criticize. and good night and good luck almost feels blasphemous. I think we need a term for that. Where a thing cannot be criticized. Because it's so of the moment? Well, or like Mission Impossible because Tom Cruise is saving theaters.

Yes, exactly. There's kind of a pulled punch effect. We'll workshop that. In other news. Pulled punch effect is kind of great. The pulled punch effect? Yeah. I like that.

In other news, America's face. Favorite historical fact died this week. Harrison Ruffin Tyler, dead at 96. He is the grandson of President John Tyler, who was in office from 1841 to 1845. Yeah. That man had a living grandson. That's crazy. This is everybody's favorite historical fact.

You see it tweeted from whatever the discussing film of history. history is every five minutes. I have sent this to friends before, but like, can you imagine this? And I was interested to know that the people that figured this out were mental floss. Remember mental floss? Love mental floss,

yeah. Back in 2012, editor says we placed a somewhat awkward call to the Charles City County History Center in Virginia to check in on the Tyler's. And at that point, there were two of John Tyler's grandson still alive. So Harrison Ruffin, Tyler became a kind of public figure, got tons of interviews.

He called Newt Gingrich a jerk in Politico in 2012 because, of course, I thought that was fun. Media piss test, David. This is where our friends in the media say that something is like something else except on steroids. John Monaghan points us to this John Dickerson soundbite from the Slate Political Gavin. And so, and now you have Donald Trump, which. is takes those trends and you know puts them on um high anabolic steroids high anabolic steroids when's the last time you heard the word anabolic in front of steroids i weirdly use it in

conversation more than you'd think okay you're talking about like the vince mcmand drug trial or something yeah well it just this sort of like you know when people are trying to parse like whether or not a wrestler or a pro athlete or whoever is on steroids right now. I'm just like, okay, but there's anabolic steroids back in the day and there's this whole sea of legal things now. There's not that much grayer in between,

but we're not talking about horse steroids here, you know, or anabolic steroids, like the Laila Zado shit. We're in a different world now. So yeah, maybe more than the average person, I would say. Before we get to Mark Krigal,

do you want some more sliding doors metaphors? Oh, please, absolutely. If you've missed this on the last couple of shows, this is a list of movies or books or other cultural documents that we reference, but we may have never actually engaged with the original. Yes. This comes from Ezra Klein and Jake Tapper admitting that they had never seen

the Gwyneth Paltrow movie sliding doors. Yeah. Here are a couple of great ones. People keep sending this end. Bruno Alves says Lothario. Oh. It says it's kind of an only in journalism sliding doors tofer. I don't know the last time you read The Fair Pentinent, a 1703 tragedy by Nicholas Rowe, David.

Oh, my God. It's where Lothario comes from. I would not have bet that whenever my wife and I are like, where did that phrase come from? It's either Shakespeare or the Bible. Yeah. That tends to be the answer. Yeah, I would have gone Shakespeare. that's not the Bible with Therio, or that he was just like a little-known Spanish writer of some vintage or something.

That's very strange. Speaking of the Bible, Aaron Werenko, who's already qualified for a press box button, gives us the writing on the wall. Do you know where that's from? No, that one just sort of seems self-evident. Is that from the Bible? Daniel chapter 5, the story of King Belchazar. Yeah, Belshazzar and, yeah. Yes. Oh my God.

My apologies to King Belchazer and his family for mangling his name. From Lee Fordham, he suggests we have a mythology corner of sliding doors metaphors. He said delivering this segment would not require a Herculian effort and should not be viewed as a Gordian knot. However, it may open a Pandora's box of email submissions. Yeah. Adal Hernandez says he is a construction worker from Florida that really loves the pod. you are the soundtrack to my 91 degree days and I tune in every week. Wow.

Just wanted to mention that I particularly always used the phrase Deus X Machina because I've heard it from other ringer podcasts and was able to discern what it meant. Then a friend asked me what that was from and I realized I had no idea where it was from until I Googled it. Yeah. So I don't know if that counts. Just wanted to add my two cents.

Love the pod guys. keep it up. Oh, that's nice. Who are the biggest offenders, do you think, in the ring of verse for Deus X Machina? Sean, Chris, any other names? I mean, it's got to be a TV thing, right?

I mean, certainly movies too, but it feels like the sort of thing that comes up in TV discussion a lot. But I have a question about this, though, that's not from a specific story or novel, though. That's like a Latin phrase that can be applied to a lot of novels, right? Is this person implying that the X-

Machina movie from 2015. No, there's ex machina, there's deus X. There's been a lot of things. Yeah. Yeah. This person is saying that we might not engage with Euripides as much as we use the term. The origins of the Latin phrase as it applies to literature. There we go.

We got a few more here, David. Zach Marconi, the official rare book dealer of the press box, gives us the dye is cast. He said, would we be in a better place of journalists we're consciously borrowing from Soutonius dubiously quoting Caesar marching his army across the Rubicon.

Crossing the Rubicon would make another good entry. Yes, there we go. To boat race Pompey. Maybe he continues. I also suspect that a goodly portion of folks using the expression, imagine a die cast model rather than an actual gambling metaphor. I know gambling, but I would not have placed that as a specific reference. That's pretty great.

The die is cast. This one comes from Uniruth, Sri Rungam. just to note that the new HBO movie Mountainhead, this is the one from Successions Jesse Armstrong, is chock full of the sort of literary references of things no one has ever read, particularly Steve Carell's character who refers to things as Hegelian or Kantian. At one point, he's confronted by another character. I think that's a pretty serious misreading of Kant.

Yeah. Not to mention who's actually read The Fountainhead. That's a great point. Before we get out of here, Brian, by the way, I'd like to inaugurate more of this. I don't mean that everybody has to follow along. I'm not trying to start a movement here. This is more of a personal self-help sort of, or just a personal betterment decision I've made. But it relates to this and other conversations on the show.

I think I might call it the Sliding Doors Book Club. We've discussed before the problem, we discussed recently the problem I had where I just convinced myself I had read a bunch of books while working at politics and prose. was 20 years ago in Washington, D.C. Part of that was, you know, the time it's deliberate. It's just, it's a thing you had to do, right? Someone says, what is the next book? After I've read this and this and this, what do I read? And you can't just be like, well, I've heard this is okay.

You got to be like, oh, this is the book for you. And you have a few sentences you can say about it. You might not literally say, I've read it, but you're presenting it as if you've read every book in the store, that's your job, even though we all know that not to be true. But I got to the point where I just didn't, like, there was books in that category that I pretended to have read, that I just never read even if I wanted to because I just, I internalized having read them. So now I've decided anytime I had a used bookstore and I see one of these books, I'm going to buy it and I'm going to read it, right? At least I'm going to start it. I'm going to

give it a solid college try here, right? So if you ever wondered in the politics and pros in the early 2000s and you said, do you have any novels for a guy who loves military history? the answer every single time was yes all right david digging in a bag here you're looking for the killer angels by michael shara i've i've founded a used bookstore this weekend for cheap i think it was two dollars i said that is a book i've a hand sold to no fewer than 50 people and so i will be reading that right now i pay it's you know whatever kin burns says it's a book that changes life i mean this is a widely regarded novelist of the Civil War novel about the Civil War.

It's not the whole thing. It's very brief, actually. So I'll be reading that this week, and I'll report back on it the next time we talk. I thought you were going the thin red line by James Jones, which is in my sliding doors book club. We all have our personal list. Yeah.

Speaking of you, David, we got a question from Rob W. Yeah. Who says, are we skipping over the fact that Shoemaker's dad gave him a copy of Sophie's choice, kind of seems like a threat. No, no, no. It's more of just a... You do have a sister, we might add,

just for people who need some context to it. It's absolutely true. No threat implied. My dad's a big reader. My dad would read something and just like hand me the book he just read or just mail if we're not living together, it's just mailed me book, a book that he's like three quarters of the way through,

you know? You got to read this too. All right. Coming up in 30 seconds, why is Mike Tyson still beloved? But first, let's do the overwork Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that

all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to add the press box spot where they are always gratefully received. And here to handle the overworked Twitter joke, David, is the man we are about to lose. Aw. The press box producer slot has kind of become like the guy who wears the red uniform and old Star Trek episodes. Bobby was brave to take the job. He was.

He's moving on. Bobby, how can we say goodbye? by letting me talk about some tweets, some of my favorite things. You guys are kind of like the late era sopranos where you're just whacking producers left and right. Yeah, I think, I think special message to the folks on the Bill Simmons Reddit page,

Bobby did get another job where he's not just being fired because he's not just being fired. He's not being shown the door. He's not been fired at all. Yeah. He's leaving us for greener or at least differently hewed green pastures and we wish him all the best. Unbelievable alpha move by you shoemaker to send me off in my final couple of days

by making me acknowledge the Bill Simmons subreddit that's tough beat tough beat All right I got too overworked for you guys this week The first one

was jokes about how Nathan Fielder is going to end season three of the rehearsal without spoiling the end of season two of the rehearsal because I'm not trying

to upset the spoilers the spoiler folks my last appearance in the press box here this was my favorite one from jerks and pro far propagandists you know i had to work a little baseball into this guys the rehearsal season three is going to end with nathan fielder playing shortstop for the san diego podra by the way that nathan fielder interview with wolf blitz at the other day what a magical piece of television that was oh my god there's no one else doing it like him uh but the joke this week that takes the cake

harkens back to one of my favorite sports moments of the 2010s i saw dozens of people go viral for comparing Timothy Shalami's outfit at game three of the Eastern Conference Finals to that of Pete Weber during his famous championship clinching strike with the wraparound sunglasses and the spiked hair.

So if you saw Timothy Shalami's outfit at game three of the Eastern Conference Finals and were inspired to say, who do you think you are? I am. Congratulations. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. That was great. That was perfect. I told Bobby this, David, when he called

me the other day to break the bad news. I said, dude, you have been here for incredibly short amount of time in in ringer years. We had a we had a cameo appearance by Bobby, but brought an enormous amount of talent and organization to this podcast. It's helped us get our 25 or 25 series going on Thursdays. It just helped us do so, so many different things. So, man, we are incredibly grateful for that, incredibly grateful you jumping on the mic, having fun with us, man. It has been so much fun to finally get to work together on something with you. Totally agree. It's a bummer that it was for so short. Thank you for being so welcoming and for making it super easy to hit the ground running.

I am a little bit bummed that like Shoemaker said, I did not force you guys to immediately do three drafts right off the jump. So maybe in my wake, you can honor me by, you know, drafting. Yeah. The greatest headline writers of the New York Post in the 1980s or something like that, power ranking them. No, this has been, this has been a true pleasure. This is, I've told you guys on and off air, I think at this point, that the press box is one of my favorite podcasts, and if not my favorite podcast. It was the podcast that I talked about in my ringer interview to get the internship in 2018. Wow. In many ways, I owe the press box to my career here. Dude, that's great. Dude, that is awesome. Awesome, man. We're going to miss you. We're going to miss

you. I'm just glad you're going to have more time for your true love, which is posting under an assumed named on the Bill Simmons subreddit. I'm just kidding. None of that's true. Make sure you defend us there, okay? No, I'm leaving now so I can get paid enough money to continue to fund my bot farms that post positive things about. There we go. That's better. I'm glad that we get through all that. And just a special word to whoever's next, whoever fills Bobby's shoes, the producer on this show, as the great Bill Goldberg would say, you're next.

We believe we will have that lady or gentleman on Thursday. day's show, David, to give him the old Goldberg welcome. Okay. All right, in the notebook dump, David, here is the sixth installment of our 25 for 25 series. Mark Kregel has a new book out about Mike Tyson. You heard me tease it last week. It's called Baddest Man. By the time you listen to this, it will be out.

It comes out officially on Tuesday. I told you, I just love this book. I can't wait to see our boxing friends like Raif Bartholomew and Jay Casp, me and Kang write about it or talk about it because I think they'll have some interesting takes on the way customato is portrayed and Jose Torres and all these boxing things, you know, boxing parts of it that I'm not an expert on by any means. But I wanted to talk to Kregel about Tyson as a subject, as a figure of the 80s. I wanted to talk to him about the way Mike Tyson talks, which I was reminded of in this book.

fact, he runs down the quote, what is the most famous Mike Tyson quote you can think of that is not fade into Bolivia or eat his children? Everybody. I know what it is. What is it? Everybody has a what? Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth or punch in the face. So he actually ran out of the original, which is Mike Tyson said in 1988.

Mike Tyson was 21 years old. Sadly, not quite as good as we have made it out to be able. over the years. Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time. Oh, yeah. That's the, I believe the original version of that Tyson quote. We also talked about how Mike, we got refined. We got refined. We talked about how Mike Tyson is still a beloved figure in the age of me too, which seems quite strange to me. Kriegel and I could have gone another hour. Here is Mark Kriegel on the baddest man on the planet. All right, Mark, among the many, many things I loved about your book was being reminded of the particular way that Mike Tyson talks.

How would you describe it? It's a macho lisp. I don't know how to describe it, but it's one of one. It's an idiosyncrasy unto itself. And I'm of the belief. I'm not like a huge wrestling fan, but I'm of the belief that you have to, to understand, America or American culture, you do have to understand wrestling. Tyson certainly steeped in wrestling, but it was one of the factors, that voice coming out of a guy who was so fearsome, especially

as you see him on network television in the 80s, that voice was a complete anomaly and you had to stop. But it was one of the real reasons why, to use a wrestling term, he got over in the way that he did. All of a sudden, you see a guy with completely vicious knockout, which is, stays with you just by itself. I mean, like television, you're looking for something that's real, that can't be duplicated. All of a sudden you see on live TV,

he destroys someone, say it's Terrell Biggs, cable, whatever it is. And now you've got the squeaky voice of, I wanted to push the bone into his brain. And you hadn't heard that before, and it sticks with you. So, I mean, as a matter of the medium, which was then television, both network and cable, that stays with you. You don't get rid of that. And every time he opened his mouth, that idiosyncratic sound plus what he was saying.

And I remember Lampley, I think it's his Lampley covers, I don't want to give you too long an answer for this. I hope this is on point. Lampley's first boxing blow-by-blow job is for ABC. And Tyson does the, I wanted to push the bone in his brain line in the voice that he, of course, delivers it in. And Lampley understands what's going on. All of Tyson's handlers rush to like, no, he didn't really mean that, you know, and they fire the PR guy. But Lampley sitting there, and he's listening to it on his headphones. He goes, he goes, This isn't gold. He goes, this is platinum. And in fact, from a, from a commercial and broadcasting point of view, he was absolutely right. So that's my longer than necessary answer on his voice.

Let's talk about Tyson as a 1980s figure. You have this line in the book that I want to read to you. Tyson has pierced something here. Part of it racial, part ethnic, a barrier that divides most of American culture. They effing loved him. Why was he so beloved in the 80s? The way that he was built was again one of one. The blueprint that they had to build him up was extraordinary. And I think that he comes from customato and he comes from a world that was retro. So they were very frightened, apprehensive about Tyson being the bad guy and being the bad black guy. like Sunny Liston. What they didn't realize was that by the 80s, the world was ready for a

sunny Liston. That came later still, but the first component in building his fan base were basically white ethnic fathers and sons in upstate New York in and around the Catskill Albany area, And he was very consciously and conscientiously built as the kind of guy your father would root for, your grandpa would root for. He didn't come out. This wasn't Sonny Liston in the packaging. It was Jack Dempsey. It was a kid with a Jack Dempsey haircut. There was something that was supposed to be stoic about him with the black shorts, no socks.

It was, it didn't start hip hop. That was the last sort of component to his fame. But as scary as Tyson was, when he first comes to the public consciousness, when he's first seen, he's like safe. And he's also, he's safe for middle America. We need it, you know, white America. Other stuff came later. And I think, you know, frankly, Larry Merchant told me, he goes, we didn't understand what was happening.

And by the way, you combine this with essentially his promos, the lines he says before and after the, I'm going to make you my girlfriend, punched the nose in your brain, whatever stuff in that voice that sticks with you, that you can't get out of your head, that makes you want to see his fights. There are the knockouts. But I remember Larry said to me, what we didn't understand was the way Tyson would eventually resonate with the street, with street guys, and the only guy who really understood that he could be bigger than big

and how all-encompassing his attraction could be, and that he would be, for lack of a better term, an icon in the emerging hip-hop world, was Don King. It was basically in this story, whether you like him or love him, think he's evil or great or whatever. He's definitely the smartest kind of the story. and he's about four or five steps ahead of everyone else. But it was Don who saw in its entirety how popular Mike could be. So you mentioned two big figures there in Tyson's life that you write about the book. First Custamato, his trainer, his surrogate father.

For those people who may be a little young here, who was Demado and what was his relationship with Tyson like? Dumato was a brilliant, eccentric, trainer, manager, boxing figure from the Bronx. He had trained Floyd Patterson, guided him really in an extraordinary way, Because Floyd Patterson is basically on his biggest day soaking wet, kind of a middleweight, light heavyweight. But he guided Floyd Patterson to become the youngest heavyweight champion of all time until, of course, Mike. Floyd leaves him. What Cuss does along the way, though, is he becomes a darling to a succession of really consequential. I know that sounds weird today where everything is like, what you're punching into your phone or what you, what video you have.

But he, you know, Gay Talese in Esquire, enormously influential writer wrote a lot about Floyd and Cuss. Norman Mailer was another one of the writers that he seduced. And all these guys are very, very influential guy who was my rabbi. Pete Hamill, later Joyce Carol Oates. And this stuff became essentially what was being written by the 80s, Robert Lipsite from the Times. There's a whole school of custom model literature. But by the 80s, when Tyson comes along, what has essentially been crafted by all of these writers put together and then some others is this incredible, irresistency. fable about cuss and the kid.

So what happened, how much is true or not, remains subject to debate, but cuss is cast as the guy who, the boxing guy who fought the mob in New York, going back to the 50s and the 60s, who guided Floyd Patterson to the title. And all of a sudden, he gets this kid, the kid. and he gets him out of this reform school upstate. And he tells him, you're going to be the greatest, you're going to be the youngest. So you have this mutually redemptive fable. And the writers write it and the broadcast executives, particularly those ABC, HBO,

Seth Abraham and HBO, go for it. Not as something cynical, but you know, you're a television executive. shit, this is a great, great story. You have these two generations of New York represented. Now, it missed all the nuances, but that was the fable and that's what it sold. That's what was essentially sold. So I think that when people ask about customato, that's who he was. He was cast as Tyson's rescuer, his Redeemer, his father. What the Cuss in the Kid Fable neglected to mention was, and everyone has, is her fault, DeMato's paranoia, his own, like, nuttiness.

And I think, and Mike pushed back on this in the couple conversations we had, and I understand why, it wasn't, this wasn't like some young fighter or, kid getting delivered to cuss out of a juvenile lockup. And, you know, the usual thing in Bach is, all right, kid, let's see what you got. Maybe we'll maybe we'll take you, put you in the golden gloves. Maybe you get a GED. You can stay here. Who knows, one day you turn pro champ, you know, I'll put the belt around you.

This was, from the beginning, you're going to be the best of all time. You're going to be the youngest of all time. to me, it's a Faustian bargain, and Cuss had always been looking for this perfect kid. He said, what he's saying to him, the way I think of it, hey, kid, I'll give you what you want. You've got to make me live forever. Now, Tyson pushed back on that, as I said, but his answer to me was, well, didn't I? And of course, he did. People will always remember Custamato as long as they remember Mike Tyson, which is going to be, you know, long after.

So that's Cuss. Yeah. Then there's Don King. What did young Mike Tyson see in Don King? Because Cuss occupied this very particular place in the history of New York and boxing, he was seen as the reformer, the good guy, you know, craggy, cranky, idiosyncratic, but definitely the good guy. and he had all these wonderful writers singing his praises.

Much of it true. But Tyson had been warned about Don King and predatory boxing contracts. Same thing for Aram, which is why the way that Tyson's early contracts were designed was to give all control to first cuss, then his deputies in this. Jimmy Jacobs, who had been a protege, a very powerful personality, but kind of a strange dude. And Bill Caten, who was the money guy, a remote figure, not Mr. Personality. But the issue of control, control of Mike Tyson was paramount from the beginning. So he had been warned, don't go to King, don't go to King, don't go to King, Aram even more.

But Aram wasn't a player in the heavyweights. at that point. And of course, Don King, I'm getting to the end of this, or at least to the end of the first volume. Don King is smarter and more resourceful than anyone he's in competition with and winds up with pretty much full control of Tyson. My theory on this is Tyson, who has two volumes. volumes of autobiography here. And I think they're both really pretty good, especially when

you read a lot of like, as told to's. Few subjects are predisposed to eviscerate themselves, or really expose who they are. This one does. So I credit Tyson and his co-authors, Guy Ratzl Sloman. Tyson says early on in his book, there's a question, who's my dad? Is it like the livery cab driver or is it the street guy? Is it the pimp? And he says, I'm paraphrasing now, I so much wanted my dad to be the pimp. And I think what he's saying there when I speak to, I covered Brownsville a lot as a police reporter. He wanted the guy who had standing in the street.

He wanted the potent figure. He wanted the guy, you know, who had gangster standing. who had power. And certainly Don came from the street world. Don was brilliant. Don, I'm sure he is still brilliant. Don is well-read. But he camouflages it with all the street stuff.

So I think that ultimately, and again, this is my, and I don't mean to go pain in the ass and sound Freudian. But I think ultimately, you know, Mike is surrounded by old white dudes. It's a point that Joyce Carol Oates makes in one of her essays on Tyson. Jimmy, Bill, they're putting him out. He grew up with legendary stick-up kids, and they're marketing him in like NYPD caps, just say no, all sorts of public service announcements. And everyone he knows from being a kid is getting shot up.

There's a real worship of the street and street culture. And particularly in Brooklyn, in Mike's background. So once Jimmy dies after Cuss dies, what builds a remote figure to Mike? Don understands that. And I think in some larger metaphorical sense, or maybe even not metaphorical, he's saying, hey, I'm your dad. I'm going to take care of you. I'm the street guy. I got power.

Forget about these white guys. You had two Zoom calls with Tyson for this book? What were those like? They were funny and they began with my confession as like, hey, I probably wrote more bad stuff about you than anyone on the face of the earth. This is in your New York Post column in the 90s. In the post, then later in the news. And I'll get to that more later if you want, but I said, yeah, I know the Hamels were very important to him. So I know Pete was my rabbi.

I know this guy. I know that guy. These guys will vouch for me. And we had the same literary agent guy named David Villiano. And Villiano had sold both of Tyson's books. So he arranged the meeting. And all I was after was some sense of ground rules. You know, I had the first biography I did.

was Joe Namath. And I don't know why I thought Joe Namath would cooperate. But, you know, Namath and his hand, his guy thought of, I thought I was writing, I wanted to write a biography. I had a very particular idea. They saw it. And I don't blame them. They saw, this is a licensing deal.

I'm telling my story. I want to get paid. I'm like, I can't do that. I want this to be history. It's not a licensing deal. The next book. Mark Marovich had passed away. His family was very gracious and cooperated with me. Boom Boom Mancini, which is just my obsession. I told him I can't pay you. I'm going to go

every place you don't want to go, but I think I'll write a good book that'll last. He cooperated. I had no expectation that Mike would cooperate. What I did want, hey, listen, I just want your blessing. If someone calls you, say I'm not a prick. And that's a sense. That's a Essentially what happened, that first call, I posed these things to him. And I was thinking about the book in a different way. I didn't want it to be. I was trying anything for it not to be a biography because I didn't want to relive the 80s, the 90s, all the bullshit that I had written. A lot of which, some of which I'm proud of, a lot of which I'm not.

So anyway, I wanted some ground rules. And I wanted to tell him who I knew. Also what street guys I knew, you know, that would sort of give me some bona fides with him. And I said, hey, listen, I'm not, I'm not sure Cuss did you 100% favor here. What do you mean? I said, you know, you're taking a kid out of not far removed from Spofford, which was this notorious juvenile prison in the Bronx where he was in and out of. I said, you know, you're taking a kid who's been locked up and you're putting him under hypnosis

and you're telling him he's a scourge from God. That was one of DeMato's methods. I go, and I'm not sure that's really good for a kid. And that's when he started pushing back. He's like, what do you think I had at 13? Where was I going to go? What was the alternative? And he was invested in, he was invested in defending Cuss.

And I understand it. I think that he full long, Cuss saved his life. But that was our second call. Our first call, the second call, I think he was eating a bowl of cereal. I'm assuming it was cat and crunch. His wife was on. Oh, the other, it was really weird things. I tell him I tell him I written more bad shit about you than anybody.

And I was a mess at the time. Like, I was breaking up or not breaking up with my girlfriend. And he goes to me, he does this thing. He goes, he goes, listen, don't blame yourself. Like, he's my shrink now. It was very sweet. The second call, I remember this about the second call. It was a really slick move, a smart move on his part.

I had been in touch with his half-brother. And I very much needed his half-brother to talk to me. He's a really, really interesting guy from Charlotte, North Carolina, played football at Purdue, but left the game disillusioned in the 60s and just drifted. I think he was like a longshoreman, he was at this, he was a that, like that kind of late 60s, early 70s, I'm going to find out myself, it winds up as a teacher in Portland. And God bless me, this guy was like a great guy to talk to. So he didn't want to, he was on the fence about going on the record. And I said to Tyson, I've been talking to your brother.

He goes, yeah? He goes, call him up right now. I'll tell him to talk to you. I said, really? I'm like nervous now. So I go, okay, so I dial him up. I say, hey, Jimmy, I got your brother on the phone here. talk to him, he says it's okay for you to talk to me.

Tyson did. So, like, that's what I remember of our second conversation. And what happened functionally, journalistically, people would call Kiki, his wife, and say, hey, this guy Kregel's calling me, is it okay to speak? And, you know, she would say, yeah, at least as far as I know. And some people, she would say, yeah, They still wanted like money.

I said, hey, I mean, I can't help you. But that's essentially how it worked. The book ends with Tyson fighting Michael Spinks in 1988. He's the heavyweight champion of the world. He's 21 years old, which is amazing in retrospect. Why end the book there? Is you ready for it? I don't mean to give you another penny as long answer.

I love it. Let's go. So I had a project I've been working on. in like Dubai, it fell apart. I owed the publisher, I owed Penguin money on another biography. And then I got this ESPN gig. And the subject, to put it mildly, was, became a real pain in the ass. I didn't like something that he told me he would speak to me, at least

face to face about whether or not he cooperated and I got an entirely different message after the fact. That book died. I owed the money. Take the money back, please, because I had this ESPN gig and I was in an airplane every day. They wouldn't, no, we'll find something for you. I tried a novel again. It didn't work out.

This thing in Dubai didn't work out. I fly back from Dubai. I go to the gym. I shear my hamstring. It really fucking hurt. Can I curse? Sure. I mean, it's like, and I'm more than a little medicated.

And now the publisher's like, okay, we want the money back now. Great, take it. I don't, like, unless, like, would you consider doing Tyson? And I'm thinking, like, of which body parts I'd rather, like, impale than do a full Tyson biography. And I think what the publisher was reacting to some months before, he bought Roy Jones, and they realized that, holy shit, he's still a commercial touchstone. So I say, like, no way, I don't want to do Tyson. Like, I don't want to go back to that shit. A friend of mine who was working with me on something else, he goes, what are you kidding me?

Like, your job is a writer. Your duty is to never, ever give money. back. I'm like, watch me. He goes, you could do this book off the top of your head. Bullshit, there's no way. And then he mentioned, this is really peculiar, this book on Princess Margaret. I don't really give a shit about Princess Margaret, okay? But it's called 99 glimpses of Princess Margaret, in which she's explained sort of anecdotally. It's a gorgeous book. After reading it, I care about everything in Princess Margaret. It was so well done. So I call the editor back. I said, can I, could I write this book as a kind of essay?

Because I had this story about when I really meet Tyson for the first time years later, and he becomes human to me. It was in preview of his one-man show in Vegas. He goes, yeah, sure, whatever you want. But because one of the peculiarities about writing about Tyson is that there's just so much, stuff, there's so much story. There's this phrase in television that

television just burns story might create story. It's just one thing after another, after another, and you open this door, you've got four more doors to go, and it's nuts. So this this like slender, elegant essay

book that I imagine, you know, a couple years later, I'm sitting down the editor and he goes, oh, I'm really happy with it. I said, I'm really glad you're happy with it. You know, I got 80,000 words, and he's 16 years old. He goes, oh, well, is there a place you can, is there a natural breakpoint? Can you make it a two-volume?

The same thing I did. Absolutely fucking, absolutely not. No way, impossible. But I'm thinking about it. Like, what am I going to do? I can't spend another five years on this, on this volume. So there is a natural breaking point. And it is the Spinks fight because it is the highlight of his professional career.

It was a, I guess this is a sort of term of art and boxing, a fight of the century. You wouldn't know it from the result, but it was so hyped. It was so heavy. And I think in a way, it both epitomized the 80s and whatever, the decade of greed or whatever, and anticipated the 90s and the frenzied tabloid culture of the 90s. So you're ending at the Spinks fight, and in the center, there's Tyson, there's Robin, But there's also Trump ascended. So it seemed at that moment the best possible place to end

because it's the highlight of his, again, of his professional career. Is that a long enough answer? It is. And in terms of throwing off story or burning story. So soon to come, shocking loss to Buster Douglas, the rape conviction, the earbite versus Holyfield, him sort of wandering through pop culture, American culture for years and years and years. Are you going to write that as volume two?

If I survive psychiatrically, yes. Yeah, no, I mean, but now that I had some personal insight to because I was running around on it. Like my first, my first Tyson assignment, I was at the Daily News for like, you know, a month or so. And I get a call like four in the morning, like run up to Harlem. He just got into a fight with Mitch Green. Where? Dapper Dan's. I'm like, is that a club? No, it's a clothing store. Just get the hell go. That was my first. And, you know, local news was still heavy then, man. And, you know, Mitch Green coming out, calling him Cicely Tyson and taking off his sunglasses for the cameras. That was like tabloid heaven. A couple weeks later, I get a tip. And I'm like just a schmuck cityside reporter. I get a tip. Like, he tore up the house, his mansion in Bernardsville, where, I mean, like, his neighbor is Malcolm Forbes.

That may not mean anything today, but to me being out that all. Sure. Wow. And then I cover, they turned me into a sports columnist kind of by accident. And I spent like a year covering a case in Brownsville, the death of a cop in Brownsville. So I knew the neighborhood. But he did. I covered his.

extended downfall as a columnist. And he was my designated bad guy. You know, and it was a perfectly reasonable choice. I mean, I remember my instructions. I got one editor, was a great editor, gave me instructions. They gave me this column. I got the column at the bar because the post had bought out all its sports writers.

And I'd written, like, about basketball. And the guy says to me, like, I don't really care if you want to be like a great. writer. I'm glad you want to be like Pete Hamill and all this other shit. But I want red meat. I know what that. And I don't think that's necessarily such a bad journalistic aspiration. I mean, as long as it's honest red meat. I got a different set of instructions from Hamill, which is like after a season, you should have enough material for a novel. It was much, much more nuanced. But through the 90s, he was, yeah, he had a shitty day.

I needed a column. You know, the Knicks were unavailable. I'm sure Tyson did something fucking terrible. And it wasn't until I saw him in preview in this one-man show, which his wife wrote, by the way. I started holding back tears. I feel myself like, I weep easy, but I really really, really. hit me. And it was before, like, Spike Lee went to Broadway. It wasn't polished. It was, it was raw. It was rough. He was jagged. You know, he flubbed some lines. But it was,

it was the real Mike Tyson. And I go back and, um, sit down with him after. I'm running a column for Fox Sports at the time. And I tell him, like, how much bad, how much bad shit I wrote about him and all the rest of it. He's like, yeah, yeah. I think he was like, newly sober and a vegan at this time. And he says, turn to me and he says, well, how'd that make you feel? And I'm like, what? What did it make me feel? It was like, how did they make you feel like that stuff?

I mean, like running around the city, running around chasing him. And when I took it to me, like the heat of a big city competitive story. I was like, wow, I mean, the adrenaline, it was like getting high. You know, it's a high. And he kind of looks at me and he nods, not like nasty, which he was perfectly entitled to, but kind of, you know, recognition like, yeah, who was. And I'm ashamed to say this. But it wasn't until that moment that he became an actual

human being to me in a sympathetic figure. I'm not saying he's entirely a sympathetic figure, but in that moment, like, it was, there was nothing but empathy I had for him. One thing you do in the book is go through sports writing of the 80s and sort of analyze how sports writers

are trying to process Mike Tyson in real time. So put you in this category, since you come along a few years later, start writing about him. What did sports writers miss then that's easier to see now with some distance? Well, the first thing that was missed was cussing the kid. That was the first thing that the myth, that the genesis story of this great old man

and this really smart kid. Tyson has, I mean, to me, even then I knew, like, the sort of racist, stuff in Tyson's story where people called them stupid. It's not a fucking day that ever happened that Tyson was stupid, right? But I think that the press, we caught up in the romance of the story, how irresistibly romantic it was, and they forgot that Cuss cut corners. That if Tyson gets thrown out of school, Cuss gets them a tutor. If, you know, you get some pigeon coops, you get some.

The one word, and I don't think this helped Tyson, the word that Tyson never heard was no. You know, other kids at the dinner table had a strict allotment of food, not Tyson. But again, there's this Faustian bargain at work, and with Cuss, it's not just Faustian, but there's a clock ticking. So Cuss is going to die soon, and he wants to go down. He wants some guarantee of his immortality that finally he's going to have the kid before he goes. And he gets there, but they have to cut corners to do it. There's a scene, and it's not my original reporting. It's Peter Heller, it's boxing a story.

We're talking about, like Cuss is talking about mob guys are going to get Tyson. And Cuss is paranoia, as it was in the 50s. in the 60s was that someone was going to take his kid. Ultimately, it was Don King. But that was the first one that was missed. There was a sense, and this was definitely me in the 90s, that you had to be a tough guy, which was just complete bullshit. Like, you know, you're sort of imitating your heroes,

and especially in New York, there was a... level of asking a question or whatever it was just to show that you had the balls to stand alone, which more often than not was bullshit. That was the big thing that was missed, but that was New York columnists were one thing, and I entered that fray, and I know something about it. I mean, it was certainly more tactile than it is today. You know, I remember sitting at the bar and waiting for the papers to be dumped outside. You could hear the thud when the trucks, and you're cutting open the bundle to see who got scooped,

you know, going back in the bar, ripping it open, oh, look at your column, you got scooped, you sucked, I'm good. It was a visceral competition. Within that, though, and I was not part of this, but the, boxing beat. I mean, look, no papers have box. I don't know how many, any newspapers have boxing writers anymore. But everyone in New York had a boxing writer. And they were all, they were consumed with being the toughest guy on the beat, all of them. And they were each de facto colonists. And some of them really, really talented writers. Mike Katz, who came from the Times to the news.

Phil Berger succeeded him at the Times. Mike Marley, who was good and nuts, but funny as hell, eventually went to work for King. And Wally Matthews, who was, I didn't know this until later, he's a young guy thrown in the mix, but he's like the toughest guy of all. really, to me, very, very swift and good, Wally would go right to the hypocrisy of the situation and, like, go to kill. And he too had this, I got to be a tough guy because I can't show that I'm soft.

The difference with Wally is that Wally had actually fought in the gloves, and there's a scene in there later, and it's germane in that when the Robin Givens camp, mostly through her sister and assistants, but when the Givens camp wants to spread bad stuff about Tyson with like a week to go before the sphinx fight, they go to Wallet. But Wally was interesting in that most of the time you go into a locker room and basically the ballplay is looking at you with at best thinly veiled contempt because you've never done this. What do you know? And Wally had fought in the gloves, like insisted on fighting with a broken jaw,

which is you got to check up for that. But he had some authority with which to speak. And he really was a tough guy and a good writer. She had this crazy, crazy beat, you know, before beats were like politically correct. Mike Marley's famous line, by the way, which was universally admired in the press box, is that, you know, I think he's in Boston. Whatever it is, but, like, you know, he had an all night. episode and he's he's laying there in the street and the cop comes to rouse him like hits him with

the stick like hey come on goes but but officer the curb is my pillow that was a boxing beat legendary legendary but it was that was the that was the boxing beat for decades and decades and like cats i'm out of sequence here as it tell me to shut up but i mean cats who i love was an incredibly graceful, beautiful writer, especially at the times. He comes over the news to be a columnist. My personal opinion, and I love cats, I used to drive him to the picket line. He was so cantankerous.

I said, why, you know, eight months have gone by, we haven't gotten paid. He looks up at the building, the Daily News Building, points in his cane, I wouldn't give those sons of bitches the satisfaction. But Katz had like a neck brace of cane. He was physically a mess, but I love it. I loved him.

It was an acquired taste. But I remember when Tyson loses to Holyfield, and the relationship between the Tyson camp, particularly John Horn, and the press, by that time, whatever the first Holyfield fight was, 96, 96, 96. It was so nasty. So Tyson loses and cats, and he's pissed off him because I'm smoking. He's in, he's in reformed everything. But he's pissed off the whole time. Tyson loses. He gets up.

He takes off the neck brace, throws a neck brace down, throws the cane down. He goes, thank you, God. I can see. I can walk. I'm healed. And everyone, of course, and everyone claps for him. That's how great the press relations were between the Tyson camp and the objective press corps. Let's talk about Mike Tyson now here in 2025, because we were speaking in the time of the Me Too movement.

As I said, he was convicted of rape in 1992, at least as of that James Toback documentary in 2008, he was not contrite or anything close to contrite. Why is he still a beloved national figure? There's another layer actually to it, which is, I guess, the Toback doc, what did you say, 2008? he's had a whole other he's had a whole other life since then I think that when when Tobac filmed the dock he's still in rehab and I don't know what the ethics are of like

you know shooting a guy who's you know spending his debt you know but he's he's in full on rehab trying to get clean from Coke, booze all sorts of stuff and it's the years it's the years since where

he has become, and I don't have a clean answer for you, I have a couple of, my interpretation is that he's pretty close to universally beloved. The other component is he's become an avatar of broculture. I think there are a bunch of factors at play. Number one, he did his time for the rape conviction, whatever. So I think there's a sense there that it's old news. As far as the Me Too, why he's beloved in the era of Me Too, that's an anomaly that's something peculiar to him. I think that some of it actually has to do with him.

I think that the hangover, the movie started to reshape the idea. of him that there was something comic. And there is. I mean, he has, sometimes he means it, sometimes he doesn't. Inpeccable comic timing. And you go back to where you began, you began, the voice. Like, sometimes you look at Mike and you're like, you don't know if, is he going to tear my head off or is he going to give me a kiss? And it could be either one.

I think that he is an empathetic guy that comes through. but ultimately I believe that there is a sense that I couldn't judge him the same way I judged him as a 32-year-old young, full of myself columnist. I'm 62, I've had my ass kicked on any number of fronts. I'm a better judge of character and less puritanical. But I think you judge him by what he survived. So, you know, the mom dying early, but she was broken. No real dad to speak of.

He survived boxing, which if I could, we'll get to later. And boxing is not a little thing to survive. Booze, coke, molestation as a child, juvenile incarceration, adult incarceration, the death of a child, boxing, I guess that's twinned up with Don King and other stuff, I would go so far as to argue, remember, the one thing that people like me who are always like dumping on him and people who loved him, and Tyson himself, the one thing everyone could agree on is he ain't long for this world. He ain't going to see 30, he ain't going to see 40, he ain't going to see 50. When I met him that day after the show,

Could you ever imagine, I think it was 45, could you ever imagine being 45? No, I never, no way. So I think that there's virtue itself in having survived. Also, I mean, and I don't know if people see the glimpse of this, but he's actually, he's a really good dad. I mean, it was a different book when I started it, but it begins with a portrait of him watching his kid play tennis in fucking Orange County. and there's no way you couldn't have done enough drugs. You could be Hunter Thompson ten times over and not have imagined this is the destination for Mike Tyson. In Orange County of all places, watching his kid play tennis, man.

So I think those factors have conspired. or gathered to make him a sympathetic figure. The other thing, what's always been the case, and you see it with Jake Paul, you see it with Netflix, and it's as clear as it was with HBO, is there's a great economic imperative because of the same reasons that we went through probably too long in the beginning that created this attraction, all these disparate factors that went into making. making Mike Tyson the most potent commercial force in the history of combat sports. Also make you want to like him.

By the way, I think that the wrestling, his stint as a wrestler in 98 when he's suspended, I think that helps too. And that sort of humanized him, and that's a full of decade. before the hangover or the towback dock. By bringing him to a no audience, a sympathetic audience, perhaps. Yeah, no one's love as much as a heel. And Tyson was supposed to be the scariest MF there was.

That's why the WWE or WWF at that time cut this deal. And the, like the WCW had signed Dennis Rodman. You go, yeah, you want Dennis Rodman? Look what we're going to do. And there was, of course, a great outcry from all the moralists and boxing, including myself. But it was a great, it was a great move at a really crucial juncture for the WWE. And the thing about Tyson, the thing about being a heel is that he naturally did it perfectly, which is, yeah, he was the scary guy, but he did it with a wink. He did it with a wink. And that, you know, I'm sure he didn't prepare for that. That came natural to him. And I think it still does. It's a great way to put it.

Let's circle around to boxing, because you mentioned boxing and what it does to people. Going back to the 90s, why are you drawn again and again to writing about fighters? I love covering cops and organized crime. This is my sort of post-adolescent conceit. When I started really writing about New York, I thought that I wanted to be, I wanted to refashion the murder-incorporated story as like a fable of the 80s.

Whatever. I mean, beware of, like, young guy with ambition. And I got, they gave me the sports column, because I was alleged to know something about basketball. It's debatable. But fucking boxing. I love covering organized crime. It was great.

I couldn't stand. Like, I didn't want to be a sports columnist. I didn't want to cover the fucking Mets unless, and Jeff Torbork. But boxing was like, it was like organized crime meets show business. It was great.

It was spectacular. Everything I wanted in terms of material, fame and masculinity, the characters like go up and down there, like they ride these parabolas between, like wrestling,

but in real life, ecstasy and humiliation. And they just swerve between these huge, you know, there were other elements that in boxing you had trainers. And even if the fighter wasn't articulate, the trainers, like cuss, was your guide into the soul. And as a writer, that's a huge advantage. And I'm not joking when I say,

Like, boxing made me like a little bit better writer than I actually am. Maybe a lot. But I kept, became atomic. I didn't want to write about the Jets. I mean, I know the Jets. I know the Jets are going to fuck it up in the playoffs or right before. I was a Jets fan. But boxing was completely seductive.

The first heavyweight fight I cover was Bo Holyfield 1. And I'm ringside and I'm watching this thing. And I remember like this globule of like sweat or Vaseline flying off of Vander and Riddick Boe and the lights. And I felt at home, oh, shit, this is what they're talking about. And my dad was a professor of, my dad was essentially a professor of male American literature, okay, for a better term. and he had all this like Norman Mailer on his desk, before like Norman Mailer became an object of ridicule and out of fashion. And there was stuff on his desk that I appropriated for myself

that became really important to me as I was trying to learn how to write a column. One of them was this, it's from the presidential papers. I think it's an Esquire piece on Patterson. listen and he talks about the press and the mafia and cuss and jimmy and i just and i loved it i found in love with it and then there was a collection a collection on his desk called reading the fights and it was uh elid by joyce carolots and david halpern but it had stuff in there it had hugh mackle vannies great piece onward virgin soldier about the death of Johnny Owen against Luke, we fought Lupe Pintour in 80 out here in LA.

And Johnny Owen is a kid from Wales and he dies a virgin. And it had Pete Hamill's up the stairs with Custamato that ran in the voice, which is, that's the New York I wanted to live in. That's the kind of writer I wanted to be. Now, I mean, I'm sort of adolescent, I'm posing, I'm posturing, but wow, that's, That's the stuff I want to do. So that's how I wound up in boxing. And after a while, I don't want to cover, okay, I'll cover the jets.

I'll cover the, you know, I was always feuding with the Knicks, but the boxing stuff I loved. And, of course, boxing is the sport that has consistently devalued and diminished itself, you know. But one thing I'll say about boxing, it's always, you're always at the end of boxing. And it's not just me either. If you consider, if you consider boxing's place as a sport, which is like, you know, way down here, it doesn't warrant a comparison with the NFL or the NBA or probably at this point to WMBA. But if you look at where boxing's place as a sport is versus boxing literature. and certainly versus boxing cinema. So it might not work for the fighters,

but it definitely works for the writers. Let's end with an old boxing story. I think that's appropriate. It's one of the things in this book that made me, I don't know if smile is the right word, but I think I wrote a few exclamation points in the margin of my copy here. Mike Tyson was fascinated with an old fighter named Artie Diamond

who died in the 1970s. How does Artie Diamond help us understand Mike Tyson? Jason. How's that for a setup? Wow, Artie Diamond. I'm most proud that I found a guy that served the time with Artie Diamond. It's a long wind-up. It really, the Artie Diamond story, when this was going to be a one-volume biography,

Artie Diamond was intended to connect to the Holyfield fight, as was there's some passages with Lennox Lewis that would... So I was close with Teddy Atlas in the 90s. He was a really extraordinary guy, even though he hated Tyson. He was an extraordinary guide about cuss and the kind of almost the theology of fear. He's probably more articulate about it and more strident about things than cuss himself. But if I heard like once from Teddy about Artie Diamond, it might have been 20 times. And I knew the circles that I traveled in journalistically, like Jose Torres, who was a writer and later commissioner of the New York State Athletic Commission, Pete Hamill, all those guys.

There's an Artie Diamond scene and a Pete Hamill novel, by the way. But Artie was like a central story for the kids at Catskill, which is, you know, you go to sleepaway camp, you get like one kind of bedtime story. You go to Catskill with Cuss, you get the Artie Diamond story. So, per cuss, Artie Diamond is, Artie Diamond is the one fighter who is not scared. And supposedly he would growl on his way into the ring and not a great fighter, but a big hitter. And he's getting punchy. And the guy I know the time with him says, you know, Cuss felt guilty. But apparently, Arty was Cuss's favorite fighter for a time.

Now, mind you, Tyson has, again, a Talmudic understanding of fighters. He loves fighters. He would carry Edwin Rosario's spit bucket. He wept when Mark Rilin lost his title. I think that in the absence of a real family, fighters, dead and alive are Mike's family. But the Arty thing is big. All these kids heard the Artie story. already stops fighting, becomes a stick-up guy, gets sent away.

I don't know if it's Attica or Green Haven, but it's one of those places. And a Jewish guy from the Bronx, and his first day of the yard, the big convict comes up to him. And it's always, always, and there's an inside sports piece written by a lot of Jose Torres and I think 82, the toughest SOB who ever lived. So the racial trope, I don't think, is incidental to this, but the big black guy comes up to Artie Diamond in the yard, and he's supposed to represent like your fear. It sounds like a pretty scary guy, tells Artie, listen, you can have anything you want in this prison, anything you want. But, you know, you're going to be my wife. So Artie goes, okay, leans in.

in and think like, like, what, you can hug, kiss? Like, what would you think that Artie Diamond does? He bites his ear off and spits it out quite theatrically. Now, remember something in boxing, there are really three protagonists in every fight. It's you, it's the other guy or the other woman, and the audience. And what Artie Diamond did was not just de-masculate, but defang the bully in front of everyone else. So this, this, story was repeated again and again and again for all the kids in Catskill. But Artie Diamond within that story is behaving ethically because he's standing up to the bully. And when I was going through Tyson's second autobiography, there it is right there, the Artie Diamond story.

and pretty told in pretty prominent fashion as it would have been when he was a kid in Cats go. My argument is that when Tyson feels closed in in the second fight against the Vanderholyfield, you know, whether Avander's budding him or not, I mean, Vander's budding him, but, you know, Mike wasn't helpless in the ring either. All of a sudden, to me, he reverts to that. He becomes Ardy. I'm not saying it's savage artie. I'm saying in this very peculiar way, it's a righteous artie.

Maybe I'm making a distinction that it shouldn't be made, but there's your Artie Diamond story. And it was written, Jose Torres, who was, you know, full on in the Custamato entourage and Doring, of Cuss, wrote this in the 1982 somewhere inside sports, toughest S.O.B. So he was immortalized. That's my already diamond story. Mark Kregel, the book is Baddest Man, The Making of Mike Tyson. Tice. I tried to say it without sounding like Michael Buffer. Mark, thanks for coming on the press box.

It was my pleasure, Brian. All right. It's time for a man who needs no introduction from Michael Buffer or other. It's time for David Shoemaker, guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Last Monday's headline about a lake that suddenly filled with birds was, we are not aloon. So bad.

Today's headline comes to us from alert listener Charles G. Snoddy the second. That's the fakesh name I've ever heard. I believe it is a gentleman's real name because I'm sending him a button. So hopefully it gets through. Was that the Jefferson's neighbor, the British one? No, I'm sorry. Yeah. It's from Reuters.

You saw when Elon Musk had his farewell event in the Oval Office, that he had a black eye. And he said, my five-year-old son, X, punched me, which is about as relatable as Elon has ever been to somebody like you or me who was a dad of young kids. I told that story on here, right? When Aubrey punched me on the way out of a family cookout, it was like late at night. He was up way past his bedtime. He's probably three or four at the time, whatever, and just, I mean, he's punched me like three times in his life. life. And just as I was carrying him, just clocked me straight in the bridge of the nose, into the bridge of my glasses. And just the wonders of physics just busted me wide open.

So I'm like looking, I'm staring at him like, how could you have done that? Just the silent, you know, look of shock. They really drive the point home without doing anything without realizing that I've now blood pouring down my face. And he just starts crying. He's just scared out of his mind. I think I'm doing the stare down really well, you know, like whatever. And it's apparently, I'm just bleeding profusely. So yeah, anyway. Aubrey gave you some color. Yeah, he did. He did. That's what, you know, blood red turns dollar green, man. All right. Elon Black Eye from his son, X.

What was Reuters strained upon headline? Oh, that's the whole subject of it? That's it. Black eye, black, uh, uh, uh, the son's name in particular. X, X marks the spot. X marks the spot, baby. There we go. He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis. but I'm so magic. One last time by Bobby Wagner. Coming up a Thursday on the podcast, Joel Anderson and I are going to do our thing.

And then we're going to have another installment of 25 for 25. Noah Eagle, who's going to be calling NBA games or NBC next year. He's going to talk to us about that and the future of play-by-play. It's going to be great counter-programming to the NBA finals, which start on Thursday. Shoemaker, I'll see you next Monday for more lukewarm takes about the media. Talk to you then. See you then, Brian. Thank you.