MIKE VS. TYSON

A new drama about the most famous fighter alive ends up playing patty-cake with the past.

- Brin-Jonathan Butler

Before writing that “there are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald should have met Mike Tyson.

Almost 40 years after beginning a boxing career in which he became both the youngest heavyweight champion and the victim of the biggest upset in history, earned and lost more than half a billion dollars, and served a three-year sentence for a rape conviction, Tyson’s celebrity has hardly dimmed. Despite our nation’s limited attention span, “Iron Mike” remains one of the most famous faces on the planet.

His life story is the basis of Undisputed Truth, a critically acclaimed one-man Broadway show that became a Spike Lee-directed HBO special and finally a bestselling memoir. There are numerous documentaries, including the James Toback-directed Tyson (2008) and Barbara Kopple’s Fallen Champ (1993), now part of the Criterion Collection. He has a hit podcast, Hotboxin’, where he hosts celebrities such as Joe Rogan and Kevin Hart. He even wrote and co-executive-produced an animated mystery series that aired from 2014 to 2020.

Tyson’s popularity remains so extraordinary that two years ago, at age 54, he “fought” 51-year-old boxing legend Roy Jones Jr. in a pay-per-view exhibition that resembled a game of geriatric tag. Not only was it the highest-grossing PPV in all of boxing in 2020, consumer satisfaction afterward was overwhelmingly positive.

Now, Walt Disney Co. takes a swing at the story. Steven Rogers, who wrote the celebrated Tonya Harding biopic, I,  Tonya, has created Mike, a just-released Hulu docudrama series.