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‘You can’t even believe it’: Mike Tyson’s reinvention as a cannabis heavyweight
By Ashley Southall
On a recent weekend, Mike Tyson fans lined up by the hundreds at dispensaries in New York for a chance to meet one of the greatest boxers ever and to support his latest business move: selling weed in his home state.
With the recent release of his Tyson 2.0 line, Tyson, 57, has become the most visible newcomer of the celebrity wave in the state’s cannabis industry. Although actors, athletes and musicians have been cashing in on weed with product lines and endorsement deals over the past decade as legalisation has swept the United States, the tide is just rising in New York. And Tyson is one of the biggest names yet to test how far fame can carry a brand in a market that is shaping up to be one of the largest and most competitive in the world.
Mike Tyson greets fans at an event trumpeting his Tyson 2.0 cannabis line.Credit: NYT
At the Conbud dispensary on the Lower East Side, he greeted fans with handshakes and hugs as they bought from a selection of smokable flower packaged with names such as Tiger Mintz and Knockout OG. He playfully barked as he posed with a dog named Dottie and her owner, and he complimented a woman who, against the advice of her sons, wore a “Chrithmith” shirt making light of his lisp.
Within a few hours, the pair of dispensaries that introduced his cannabis brand to New York had sold more than $40,000 ($61,000) of his flower and expanded their foothold in a market dominated by unlicensed competitors. And that was without the popular gummies shaped to look like Evander Holyfield’s ear, which Tyson infamously bit during a 1997 bout — one of only six fights that he lost.
“The cannabis is just doing incredible,” Tyson said. “You can’t even believe it.”
Tyson, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, joined other New Yorkers banking on their local bona fides. They include Method Man, a member of the influential hip-hop collective known as the Wu-Tang Clan, and Abby Rockefeller, an ecologist and the scion of one of the most powerful families in America. Rockefeller is among the biggest investors in Hudson Cannabis, the producer that grows Tyson’s weed on her farm in the Hudson Valley.
Fans surround Tyson, who is trying to break into the New York market.Credit: NYT
Cannabis brands backed by big names have drawn mixed reception. Although they tend to outsell traditional brands, they cannot compete with the biggest brands that are selling millions of dollars of weed each month. In California, the nation’s largest market, just nine of the 30 bestselling brands are owned or backed by celebrities, including Tyson 2.0, Houseplant by actor Seth Rogen and Mirayo by musician Carlos Santana, according to Headset, a data firm specialising in cannabis.
Mitchell Laferla, one of the firm’s analysts, said that what ultimately drives consumers in newer markets such as New York is value, and that’s where celebrity brands struggle. The consumers who are the biggest spenders are looking for the highest potency at the lowest price, and celebrity brands vary in quality while generally carrying a higher price tag. In California, the average cost of a typical 3.5-gram bag of flower is around $23.14, while Tyson 2.0 sells for about $28.44, a 23 per cent difference.
Tyson 2.0’s success can be credited to Tyson’s hands-on approach to customers and his company, the business’s aggressive expansion into new markets such as New York and Maryland, and its product quality, Laferla said.
“Your name may get someone to try it once,” he said. “But your brand and the quality of your product is what’s going to get people coming back.”
Mike Tyson cutouts at the Conbud cannabis dispensary.Credit: NYT
Yuvraj Singh, president and chief executive of Strain Stars on Long Island, said customers were already returning for Tyson’s weed. His customers bought $30,000 of Tyson 2.0 flower on the first day of sales, and the cannabis line is already one of the store’s five bestsellers.
Coss Marte, co-owner and chief executive of Conbud, said his dispensary has also had repeat customers after selling $10,000 of Tyson 2.0 in an hour, roughly as much as the dispensary typically makes in a day.
Tyson has emphasised the therapeutic role of cannabis in his transformation from a brash boxing champion to a disciplined business owner. Less than 10 years ago, he said in an interview, he was broke and struggling with a cocaine addiction. Now, he owns one of the most successful celebrity cannabis brands in the country.
He said his goal is to solidify his legacy as a trailblazer in cannabis. “That’s more important to me than making money,” he said.
Moneefa Jones Tucker, buys some of Tyson’s new 2.0 cannabis line.Credit: NYT
Tyson was born poor in Brooklyn before he discovered a talent for boxing at a reform school upstate. He quickly became a teenage phenomenon and ultimately won 50 of his professional bouts, mostly by knockout.
But his reputation was sullied by his antics in the ring, including biting Holyfield’s ear, and legal troubles, including a three-year stint in prison for a rape that he still denies. He revealed his cocaine addiction in 2014, and has credited cannabis with helping him to get clean. He now lives in Las Vegas and owns a cannabis ranch in California.
His personal narrative appeals to many of his fans, who seem eager to support him. “He’s had a hard time, and I resonate with that,” said Tony Pedroza, 26, a boxing fan from Brooklyn who lined up to see Tyson in Manhattan.
Kristina Lopez, co-founder and chief executive of House of Puff, an artistic accessories brand, said celebrities can have an effect in cannabis far beyond the cash register as “secret weapons” in the fight to legalise and normalise cannabis use.
A package of Mike Bites from Tyson’s 2.0 cannabis line.Credit: NYT
Rapper Jay-Z, for instance, has helped the public to reimagine cannabis as part of a life well lived with Monogram, his line of luxury weed, she said. And Cynthia Nixon, an actor most famous for her role on Sex and the City, was a quintessential force in promoting legalisation as a racial justice issue during her primary campaign against former governor Andrew Cuomo in 2018.
“Their real power isn’t just in sales figures,” Lopez said. “It’s in how they can change the game about what people think about cannabis, and influence market dynamics, and even potentially influence legislation.”
Even high-profile politicians have joined the industry as advisers, investors and lobbyists. In 2018, John Boehner, the Ohio Republican who once served as speaker of the US House of Representatives, joined the board of Acreage Holdings, a multistate cannabis company with four medical dispensaries in New York. Boehner, who was firmly against legalising cannabis during his 12 terms in Congress, has said it was time for a shift in federal policy. (At the time, such a change would have netted him a $20 million payday.)
It was the opportunity to raise awareness about how the criminalisation of marijuana fuelled racial inequality that drew Fred Brathwaite, better known as Fab 5 Freddy, to the industry. In the 1980s, he was a street artist who counted Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol as friends, and he later became the host of Yo! MTV Raps, a popular cable show that took hip-hop from the streets and broadcast it into millions of American households.
Now, he is co-owner and chief executive of B Noble, a weed brand named after Bernard Noble. Noble, who is Black, became a national symbol of the nation’s draconian drug laws after he was sentenced to 13 years in prison in Louisiana over the equivalent of two joints.
B Noble, created in partnership with Curaleaf, the largest cannabis company in the country, sells weed packaged as a pair of prerolled joints in a nod to Noble’s arrest. Ten per cent of the profits go to organisations serving people who are reentering society from prison. Brathwaite said the company has donated $400,000 so far.
“This is how I think more people should function,” he said. “It could make the world a better place, as trite as that sounds.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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