Читать книгу Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography - Mike Tyson - Страница 7

The fact that they were sending me up to the state reformatory was not cool. I was with the big boys now. They were more hard-core than the guys at Spofford. But Tryon wasn’t a bad place. There were a lot of cottages there, and you could walk outside, play basketball, walk to the gym. But I got in trouble right away. I was just angry all the time. I had a bad attitude. I’d be confrontational and let everyone know that I was from Brooklyn and I didn’t fuck around with any bullshit.

I was going to one of my classes one day when this guy walked by me in the hall. He was acting all tough, like he was a killer, and when he passed by, he saw that I was holding my hat in my hand. So he started pulling on it and kept walking. I didn’t know him, but he disrespected me. I sat in the class for the next whole forty-five minutes thinking about how I was going to kill this guy for tugging on my hat. When the class was over, I walked out and saw him and his friends at the door.

That’s your man, Mike, I thought. I walked up to him and he had his hands in his pockets, looking at me as if he had no worries in the world; like I forgot that he had pulled my hat forty-five minutes ago. So I attacked him rather ferociously.

They handcuffed me and sent me to Elmwood, which was a lockdown cottage for the incorrigible kids. Elmwood was creepy. They had big tough-ass redneck staff members over there. Every time you saw somebody from there, they were walking in handcuffs with two people escorting them.

On the weekends, all the kids from Elmwood who earned credits would go away for a few hours and then come back with broken noses, cracked teeth, busted mouths, bruised ribs – they were all jacked up. I just thought they were getting beat up by the staff, because back then nobody would call the Health Department or Social Services if the staff were hurting the kids. But the more I talked to these hurt guys, the more I realized they were happy.

“Yeah, man, we almost got him, we almost got him,” they laughed. I had no idea what they were talking about and then they told me. They were boxing Mr. Stewart, one of the counselors. Bobby Stewart was a tough Irish guy, around 170 pounds, who had been a ­professional boxer. He was a national amateur champ. When I was in the hole, staff members told me there was an ex-boxing champ teaching kids how to box. The staff members that told me about him were very nice to me and I wanted to meet him because I thought he’d be nice too.

I was in my room one night when there was a loud, intimidating knock on the door. I opened the door and it was Mr. Stewart.

“Hey, asshole, I heard you want to talk to me,” he growled.

“I want to be a fighter,” I said.

“So do the rest of the guys. But they don’t have the balls to work to be a fighter,” he said. “Maybe if you straighten up your act and stop being such an asshole and show some respect around here, I’ll work with you.”

So I really started to apply myself. I think I’m the stupidest guy in the world when it comes to scholastics, but I got my honor-roll star and I said “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” to everyone, just being a model citizen so I could go over to fight with Stewart. It took me a month, but I finally earned enough credits to go. All the other kids came to watch to see if I could kick his ass. I was supremely confident that I was going to demolish him and that everyone would suck up to me.

I immediately started flailing and throwing a bunch of punches and he covered up. I’m punching him and slugging him and then suddenly he slips by me and goes boom and hits me right in the stomach.

“Boosh. Uggghhh, uggghhh.” I threw up everything I had eaten for the last two years. What the fuck was that? I was thinking. I didn’t know anything about boxing then. Now I know that if you get hit in the stomach, you’re just going to lose your breath for a couple of seconds, but it comes back. I didn’t know that then. I really thought that I wouldn’t be able to ever breathe again and I’d die. I was trying desperately to breathe but all I could do was throw up. It was just ­horrible shit.

“Get up, walk it off,” he barked.

After everyone left, I approached him real humble. “Excuse me, sir, can you teach me how to do that?” I asked. I’m thinking that when I go back to Brownsville and hit a motherfucker in the stomach like that, he’s going to go down and I’m going to go in his pockets. That’s where my mind was at back then. He must have seen something in me that he liked, because after our second session he said to me, “Would you like to do this for real?” So we started training regularly. And after our workouts, I’d go back to my room and shadowbox all night long. I started to get a lot better. I didn’t know it at the time, but during one of our sparring sessions I hit Bobby with a jab and broke his nose and almost knocked him down. He had the next week off, so he just let it heal at home.

After a few months of workouts, I called my mother and put Bobby on the phone with her. “Tell her, tell her,” I said. I wanted him to tell her how good I was doing. I just wanted her to know I could do something. I figured she might believe me if a white person was telling her it. But she just told him that she had trouble believing that I had changed. She just thought I was incorrigible.

Shortly after that Bobby came to me with an idea. “I want to bring you to see this legendary boxing trainer Cus D’Amato. He can take you to the next level.”

“What the heck is going on here?” I asked. I didn’t trust anybody but Bobby Stewart at that particular time. Now he was going to transfer me over to another person?

“Just trust this man,” he told me.

So one weekend in March of 1980, Bobby and I drove to Catskill, New York. Cus’s gym was a converted meeting hall that was above the town police station. There were no windows so they had some old-fashioned lamps to provide light. I noticed there were posters on the walls and clippings of some of the local boys who were doing well.

Cus looked exactly like what you’d envision a hard-boiled boxing trainer to look like. He was short and stout with a bald head and you could see that he was strong. He even talked tough and he was dead serious; there wasn’t a happy muscle in his face.

“How you doin’, I’m Cus,” he introduced himself. He had a strong Bronx accent. He was with a younger trainer named Teddy Atlas.

Bobby and I got in the ring and started sparring. I started out strong, really knocking Bobby around the ring. We would usually do three rounds, but in the middle of the second round Bobby hit me in the nose with a couple of rights and I started bleeding. It didn’t really hurt but the blood was all over my face.

“That’s enough,” Atlas said.

“But, sir, please let me finish this round and go one more round. That’s what we normally do,” I pleaded. I wanted to impress Cus.

I guess I had. When we got out of the ring, Cus’s first words to Bobby were, “That’s the heavyweight champion of the world.”

Right after that sparring session, we went to Cus’s house for lunch. He lived in a big white Victorian house on ten acres. You could see the Hudson River from the porch. There were towering maple trees and large rosebushes on the side of the house. I had never seen a house like that in my life.

We sat down and Cus told me he couldn’t believe I was only thirteen years old. And then he told me what my future would be. He had seen me spar for not even six minutes, but he said it in a way that was like law.

“You looked splendid,” he said. “You’re a great fighter.” It was compliment after compliment. “If you listen to me, I can make you the youngest heavyweight champion of all time.”

Fuck, how could he know that shit? I thought he was a pervert. In the world I came from, people do shit like that when they want to perv out on you. I didn’t know what to say. I had never heard anyone say nice things about me before. I wanted to stay around this old guy because I liked the way he made me feel. I’d later realize that this was Cus’s psychology. You give a weak man some strength and he becomes addicted.

I was excited on the ride back to Tryon. I was sitting with a bunch of Cus’s roses in my lap. I had never seen roses in person before, only on television, but I wanted some because they looked so exquisite. I wanted to have something nice to take back with me so I asked him if I could take some. Between the smell of the roses and Cus’s words ringing in my ears, I felt good, like my whole world had changed. In that one moment, I knew I was going to be somebody.

“I think he likes you,” Bobby said. “If you’re not a prick and an asshole, this will go well.” I could tell Bobby was happy for me.

I got back to my cottage and put the roses in water. Cus had given me a huge boxing encyclopedia to look at and I didn’t sleep that whole night, I just read the whole book. I read about Benny Leonard and Harry Greb and Jack Johnson. I got turned out real bad. I wanted to be like those guys; they looked like they had no rules. They worked hard, but on their downtime they just lounged and people came to them like they were gods.

I started going out to Cus’s house every weekend to work out. I’d work with Teddy in the gym and then I’d stay over at Cus’s house. There were a few other fighters living there with Cus and his companion, a sweet Ukrainian lady named Camille Ewald. When I first got to the house, I would steal money from Teddy’s wallet. Hey, that shit doesn’t go away just because you got some good shit going on. I had to get money for weed. I would hear Teddy tell Cus, “It has to be him.”

“It’s not him,” Cus said.

I was excited about the boxing, but I became certain that boxing was what I wanted to do with my life after I watched the first Leonard-Duran fight on TV at Cus’s house one weekend. Wow, that fight turned me out, it was so exciting. They were both so stylish and deadly, throwing punches so fast. It looked choreographed, like the two of them were acting. I was just amazed. I’ve never felt that feeling again.

When I first started going to Cus’s, he didn’t even let me box. After I finished my workout with Teddy, Cus would sit down with me and we’d talk. He’d talk about my feelings and emotions and about the psychology of boxing. He wanted to reach me at the root. We talked a lot about the spiritual aspects of the game. “If you don’t have the spiritual warrior in you, you’ll never be a fighter. I don’t care how big or strong you are,” he told me. We talked about pretty abstract concepts, but he was getting through to me. Cus knew how to talk my language. He had grown up in tough neighborhoods and he had been a street kid too.

The first thing Cus talked about was fear and how to overcome it.

“Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you. Like a snowball on a hill, you can pick it up and throw it or do anything you want with it before it starts rolling down, but once it rolls down and gets so big, it’ll crush you to death. So one must never allow fear to develop and build up without having control over it, because if you don’t you won’t be able to achieve your objective or save your life.

“Consider a deer crossing an open field. On approaching the forest, suddenly instinct tells it there’s danger there, might be a mountain lion there. Once this happens nature begins its survival function where the adrenal glands inject into the bloodstream, causes the heart to beat faster, which in turn enables the body to perform extraordinary feats of agility and strength. Where normally the deer can leap fifteen feet, the adrenaline enables the first leap to be forty or fifty feet, enough to escape from the present danger. The human being is no different. When confronted with a situation of fear of getting hurt or intimidation, the adrenaline speeds up the heart. Under the influence of adrenal glands people can perform extraordinary feats of strength.

“You think you know the difference between a hero and a coward, Mike? Well, there is no difference between a hero and a coward in what they feel. It’s what they do that makes them different. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same but you have to have the discipline to do what a hero does and to keep yourself from doing what the coward does.

“Your mind is not your friend, Mike. I hope you know that. You have to fight with your mind, control it, put it in its place. You have to control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is ninety percent psychological. It’s just the excuse of a man who wants to quit. The night ­before a fight, you won’t sleep. Don’t worry, the other guy didn’t either. You’ll go to the weigh-in, he’ll look much bigger than you and calmer, like ice, but he’s burning up with fear inside. Your imagination is going to credit him with abilities he doesn’t have. Remember, motion relieves tension. The moment the bell rings, and you come in contact with each other, suddenly your opponent seems like everybody else, because now your imagination has dissipated. The fight itself is the only reality that matters. You have to learn to impose your will and take control over that reality.”

I could listen to Cus for hours. And I did. Cus talked to me about the importance of acting intuitively and impersonally and in a relaxed manner so as to keep all my emotions and feelings from blocking what I intuitively knew. He told me that he was talking about that once with the great writer Norman Mailer.

“Cus, you don’t know it but you practice Zen,” Mailer had told Cus, and then he gave him a book called Zen in the Art of Archery. Cus used to read that book to me. He told me that he had actually experienced the ultimate in emotional detachment in his first fight. He was training in a gym in the city because he wanted to be a professional fighter. He had been hitting the heavy bag for a week or two when the manager asked him if he wanted to box with someone. He got in the ring and his heart was beating like a drum, and the bell rang and the other guy charged him and he got knocked around. His nose was swollen, his eye was shut, he was bleeding. The guy asked him if he wanted to go a second round and Cus said he’d try. He went out there and suddenly his mind became detached from his body. He was watching himself from afar. The punches that hit him felt like they were coming from a distance. He was more aware of them than feeling them.

Cus told me that to be a great fighter you had to get out of your head. He would have me sit down and he’d say, “Transcend. Focus. Relax until you see yourself looking at yourself. Tell me when you get there.” That was very important for me. I’m way too emotional in general. Later on I realized that if I didn’t separate from my feelings inside the ring, I would be sunk. I might hit a guy with a hard punch and then get scared if he didn’t go down.

Cus took this out-of-body experience one step further. He would separate his mind from his body and then visualize the future. “Everything gets calm and I’m outside watching myself,” he told me. “It’s me, but it’s not me, as if my mind and my body aren’t connected, but they are connected. I get a picture in my mind, what it’s going to be. I can actually see the picture, like a screen. I can take a fighter who is just beginning and I can see exactly how he will respond. When that happens, I can watch a guy fight and I know everything there is to know about this guy, I can actually see the wheels in his head. It’s as if I’m that guy, I’m inside him.”

He even claimed that he could control events using his mind. Cus trained Rocky Graziano when he was an amateur. One time, Cus was in Rocky’s corner and Rocky was taking a beating. After being knocked down twice, Rocky came back to the corner and wanted to quit. But Cus pushed him out for the next round, and before Rocky could quit, Cus used his mind to will Rocky’s arm to throw a punch and it connected and the guy went down and the ref stopped the fight. This was the heavy dude who was training me.

Cus was a strong believer that in your mind you had to be the entity that you wanted to be. If you wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, you had to start living the life of a heavyweight champion. I was only fourteen, but I was a true believer in Cus’s philosophy. Always training, thinking like a Roman gladiator, being in a perpetual state of war in your mind, yet on the outside seeming calm and relaxed. He was practicing and teaching me the law of attraction without even knowing it.

Cus was also big on affirmations. He had a book called Self ­Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion by a French pharmacist/psychologist named Emile Coué. Coué would tell his patients to repeat to themselves, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better” over and over again. Cus had a bad cataract in one eye, and he would repeat that phrase and he claimed the phrase had made it better.

Cus had us modify the affirmations for our own situation. So he had me saying, “The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me. The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me” over and over again all day. I loved doing that, I loved hearing myself talk about myself.

The goal of all these techniques was to build confidence in the fighter. Confidence was everything. But in order to possess that confidence, you had to test yourself and put yourself on the line. It doesn’t come from osmosis, out of the air. It comes from consistently going over the visualization in your mind to help you develop the confidence that you want to possess.

Cus laid all this out for me in the first few weeks that we were together. He gave me the whole plan. He gave me a mission. I was going to be the youngest heavyweight champion of all time. I didn’t know it then, but after one of our first long talks, Cus confided in Camille. “Camille, this is the one I’ve been waiting for all my life.”

I was getting close to being paroled back to Brooklyn when Bobby Stewart came to see me one day.

“I don’t want you to go back to Brooklyn. I’m afraid you may do something stupid and get killed or get your ass locked up again. Do you want to move in with Cus?”

I didn’t want to go back either. I was looking for change in my life. Plus, I liked the way those people talked and made me feel good, made me feel like I was part of society. So I talked to my mother about staying up there with Cus.

“Ma, I want to go up there and train. I want to be a fighter. I can be the best fighter in the world.” Cus had my mind so fucked up. That’s all he talked to me about, how great I could become, how to improve myself, day by day, in every way. All that self-help shit.

My mom felt bad about me leaving, but she signed the permission papers. Maybe she thought she’d failed as a mother.

So I moved in with Cus and Camille and the other fighters in the house. I got to know more and more about Cus because we’d have these long talks after I trained. He was so happy when I told him my hard-luck stories about my life. He would light up like a Christmas tree. “Tell me more,” he’d say. I was the perfect guy for his mission – broken home, unloved, destitute. I was hard and strong and sneaky, but I was still a blank chalkboard. Cus wanted me to embrace my shortcomings. He didn’t make me feel ashamed or inferior because of my upbringing. He loved the fact that I had great enthusiasm. “Enthusiasm” – Cus taught me that word.

Cus could relate to me because he’d had a hard life too. His mother died at a very early age. He’d lost his vision in one eye in a street fight when he was a little kid. His father died in his arms when he was a young man. A cop had murdered his favorite brother.

Cus really only worked a nine-to-five job for one year in his life. And then he left because he got into fights with his coworkers. But he spent a lot of time helping out the people in his neighborhood, solving their problems almost like an unofficial social worker. He derived a lot of pleasure out of assisting other people. Cus helped weed out political corruption in his neighborhood when La Guardia was running for mayor of New York City as a reformer. He did it by standing up to one of the corrupt guys who had pulled a gun on him. He was fearless.

He was also bitter.

“I stood up for the little guy all my life,” Cus said. “Lot of my troubles came from standing up for the underdog. Some of the people that I did things for didn’t deserve it. Very few people are worth saving.”

Cus was totally color-blind. His father’s best friend was black. When he was in the army, stationed in the South, he had a boxing team. When they traveled, no hotel would take his black fighters so he slept with them in parks.

He was also a big-time socialist. He was in love with Che and Fidel and the Rosenbergs. He’d tell me about the Rosenberg case and I’d tease him.

“Come on, Cus. That ain’t right. They were guilty,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” he’d roar. “You’re talking now but when they bring slavery back you’re not going to be able to say who was guilty or not. They’re planning to bring it back too, all right?”

His biggest enemy was Ronald Reagan. Reagan would come on the TV and Cus would scream at the top of his lungs, “LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. LIAR!!!” Cus was a maniac. He would always be talking about who needed to die. “A man dies by the way he lives,” he’d tell me.

One day Cus said, “When you make a lot of money, you could really help everybody you ever cared about. You could help the black churches.” He thought the black churches were the best grassroots social net for black people. He loved the Reverend Martin Luther King. Cus was always into helping people and that was how he gave all his money away.

“Money is something to throw off the back of trains,” he’d tell me. “Money means security, and to me security means death, so I never cared about money. To me all the things that I value I couldn’t buy for money. I was never impressed with money. Too many of the wrong people have a lot of money so the association is not good. The truth was, I wasn’t careless about money. I gave money to people in trouble. I don’t consider that wasting it.”

He also didn’t believe in paying taxes to a right-wing government. He declared bankruptcy when he owed $200,000 to the IRS.

How Cus got into boxing was itself a mystery. Out of nowhere he popped up and said, “I’m a boxing trainer.” Nobody had ever heard of him. He didn’t know anything about contracts or fighters, but he claimed to be a manager. He wound up managing and training a promising young heavyweight named Floyd Patterson who was also a poor kid who grew up in Brooklyn. At the time, boxing was ruled by a group called the IBC, the International Boxing Club, owned by rich entrepreneurs who had a stranglehold on the promotion of championship bouts. But Cus guided Floyd to the championship, and then he went after the IBC. Which meant he was going up against the mob, because Frankie Carbo, a soldier in the Lucchese family, was in bed with the IBC. Cus helped break the back of the IBC, and Carbo wound up in jail for conspiracy, extortion, and unlicensed management.

But Cus’s heart was broken when Roy Cohn, a right-wing attorney, stole Patterson away from him by wooing the newly converted Catholic boxer with a meeting with New York’s Cardinal Spellman. Cus never set foot inside a Catholic church again. He got increasingly para­noid after that. He claimed that someone tried to push him in front of a subway car. He stopped going to bars because he was afraid someone would spike his drink. He actually sewed shut the pockets of his coat jackets so no one could drop drugs into them to set him up. Finally he moved upstate to Catskill.

He was even paranoid in the house. Nobody was allowed into his room, and he would rig up some matches in his door so he could see if anyone had gone in while he was away. If he’d see me anywhere near his room, he’d say, “What are you doing up there?”

“I live up here, Cus. I live here,” I’d answer.

One time, me and Tom Patti and Frankie, two other boxers who were living at the house, went out. Cus didn’t trust anyone with keys, because we might lose them and then some stranger would have access to the house. When we came home and knocked on the door, there was no answer. I looked in the window and Cus had fallen asleep in his ­favorite plush chair with the TV blasting because he was half deaf. Tom figured that the time to knock was when the show went to commercial and there were a couple seconds of silence. So at exactly that moment we all banged on the window and yelled, “Cus!! Cus!!” In one-thousandth of a second, Cus did a one-eighty, dropped down, bent over at the waist, with his left hand bracing himself, ready to pop up with the right hand to knock the intruder out. We were all on the floor, laughing hysterically.

Another time, one of the sparring partners who was staying there snuck out during the night to go to town. Tom and I woke up early in the morning and we were going downstairs to get breakfast. We looked in the living room and Cus was on the floor doing an army crawl with his rifle in his hand. The guy had come home and knocked on the window and Cus probably thought it was some IBC guy after him. Tom and I stepped over him and walked into the kitchen to get some cereal.

I could go on and on with Cus stories. He was that unique and colorful a cat. But the best description of Cus I’ve ever heard was in an interview that the great writer Gay Talese gave to Paul Zuckerman, a young man who was researching a book about Cus.

“He was a Roman warrior two thousand years too late. Warriors like war, need war, that’s the atmosphere in which they feel most at home. In times of peace, they are restless and useless men they think. They like to stir up a lot. Cus, like Patton, felt alive when there was confusion, intrigue, a sense of impending battle. He felt most engaged with himself then, his nerve endings, his brainpower was most alive and he felt most fulfilled when he was in a state of agitation. And if it wasn’t there, he had to create or heighten it. If it was simmering, he had to turn up the flames to feel fully alive. It gave him a high. He was an activist, he needed action.”

Cus was a general and I was his soldier. And we were ready to go to war.

I was this useless Thorazined-out nigga who was diagnosed as ­retarded and this old white guy gets ahold of me and gives me an ego. Cus once said to me, “Mike, if you were sitting down with a psychiatrist and they asked you, ‘Are you hearing voices?’ You’re going to say no, but the voices are telling you to say no, aren’t they?” Cus was such a deep guy. No one ever made me more conscious of being a black man. He was so cold hard, giving it to me like a bitter black man would. “They think they’re better than you, Mike,” he’d say. If he saw somebody with a Fiat or a Rolls-Royce, he’d look at me and say, “You could get that. That’s not the hardest thing in the world to do, getting wealthy. You’re so superior to those people. They can never do what you are capable of doing. You got it in you. You think I would tell you this if you didn’t have it in you? I could probably make you a better fighter but I couldn’t make you champion.”

Whoa. I always thought I was shit. My mother had told me I was crap. Nobody had ever said anything good about me. And here’s this dude saying, “I bet you if you try, you could win an Oscar. You’d be just as good an actor as you’d be a boxer. You want to be a race-car driver? I bet you’d be the best race-car driver in the world; you’re smarter and tougher than those guys. You could conquer any world. Don’t use that word ‘can’t.’ You can’t say ‘can’t.’ ”

When I got discouraged, as I often did, Cus would massage my mind with thoughts of an exotic world with great treasures. ­Everything he said was foreign to me, but I liked the sound of it.

“All you have to do is listen to me,” he’d say. “People of royal descent will know your name. Do you hear what I’m saying to you, boy? The whole world will know who you are. Your family name will reign. People will respect your mother, your family, your children. When you enter a room, people will stand up and give you an ovation.”

Cus wouldn’t let me fail. When I felt like quitting and I got discouraged, he just kept on inspiring me. Cus would always say, “My job is to peel off layers and layers of damages that are inhibiting your true ability to grow and fulfill your potential.” He was peeling me and it hurt! I was screaming, “Leave me alone. Aarrgghh!” He tortured my mind. He’d see me sparring with an older guy and it was in my mind that I was tired and I wasn’t punching back at the guy, the guy was just bullying me, and Cus would talk to me about that, make me confront my fears. He was a perfectionist. I’d be hitting the heavy bag with combinations and Cus would be standing there, watching.

“It’s good. It’s good. But it’s not poifect,” he’d say in his thick Bronx accent.

Cus wanted the meanest fighter that God ever created, someone who scared the life out of people before they even entered the ring. He trained me to be totally ferocious, in the ring and out. At the time, I needed that. I was so insecure, so afraid. I was so traumatized from people picking on me when I was younger. I just hated the humiliation of being bullied. That feeling sticks with you for the rest of your life. It’s just such a bad, hopeless feeling. That’s why I always projected to the world that I was a mean, ferocious motherfucker. But Cus gave me confidence so that I didn’t have to worry about being bullied ever again. I knew nobody was ever going to fuck with me physically.

Cus was much more than a boxing trainer. He instilled so many values in me. He was like some guru, always saying things that would make me think.

“No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.”

Or, “I’m not a creator. What I do is discover and uncover. My job is to take the spark and fan it. Feed the fire until it becomes a roaring blaze.”

He could impart wisdom in the most mundane situations. Camille was very big on the boys doing their chores around the house. I hated doing chores; I was so focused on my boxing. One day Cus came to me. “You know, Camille really wants you to do your chores. I could care less if you did, but you should do them because it will make you a better boxer.”

“How’s taking out the trash going to make me a better boxer?” I scoffed.

“Because doing something you hate to do like you love it is good conditioning for someone aspiring towards greatness.”

After that, Camille never had to remind me to do my chores again.

One day Cus called me into the room where he was sitting.

“Are you scared of white people?” he said out of the blue. “Are you one of those kinds? You scared of mustaches and beards? I’ve been around black fighters who were scared to hit white people. You better not be one of them.”

It was funny. I had Cus in my face telling me not to be intimidated, but I was intimidated by the way he was telling me not to be intimidated.

Cus was always dead serious, never smiling. He didn’t treat me like a teenager. He always made me feel like we had a mission to accomplish. Training day in and day out, thinking about one fucking thing. He gave me a purpose. I had never had that feeling in my life before except when I was thinking about stealing.

Every once in a while, things would happen that made our goal seem much more tangible. One time, Wilfred Benitez came to train at Catskill. I was overwhelmed. I was a groupie. I had seen him fight on television and he was something to watch. It was like he had radar, he’d punch people with his eyes closed. Truly a master. And he brought his championship belt with him. Tom Patti, one of Cus’s other boxers, was there with me. Benitez pulled out this little case, and the belt was inside and he let me touch it. It was like looking at the Holy Grail.

“Man, Tommy, look at this, it’s the belt, man,” I said. “I gotta get one of these now. I’m going to train so hard. If I win this, I’m never going to take the belt off.”

I was so happy to be in Benitez’s presence. He inspired me, made me want to become more committed and dedicated.

Thanks to Cus, I also got to talk to Ali. In October of 1980, we all drove up to Albany to watch the closed-circuit broadcast of Ali trying to win back his title from Larry Holmes. Ali got the shit kicked out of him. Cus was mad as a motherfucker; I’d never seen him that angry before. After the fight, he was poker-faced because he had to give interviews and shake people’s hands, but once we got in the car, we could feel that negative energy. We didn’t say a word for the whole forty-five-minute drive home.

The next morning, Ali’s aide Gene Kilroy put Ali on the phone with Cus.

“How did you let that bum beat you? He’s a bum, Muhammad, he’s a bum. No, he’s a bum. Don’t tell me that, he’s a bum. Why did you let that bum hit you like that?”

I was listening to Cus talk and every time he said the word “bum” it was cutting right through me. I started crying. That was a bad day in my life.

Then Cus did a head trip on me.

“I have a young black kid with me. He’s just a boy, but he’s going to be the heavyweight champion of the world. His name is Mike Tyson. Talk to him for me, please, Muhammad. I want you to tell him to listen to me.”

Cus handed me the phone.

“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I said. I was a little ­dickhead.

“I was sick,” Ali told me. “I took some medicine and it made me weak and that’s how Holmes beat me. I’m going to get well and come back and beat Holmes.”

“Don’t worry, champ,” I said. “When I get big, I’m going to get him for you.”

A lot of people assume that Ali was my favorite boxer. But I have to say it was Roberto Duran. I always looked at Ali as being handsome and articulate. And I was short and ugly and I had a speech impediment. When I saw Duran fight, he was just a street guy. He’d say stuff to his opponents like, “Suck my fucking dick, you motherfucker. Next time you’re going to the fucking morgue.” After he beat Sugar Ray Leonard in that first fight, he went over to where Wilfred Benitez was sitting and he said, “Fuck you. You don’t have the heart or the balls to fight me.”

Man, this guy is me, I thought. That was what I wanted to do. He was not ashamed of being who he was. I related to him as a human being. As my career progressed and people started praising me for being a savage, I knew that being called an animal was the highest praise I could receive from someone. When I’d go back to the city, I would go to Victor’s Café because I heard Duran hung out there. I’d go and sit at a table by myself and look at the pictures of Duran hanging on the wall. I was living out my dreams.

I was sad when Duran quit during the No Más rematch with Leonard. Cus and I watched that fight in Albany and I was so mad that I cried. But Cus had called it. “He’s not going to do it a second time,” he predicted.

By the time I had moved in with Cus, I was already into the flow of his repertoire. He began to train me hard every day. I never had the privilege of enjoying boxing as a sport or as something to do for fun. Cus was an extremist but I was just as extreme. I wanted to be Achilles right then. I’m the kind of guy they make fun of. “Don’t give the nigga a rope, he’ll want to be a cowboy.” I was the kid who had no hope. But if you give me a glimmer of hope, you’re in trouble. I take it to the moon.

Cus normally had to wake the fighters up in the morning, but when he’d get up to do it, I had already come back from running. Cus would usually set the table for breakfast, but I started doing it after my run. He’d get mad. “Who made up my table?” he’d bark. He was upset that I showed more dedication than he did. Then Cus would cook me my breakfast. He’d throw in a whole slab of bacon, twenty or so strips, into the frying pan and then he’d cook the eggs in that bacon grease. I didn’t drink coffee so I’d have tea. He did that every morning even if he was angry with me.

I think both of us realized that we were in a race with time. Cus was in his seventies, he was no spring chicken, so he would constantly be shoving all this knowledge into me. Shove, shove, shove all this shit in. If you keep shoving it in, you learn it, unless you’re an idiot. I became very adept at boxing but my maturity, my thinking ability as a human being didn’t catch up with my boxing ability. It wasn’t like I was going to go to school and they were building my character to make me a good, productive member of society. No, I was doing this to become heavyweight champion of the world. Cus was aware of that. “God, I wish I had more time with you,” he said. But then he would say, “I’ve been in the fight game for sixty years and I’ve never seen anybody with the kind of interest you have. You’re always talking about fighting.”

I was an extremist. If we got snowed in, Cus trained me in the house. At night, I’d stay up for hours in my room shadowboxing. My life depended on succeeding. If I didn’t, I would just be a useless piece of shit. Plus, I was doing it for Cus too. He had a tough life with a lot of disappointments. So I was here to defend this old Italian man’s ego and pride. Who the fuck did I think I was?

When I wasn’t training, I was watching old fight films for at least ten hours a day. That was my treat on the weekend. I’d watch them alone upstairs, all night long. I’d crank up the volume and the sound would travel through the old house. Then Cus would come up. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Just watching the films,” I said.

“Hey, you gotta go to bed. People want to sleep,” he said. Then he’d walk down the stairs and I’d hear him muttering, “I never met a kid like this. Watching the films all night, waking up the whole damned house.”

Sometimes we’d watch the fight films together and Cus would give me tips on how I could beat Dempsey and Jeffries and Louis.

I was so focused sometimes that I’d actually go to sleep with my gloves on. I was an animal, dreaming about Mike Tyson being a big-time fighter. I sacrificed everything for that goal. No women, no food. I had an eating disorder; I was addicted to food then. And I was going through puberty. I was getting acne, my hormones were raging, all I wanted to do was eat ice cream but I couldn’t lose sight of the goal. I’d talk to Cus about girls and he’d pooh-pooh me, telling me that I was going to have all the women I ever wanted. One time, I was morose.

“Cus, I ain’t never going to have a girl, huh?”

Cus sent someone out and they came back with one of those miniature baseball bats and he presented it to me.

“You’re going to have so many girls that you’ll need this to beat them off you.”

So all I did was jerk off and train, jerk off and train. I thought that after I became champion, I could get as much money and women as I’d need.

In the gym, Cus had some very unusual and unorthodox techniques. Some people laughed at the style he taught, but it was because they didn’t really understand it. They called it the peek-a-boo style. It was very defense-oriented. You’d keep both your hands in front of your face, almost like you were turtling. Your hands and your elbows move with you, so when the guy throws the punch, you block it as you’re coming forward, and then you counter.

Cus’s offense started with a good defense. He thought it was of paramount importance for his fighter not to get hit. To learn to slip punches, he used a slipbag, a canvas bag filled with sand, wrapped around a rope. You had to slip around it by moving your head to avoid it hitting you. I got really good at that.

Then he used something called the Willie, named after the fighter Willie Pastrano. It was a mattress covered in canvas and wrapped around a frame. On the exterior was a sketch of a torso. The body was divided into different zones and each zone had a number associated with it. The odd numbers were left-hand punches, the even numbers were the right-hand ones. Then Cus would play a cassette tape of him calling out the various sequences of numbers. So you’d hear “five, four” and immediately throw a left hook to the body and a right uppercut to the chin. The idea was that the more you repeated these actions in response to numbers they’d become instinctual and robotic and you wouldn’t have to consciously think about them. After a while, you could throw punches with your eyes closed.

Cus thought that fighters got hit by right hands because they were stationary and had their gloves too low. So he taught me to weave in a U-shape, not just up and down. He had me on the move constantly, sideways and then forward, sideways and forward. When you were punching, Cus believed that you got the maximum effect from your punches when you made two punches sound like one. The closest you could get to that sound, the higher percentage that barrage would result in a knockout.

Even though he emphasized defense, Cus knew that defensive fighters could be boring.

“Boxing is entertainment, so to be successful a fighter must not only win, but he must win in an exciting manner. He must throw punches with bad intentions,” Cus would always say. He wanted me to be an aggressive counterpuncher, forcing my opponents to punch or run. Cus was always trying to manipulate the opponent in the ring. If you kept eluding their punches, they would get frustrated and lose their confidence. And then they were sunk. Slip the punch and counter. Move and hit at the same time. Force the issue. He thought short punches could be harder than long punches. He thought that punching hard had nothing to do with anything physical, it was all emotional. Controlled emotion.

Cus hired the best sparring partners to teach me. My favorite was Marvin Stinson. I believe he was a former Olympian. He had been Holmes’s top sparring partner and then Cus brought him in to work with me. He was an awesome mentor to me, teaching me about movement and throwing punches. When he was finished the first time he came up to spar, he pulled me aside and gave me his running gloves because it was so cold out in the morning when I’d run. He saw that I didn’t have any.

My sparring sessions were like all-out war. Before we fought, Cus would take me aside. “You don’t take it easy, you go out there and do your best,” he said. “You do everything you learned and you do it all full speed. I want you to break these guys’ ribs.”

Break their ribs? Sparring? He wanted to get me prepared for the guys I’d fight and he certainly wanted me to break the ribs of my ­opponents in an actual fight. When Cus found a good sparring partner for me, he treated them special because he knew that they gave me good workouts. He always paid the sparring partners top dollar. But that didn’t insure that they would stay. Often a guy would come up anticipating sparring for three weeks. But after his first session, we’d go back to the house and he’d be gone. They were so disgusted with getting the shit kicked out of them, they didn’t even bother to get their stuff. When that would happen, Tom and I made a beeline for their room and rummaged through their clothes and shoes and jewelry. If we were lucky, we’d find a stash of weed or at least a pair of shoes that fit.

Sometimes Cus would bring up established fighters to spar with me. When I was sixteen, he brought Frank Bruno to Catskill. Bruno was twenty-two at the time. We sparred for two rounds. Before I’d spar with an established fighter, Cus would take them aside.

“Listen, he’s just a boy but don’t take it easy on him. I’m informing you now, do your best,” he said.

“Okay, Cus,” they would say. “I’ll work with the kid.”

“Hey, do you hear me? Don’t work with him. Do your best.”

We fought to hurt people; we didn’t fight just to win. We talked for hours about hurting people. This is what Cus instilled in me. “You’ll be sending a message to the champ, Mike,” Cus would tell me. “He’ll be watching you.” But we would also be sending a resounding message to the trainers, the managers, the promoters, and the whole boxing establishment. Cus was back.

Besides watching old fight films, I devoured everything I could read on these great fighters. Soon after I moved in with Cus, I was reading the boxing encyclopedia and I started laughing reading about a champion who only held his title for a year. Cus looked at me with his cold piercing eyes and said, “A one-year championship is worth more than a lifetime of obscurity.”

When I started studying the lives of the great old boxers, I saw a lot of similarity to what Cus was preaching. They were all mean motherfuckers. Dempsey, Mickey Walker, even Joe Louis was mean, even though Louis was an introvert. I trained myself to be wicked. I used to walk to school, snapping at everybody. Deep down, I knew I had to be like that because if I failed, Cus would get rid of me and I would starve to death.

Cus had given me a book to read called In This Corner … ! I couldn’t put it down. I saw how these fighters dealt with their emotions, how they prepared for fights. That book gave me such superior insight into the psychology of human beings. What struck me was how hard the old-time fighters worked, how hungry they were. I read that John L. Sullivan would train by running five miles and then he’d walk back the five miles and spar for twenty rounds. Ezzard Charles said he only ran three to four miles a day and boxed six rounds. I thought, Damn, Sullivan trained harder in the 1880s than this guy did in the 1950s. So I started walking four miles to the gym, did my sparring, and then walked back to the house. I started emulating the old-school guys because they were hard-core. And they had long careers.

I drove Cus nuts asking him questions about these old fighters all the time. I know he wanted to talk about boxing but I think I overdid it sometimes. I read all of Cus’s books about boxing, so when we’d sit around the dining room table and Cus would start expounding to the other guys about boxing history and he’d stumble on a name or a date, I’d finish his sentence for him.

“This guy knows everything,” he’d say. “He acts like he was there.”

I was serious about my history because I learned so much from the old fighters. What did I have to do to be like this guy? What discipline did this other guy possess? Cus would tell me how vicious and mean they were outside the ring but when they’re in it, they’re relaxed and calm. I got excited hearing him talk about these guys, seeing that he held them in such high esteem. I wanted so much for someone to talk like that about me. I wanted to be part of that world. I would watch the fights on TV and I’d see the boxers punching with grimaces on their faces and their ripped bodies, and I wanted that to be my face and my body.

We talked about all the greats. I fell in love with Jack Johnson. What a courageous guy. He was really the first black-pride guy. And I loved his arrogance. He got pulled over for speeding at the turn of the century and the ticket was for, like, ten dollars and he gave the cop a twenty and said, “Why don’t you take this twenty ­because I’m going to be coming back the same way I’m going.”

He was a master of manipulation. When he was training, he’d wrap his penis before he put on his tights to make it look larger and give the white guys an inferiority complex. He’d humiliate his opponents during fights. He was the original trash talker. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you can cut my lip,” he’d say. He’d laugh in the face of his opponents during a round, talk to his white wife and tell her how much he loved her while he was beating the shit out of the guy he was fighting. He was a guy I would have loved to hang with. He spoke several languages and partied with the royal families of Russia and England. Dempsey was the first million-dollar champion. He brought showbiz and glamour to boxing. I related to him the most because he was a real insecure guy, he was always afraid, but he always overcame those feelings to reach his goals.

Cus loved Henry Armstrong the most. He would constantly attack his opponents and wear them down. “Constant attack, no letup,” Cus told me. “Moving his head with a good defense, that’s what Armstrong would do. Break his opponent’s will, destroy his spirit, make all his causes a lie.”

Make all his causes a fucking lie? Whoa. Then Cus would stare at me.

“If you listen to me, you’ll reign with the gods. See the way you’re interested and talk about all these old fighters? By the time you’re champ, if you listen to me, the only reason people would know about these guys was because you’d talk about them. You’ll supersede them all. You’ll make them forget about everybody. I watched Jack Dempsey as a boy. I’ve met these guys, shook their hands. They are not what you are. You are a giant; you are a colossus among men.”

I ate that shit up. But all this talk about dedication and discipline and hard work wasn’t enough to keep me from going back to Brooklyn and doing my jostling and robbing. I was playing two heads of the same coin. I’d be up in Catskill and be the choirboy and then I’d go down to Brooklyn and be the devil. Thank God that I never got arrested for anything. That would have broken Cus’s heart.

Cus knew how to make me feel like I could conquer the world. But he also knew how to make me feel like shit. Sometimes he’d tell me, “You allow your mind to get the better of you.” That was his secret, unwritten code way of saying, “You’re a weak piece of shit. You don’t have enough discipline to be one of the greats.” The greats could fight the best fight of their life even if someone had just kidnapped their child or killed their mother. Greats are totally emotionally independent. Performers are like that too, not just boxers. Some of the legendary artists I read about would be high on everything but still be able to go out there and do a record-breaking performance. They couldn’t even walk, but they had great discipline and determination. Sometimes they’d go directly from the arena to a hospital. I wanted to be one of those fighters and performers.

From the first night I moved in with Cus, he started to break me down, see how far he could fuck with me for no reason. He’d come to my room and say, “What did you do in school today, what did you do? Well, you had to do something, you were in school all day. What did you learn? Where’s your homework? Do you have homework today?” The other guys in the house would always say that Cus favored me but they didn’t know what he was saying to me when we were alone.

I was always struggling with my weight. In my mind, I was a fat pig even though nobody would know by looking at me. When I trained, I would put Albolene over my pores and wear a plastic suit for a week or two and only take it off at nighttime when I was taking a hot bath so I could sweat some more weight off. Then I’d go to bed and wake up the next morning and put it on and go run and wear it the whole day.

My weight was another thing that Cus would get on me about. “Your ass is getting fat,” he’d say. “You’re losing interest, aren’t you? You don’t want to do this no more, huh, Mike? It’s too tough for you, isn’t it? You thought that we were playing games up here, didn’t you? You thought you were back in Brownsville running around and playing games. Huh?” Imagine hearing that. Just as I was about to enjoy some ice cream that I only allowed myself to have on the weekend, I’d hear that. “Not many people could do this, that’s why it’s so special. Jeez, I really thought you could.”

Sometimes Cus would reprimand me and I’d have no idea why. He would rip into me, put down my character. “You can never reach the apex of what we’re aiming for with your infantile behavior and conduct.” At times I’d just scream, “I hate everybody here! Agggghhhhh.” Cus was tearing me apart.

I would pick up on his positive comments and say things like, “I’m going to do anything I can do to win. I’d give my life to be champion, Cus.” And instead of saying, “You’ll get it, Mike,” he had to just step in my face. “You just be careful what you ask for, you might get it.”

He’d even criticize my clothes. On the holidays, they might have some guests over, Camille’s sister or someone. I’d put on nice slacks and a shirt and a vest and I’d wear a tie that Camille helped me put on. I’d be sitting there chilling and all the ladies would be saying, “Oh, you look so nice, Mike.” And then Cus would come in the room.

“What are you dressed like that for? Your pants are so tight your balls and your ass are all over the place. What is wrong with you?”

Camille would defend me, but Cus had none of it.

“Don’t tell me nothing about what you think about this. Camil-lee, please. Okay? There is nothing nice about his clothes.”

Cus would never call me bad names like “a son of a bitch.” He’d just call me “a tomato can and a bum.” That was the boxing equivalent of calling me a dirty, filthy no-good nigga. That would make me cry like a baby. He knew that if he said that to me, it would break my spirit.

I was getting so many mixed messages that I was becoming insecure about how he really felt about me as a boxer. Tom Patti and I once were leaving the gym and Cus was delayed for a second. So I jumped into the backseat and crouched down.

“Tell Cus I walked back home. Because when he gets in the car, I want you to ask him how he really feels about me.” Tom agreed. Cus got in the car.

“Where the hell is Mike?” he said.

“I think he’s staying in town,” Tom said.

“Well, let’s go. He can find his way home later.” So we started driving and I was lying in the back whispering to Tom because Cus was half deaf and couldn’t hear anything.

“Yo, Tom. Ask Cus if he thinks I punch hard,” I said.

“Hey, Cus, you think Mike punches hard?” Tom asked.

“Punches hard! Let me tell you something, that guy punches so hard he could knock down a brick wall. Not only does he punch hard, he punches effectively. He can knock a fighter out with either hand,” Cus said.

“Ask Cus if he thinks I can really be something in the future,” I whispered.

Tom repeated the question.

“Tommy, if Mike keeps his head on straight and focuses on the intended purpose, he’ll become one of the greatest fighters, if not the greatest fighter in the history of boxing.”

I was thrilled to hear that. By now we were at the house. As we got out, Cus saw me lying down in the backseat.

“You knew he was back there, didn’t you?” he said to Tom.

Tom pleaded innocence.

“Don’t hand me that nonsense. You knew he was back there. You guys are a couple of wise guys right now, let me tell you something.”

Cus didn’t think it was funny, but we did.

The funny thing is he couldn’t control his own emotions. Cus was just a bitter, bitter, bitter man who wanted revenge. Roy Cohn, Cardinal Spellman, those guys haunted him in his sleep. J. Edgar Hoover? “Oh, I wish I could put a bullet in his head, that’s what he deserves.” He was constantly talking about killing people and some of those guys were dead already! But he hated them. I once said something complimentary about Larry Holmes and Cus went nuts.

“What do you mean? He’s nothing. You have to dismantle that man. That’s our goal to dismantle this man and relinquish him from the championship. He’s nothing to you.”

Sometimes Cus would just roar at people on the TV like an animal. You’d never think he was a ferocious old man but he was. If you weren’t his slave, he hated your guts. He was always in a state of confrontation. Most of the day he’d walk around, mumbling, “Oh, this son of a bitch. Oh, I can’t believe this guy from, you know his name, from such and such. What a son of a bitch.”

Poor Camille would say, “Cus, Cus, calm down, calm down, Cus. Your blood pressure is getting too high.”

Cus ruled that house with an iron fist, but the funny thing was that it was actually Camille’s house. Cus didn’t have any money. He never really cared about money and he gave most of his away. ­Camille wanted to sell the house because it was so expensive to maintain but Cus talked her into keeping it. He told her he’d get a stable of good fighters and things would get better. He was losing hope, but then I came along.

I don’t think that Cus thought that in a thousand years he’d get another champion, although he hoped he would. Most of the men who came up there were already established fighters who wanted to get away from the girls and the temptations of the city. Plus, no one liked Cus’s boxing style at that time. They thought it was outdated. Then I show up there knowing nothing, a blank chalkboard. Cus was happy. I couldn’t understand why this white man was so happy about me. He would look at me and just laugh hysterically. He’d get on the phone and tell people, “Lightning has struck me twice. I have another heavyweight champion.” I had never even had an amateur fight in my life. I have no idea how, but somehow he saw it in me.