Читать книгу Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography - Mike Tyson - Страница 8

I’ll never forget my first amateur fight. It was at a small gym in the Bronx owned by a former Cus boxer named Nelson Cuevas. The gym was a hellhole. It was on the second floor of a building that was right next to the elevated subway line. The tracks were so close that you could put your hand out the window and almost touch the train. These fight cards were called “smokers” because the air was so thick with cigarette smoke you could hardly see the guy standing in front of you.

Smokers were unsanctioned bouts, which basically meant they were lawless. There weren’t any paramedics or ambulances waiting outside. If the crowd didn’t like your performance, they didn’t boo, they just fought one another to show you how it was done. Everybody who came was dressed to the nines whether they were gangsters or drug dealers. And everybody bet on the fights. I remember I asked one guy, “Will you buy me a piggy in a blanket if I win?” People who bet and won money on you would usually buy you some food.

Right before my fight, I was so scared that I almost left. I was thinking about all that preparation that I had undergone with Cus. Even after all the sparring, I was still totally intimidated with fighting somebody in the ring. What if I failed and lost? I had been in a million fights on the streets of Brooklyn but this was a whole different kind of feeling. You don’t know the guy you’re fighting; you have no beef with him. I was there with Teddy Atlas, my trainer, and I told him that I was going down to the store for a second. I went downstairs and sat on the curb by the steps leading up to the subway. For a minute, I thought I should just get on the damn train and go back to Brownsville. But then all of Cus’s teachings started to flow into my mind and I started to relax, and my pride and my ego started popping up, and I got up and walked back into the gym. It was on.

I was fighting this big Puerto Rican guy with a huge Afro. He was eighteen, four years older than me. We fought hard for two rounds, but then in the third round I knocked him into the bottom rope and followed with another shot that literally knocked his mouthpiece six rows back into the crowd. He was out cold.

I was ecstatic. It was love at first fight. I didn’t know how to celebrate. So I stepped on him. I raised my arms up in the air and stepped on the prone motherfucker.

“Get the hell off him! What the fuck are you doing stepping on this guy?” the ref told me. Cus was up in Catskill waiting by the phone for the report. Teddy called him and told him what happened and Cus was so excited that he made his friend Don, who had driven down with us, give him another account the next morning.

I kept going back to the smokers every week. You’d go into the dressing room and there were a bunch of kids looking at one another. You’d tell them your weight and how many fights you had. I normally told them I was older than fourteen. There weren’t many two-­hundred-pound fourteen-year-olds around. So I was always fighting older guys.

Those smokers meant so much to me, a lot more to me than the rest of the kids. The way I looked at it, I was born in hell and every time I won a fight, that was one step out of it. The other fighters weren’t as mean as I was. If I hadn’t had these smokers, I probably would have died in the sewers.

Teddy even got in the action at these fights. We were at Nelson’s gym one night and a guy pushed Teddy and Teddy punched the guy in the face and Nelson jumped in. He picked up one of the trophies that were there, solid marble with the tin fighter on top of the base, and he started smashing that guy’s head in. If the cops had come they would have charged him with attempted murder. Teddy was always getting into fights. I don’t know if he was defending me or if other guys were jealous because he had the best fighter there, but he was never smart enough to back down from anybody. We’d go to Ohio and there was Teddy, fighting with some of the other trainers.

We started driving to smokers all over the Northeast. Before we’d get in the car, Cus would come over.

“I’m going to have some friends watching the fight. I’ll be waiting by the phone. I expect that when they call me, they’ll be ranting and raving about you,” he said. I never forgot that. “Ranting and raving.” That would get me fired up, and I’d be pumped for the whole six-hour car ride. I wouldn’t rest a minute. I couldn’t wait to get into that ring and start beating the motherfuckers. One guy came to the fight with his wife and his little baby and I knocked him out cold.

Cus came to my fifth fight, a smoker in Scranton. I was fighting a guy named Billy O’Rourke at the Scranton Catholic Youth Center. Billy was seventeen and I said I was too because it was a pro-amateur card. Before the fight, Cus went over to O’Rourke.

“My man is a killer,” Cus said. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

That was my toughest fight so far. In the first round, I kept knocking this guy down and this crazy psycho white boy kept getting the fuck up. And he didn’t just get up, he came up swinging. The more I knocked him down, the more he got up and whipped my ass. I had kicked his ass in the first round, but the second was just a war. We were fighting three rounds and Teddy didn’t want to take any chances on a decision going the wrong way.

“Listen, you talk about being great, and all these crazy fighters, and you want to be this great fighter. Now is the time. Get in there and keep jabbing and moving your head.”

I got off my stool and went out and dropped O’Rourke twice in the third round. He was bleeding all over the place. At the end of the fight, he got me against the ropes. But, boom, boom, boom, I came back and down he went. The crowd went crazy. It was the fight of the night.

Cus was pleased with my performance, but he said, “Another round and he would have worn you down.”

In May and June of 1981, I went after my first championship – the Junior Olympics. I probably had about ten fights at that point. First you had to win your local tourney, then your region, and then you competed in Colorado for the national title.

I won all my regionals, so Teddy and I flew to Colorado and Cus took a train because he had a fear of flying. When I entered the dressing room, I remembered how all my heroes had behaved. The other kids would come up to me and put out their hand to shake, and I would just sneer and turn my back on them. I was playing a role. Someone would be talking and I’d just stare at him. Cus was all about manipulating your opponent by causing chaos and confusion, but staying cool under it all. I caused such chaos that a few of the other fighters took one look at me and lost their bouts so they wouldn’t have to fight me later on. I won all of my fights by knockouts in the first round. I won the gold by knocking out Joe Cortez in eight seconds, a record that I believe stands to this day. I was on my way.

I became a local hero after I won that gold medal. Cus loved the attention I was getting. He loved the spotlights. But I kept thinking how crazy all this was. I was barely fifteen years old and half of my friends back in Brownsville were dead, gone, wiped out. I didn’t have many friends in Catskill. I wasn’t interested in school. Cus and I had already established what we wanted to accomplish, so school seemed to be a distraction from that goal. I didn’t care about what they were teaching me, but I did have an urge to learn. So Cus would encourage me and I read some of the books from his library. I read books by Oscar Wilde, Charles Darwin, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Dumas, and Adam Smith. I read a book about Alexander the Great. I loved history. By reading history, I learned about human nature. I learned the hearts of men.

I didn’t get into major trouble in school with the exception of ­hitting a couple of students and getting suspended. I was just uncomfortable there. Some students would make fun of me, but nobody fucked with me. Cus had told my junior high school principal, Mr. Bordick, that I was special and that “allowances had to be made for him.” Mr. ­Bordick was a beautiful man and whenever there was a problem, Cus would go to the school, do his Italian gesturing shit with his fingers, and I’d be back in school. I’d go home and go to the gym at five p.m. every night for two hours. In the evenings, I’d read boxing books, watch films, or talk to Cus. On the weekends, I’d get up at five, run a few miles, eat, nap, and then be back in the gym at noon. During the week, I ran back and forth from school.

I got some extra running in thanks to my control-freak guardian Cus. I was at a school dance and it was scheduled to end at ten p.m. I told Cus I’d be home at eleven. Everybody was hanging around after the dance, so I called Cus and told him that I’d probably be home a little late because I was waiting for a cab.

“No, run home now. Run. I can’t wait up for you,” he barked. Cus didn’t believe in giving out keys because he feared we’d lose them. I had on a two-piece suit and nice dress shoes, but Cus wanted me home now.

“Man, I gotta go,” I told my friends. Everyone knew what time it was. If Cus called, I had to go. So I took the fuck off.

One day I was hanging out with some friends and we were drinking and partying, and they were about to drop me off at the house and I saw Cus through the window, sleeping in his chair, waiting for me to come home.

“Turn around. Take me to your house. I don’t even want to deal with Cus,” I said. Every time I’d come home late he would rip me a new asshole. I’d try to sneak up the stairs, but they were old and rickety, and I’d think, Shit, I’m busted. I’d come home from a movie after he gave me permission to go and there was Cus waiting to interrogate me.

“What did you do? Who did you hang out with? Who are they? Where are their families from? What are their last names? You know you’ve got to box tomorrow.”

Cus even tried to marry me off in the ninth grade. I started dating this local girl named Angie. Cus loved her. You would think that he’d discourage a relationship, that it would distract from my training, but Cus thought it would be good for me to settle down with her. I’d be calmer and it would actually help focus me on my boxing. I wasn’t serious about Angie. I wanted to live the flamboyant lifestyles of my heroes, boxers like Mickey Walker and Harry Greb. They drank, they had lots of women, and they were living the life. But Camille was on to Cus.

“Don’t you dare listen to Cus about marrying anyone,” she told me. “You date as many girls as you want and then you select the best.”

One day I got into a fight in school and Cus had to go smooth things over. When he got back, he sat me down.

“You’re going to have to leave here if you’re going to continue to act like that.” I just broke down and started crying.

“Please don’t let me go,” I sobbed. “I want to stay.”

I really loved the family environment Cus had given me. And I was madly in love with Cus. He was the first white guy who not only didn’t judge me, but who wanted to beat the shit out of someone if they said anything disrespectful about me. Nobody could reach me like that guy. He reached me down in my cortex. Any time I finished talking to him, I had to go and burn energy, shadowboxing or doing sit-ups, I was so pumped. I’d start running and I’d be crying, because I wanted to make him happy and prove that all the good things he was saying were right.

I guess Cus felt bad about threatening to send me away and making me cry that day because he started hugging me. That was the first physical display of affection I’d ever seen from Cus. Ever. But the moment that I cried was when Cus really knew that he had me. From that moment on I became his slave. If he told me to kill someone, I would have killed them. I’m serious. Everybody thought I was up there with this old, sweet Italian guy, but I was there with a warrior. And I loved every minute of it. I was happy to be Cus’s soldier; it gave me a purpose in life. I liked being the one to complete the mission.

I started training even harder, if that was possible. When I got home from the gym, I actually had to crawl up the stairs. I’d make my way up to the third-floor bathroom. Cus would run some incredibly hot water into the little porcelain tub and then pour some Epsom salts in.

“Stay in as long as you can,” Cus said.

So I’d sit down and get burned, but the next morning my body felt much better and I could go work out again. I never felt so glorious in my life. I had a tunnel-vision mission and I never deterred from it. I can’t even explain that feeling to other people.

When all the other fighters would leave the gym and go out with their girlfriends, living their life, Cus and I went back to the house and devised our scheme. We’d talk about having houses in all parts of the world. Cus would say, “ ‘No’ will be like a foreign language to you. You won’t understand the concept of ‘no.’ ”

I thought that it was unfair for the rest of the fighters trying to win the championship because I was raised by a genius who prepared me. Those other guys wanted to make money and have a good life for their family. But thanks to Cus, I wanted glory and I wanted to get it over their blood. But I was insecure. I wanted glory, I wanted to be famous, I wanted the world to look at me and tell me I’m beautiful. I was a fat fucking stinking kid.

Cus made me believe that the green and gold WBC belt was worth dying for. And not for the money. I used to ask Cus, “What does it mean being the greatest fighter of all time? Most of those guys are dead.”

“Listen. They’re dead but we’re talking about them now. This is all about immortality. This is about your name being known until the end of time,” he said.

Cus was so dramatic. He was like a character from The Three Musketeers.

“We have to wait for our moment, like crocodiles in the mud. We don’t know when the drought will come and the animals will have to migrate across the Sahara. But we’ll be waiting. Months, years. But it will come. And the gazelles and the wildebeests will cross the water. And when they come, we are going to bite them. Do you hear me, son? We are going to bite them so hard that when they scream, the whole world is going to hear them.”

He was dead serious and so was I. Cus was using me to get back at the boxing establishment. I wanted to be involved with that so badly. It was like The Count of Monte Cristo. We were out to get our revenge.

When Cus realized that I was truly with him, he was happy. But then he would just get paranoid. I’d be sitting in the living room reading a book and Cus would be walking around with his robe on and he’d come over to me.

“Yeah, you’re gonna leave me too. They’ll take you away. You’ll leave me just like everybody else,” he’d say out of the blue.

I didn’t know if he was playing a mind game with me or just feeling sorry for himself.

“Are you crazy, Cus? What are you talking about?”

I would never talk to him like that. That was probably the only time I ever called him crazy.

“You know what I mean. Somebody’ll give you some money and you’ll just go away. That happened to me all of my life. I put in the time and developed fighters and people stole them away from me.”

Go away? I would try to kill somebody who kept him away from me. Floyd Patterson had left him but I was on a different level. I just wanted to be hanging around with him and Camille, my new family. No more hard life.

“You’re crazy, Cus,” I said, and he walked away.

In November of 1981, Teddy, me, and two other fighters got in the car and drove to Rhode Island for a smoker. For the whole ride I was thinking about what I was going to do to the motherfucker when I got there. I had been reading Nietzsche and thought I was a Superman. I could barely spell my name but I was a Superman. So I was visualizing how I was going to electrify the place and how all the people would be applauding me when I kicked this guy’s ass. My delusion had me believing that the crowd would be throwing flowers at my feet. I was only fifteen but I would be fighting a guy named Ernie Bennett, the local champ, who was twenty-one. It was going to be his last amateur fight before he turned pro.

We walked into the place and there were a bunch of nasty-looking people in there, packed wall to wall. It was so crowded it felt like I was back in the Brownsville slums. But I didn’t give a fuck. I was feeding on all their energy. Teddy said, “Get on the scale.” So I took off my shirt and pants. I was only wearing underwear. I was really ripped. I got up on the scale and everyone ran up and surrounded us.

“That’s Tyson. That’s him,” I heard people say.

I was standing on the scale and started getting nervous. These guys were gangsters, legitimate tough guys, and I wasn’t from their neighborhood. But then I remembered all those films I watched. Jack Johnson would be on the scale with a crowd around him. I always ­visualized myself in that position. Then I heard all the whispers and whistling. “That’s the guy who knocked out everyone in one round at the juniors,” they said.

My Cus thinking kicked in. I was nobility. I was this great gladiator, ready to do battle.

“Hey, champ!” These guys smiled at me. But I’m just looking at them with contempt, like, “Fuck you, what are you looking at?”

I weighed in at around 190.

“Oh, you are too heavy,” Bennett’s trainer said. He was a deaf-mute but you could make out his words.

“But we’ll fight him. We’ll fight anybody,” the guy said.

“I’m not just anybody,” I sneered.

The place was packed. There were at least three thousand people there. We got into the ring and it was nine straight minutes of mayhem. To this day, people still talk about that fight. The crowd never stopped cheering, even during the one-minute rest between rounds they were still applauding. We were like two pit bulls. He was very smooth and elusive and experienced but then, bam, I knocked him through the ropes. I fought this guy hard, right to the end. It was the best performance of my life.

And then they gave him the decision. It was highway robbery. I was distraught. I started crying. I had never lost a fight before. In the dressing room, the deaf-mute trainer came up to me. I was still ­crying.

“You’re just a baby,” he said. “My man has had many, many fights. We were fighting you with everything we got. You’re better than my fighter. Don’t give up. You’re going to be champion one day.”

That didn’t make me feel any better. I cried during the whole ride home. I wanted to beat that guy so badly. We got back home and I had to get in the shower and go to school. But Teddy must have called Cus because he was waiting for me. I thought Cus was going to be mad at me for letting him down, but he had a big smile on his face.

“I heard you did great. Teddy said the guy was cut and experienced,” Cus said. “Hey, take the day off. You don’t have to go to school.”

There was no way I was not going to school. That guy had given me a black eye and I wanted to show off my badge of courage.

I didn’t let that controversial loss get me down. I kept fighting at smokers and knocking out each of my opponents. Cus began coming to more of my fights. He loved it when I would act arrogant and give off an imperious air. Cus was plenty arrogant himself. One time, I was fighting a twenty-four-year-old guy who had been the champion of his region since he was sixteen. No one had ever beaten him.

Before the fight, one of the local boxing officials came over to us.

“Cus, the man you’re fighting is big, strong, and scary,” he said.

Cus didn’t bat an eye.

“My boy’s business is to put big, strong, scary men in their place.”

I heard that and oh, my heart. Arrrghh. I would turn into fucking hot blue fire. I got so pumped up that I wanted to fight those guys before we got into the ring.

Once, I didn’t bathe for three days leading up to a fight. All I thought about was hurting my opponent. I didn’t know anything about my opponents in these smokers, there were no videos to watch, no TV appearances by them. So I always imagined that the people I was fighting were the people who had bullied me when I was younger. It was retribution time. No one would ever pick on me again.

Whenever I displayed the slightest bit of humanity at a fight, Cus would be all over me. A guy might try to shake my hand before our fight in a gesture of sportsmanship. If I shook it, Cus went ballistic.

The only display of compassion that he didn’t criticize was when I would pick up my opponents after I knocked them out. Dempsey would do that all the time. He would pick up his vanquished opponent, take him back to his corner, hold him, and kiss him. That was right after he tried to eviscerate him. So I’d pick them up and give them a kiss. “Are you okay? I love you, brother.” It was almost humiliating for them.

Cus didn’t like me to celebrate my knockouts. No high fives, no dance steps.

“You’ve been practicing this for two years and you’re acting like you’re surprised this happened?” he’d say.

To Cus, my opponents were food. Nourishment. Something you had to eat to live. If I did good in a fight, Cus would reward me. Nice clothes, shoes. When I won one of my junior championships, he bought me gold teeth. When I got my gold in the ’80s, most people would think, “Ugh, criminals wear gold teeth. Be careful.” But Cus loved it because all the old-time fighters got gold teeth to celebrate their success.

You’d think with all these knockouts and the junior championship Cus would have had little to criticize. Not Cus. He always treated me like a prima donna in front of people, but behind closed doors it wasn’t like that. I’d be alone with him at the house and he’d sit me down.

“You know, you had your hand low. With all due respect, if that gentleman was a bit more professional, a little bit calmer, he would have hit you with that punch.”

This was after I had knocked the guy out! Everybody had been congratulating me on my right-hand KO. Cus didn’t say I would have gotten knocked out. He said he would have hit me! He would put that idea of getting hit by that punch in my head all day. Then after a couple of days, he’d run that shit again.

“Remember after the fight I told you that guy would have hit you …”

AAAGGGHH.

Cus was all about manipulation, psychological warfare. He ­believed that 90 percent of boxing was psychological and not physical. Will, not skill. So when I was fifteen, he began taking me to a hypnotherapist named John Halpin. He had an office on Central Park West in the city. I’d lie down on the floor of John’s office and he’d go through all the stages of relaxation: your head, your eyes, your arms, your legs, all getting heavy. Once I was under, he’d tell me whatever Cus wanted him to say. Cus would write out the suggestions on a piece of paper and John would recite them out loud.

“You’re the world’s greatest fighter. I’m not telling you this because I’m trying to make you believe you are something that you’re not, I’m telling you this because you can actually do this; this is what you were actually born to do.”

Halpin showed us a method by which we could put ourselves into a hypnotic state anytime we wanted. When we were back up in Catskill, I’d lie down on the floor or in my bedroom and Cus would be sitting next to me. I’d start to relax and go into my hypnotic state and Cus would talk. Sometimes he’d talk in generalities like I was the best fighter in the world but sometimes it would be specifics.

“Your jab is like a weapon. You throw punches that are ferocious, with bad intentions. You have a wonderful right hand. You haven’t really believed in it but now you will. You are a scourge from God. The world will know your name from now until the eons of oblivion.”

It was some really deep shit. And I believed it.

Sometimes Cus would wake me up in the middle of the night and do his suggestions. Sometimes he didn’t even have to talk, I could feel his words coming through my mind telepathically.

I became focused on the hypnosis. I thought this was a secret method that was going to help me. Some people might think this was crazy but I believed everything that Cus was telling me. I embraced it religiously. Cus was my God. And this old white guy was telling me that I was the apex. Why did I have to be the best that ever existed?

Now that I was a gladiator and a god among men, it seemed a little demeaning that I had to go to high school. Then, in the fall of 1981, I got in trouble at Catskill High. One of my teachers, a real ignorant redneck, started arguing with me and threw a book at me. I got up and smacked the shit out of him in front of all the other students. They suspended me. So Cus grabbed me and we marched into the school and confronted the principal, Mr. Stickler, and the teacher. You would have thought Cus was Clarence Darrow the way he was defending me.

“You maintain that you merely dropped the book and it hit Mike by accident,” Cus grilled the teacher. “But if, as you claim, you dropped the book, how could it have been propelled into the air and into Mike’s physical person? It would have harmlessly fallen to the floor without causing any injury to anyone.”

Cus was pacing the room, making sudden stops and pointing dramatically at my teacher as if he was the guilty party.

They finally compromised and let me stop attending school as long as I got a tutor. Cus was hurt that I was leaving school. He had planned to throw me a big graduation party. On the way home from the meeting at the high school, I looked over at Cus. “Come on. I’m ready to go to the gym.”

He just looked back at me. “Come on,” he said.

June of 1982 rolled around and it was time for me to defend my ­Junior Olympics championship. By now my reputation had certainly preceded me. Parents pulled their kids out of the tournament in fear of them fighting me. John Condon, who was part of the Golden Gloves tournaments, wouldn’t let me compete. “I’ve seen you fight. You’re too mean. I can’t let you fight these kids. You’d rip them apart.”

My second Junior Olympics started off well. We were back in ­Colorado, and in my preliminary matches I knocked out all of my ­opponents. Then it was time for the finals where I’d defend my title. That’s when the pressure got to me. I saw all of the cameras and my insecurities started to kick in. There were all these established boxing officials saying great things about me. I thought that that was wonderful, but that it was all going to end because I was filthy, I was dirty. Even so, I certainly didn’t want to let Brownsville down. Cus had told me many times that if I listened to him, “when your mother walks the streets of Brownsville, people will carry her ­groceries.”

I couldn’t deal with all that pressure. Before the finals, Cus pulled me aside.

“Mike, this is the real world. You see all these people,” and he pointed to all the ring officials and the reporters and the boxing officials in the arena. “When you lose, they don’t like you anymore. If you’re not spectacular, they don’t like you anymore. Everybody used to like me. Believe me, when I was in my fifties, young, beautiful women would chase me all over the place. Now that I’m an old man, no one comes around anymore.”

Ten minutes before my fight, I had to go out for some air. Teddy went with me.

“Just relax, Mike, just relax,” he said.

I lost it. I started crying hysterically. Teddy put his arms around me.

“It’s just another match. You done it in the gym with better fighters than this guy,” he tried to console me.

“I’m Mike Tyson …,” I sobbed. “… everyone likes me.”

I couldn’t get a coherent sentence out. I was trying to say that if I lost, nobody would ever like me again. Teddy comforted me and told me not to let my feelings get the best of me.

When I walked into the ring, my opponent was waiting for me. He was a 6'6" white guy named Kelton Brown. I composed myself, summoned up my courage. We went to the center of the ring to get the instructions and I got so up into his face with my malevolent stare that the ref had to push me back and give me a warning before the fight even started. The bell rang and I charged him. Within a minute, I was giving him such a masterful beating that his corner threw in the towel. I was now a two-time Junior Olympic champ.

After my hand was raised, the TV commentator interviewed me in the ring.

“Mike, you must be very satisfied with how your career has progressed so far.”

“Well, I can say, ‘Yes, I am.’ I’m in here with kids, but I’m just as old as they are and I am more on the ball than them. I’m more disciplined. I learned first how to deal with my problems mentally, then physically. That’s an advantage I have over them mentally.”

“How did you feel at the end of the bout after defeating Brown?”

“I went in there to do my job. I don’t have nothing bad to say about my opponent. He did a well job. He was just in a little over his head. I commend him on his efforts,” I said.

When I got back east, I went back home to Brownsville. Everybody in the neighborhood had seen me on TV knocking out Kelton Brown. A lot of the guys who used to bully me came up to me on the street.

“Hey, Mike, you need anything? Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you,” they’d say.

They used to kick my ass, now they were kissing it.

But the audience I was really after was my mom. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with her.

“Hey, Mom, I’m the greatest fighter in the world. There ain’t a man living who can beat me,” I said.

My mom was living in this damp, decrepit, lopsided tenement building and was just staring at me as I talked about myself as if I were a god.

“You remember Joe Louis? There’s always someone better, son,” she said.

I stared back at my mom.

“That is never going to happen to me,” I said coldly. “I am the one who is better than everyone else. That’s me.”

I was dead serious because this was what Cus had brainwashed me into believing. My mother had never seen me like that before. I had always been creepy and looking for an angle. Now I had dignity and pride. Before, I smelt like weed or liquor. Now my body was pumped, I was immaculate. I was ready to take on the world.

“There is not a man in the world that can beat me, Ma. You watch, your boy is going to be champion of the world,” I boasted.

“You’ve got to be humble, son. You’re not humble, you’re not ­humble …” She shook her head.

I had my little bag with me and I took out the clippings of me getting my gold medals and handed them to her.

“Here, Mom. Read about me.”

“I’ll read it later,” she said.

The rest of the night she didn’t talk to me. She’d just go “um hmm.” She just looked at me with concern, like, “What are these white people doing to you?”

So I went back to Catskill and was feeling on top of the world. I was a spoiled upper-middle-class kid there. A few months after that, Cus told me that my mother was sick. He didn’t tell me the details, but my social worker had found out that my mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The same day that Cus told me, my sister called me.

“Go visit Mommy,” she said. “She’s not feeling well.”

I had seen my mother a few weeks before my sister called and she had had some kind of stroke and her eye on one side of her face was drooping, but I didn’t know she had cancer. The only cancer I knew was my astrological sign. I knew something wasn’t right, but I didn’t know it had anything to do with dying.

But when I got to the hospital, I got a big shock. My mother was lying in the bed, moaning, but she was pretty catatonic. It was painful just to look at her. Her eyes were sunken; her skin was wrapped tight around her cranium; she had lost all this weight. Her bedsheet had fallen off her and you could see some of her breast exposed. So I kissed her and covered her up. I didn’t know what to do. I had never seen anyone with cancer. I’d seen movies, so I expected to see something like “Well, I love you but I’m a goner now, Johnny.” I thought I’d have a chance to talk to her and say good-bye before she died, but she wasn’t even conscious. So I walked out of that hospital room and never went back again.

Every night I’d go back to the apartment and tell my sister that I had seen Mommy and that she looked good. I just didn’t want to deal with the hospital scene, it was too painful. So I went on a house-­robbing spree. I ran into Barkim and some other hustlers I knew from the neighborhood and we robbed some houses.

One night before we went out to rob a place, I showed Barkim a photo album I had brought down from Catskill. There were photos of me and Cus and Camille, and me with all these white kids at school.

Barkim couldn’t get over those photos.

“Yo, Mike, this is bugging me out. Are they trying you up there? Do they call you ‘nigga’?”

“No, this is like my family. Cus would kill you if you said that about me,” I told him.

Barkim shook his head.

“What are you doing here, Mike?” he asked. “Go back there with those white people. Shit, man, those white people love you. Can’t you see that, nigga? Man, I wish I had some white people that loved me. Go back, man. There ain’t shit out here for you.”

I thought about what he said. Here I was, a two-time national champ, and I was still robbing houses because you just go back to who you are. Every night I was drinking, smoking angel dust, snorting cocaine, and going to local dances. Anything to get my mind off my mother.

My sister kept telling me, “You came here to see Mommy. Don’t get carried away, you’re not here to play.”

One night Barkim went to pick his girl up and the three of us were walking through one of the Brownsville projects and we saw a couple of my old friends playing dice. Barkim was friends with them too, but he didn’t stop to talk to them, he just kept walking. I went over to say hello to them and they said, “What’s up, Mike?” but they were acting leery. “We’ll talk to you later,” they said. I could feel the vibe that something real bad happened, somebody died or somebody got a lot of shit taken from them.

I later found out that there had been some power struggles going on in the neighborhood and when the smoke had cleared, Barkim was on top. He had all of the cars and the girls and the jewelry and the guns, ’cause he had the neighborhood drug enterprise. The whole street scene had changed since I had lived there. Drugs had come in and people were dying. Guys we used to hang out with were killing one another for turf and money.

Then one day my sister came home. I was hungover, but I heard her key in the door, so I opened it and as soon as it swung open, POW, she punched me right in the face.

“Why did you do that?” I said.

“Why didn’t you tell me Mommy was dead?” she screamed.

I didn’t want to say “I didn’t go to the hospital. It was too painful to see Mom a shell of her old self” because my sister would have killed me, so I said, “Well, I didn’t want you to be hurt. I didn’t want you to know.” I was just too weak to deal with this. My sister was the strongest one in my family. She was good at dealing with tragedy. I couldn’t even go down with my sister and witness the body. My cousin Eric went with her.

My mom’s funeral was pathetic. She had saved up some money for a plot in Linden, New Jersey. There were only eight of us there – me, my brother and sister, my father Jimmy, her boyfriend Eddie, and three of my mother’s friends. I wore a suit that I had bought with some of the money that I had stolen. She only had a thin cardboard casket and there wasn’t enough money for a headstone. Before we left the grave, I said, “Mom, I promise I’m going to be a good guy. I’m going to be the best fighter ever and everybody is going to know my name. When they think of Tyson, they’re not going to think of Tyson Foods or Cicely Tyson, they’re going to think of Mike Tyson.” I said this to her because this was what Cus had been telling me about the Tyson name. Up until then, our family’s only claim to fame was that we shared the same last name as Cicely. My mom loved ­Cicely Tyson.

After the funeral, I stayed in Brownsville for a few weeks, getting high. One night I saw my friends who had been playing dice a few nights before. They told me that Barkim had been killed.

“Yeah, they got your man,” one of them told me. “I thought they got you too, because last time I saw you, you were walking away from the dice game with him and I haven’t seen you since.”

Barkim’s death had a big impact on me. This was the guy who had first gotten me into robbing, making me his street son. And he had just told me to get out of here and go back with my white family. And it wasn’t just him. All my friends in the neighborhood had big hopes for me and Cus. Cus was going to take me places.

“Stick with that white man, Mike. We’re nothing, Mike, don’t come back here, Mike. I don’t want to hear no bullshit, nigga. You’re the only hope we have. We ain’t going to never go nowhere Mike, we’re going to die right here in Brownsville. We’ve got to tell people before we die that we hung out with you, you were our nigga.”

I was hearing variations of that everywhere I went. They took it seriously. To my friends, Brownsville was pure hell. They all wished they had an opportunity to get out like I did. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to come back, but I went back because I was trying to figure out who I really was. My two lives were so divergent, yet I felt at home in both worlds for different reasons.

One day there was a knock on my door and it was Mrs. Coleman, my social worker. She had come to take my black ass back upstate because I got caught up robbing and stealing. I was supposed to ­return to Cus’s house three days after my mother’s funeral. Mrs. Coleman was a nice lady who drove over two hours from Catskill to get me. She was very supportive of Cus and thought that boxing was a positive direction for me. I was still out of it, so I told her that I wasn’t going back to Catskill. She informed me that if I wanted to stay in Brooklyn, then she’d have to do some paperwork and the police would pick me up and she’d place me somewhere in New York. I was sixteen by then, so I knew what she was saying was bullshit. Legally, I didn’t have to answer to anybody. But I went back upstate with her. I looked at my apartment and saw how my mother had lived in poverty and chaos and then thought about the way she died. That changed my whole perspective about how I was going to live my life. It might be short, but I was going to make sure it would be glorious.

When I got back to Catskill, Cus really helped get me over my mother’s death. He talked to me about the day his father died. Cus was in the house with him and his father was screaming. He couldn’t help him because he didn’t know what to do. Cus helped me get strong again. During this time there was a white South African boxer named Charlie Weir who was a top contender for the junior middleweight title. He and his team came to Catskill to train with Cus. This was during the apartheid era and Cus told them, “We have a black boy here. He’s part of our family. You have to treat him with respect. The same way you treat me and Camille, this is how you treat him.”

That was awesome. Nobody ever fought for me like that. Charlie and his team were paying to train with Cus and usually when you pay to train at a fight camp, you run the show. But Cus set them straight. And Cus talked like that at home too.

“Listen, we’re your family now, okay?” he told me. “And you’re our boy now. And you’re going to bring a lot of pride to this family. Pride and glory.”

The three of us would be sitting at the dining room table and Cus would say, “Look at your black son, Camille. What do you think about that?”

Camille would get up and come over to me and kiss me.

But our little idyllic scene got disrupted a month later. I fucked up. Cus was having trouble with my trainer Teddy Atlas. They were fighting over money. Teddy had recently married into a family that Cus was really dubious about, so when Teddy needed money, Cus wouldn’t give him much. Teddy was struggling, so he wanted me to turn pro so he could collect his share of my purses, but turning pro at that time wasn’t in Cus’s plan. So it was common knowledge that Teddy was going to leave Cus and that he would try to take me with him. There was no way in the world I would leave Cus.

But then I did something that made Cus get rid of Teddy. I had known Teddy’s sisters-in-law before Teddy even did. We had all gone to school together and were friends. The girls would always be flirtatious with me, but I never had a sexual thing with them. I was hanging out with his twelve-year-old sister-in-law one day and I grabbed her butt. I really didn’t mean to do anything evil. I was just playing around and I grabbed her butt and I shouldn’t have. It was just a stupid thing to do. I didn’t think it through. I had no social skills with girls because Cus kept me in the gym all the time. As soon as I did it, I immediately regretted it. She didn’t say anything to me but I knew it must have made her uncomfortable.

Later that evening my sparring partner drove me to the gym to work out with Teddy. I got out of the car and Teddy was waiting for me outside. He looked angry.

“Mike, come here. I want to talk to you,” he said.

I went over to him and he pulled out a gun and held it to my head.

“Motherfucker, don’t you ever touch my sister-in-law …”

He shot the gun into the air, right next to my ear. The sound was so deafening, I thought that he might have actually shot my ear off. And then Teddy ran. I would have too, because the gym was on top of a police station.

Whenever Teddy talks about this incident now, he makes it sound like he scared me to shit. The truth was, it wasn’t the first time someone had held a gun to my head, but it wasn’t like I was saying stuff like “C’mon, shoot me, motherfucker.” I was nervous. By the way, it took a while for my hearing to come back. But I just felt that I had fucked something up real bad. I really cared about Teddy. I was pissed, though, and I might have told some people that I was going to get back at him, but I would never do anything to hurt Teddy. He taught me how to fight, he was right there from the beginning.

Camille was furious with Teddy. She wanted Cus to press charges and have him arrested but Cus wouldn’t do that. He knew that Teddy was on probation for some other issue and that he would have gone right to jail. Teddy and his family eventually moved back to the city.

All this was my fault. I’m just sorry all that went down. After Teddy left, I started working with Kevin Rooney, another boxer who Cus converted into a trainer. Rooney and Teddy were childhood friends and Teddy had introduced Kevin to Cus. You can imagine how high the emotions ran when things played out the way they did.

I felt pretty developed by the time I got with Rooney. Normally when guys won tournaments, they’d get choosy about who they’d fight. Not me. I’d fight anybody anywhere: in their hometown, their backyard. Cus would say to me, “Fight them in their living rooms and their families could even be the judges.” I just wanted to fight and I wasn’t afraid of anything. I would fight in Chicago, Rhode Island, Boston, anywhere. And people would say, “That’s Tyson, he won the Junior Olympics twice.”

In December of 1982, I suffered my first loss in a tournament. I was fighting for the U.S. Amateur Championships in Indianapolis and my opponent was Al Evans. I was sixteen then and he was twenty-seven, a hard puncher and a very experienced guy.

I charged him in the first round and threw a ton of punches. I did the same in the second round. I was knocking him from pillar to post. In the third round, I was a little wild and he countered with a left hook and I went down. I got right up and rushed him again. He knocked me down with a right hand this time. I got up and started to charge again and I slipped. That was it, the ref stopped the fight. I wasn’t really hurt. I could have gone on. Cus was screaming at the ref from the corner.

I was crushed. I wanted to win every tournament. I liked the way the champion was treated after he won. I wanted that feeling, I was addicted to that feeling.

Cus might have thought that the loss shook my confidence and my desire, because when we got back to Catskill, he gave me a little lecture.

“Look at the champions you’ve read about in all these books. At some time early in their careers a number of them suffered knockout losses. But they never gave up. They endured. That’s why you’re reading about them. The ones who lost and quit, well their demons will follow them to their grave because they had a chance to face them and they didn’t. You have to face your demons, Mike, or they will follow you to eternity. Remember to always be careful how you fight your fights because the way that you fight your fights will be the way that you live your life.”

I won my next six fights, and then I fought for the National Golden Gloves championship against a guy called Craig Payne. I knocked Payne around the ring for three rounds with very little resistance. So I was confident when the official holding the big trophy walked past me into the ring. Craig and I were on either side of the ref and he was holding our hands waiting for the decision. I started raising my other hand in celebration when I noticed the official holding the trophy giving Craig the thumbs-up sign.

“And the winner in the Super Heavyweight division is … Craig Payne.”

I was stunned. The audience erupted into boos. Go to YouTube and watch that fight. I was robbed. After the fight, Emanuel Steward, the great trainer from Detroit who had Payne in his program, told me that he definitely thought that I had won. Cus was angry about the decision, but he was happy to see that I could handle that type of competition. He knew that we had won morally, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I was crying like a baby for a long time after the fight.

I didn’t have time to sulk. I went right back in the gym to train for more tournaments. In August of 1983, I won the gold medal at the CONCACAF Under-19 tournament. I won it again in 1984. That same year I won the gold medal at the National Golden Gloves tournament by knocking out Jonathan Littles in the first round. I had fought Littles in 1982 at the Junior Olympic trials and he was the only opponent who even made it into the second round with me. Now it was time to start getting ready for the Olympic trials.

While I was training for the Olympics, the boxing commentator Alex Wallau came up to Catskill to do a feature on Cus and me. At one point they had us sit in the living room and talk about each other. Cus was dressed in a conservative gray suit and a plaid sports shirt. I was wearing slacks and a shirt and a fly white Kangol cap.

Alex asked Cus about working with me and Cus went off into an interesting stream-of-consciousness rap.

“All my life I’ve been thinking in terms of developing a fighter who’s perfect. To me a person can accomplish this. I recognized the quality of a future champion because he was always able to rise to the level and exceed his sparring partners. Taught him movements like in karate so the body would make adjustments during a fight even if your opponent doesn’t make it necessary. He can strike a blow with lightning speed to the complete surprise of his opponents. He had tremendous speed, coordination, and an intuitive sense of timing, which usually comes after ten years of fighting because in the old days they used to box every single day.

“I don’t start teaching until I find out if they’re receptive. I do a great deal of talking to find out what kind of a person he is. For example we are today a sum total of every act and every deed. So in Mike’s case we talk and I try to find out how many layers I have to peel off of him of experience, detrimental and otherwise, until I get down to the man himself and then expose that, so that not only I see but that he can see. The progress begins from that point on more ­rapidly.”

“When you peeled away the layers on Mike Tyson, what did you find?” Alex asked.

Cus hesitated. “I found what I thought I’d find: a person of basically good character, capable of doing the things that are necessary to be done in order to be a great fighter or champion of the world. When I recognized this, then my next job was to make him aware of these qualities because unless he knew them as well as I did, it wouldn’t help him very much. The ability to apply the discipline, the ability to do what needs to be done no matter how he feels inside, in my opinion, is the definition of a true professional. I think that Mike is rapidly approaching that status, that important point, which I consider Mike must do in order to become the greatest fighter in the world. And for all we know, barring unforeseen incidents, and if this continues without any interruptions, and if we get the sparring and everything else that goes with it, he may go down in history as one of the greatest we ever had, if not the greatest that ever lived.”

I was so happy that Cus was talking about me. Then Alex asked Cus if it was hard for a man his age to work with such a young fighter.

“I often say to him, and I know he doesn’t know what I mean but I’m going to tell him now what I mean, because if he weren’t here I probably wouldn’t be alive today. The fact that he is here and doing what he’s doing and doing it so well and improving as he has gives me the motivation and interest in staying alive because I believe that a person dies when he no longer wants to live. Nature is smarter than we think. Little by little we lose our friends that we care about and little by little we lose our interest, until finally we say, ‘What the devil am I doing around here? I have no reason to go on.’ But I have a reason with Mike here. He gives me the motivation and I will stay alive and I will watch him become a success because I will not leave until that happens because when I leave, he will not only know how to fight, he will not only understand many things, but he will also know how to take care of himself.”

Whew. That was just Cus putting this fucking pressure on me again. I know that Cus believed I could handle it, but he also believed that I didn’t believe I could.

Then they asked me about my future and my dreams.

“Dreams are just when you’re starting off. You have the dream to push the motivation. I just want to be alive ten years from now. People say I’m going to be a million-dollar fighter. Well, I know what I am, and that’s what counts more than anything else, because the people don’t know what I go through. They think I’m born this way. They don’t know what it took to get this way.”

“What do you go through?” Alex asked.

“The training. The boxing’s the easy part. When you get into the ring to fight, that’s the vacation. But when you get in the gym, you have to do things over and over till you’re sore and deep in your mind you say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I push that out of my mind. At this particular time it’s the amateurs and it’s all fun, trophies and medals, but I’m like you, I want to make money when it comes to being professional. I like the fancy hairdos and I like to wear fancy clothes, gold, jewelry, and everything. To continue this kind of lifestyle you have to earn the money the right way. You can’t take a gun and go into a bank. You might as well do it in a way that you feel good about yourself by doing something you like.”

I was bitter about working that hard. I had never endured that kind of deprivation and then I had to get up the next day and do it all over again. I worked hard for those Olympics.

The U.S. team officials wouldn’t let me compete at my natural weight, because Cus was feuding with the Olympic boxing guys. It started when they wanted me to fight on the U.S. team at a fight in the Dominican Republic, but Cus wouldn’t let me go because we couldn’t use Kevin as our trainer. I would have had to use their trainers. He also didn’t want me to go because he was afraid that revolutionaries might try to kidnap me.

To get back at Cus, they told him that I would have to fight in the Under-201-pound division. I was fighting at about 215 then so I went on a fast. I put on those vinyl suits again and wore them all day. I loved it; I felt like a real fighter, lose the weight to make the weight. I was so delusional, I thought I was making a great sacrifice.

I had an intense schedule preparing for the Olympic trials. On August 12, 1983, I entered the Ohio State Fair National Tournament. On the first day, I achieved a forty-two-second KO. On the second day, I punched out the front two teeth of my opponent and left him out cold for ten minutes. Then on the third day, the reigning tournament champ withdrew from the fight.

The next day we went to Colorado Springs for the U.S. National Championship. When I got there, four of the six other fighters dropped out of the competition. Both of my victories were first-round KOs.

On June 10, 1984, I finally got a shot at the Olympics. My qualifying fight was against Henry Tillman, an older and more experienced boxer. In the first round, I knocked him almost through the ropes. Then he was up and I stalked him for the next two rounds. But in amateur boxing, aggression isn’t rewarded and my knockout counted the same as a light tippy-tap jab. When they announced the decision, I couldn’t believe that they gave it to Tillman. Once again, the crowd agreed and they started booing.

I hated these amateur bouts. “We are boxers here,” these stuffed shirts would say.

“Well, I am a fighter, sir. My purpose is to fight,” I’d answer.

The whole amateur boxing establishment hated me. They didn’t like my cocky Brownsville attitude. I was behaving myself but you could still see that New York swagger coming out. And if they didn’t like me, they despised Cus. He could be so over-the-top that sometimes he’d embarrass me. I never let him know; I always stood there and listened to him go after these guys, but I was totally embarrassed by the way he would talk to them. He was very vindictive and always out for revenge. He couldn’t live without enemies, so he created them. I sometimes thought, Damn, why couldn’t I have been with a nonconfrontational kind of white guy? I thought I was getting away from that loud life where people screamed at the top of their lungs. But with Cus, it was a constant reminder that I hadn’t.

I had a chance to avenge my loss to Tillman a month later at the Olympic Box-Offs. Again I pressed him for three rounds and this time he did even less than in the first fight. Even Howard Cosell, who was doing the announcing for ABC and who had thought Tillman had outpointed me in our first fight, had to admit that I had a much better chance of getting the decision.

I was sure I had won and when the ref lifted Tillman’s arm again, I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that they’d give him two bullshit decisions. Again the whole audience started booing the judges. Cus was furious. He started cursing and tried to punch out one of the U.S. Olympic officials. Kevin Rooney and some other officials had to hold him back. I was so self-absorbed at the time that I thought all of this stuff with Cus was about me. As I got older, I understood that this was really a story that went back about thirty years. These were his demons and they really had little to do with me.

It was all about Cus being taken advantage of and robbed of his glory. I didn’t even know until recently that Cus had sent a friend of ours named Mark, who worked for the FBI, to the U.S. Attorney’s ­office in Albany to investigate the Tillman decisions.

I threw tantrums after the two Tillman decisions. I took the ­runner-up trophies that they gave me and threw them down and broke them. Cus sent me to the Olympics anyway, to live with the Olympic team. The Olympics were in L.A. that year. He said that I should just go there and enjoy the experience. He got me two tickets to every fight, but I had a pass anyway so I scalped the tickets. And the Olympics weren’t a total loss for me. There was this really cute intern who worked for the U.S. Olympic committee. All of the boxers and the coaches were hitting on her, but I was the one who got her. She liked me. After all those years of deprivation, it was nice to ­finally have sex.

But even getting laid didn’t take away the disappointment and pain I felt from having my Olympic dream stolen from me. When the Olympics were over, I flew back to New York, but I didn’t go right back to Catskill. I hung around the city. I was really depressed. One afternoon I went to Forty-second Street to see a karate movie. Right before it started, I smoked a joint.

I started getting high and I remembered the time that Cus had caught me with pot. It was right after I had won my second Junior Olympics Championship. One of the other boxers was jealous of me and ratted me out. Before I had a chance to ditch the evidence, Cus had sent Ruth, the German cleaning lady, to my room and she found the weed.

Cus was furious when I came home.

“This must be some good stuff, Mike. I know this must be good because you just let down four hundred years of slaves and peasants to smoke it.”

He broke my spirit that day. He made me feel like an Uncle Tom nigga. And he hated those kinds of people. He really knew how to bring me to my nadir.

So I was sitting in the theater, remembering that, and sinking deeper and deeper into my depression. Then I started crying. When the movie was over, I went straight to the train station and went back to Catskill. The whole trip back, I knew I had to immediately throw myself into full-blown training for professional fighting. I had to be spectacular when I turned pro. As we got closer to Catskill, I started talking to myself.

“They’re never going to see anyone like Tyson. He will transcend the game. He will be in the pantheon of great fighters alongside John L. Sullivan and Joe Louis and Benny Leonard and Joe Gans and the rest. Tyson is magnificent.”

I talked about myself in the third person. Even to myself.

I was completely pumped up when I got off that train and took a cab to Cus’s house. The world was about to see a fighter the likes of which it had never been seen before. I was going to transcend the game. With all due respect, and not to be arrogant, but I was conscious of my future prominence as a boxer then. I knew nothing could stop me and I would be the champion as surely as Friday would come after Thursday. I didn’t lose a fight for the next six years.