Читать книгу Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography - Mike Tyson - Страница 9

Coming off of those two losses to Tillman, I wasn’t exactly the ­hottest property in the boxing world. Cus had planned for me to win the gold medal at the Olympics and then start my career with a lucrative TV contract. But that didn’t work out. No professional promoters were interested in me. Nobody in boxing really believed in Cus’s peek-a-boo style. And a lot of people thought that I was too short to be an effective heavyweight.

I guess all that talk got to Cus. One night I was taking the garbage out and Cus was cleaning up the kitchen.

“Man, I wish you had a body like Mike Weaver or Ken Norton,” he said out of the blue. “Because then you would be real intimidating. You’d have an ominous aura. They don’t have the temperament but they have the physique of an intimidating man. You could paralyze the other boxers with fear just by the way you look.”

I got choked up. To this day, when I recount this story, I still choke up. I was offended and hurt but I wouldn’t tell Cus that because then he’d say, “Oh, you’re crying? What are you, a little baby? How can you handle a big-time fight if you don’t have the emotional toughness?”

Any time I showed my emotions, he despised it. So I held back my tears.

“Don’t worry, Cus.” I made myself sound arrogant. “You watch. One day the whole world is going to be afraid of me. When they mention my name, they’ll sweat blood, Cus.”

That was the day that I turned into Iron Mike; I became that guy 100 percent. Even though I had been winning almost every one of my fights in an exciting fashion, I wasn’t completely emotionally invested in being the savage that Cus wanted me to be. After that talk about me being too small, I became that savage. I even began to fantasize that if I actually killed someone inside the ring, it would certainly intimidate everyone. Cus wanted an antisocial champion, so I drew on the bad guys from the movies, guys like Jack Palance and Richard Widmark. I immersed myself in the role of the arrogant sociopath.

But first I got a Cadillac. Cus couldn’t afford to pay for my ­expenses while we were building up my career, so he got his friend Jimmy ­Jacobs and his partner, Bill Cayton, to lay out the money. Jimmy was an awesome guy. He was the Babe Ruth of handball and while he traveled around the world on the handball circuit, he began collecting rare fight films. Eventually he met Bill Cayton, who was a collector himself, and the two of them started Big Fights, Inc. They cornered the market on fight footage and Cayton later made a fortune selling those fights to ESPN. Cus had lived with Jimmy for ten years when Cus was still in New York, so they were close friends. In fact, Cus had devised a secret plan to train Jimmy as a fighter and for his first fight ever, amateur or professional, to fight Archie Moore for his light-heavyweight title. Jacobs trained intensely for six months with Cus, but the fight never happened because Archie pulled out.

But Cus never liked Jimmy’s partner Cayton. He thought he was too in love with his money. I didn’t like him either. Where Jimmy had a great outgoing personality, Cayton was a pompous cold fish. Jimmy and Cayton had been managing boxers for many years and had ­Wilfred Benitez and Edwin Rosario in their stable, so despite his dislike of Cayton, Cus promised them a role with me when I turned pro.

I guess Cus saw Jimmy and Bill as investors who wouldn’t interfere with my development and would allow Cus to have total control over my upbringing. By now they had invested over $200,000 in me. When I got back from the Olympics, Jimmy told Cus that he wanted to buy me a new car. I think that they might have been worried that I would leave Cus and go with someone else, cutting them out of the picture. Of course, I would never have done that.

Cus was mad because he thought that I didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t like I had come home with a gold medal. But he took me to a local dealership. Cus was trying to steer me to an Oldsmobile Cutlass because it didn’t cost much.

“Nah, I want the Cadillac, Cus,” I said.

“Mike, I’m telling you …”

“If it’s not the Cadillac, I don’t want no car.” I stood my ground.

I got the car and we drove it back to the house and stored it in the barn. I didn’t have a license and I didn’t know how to drive, but when Cus got on my case, I’d grab my car keys, run out to the barn, get in the car, lock myself in, and play music.

In September of 1984, I signed two contracts, one with Bill Cayton and one with Jimmy Jacobs. Cayton owned an advertising agency, and he signed me to a seven-year personal management contract representing me for commercials and product endorsements. Instead of the usual 10 or 15 percent, Cayton was taking 331/3 percent. But I didn’t know the terms, I just signed it. A few weeks later, I signed a contract with Jimmy and he became my manager. Standard four-year contract, two-thirds for me, one-third for Jimmy. And then they agreed to split the income from the contracts with each other. Cus signed my management contract too. Under his signature it read, “Cus D’Amato, Advisor to Michael Tyson who shall have final approval of all decisions involving Michael Tyson.” Now I had an official management team. I knew that Cayton and Jimmy were very savvy guys with the media, and I knew that they knew how to organize shit. And with Cus making all the boxing decisions and handpicking my opponents, I was ready to begin my professional career.

Until about a week into training, when I vanished for four days. Tom Patti finally tracked me down. I was sitting in my Caddy.

“Where have you been, Mike?” Tommy asked.

“I don’t need this shit,” I vented. “My girlfriend Angie’s father is a manager at J.J. Newberry’s department store. He can get me a job making a hundred thousand dollars. I got this Caddy. I’m going to split,” I said.

The truth was, I was just nervous about fighting as a professional.

“Mike, you’re not going to make a hundred grand a year because you’re dating his daughter,” he said.

“I can do a lot of things,” I said.

“Man, you don’t have a lot of options. Get back in the gym, win your fight, and move on.”

I was back in the gym the next day. Once I got over my nerves, I was proud that I was going to be a professional fighter at just eighteen years old. I had a great team in my corner. Besides Kevin Rooney, there was Matt Baranski. Matt was a wonderful man who was a methodical tactician. Kevin was more “Aarrrgggghhh” in-your-face.

We discussed giving me a nickname. Jimmy and Bill didn’t think it was necessary, but Cus wanted to call me the Tan Terror, as an homage to Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber. I thought that was cool, but we never ran with it. But I paid homage to other heroes of mine. I had someone put a bowl over my head and go around it with an electric shaver and give me a Jack Dempsey haircut. Then I decided to go with the Spartan look that all my old heroes had, no socks, no robe. I wanted to bring that look back into the mainstream of boxing.

My first professional bout was on March 6, 1985, in Albany. My opponent was a guy named Hector Mercedes. We didn’t know anything about him, so the morning before the fight Cus got on the phone with some trainers and boxing gym owners in Puerto Rico to make sure that Mercedes wasn’t a sleeper. The night of the fight, I was nervous, but I knew I could beat the guy as soon as I saw him in the ring. I knew that Cus would match me up against a weaker opponent for my first few fights to build up my confidence.

I was right. They stopped the fight in the first round when I pummeled Hector to a kneeling position in the corner of the ring. I was excited, but back in the locker room, Cus pointed out all my flaws. “You gotta keep your hands up more. Your hands were playing around,” he said.

My next two fights were also in Albany, which was practically my hometown. A month after Mercedes, I fought Trent Singleton. I entered the ring and bowed to all four corners of the arena, then I raised my arms to the crowd like a gladiator. It didn’t take long for me to knock him down three times. The referee stopped the fight. Then I sauntered over to his corner, kissed him, and rubbed his head.

I was due to fight again in a month, so in between fights all I did was run, train, and box. That’s all Cus wanted me to do. Box, box, box, spar, spar, spar.

I fought Don Halpin on May twenty-third, and he was a much more experienced opponent. He lasted for three rounds while I was switching back and forth from a conventional stance to southpaw, experimenting and getting some ring experience. In the fourth round, I tagged him with a left and a right and he was on his way down when I hit him again with a right hook. He was on the canvas for a good amount of time before they finally got him up. Cus, of course, thought I didn’t go to the body enough and I didn’t move laterally. But Jacobs and Cayton were thrilled with the way I looked so far.

I started attracting my own following at these fights. They began showing up with little signs like they do at baseball games. One sign read GOODEN IS DOCTOR K BUT MIKE TYSON IS DOCTOR KO. I also started attracting groupies, but I wasn’t taking advantage of their advances. I was too in love with myself to think about anybody else. Actually, Cus thought I was going a little bit overboard. He thought I should go out more. So I’d go up to Albany and hang out with some of my friends there.

I hardly made any money from those early fights. My first fight lost money for the promoter, but Jimmy gave me $500. Then he took $50 from that to give to Kevin and he put $350 in the bank for me, so I walked away with $100. They were more concerned with spreading my name around than making money on these early fights. Jimmy and Cayton were the first fight managers to make highlight reels of all my knockouts and send VHS tapes to every boxing writer in the country. They were very innovative that way.

I was performing sensationally, but it seemed that Cus was getting grumpier and grumpier. Sometimes I thought that Cus thought I was an Uncle Tom. I would try to be polite to the people I’d meet and give them “Yes, ma’ams” and “No, sirs” and Cus would get on my case.

“Why are you talking to them like that? You think they’re better than you? All those people are phonies,” he’d say. Then when I acted like the god that he kept telling me I was, he’d look at me with ­disgust.

“You like people looking up to you, huh? Guys like Cayton and them telling you how great you are.”

I think he just needed someone to tear into. My day depended on what side of the bed Cus woke up on. By then, I had gotten my license and I would drive him to various meetings and conferences.

On June twentieth, shortly before my nineteenth birthday, I fought Ricky Spain in Atlantic City. This was my first pro fight outside of Albany, but Cus had sent me to watch big fights in cities all over the country to get me acclimated to the arenas.

“Make this your home, know this arena, know this place with your eyes closed,” he’d tell me. “You are going to be living here for a long time, so get comfortable.” He also took me along when he hung out with big-time fighters. He had me sit with them around a dinner table and get familiar with them so I’d never get intimidated by a fighter.

I was really excited to be fighting in Atlantic City and for it to be broadcast on ESPN. My opponent was unbeaten too, with a 7-0 record with five knockouts. They introduced me as “the Baby Brawler” and I don’t know about the “Baby” part, but I floored Spain twice in the first round and the ref stopped the fight.

Jimmy and Cayton were trying to get me a regular slot on ESPN, but Bob Arum, who was promoting the fights, told them that his matchmakers didn’t think much of my talent. That really pissed Cus off. Cus hated Arum’s matchmakers and after my next fight, they never worked with Arum again.

But all this political stuff didn’t interest me. I couldn’t wait for my next fight. It was in Atlantic City again on July eleventh. I was fighting John Alderson, a big country guy from West Virginia who also had a 4-0 record. This fight was on ESPN and I dropped him a few times in the second round and the doctor stopped the fight after he went back to his corner.

I ran my record to 6-0 in my next fight against Larry Sims, but I really pissed Cus off in doing so. Sims was really slick and awkward, one of those cute fighters. So in the third round, I turned lefty and I knocked him out with a resounding punch. In the dressing room later, Cus confronted me.

“Who taught you that southpaw crap? It might be hard to get you fights now,” he said. “People don’t want to fight southpaws. You’re going to ruin everything I created.” Cus hated southpaws.

“I’m sorry, Cus.” Ain’t that a bitch. There I was apologizing for a spectacular knockout.

I was back in the ring a month later and dispatched Lorenzo Can­ady in one round, and three weeks later I faced Mike Johnson in ­Atlantic City. When we lined up for the instructions, Johnson looked so arrogant, like he hated my guts. Within seconds he was down from a left hook to the kidneys and then when he got up, I threw a spectacular right hand that hit him so hard his front two teeth were lodged in his mouthpiece. I knew it would be a long time until he came to. Kevin jumped into the ring and we were laughing and high-fiving like two arrogant little kids. I was, like, “Ha, ha. Look at this dead nigga, Kevin.”

Now I was 8-0 with eight knockouts and Jimmy and Cus were using all their contacts in the press to get me recognition. I’d go down to New York to go to lunch with Jimmy and his newspaper friends. We really courted the press. I also started getting mentioned in the gossip columns because I started hanging out at the New York City hot spots like the restaurant Columbus on the Upper West Side. I became friendly with the great photographer Brian Hamill, and him and his brother Pete, who was a world-famous writer, started introducing me to all these celebrities. Pete would bring me to the bar and we’d sit with Paulie Herman, one of the owners. Paulie was the man in New York at that time. It seemed to me that he was a bigger celebrity than the celebrities themselves. Everybody wanted to be around Paulie, sit at his table, ask him for favors. I thought that he was a Mafia boss or something.

You never knew who you’d meet at Columbus. Sometimes Pete would leave me there with Paulie. Next thing I knew, David Bowie, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Drew Barrymore, this little kid, would be sitting at the same table with us. I’d think to myself, This is deep. You better keep your composure. Then Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci walked in and sat down. We were sitting and talking and the next thing I knew, Paulie said, “Hey, Mike, we all gotta go somewhere.” And, boom, five minutes later I’m at Liza Minnelli’s house sitting on the sofa chilling with Raul Julia.

Eventually I met all those New York social scenesters. Being around them, I realized that something special had died right before I had come onto the scene. It was so powerful, you could still feel it in the music of Elton John and Stevie Wonder and Freddie Mercury. You knew they had been to a special place that wasn’t around any longer.

But even meeting all these superstars didn’t validate my own sense of having made it. That didn’t happen until I met the wrestler Bruno Sammartino. I was a huge wrestling fan growing up. I loved Sammartino and Gorilla Monsoon and Billy Graham. One night I went to a party where I met Tom Cruise, who was just starting out. At the same event, I saw Bruno Sammartino. I was totally starstruck. I just stared at him. Someone introduced us and he had no idea who I was, but I started recounting to him all the great matches I had seen him participate in, against people like Killer Kowalski, Nikolai Vol­koff, and George “the Animal” Steele. In my sick, megalomaniac mind I was thinking, This is a sign of my greatness. My hero is here with me. I’m going to be great like him and win the championship.

Cus wasn’t too thrilled that I was spending more and more time in Manhattan. When I went to the city, I’d crash on the couch of Steve Lott, who was Jimmy Jacobs’s right-hand man. Steve was a model junkie and he’d take me to places like the Nautilus Club and other spots where beautiful girls would hang out. At the time I was dedicated to winning that belt so I wasn’t really fooling around with the girls yet. I tried to be a nice guy then, not going too far. My weakness was food. Steve was a great cook and when I went out at night clubbing, I’d come back and have Steve heat up some Chinese leftovers for a late-night snack. I’d go back to Catskill after a few days and Cus would be mad.

“Look at your ass. Your ass is getting fatter,” he’d shake his head.

My next fight was my first real test. On October ninth, I went up against Donnie Long in Atlantic City. Long had gone the distance with both James Broad, a tough heavyweight, and John Tate, the former WBA heavyweight champ. I knew it would make me look good in the boxing world if I dispatched him promptly. Long was confident going into the fight, telling Al Bernstein of ESPN that he could outpunch me. They called Long “the Master of Disaster,” but his night turned disastrous as soon as the opening bell rang. I went after him fast and ferocious and knocked him down seconds into the fight with a lunging left. A little later, a right uppercut dropped him and then I finished him off with a right-uppercut-left-hook combination. It took me under a minute and a half to win.

After the fight, Al Bernstein interviewed me.

“Earlier in the day I really thought that Donnie Long would be a fairly tough opponent for you. He wasn’t!” Al said.

“Well, like I told you earlier today, if I knock him out in one or two rounds, would you still consider him that?”

“I thought he was supposed to be, but I guess he wasn’t,” Al said.

“Oh, now he wasn’t …” I laughed.

“No, he was a tough man, I’m just saying for you he wasn’t tough, apparently, because you beat him.”

“I knew from the beginning, but everybody else didn’t know that it was no con, it was no con. A lot of people came to look, Jesse Ferguson came to look, the Fraziers came to look. All of you come and get some, because Mike Tyson is out here, he is waiting for you, all come and get some.”

I was almost too focused then; I didn’t really live in reality. I was interviewed for Sports Illustrated and I said, “What bothers me most is being around people who are having a lot of fun, with parties and stuff like that. It makes you soft. People who are only interested in having fun cannot accomplish anything.” I thought I was stronger than people who were weak and partying. I wanted to be in that Columbus celebrity world, but I was fighting that temptation to party.

I still wasn’t having sex. The last time I had gotten laid was at the Olympics with that intern. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex, but I was too awkward with women. I didn’t know how to access them. “Hey, hi, you want to get laid?” I didn’t know how to say that. Around this time, I was supposed to fight on the undercard in Madison Square Garden. My reputation preceded me and my opponent didn’t show up. So I left the Garden and went to a whorehouse on Forty-second Street. I had known about the place since I was a kid hanging out in Times Square.

I walked into the joint and sat down in one of the chairs in the outer room. There was a big-screen TV playing porno films. The girls would come up and they’d sit with you, and ask, “Would you like to date?” If you passed on one of them, another one would come over. I was the youngest guy there, so they thought I was kind of cute. I picked out a nice Cuban girl and we went to a room in the back.

Freud would have had a field day with that scenario. Here I was all ready to focus my aggression and beat up my opponent in the ring, but the fight is canceled and I go and get laid. I was actually extremely excited. During our session, her back went out. She said, “Hey, we have to stop. I pulled something in my back.” I hadn’t finished yet so I asked her for my money back. She changed the subject and asked me for my Edwin Rosario T-shirt that I was wearing. She was too hurt to continue so she said, “Let’s talk.” We talked for a while and then I left with my T-shirt.

After that, Cus began accelerating my pace. Sixteen days after the Long fight I fought Robert Colay and I threw two left hooks. The first one missed, the second one knocked him out. It was over in thirty-seven seconds. A week later I fought Sterling Benjamin upstate in Latham, New York. I knocked him down with a short left hook and then after the eight count, I swarmed him, throwing devastating body blows and uppercuts. He crumbled to the canvas. The ref stopped the fight. The upstate crowd was going wild and I turned to face them, putting my gloves through the upper ropes, palms up, and saluted them gladiator-style.

But I had more important things on my mind than my eleventh pro victory. Cus was very ill. He had been sick since I moved into the house with him and Camille, he was always coughing, but I knew his condition was getting worse when he didn’t travel with us to some of my fights. He stayed home for the Long and the Colay fights, but he made the trip to Latham to see me fight Benjamin. He was too much of an old stubborn Italian man to miss a fight in his backyard. He had no faith in doctors and he was one of the first proponents of vitamins and what we now call “alternative medicine,” and nutritional therapy.

I knew Cus was sick but I was just of the mind-set that he was going to make it through to see me become champ because we always talked about it. He was going to stick around to see me become a success. But when we talked in private, sometimes he’d say, “I might not be around, so you’ve got to listen to me.” I just thought he said that to scare me, to make sure I acted right. Cus always said things to make me apprehensive.

He was admitted to a hospital in Albany, but Jimmy Jacobs had him transferred to Mount Sinai in the city. I went with Steve Lott to visit him. Cus was sitting in his bed eating ice cream. We talked for a few minutes and then Cus asked Steve to leave the room so he could talk to me in private.

That’s when he told me he was dying from pneumonia. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. He didn’t look morbidly ill. He was buffing. He had energy and zest. He was eating ice cream. He was chilling out, but I started freaking out.

“I don’t want to do this shit without you,” I said, choking back tears. “I’m not going to do it.”

“Well, if you don’t fight, you’ll realize that people can come back from the grave, because I’m going to haunt you for the rest of your life.” I told him “Okay,” and then he took my hand.

“The world has to see you, Mike. You’re going to be champ of the world, the greatest out there,” he said.

Then Cus started crying. That was the first time I ever saw him cry. I thought he was crying because he couldn’t see me become heavyweight champion of the world after all we had gone through together. But soon I realized he was crying over Camille. I totally forgot that he had another partner who meant more to him than me. He told me he regretted that he had never married Camille because he had tax problems and he didn’t want her to take them on.

“Mike, just do me one favor,” he said. “Make sure you take care of Camille.”

I left the room in shock. I was staying at Steve’s apartment, and Jimmy lived in the same building. Later that day, Jimmy came by to get me to go with him to the bank to deposit a check for $120,000 for my last fights. By now my name was in the papers and I was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and strangers were stopping me on the street and wishing me well. I was out there, cocky, looking good. I knew all the girls at the bank and normally I’d flirt with them and they’d flirt back.

But right before we walked in the bank, Jimmy stopped.

“Cus is not going to make it through the night, Mike. They say he has a few hours to live.”

I just started crying like it was the end of the world. It was. My world was gone. All the girls at the bank were staring at me.

“Is there a problem?” The manager came up to us.

“We just heard that a dear friend of ours is dying and Mike is taking it very hard,” Jimmy said. He was cool and collected. Just like that, boom, no emotion, just the way Cus trained him to be. Meanwhile, I was still crying like a lost soldier on a mission without a general. I don’t think I ever went back to that bank, I was so embarrassed.

They had Cus’s funeral upstate. I was one of Cus’s pallbearers. Everybody from the boxing world came. It was so sad. In my sick head all I could think about was to succeed for him. I would have done ­anything to win that title to insure Cus’s legacy. I started feeling sorry for myself, thinking that without Cus, I would have a shitty life. Camille was very composed but when we got back to the house, we cried ­together.

Shortly after the funeral, Jim Jacobs organized a memorial service for Cus at his old gym, the Gramercy Gym, in the city. All the luminaries were there. Norman Mailer said his influence on boxing was as great as Hemingway’s influence on young American writers. Gay ­Talese said it was an honor to have known Cus.

“He taught me so many things, not just about boxing, which was a craft and could be mastered, but about living and about life, which is not so easily mastered,” Pete Hamill said.

Jim Jacobs pretty much nailed Cus in his speech. “Cus D’Amato was violently opposed to ignorance and corruption in boxing. While Cus was unyielding to his enemies, he was understanding, compassionate, and incredibly tolerant with his friends.”

I shut down emotionally after Cus died. I got really mean. I was trying to prove myself, show that I was a man, not just a boy. I flew to Texas a week after Cus’s funeral to fight Eddie Richardson. Jimmy and Cayton didn’t even let me mourn. So I brought along a photo of Cus. I was still talking to Cus, every night.

“I’m going to fight this guy Richardson tomorrow, Cus,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”

Even though I was functioning, I’d lost my spirit, my belief in ­myself. I lost all my energy to do anything good. I don’t think I ever did get over his death. I was also mad at him when he died. I was so bitter. If he’d only gone to the doctor’s earlier, he could’ve been alive to protect me. But he wanted to be stubborn, so he didn’t get treated and he died and left me out there alone for these animals in the boxing world to take advantage of. After Cus died, I just didn’t care about anything anymore. I was basically fighting for the money. I didn’t really have a dream. It would be good to win the title, but I just wanted to get some wine, have some fun, party, and get fucked up.

But first I fucked Richardson up. The first punch I threw, a right hand, knocked him down. He hung on for a minute more, but then I hit him with a leaping left and because he was so tall he wound up coming down on the other side of the ring.

Conroy Nelson, who had lost to Trevor Berbick years earlier for the Canadian title, was next. He was still ranked the #2 heavyweight in Canada and was a tough, experienced guy, one of those guys with a big Adonis body. All the announcers thought this was the guy who would finally test me. I just worked over his body in the first round. Two or three times he almost went down from body blows. Then the second started and, boom, boom, boom, to the body and then an overhead right broke his nose and a left hook to the chin drove him to the canvas. When the ref stopped the fight, I paraded around the ring, soaking in the adulation of my hometown fans, arms outstretched.

My next fight was in the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden on December sixth. All my friends from Brownsville came. But I was too much in the zone to really think about being in New York and having a good time. I couldn’t wait to get through these fights and get my shot at the title for Cus. My opponent that night was Sammy Scaff. My postfight interview lasted longer than the fight. Scaff was a lumbering 250-pound Kentucky journeyman and I caught him with two awesome left hooks to the head that left his face a mask of blood and his nose mostly rearranged. After the fight, John Condon, the head of boxing at MSG who was doing the color commentary, asked me what was a typical day in the life of Mike Tyson.

“Mike Tyson is just a hardworking fighter that leads a boring life as an individual. Anyone who says ‘I wish I was in your shoes,’ the hundreds of people who say that don’t know the tenth of it. If they were in my shoes they would cry like babies. They couldn’t handle it.”

We were back in Latham for my next fight. It was the main event and the arena was packed with my fans. My opponent was Mark Young, a tough-looking guy. When we came to the center of the ring for the instructions, I could feel his energy. You got to stare them down during the instructions, but that doesn’t mean anything, that’s just window dressing. You feel that energy from their spirit, you feel it from their soul, and then you go back to your corner and you go “Oh shit” or “This guy’s a pussy.” That night it was “Oh shit, he’s coming to fight.” Kevin felt it too.

“Hit him with hard jabs and move your head,” Kevin said. “Don’t forget to move your head, he’s coming to fight.”

The bell rang and he came out winging. But he was wild and I started throwing hard jabs and moving my head. A little more than a minute in, he threw a wild right, I twisted around him and threw a sneaky vicious right uppercut and, boom, he went up in the air and came down face-first. Ray Mancini was the TV color commentary and he was very complimentary about my skills, but he thought that it was time that my management gave me someone to fight.

But Jimmy stuck to his plan. Two weeks later I was in Albany fighting Dave Jaco. He had a respectable 19-5 record with fourteen KOs including a TKO over Razor Ruddock. He was a tall skinny white guy. He didn’t look like much but was really tough. I kept knocking him down and he kept getting up. They stopped it after my third knockdown of the first round.

That night, I celebrated my victory with some friends. About eight o’clock the next morning, I knocked at Camille’s door. She opened it and I went inside and sat down. I didn’t say anything.

“How did you make out?” Camille asked me.

“I made out good, but I was looking for somebody who wasn’t there,” I said and tears started rolling down my cheeks. “Cus wasn’t there. Everybody tells me I’m doing good, I’m doing good, but nobody tells me if I do bad. It doesn’t matter how good I would have done, Cus would have probably seen something I did wrong.”

I expanded on the way I was feeling when I was interviewed for Sports Illustrated that week.

“I miss Cus terribly. He was my backbone. All the things we worked on, they’re starting to come out so well. But when it comes down to it, who really cares? I like doing my job, but I’m not happy being victorious. I fight my heart out, give it my best, but when it’s over, there’s no Cus to tell me how I did, no mother to show my clippings to.”

I put my feelings aside and kept busy. On January 24, 1986, I fought Mike Jameson. He was a big Irishman who had won decisions over Tex Cobb and Michael Dokes. It took me five rounds to stop him because he was a wily veteran and knew when to hold me. It made for a lackluster fight. My next opponent took those tactics to a new level. On February sixteenth, I met Jesse Ferguson in Troy, New York. The fight was on ABC and it was my first national TV appearance. Ferguson had become the ESPN champion when he beat Buster Douglas five months earlier. I was watching him walk around in the arena after he won the championship and I wanted to challenge him for his belt so bad. I fought on the undercard.

I knew it was going to be a tough fight. During the instructions, he didn’t even look me in the eye. He had such a humble and submissive posture. But I didn’t detect even a drop of fear or intimidation from his energy, so I wasn’t going for any of that humble, afraid-to-look-me-in-the-eye shit. I felt that he couldn’t wait to slug me.

I had the hometown advantage – in more ways than one. Jimmy had stacked the deck for my first national exposure. He got us to wear eight-ounce gloves, lighter than usual. We were fighting in a smaller ring than normal. And all the officials were in our corner.

I began the fight with a vicious body assault. But Ferguson was shrewd enough to hold on to me. This continued for the first four rounds. But in the fifth, I got him in the corner and connected with a right uppercut and broke his nose. He barely made it through the round and in the sixth he was in trouble again. Then he just blatantly held on to me and totally ignored the referee’s command to break. It got so bad that the referee stopped the fight. Ironically enough, a disqualification would have stopped my knockout streak. But the next day the local boxing commission changed the result to a TKO.

When I met with the reporters after the fight, I started a controversy. When they asked me about finishing Ferguson off after I had scored with the uppercut, I said, “I wanted to hit him on the nose one more time, so that the bone of his nose would go up into his brain … I would always listen to the doctor’s conclusions. They said that any time that the nose goes into the brain, the consequences of him getting up right away are out of the question.”

The reporters laughed, but maybe it was just nervous laughter. What I said to the reporters was what Cus used to say to me word for word. I didn’t think I said anything wrong. Cus and I always used to talk about the science of hurting people. I wanted to be a ­cantankerous, malevolent champion. I used to watch these comic book characters on TV, the X-Men and one of my favorites, Apocalypse. Apocalypse would say, “I’m not malevolent, I just am.” Cayton and Jacobs wanted me to be friendly with everybody, sociable, but I knew a man who was friendly with everyone was an enemy to himself.

The next day, the shit hit the fan because of my comment. New York papers had big headlines that read, “Is This the Real Tyson, a Thug?” One reporter even called up my old social worker, Mrs. Coleman, and she advised me to be a man, not an animal. But I didn’t care. I had a job to do. I wasn’t going to be Mike Tyson the heavyweight champion by being a nice guy. I was going to do it in Cus’s name. My opponents had to know that they were going to pay with their life or their health if they contested me.

Jimmy and Cayton tried to muzzle me after that. They assigned Steve Lott to tell me what to say after a fight. Jimmy even fired their P.R. guy because he had sent that quote out on the wires. Shortly after that fight Jimmy invited some handpicked reporters to have dinner with us. Ed Schuyler of the Associated Press was there, and he felt that there was a sense of desperation behind Cayton and Jimmy to get me a title before I got into serious trouble. But that wasn’t what it was. I think they just wanted to grab the money while they could. They didn’t have the respect for the mission I was on.

Cayton and the rest of them wanted to strip me of my history of growing up in Brooklyn and give me a positive image. Cus knew that was bullshit. They were trying to suppress me and make me conform to their standards. I wanted people to see the savage that was within me.

We partied after the Ferguson fight. I was drinking heavily during that time. Not during training, but once the fight was over, it was self-destruction time. I was a full-blown alcoholic. But I drank away from the glare of all the media in the city. We partied in Albany at my friend’s bar called September’s. That was our stomping ground. Sometimes guys went there from the city or from Boston or L.A. for work-related reasons, and they’d act like big shots, like they were gonna stomp on us little upstate guys, so we’d beat the shit out of them. I didn’t want to fight anybody and get sued, but there were people there fighting in place of me. I’d be instigating it, saying shit like, “Just kick that motherfucker. Who does he think he is?” We had a field day with those out-of-towners.

My next fight was against Steve Zouski on March tenth in the Nassau Coliseum. Zouski had never been floored in any of his previous fights, but I scored with several uppercuts in the third round and knocked him out. But I was not impressed with my performance. For one, I had fallen off a ladder in my pigeon coop at Camille’s and suffered a cut on my ear. Zouski hit my ear a few times and it blew up during the fight and started to affect my balance. During the interview after the fight, I alluded to my other problem.

“I didn’t like my performance,” I told Randy Gordon, who had been calling the fight. “I have a lot of personal problems I’m getting over.”

Cayton later told the press that I meant girlfriend problems, but that was absurd. I didn’t have a girlfriend then. I was just depressed because so many of my friends from Brownsville were getting killed. It was barbaric. Friends were killing other friends over money.

After the fight, one of the officials saw that there was a big bulge on my ear. So the next day Jimmy had a specialist check me out and he realized that my cartilage had gotten severely infected and immediately made me check into Mount Sinai on the Upper East Side. He was worried that I might lose my ear if it went untreated. They had me stay in the hospital for ten days and undergo treatment in a ­hyperbaric chamber twice a day where they forced antibiotics into the cartilage.

The doctors at Mount Sinai told me that it would be good for me to go out and get some fresh air. So every day after my second treatment at three p.m., Tom Patti and my close childhood friend Duran would pick me up in a limo or we’d walk down to Times Square, where we hung out and took pictures with all the prostitutes and the guys who sold pictures of tourists with pythons coiled around their necks. We were having a blast, partying all night. I’d roll back into the hospital at four a.m. and the nurses would freak. “This isn’t a hotel, it’s a hospital.” When I showed the doctors the pictures of me with the prostitute and the python, they freaked too. “No, no, we didn’t mean you should go out all night. We meant go downstairs and sit in Central Park, watch the birds and the squirrels and get some fresh air.”

That was almost two months before my fight with James Tillis in upstate New York. When it was time for the fight, I was out of shape because of my illness and also because I had been drinking and ­partying way too hard. The fight went ten hard rounds and I was just glad to get the decision. I dropped him once, which probably tipped the scales in my favor, but he was the toughest opponent I had ever faced at that point. He gave me such a body beating that I couldn’t even walk after the fight. I had to stay in the hotel. I couldn’t even drive home. I found out what fighting was really about that night. Several times during the fight I wanted to go down so bad just to get some relief, but I kept grabbing and holding him, trying to get my breath back.

The next day Jimmy Jacobs went into spin mode. He told the press, “The fight was just a hurdle for him. Now we see that he can go the distance.” He was a master at manipulating the press, not to mention the public. He and Cayton masterminded a publicity campaign that was unparalleled. No actor in the world ever got that kind of press before. Everybody does it now, but back then, they were true ­innovators.

Less than three weeks later, I fought Mitch Green at the Garden. He was truly a crazy motherfucker. He tried to get in my head before the fight by telling the Daily News that I was nineteen years old but I looked like I was forty. When Marv Albert asked me if Green was getting to me, I said, “Mitch Green is a good fighter but he’s not on an eloquent level to disturb me. So not at all.”

This was my first fight on my new HBO contract that Jimmy and Cayton had negotiated. And it was a thrill to fight for the first time in the big arena in Madison Square Garden. But you wouldn’t know it from the prefight interview on HBO. When they asked me if I was enjoying all my newfound attention and wealth, I got morose. “People won’t want to be in my position. ‘Wow, I can make money,’ they say. But if they had to go through some of the things I go through, they would cry. It’s so depressing. Everybody wants something. Just as hard as you’re working in the gym, people are working that hard trying to separate you from your money.” That was me being Cus. You’d think I’d be more upbeat since this was my first time headlining the ­Garden.

Green was a well-respected fighter then. He was a four-time Golden Gloves champion and he had been undefeated until he lost a decision in 1985 to Trevor Berbick for the USBA title. But I knew I was going to beat him as soon as we entered the ring. I didn’t get any threatening vibes from him at all. The fight went the distance but that was okay. After the Tillis fight, I wanted to be more comfortable going ten rounds. I knew he couldn’t hurt me so I was working on my endurance. I won every round and it wasn’t a dull fight. At one point I knocked out his mouthpiece and bridge with a couple of teeth in it. He took a lot of punishment. I was so loose that between the eighth and ninth rounds when Kevin was literally in my face jabbering on and on, telling me to punch more, I gave him a little kiss.

After the fight I was back to my usual arrogant self.

“Not to be egotistical, but I won this fight so easy. I refuse to be beaten in there. I refuse to let anybody get in my way,” I told the press.

Reggie Gross was my next target. He was a tough fighter they called “the Spoiler” because he had upset some good fighters including Bert Cooper and Jimmy Clark, who was a great American Olympian. The fight almost didn’t happen because I was suffering from a bad case of bronchitis that week. I had suffered from bronchitis my entire life and I had gotten used to it, but this was a severe case. They took me to the doctor the day of the fight and he examined me.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to postpone this fight. He’s pretty ill,” the doctor said.

“Can I talk to you for a moment, please, sir,” Jimmy said. I could see the look in Jimmy’s eyes and the next thing I knew I was in the ring fighting. In the first round, I was hitting Gross with a flurry of punches and he was covering up. Suddenly he decided to start trading punches, which was fine with me. He threw a bunch of wild punches that I dodged and then I knocked him down with a vicious left hook and then knocked him down a second time with a succession of punches. The ref stopped the fight because Gross was glassy-eyed, but Reggie complained. “You can’t even walk but you want to fight?” the ref said.

My next two opponents seemed to be going down in caliber. Maybe Jimmy and Cayton just wanted me to get some more one-round knockouts after those two decisions. I obliged them with William Hosea, but it took me two rounds to knock out Lorenzo Boyd. But my lightning-fast right to the rib cage followed quickly by a thundering right uppercut left the crowd wowed. Two weeks later I got everyone’s attention by demolishing Marvis Frazier, Joe’s son, in thirty seconds. I cornered him, set him up with my jab, and then finished him off with my fa­vorite punch, a right uppercut. He looked severely injured so I rushed over to try to help him up. I love Marvis; he’s a beautiful ­person.

I had just turned twenty a few weeks earlier, and the plan was for me to become the youngest heavyweight champ by the end of 1986. While Jimmy and Cayton were negotiating for that, they had me fight Jose Ribalta in Atlantic City on August seventeenth.

Ribalta was a game fighter who, unlike Green and Tillis, actually engaged me. And he seemed to have the will not to be knocked out. I knocked him down in the second, and again in the eighth, but he got up. In the tenth, he went down a third time and when he got up, I swarmed him on the ropes and the referee stopped the fight.

Besides gaining a lot of respect from the crowd and the commentators on his determination, Ribalta also managed to ruin my night. After the fight, I had a date with a beautiful young coed from Penn State University who I had met at the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. This young lady accompanied me to my room and she began to touch me but I recoiled in pain.

“Hey! Please don’t touch me. It’s nothing personal but you have to go now. I just need some peace,” I told her. She was very understanding and she drove back to her school, but we made up for it the next time I saw her.

She had been at the fight and had seen all the punishment I had absorbed. I had never been through anything like that before. I felt nauseous from all Ribalta’s body blows, even hours after the fight. Ri­balta and Tillis were the only two guys who had ever made me feel like that. I never felt that much general pain again. But I remember all the reading I had done chronicling how other great fighters had felt like their heads were halfway off after some of their fights, so I just felt that this was part of my journey.

The negotiations for a title fight were heating up and Jimmy decided that I should fight in Vegas so I could get used to it before I would fight there later in the year to win the title. We stayed at the house of Dr. Bruce Handelman, a friend of Jimmy’s. I started training at Johnny Tocco’s gym, a wonderfully grungy old-school gym with no amenities, not even air-conditioning. Tocco was an awesome guy who had been friends with Sonny Liston. There were pictures of Johnny and all the old-time greats on the walls.

I was in the locker room one day about to spar when it hit me. I told Kevin that I didn’t like it in Vegas and I wanted to go home. I was really just feeling anxious about the fight. If I didn’t win the Ratliff fight, I wouldn’t qualify to fight Trevor Berbick.

Kevin went out and told Steve Lott. So Steve thought to himself, WWCD? or, What would Cus do? Steve came into the locker room and tried to be positive. “You’re the star of the show. You’re going to knock this guy out in two rounds. You’ll be fantastic. If you don’t like it here, we don’t have to come back here ever again, how’s that?”

Steve always had a charming way of handling situations. Of course, I wasn’t going anywhere, I was just venting. But he didn’t know what Cus would have done. Cus would have looked at me and said, “What? Are you scared of this guy? This guy is a bum. I’m going to fight him for you.”

So on September sixth, I squared off against Alfonzo Ratliff, who was a former cruiserweight champion of the world. I didn’t think he was a step up from Ribalta, but he certainly wasn’t a bum; he was a tough opponent. Apparently, the Vegas oddsmakers didn’t agree because they wouldn’t take bets on the fight itself, only on the over-under of five rounds. You would think I invented over-under in fight betting. Before me it didn’t exist. I took it to a new level of exploitation. The opening bell rang and Ratliff just took off. He made Mitch Green look like one of those power walkers. It was so bad that even the HBO guys were joking. “I wonder if he’s going to use his ten- or twelve-speed bike in the second round,” Larry Merchant said.

He actually tried to fight in the next round, but he didn’t last long. I dropped him with a left hook and then chopped him down with several punches when he got up.

“His bicycle got a flat tire,” Merchant cracked. When Jimmy came into the ring after the fight, he commented on Ratliff’s running. “I felt his breeze,” I said.

Soon it was official. I was to fight Trevor Berbick for his title on November 22, 1986. I had more than two months off between fights and Jimmy and Cayton decided to have me make the talk show circuit to promote the fight and my career. I started out going on David Brenner’s Nightlife. David was a great guy and he treated me with the utmost respect. He predicted I would be the next heavyweight champ, but as nice as that was, it meant more to me when his other guest, the great former champion Jake LaMotta, made the same ­prediction.

“Without a doubt, the next heavyweight champ of the world,” Jake said when he came out and hugged me. “And if he doesn’t do the right thing, I’ll give him a beating. You keep it up, pal; you’re going to be like Joe Louis, Marciano, maybe even better.”

My heart soared when I heard that.

Then Brenner asked Jake a question and his answer was very ­prescient.

“Let’s say Mike becomes the champ. What advice would you give him?”

“The best advice I could give him is keep yourself busy and make believe you’re in jail for a couple of years,” Jake said. “Stay away from all the garbage out there. There’s a lot of garbage out there.”

“Why does it have to be garbage?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, guys like you and I, we attract garbage,” he said.

I did The Joan Rivers Show. I loved her and her husband, Edgar. They both made me feel so good. I felt their energy was real. That was one of the best times of my life. During our interview Joan asked me if I had an Adrian, like in the movie Rocky.

“No girlfriend,” I answered.

“When you go into training, do you give up sex?” she asked.

“No.”

“See, ’cause my husband always tells me he’s in training,” Joan cracked.

I did The Dick Cavett Show and Dick demonstrated some aikido on me. He asked me to hold him by his wrists.

“The eighty-seven-year-old founder of aikido can get away from the grasp of the world’s strongest man,” he said and he did a slip move and escaped my grip.

“But no mugger’s gonna hold you like this,” I protested.

I was so charming on these shows, just the way Jim and Bill wanted me to be. But I didn’t want that. I wanted to be a villain. I wanted to model myself on Jim Brown, the football player. When I first started hanging out in bars in the city I’d see older professional football players who played with Jim Brown. They were talking about him like he was mythical.

“Hey, if he came in here and something wasn’t cool – the smell of the place, the music that was playing, the volume of the people’s conversations – if something just wasn’t cool in his mind, he would commence to destroying the place.”

I was listening to this thinking, Fuck, I wish I was a bad motherfucker and had people talking about me like that. If Jim’s going to destroy you because he doesn’t like the smell of the place, I’ve got to come in and kill a motherfucker in here.

As the November twenty-second date came closer, I began to train seriously. I trained for a month in Catskill and then we moved to Vegas. Right at the start, Jimmy and Cayton gave me a VHS tape of Berbick’s fight versus Pinklon Thomas, the fight he won to become champion. I watched it and reported back to Jimmy.

“Was that tape in slow motion?”

I was arrogant, but I really felt that my time had come. In my sick head, all the great old-time fighters and the gods of war would be descending to watch me join their company. They’d give me their blessing and I’d join their club. I was still hearing Cus in my head, but not in a morbid sense, just supportive.

This is the moment we’ve been training for since you were fourteen. We went over this over and over again. You can fight this guy with your eyes closed.

I knew Berbick was rough and tough and hard to fight because he was the first man to go fifteen rounds with Larry Holmes in a title defense. Larry had knocked everyone else out. I just wanted to decimate Berbick. Then everybody would take me seriously, because at that time, everybody thought I was fighting tomato cans and fluff; they said this guy’s not a real fighter, he’s just fighting easy fights, so that’s why my main objective was to decimate him. I wanted to take him out in one round – I wanted to hurt him real bad.

Kevin and Matt Baranski were just as confident as me. We were firing on all cylinders. And I was firing on one more. I looked at my underpants a day before the fight and I noticed a discharge. I had the clap. I didn’t know if I had contracted it from a prostitute or a very filthy young lady. We were staying at Dr. Handleman’s house again so he gave me an antibiotic shot.

Later that day, Steve Lott and I went to rent some VHS tapes.

“Mike, what would Cus say about this guy Berbick?” he asked me.

This was Steve’s way of putting me in Cus’s shoes, getting me to think like Cus. What Steve didn’t know was that I didn’t have to think like Cus; I had Cus in my head.

“He’d say that this guy was a tomato can,” I answered. “A bum.”

I was such a prick at the weigh-in. I was glaring at Berbick every time he was within sight. He’d come over to shake my hand but I’d turn my back on his outstretched hand. When I caught him looking at me, I’d bark, “What the fuck are you looking at?” Then I told him that I was going to knock him out in two rounds. He’d pose with the belt and I’d yell out, “Enjoy holding the belt. You won’t have it too much longer. It’s going to be on a real champion’s waist.” I was so disrespectful and offensive. For some reason I just didn’t like Berbick at that time. Plus, I wanted that belt. That green-eyed monster set in.

I was also mad that Berbick’s trainer Angelo Dundee was bragging that Berbick would beat me. Cus was always so jealous of Dundee, who had trained Ali, because he got all the media attention. Cus didn’t think he deserved it.

“Berbick has the style to do a number on Tyson,” he told the press. “Trevor is licking his chops at the thought that for once, he won’t have to chase, that Tyson will be right there in his face. Trevor is a good body puncher and he has twenty-three KOs to his credit. He’s confident and so am I. I think he’ll stop Tyson in a late round.”

I couldn’t sleep the night before the fight. I was on the phone a lot, talking with girls who I liked but never had sex with. I tried to take my mind off the fight by asking them what they were doing but all they wanted to talk about was the fight. Then I got up and started shadowboxing in my room.

The day of the fight I had some pasta at one o’clock. At four, I had a steak. Then some more pasta at five. In the dressing room I had a Snickers bar and some orange juice.

Then Kevin wrapped my hands and put on my gloves. It was time to walk to the ring. It was chilly in the arena so Kevin cut a towel and draped it over my neck. I was wearing the black trunks that I had changed to a few fights ago. I had to pay a $5,000 fine since Berbick was wearing black, but I didn’t care. I wanted that ominous look.

I was the challenger so I had to go out first. They were playing a Toto song for my entrance but all I could hear in my head was that Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight”: “I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord / And I’ve been waiting for this moment for all of my life, oh Lord.”

I went through the ropes and I started pacing around the ring. I looked out at the crowd and I saw Kirk Douglas, Eddie Murphy, and Sly Stallone. A few minutes later, Berbick entered wearing a black robe with a black hood. He was projecting cockiness and confidence, but I could feel that was all a façade, an illusion. I knew that this guy was not going to die for his belt.

Ali was introduced to the crowd and he came over to me.

“Kick his ass for me,” Ali told me.

Five years earlier, Ali had been beaten by Berbick and retired after the fight, so I was more than happy to comply.

“That’s going to be easy,” I assured Muhammad.

Finally it was time to fight. The bell rang and referee Mills Lane motioned us into action. I charged Berbick and began peppering him with hard shots. I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t moving and he wasn’t jabbing; he was standing right there in front of me. I threw a right hand near the beginning of the fight square on his left ear, ­trying to bust his eardrum. About halfway through the round, I ­staggered him with a hard right. I swarmed him and by the end of the first, Berbick seemed dazed. He had taken some really, really good shots.

I went back to my corner and sat down. Because of the antibiotic shot, I was dripping like a Good Humor bar in July. But I didn’t care; I was in there to nail Berbick. Besides, one of my heroes, Kid Chocolate, fought with syphilis all the time.

“Move your head, don’t forget to jab,” Kevin said. “You’re headhunting. Go to the body first.”

Ten seconds into the second round, I hit him with a right and ­Berbick went down. He sprang up immediately and came right back at me. He was trying to fight back but his punches were ineffective. With about a half a minute or so left in the round, I hit him with a right to the body instead of an uppercut and then I shot the uppercut but I missed him. But I threw a left and hit him in the temple. It was a delayed reaction but he went down. I didn’t even feel the punch, but it was very effective. He tried to get up but then he fell back down and I noticed that his ankle was all bent.

No way he’s gonna get up and beat the count, I thought.

I was right. He tried to get up a second time and he lurched across the canvas and flopped down again. He finally got up but Mills Lane hugged him and waved him off. That was it. I was the youngest heavyweight champion in history.

“It’s over, that’s all, and we have a new era in boxing,” Barry ­Watkins, the HBO announcer, said.

“Mike Tyson did what Mike Tyson normally does. And that’s fight,” Sugar Ray Leonard added.

“That’s with a capital F,” Watkins said.

I was just numb. I couldn’t feel anything. I was conscious of what was going on around me but I was just numb. Kevin hugged me. José Torres came over.

“I can’t believe this, man. I’m the fucking champion of the world at twenty,” I said to him. “This fucking shit is unreal. Champion of the world at twenty. I’m a kid, a fucking kid.”

Jimmy came into the ring and gave me a kiss.

“Do you think Cus would have liked that?” I asked. Jimmy smiled.

Don King, whose son managed Berbick, came over to congratulate me. Then I looked out over the audience and started to feel arrogant. Yeah, we did it, I thought. Me and Cus did it. Then I started talking to Cus.

“We did it, we proved all those guys wrong. I bet Berbick don’t think I’m too short, does he?” Then I realized that Cus would have hated the way I fought.

“Everything else you did in the ring was garbage,” I heard him say in my head. “But the ending was so resounding that it’s all people will remember.”

It was time for the postfight interviews. I had to acknowledge Cus. I was the best fighter in the world at that time, and I was his creation. Cus needed to be there. He would have loved to have told off those people who wrote him off as a kook. He would have said, “Nobody can beat my boy here. He’s only twenty but nobody in the world can beat him.”

“This is the moment I waited for all my life since I started boxing,” I said when the press conference started. “Berbick was very strong. I never expected him to be as strong as me … every punch I threw was with bad intentions. My record will last for immortality, it’ll never be broken. I want to live forever … I refused to lose … I would have had to be carried out dead to lose. I was coming to destroy and win the Heavyweight Championship of the World, which I’ve done. I’d like to dedicate my fight to my great guardian Cus D’Amato. I’m sure he’s up there and he’s looking down and he’s talking to all the great fighters and he’s saying his boy did it. I thought he was a crazy white dude … he was a genius. Everything he said would happen happened.”

Someone asked me who my next opponent would be.

“I don’t care who I fight next,” I said. “If I’m going to be great, then I’m going to have to fight everybody. I want to fight everybody.”

Even Dundee praised me after the fight.

“Tyson throws combinations I never saw before. I was stunned. I worked with Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, but I’m seeing from Tyson a three-punch combination second to none. When have you seen a guy throw a right hand to the kidney, come up the middle with an uppercut, then throw a left hook?”

I didn’t take that belt off that whole night. I wore it around the lobby of the hotel. I wore it to the after-party, and I wore it when I went out drinking later with Jay Bright, my roommate at Cus’s house; Bobby Stewart’s son; and Matthew Hilton, the fighter. We went to a dive bar in Vegas called The Landmark, across the street from the Hilton. Nobody was in there, but we just sat and drank all night. I was drinking vodka straight and I got truly smashed. At the end of the night, Matthew passed out and I went around to different girls’ houses, showing them my championship belt. I didn’t have sex with them, I just hung out with them for a while, and then I’d leave and call another girl and go over to her house and hang out. It was crazy. You have to understand that I was still only twenty years old. And when you think about it, a lot of my friends were only fifteen or sixteen. That wasn’t a big difference at that age. Now all of a sudden, because I’m champion of the world, everyone expected me to be a totally together guy because of the title and what it represents. But I was just a little kid having fun.

And I was lost. By the time I won the belt I was truly a wrecked soul because I didn’t have any guidance. I didn’t have Cus. I had to win the belt for Cus. We were going to do that or else we were going to die. There wasn’t any way I was leaving that ring without that belt. All that sacrifice, suffering, dedication, sacrifice, suffering. Day by day in every way. When I finally got back to my hotel room early that morning, I looked at myself in the mirror wearing that belt, and I realized that I had accomplished our mission. And now I was free.

But then I remembered reading something Lenin wrote in one of Cus’s books. “Freedom is a very dangerous thing. We ration it very closely.” That was a statement I should have taken into consideration in the years that followed.