Читать книгу Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition) - Monteith Illingworth - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWhen Tyson moved into D’Amato’s house, eight other boys lived there, all aspiring boxers, every one of them white, tough, and confident. They lived two to a room. Ewald cooked the dinners and the boys cleaned up. All other meals they cooked for themselves. Food was for the taking, though Ewald expected no one to consume more than his fair share, especially of the cookies and ice cream.
For the first few weeks, Tyson stayed in awe of his new surroundings. He did as he was asked, talked little, and acted shyly. At dinner, he closely watched the other boys to learn table manners. D’Amato, of course, lectured constantly. Most of the time, Tyson could barely follow his train of thought. A week into his stay, D’Amato gave him a book, Zen and the Art of Archery. Tyson couldn’t get past the first page. He was more interested in reading the books on boxing.
Tyson’s feelings of awe gave way to suspicion. Through most of that summer of 1980, D’Amato spent far more time talking with Tyson than training him in the gym. Every night and morning he told him to repeat out loud the words “Day by day in every way, I’m getting better and better.” D’Amato came into Tyson’s room at night and woke him up to complete a thought from the day’s lecture, one of the many that got lost in his meanderings. Remembered Ewald of Tyson: “He was always saying, ‘What the white dude want to do with the black kid?”’
D’Amato drilled him on fear those first few months. “Who is your best friend?” D’Amato asked Tyson early on. Before he could answer, D’Amato cut in, “Fear is your best friend.”
He’d go on, “Fear is like fire … fear is like a snowball going down a hill—if you don’t learn to control it, it will get bigger and out of control … fear is like an ugly friend who smells bad but saves you from drowning.
“Control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is psychological, the excuse of the man who wants to quit.
“The night before a fight you won’t sleep. Don’t worry—the other guy didn’t either. You’ll go to the weigh-in and he looks so much bigger than you, and calmer, like ice, but he’s burning up with fear inside. Your imagination is going to credit him with abilities he doesn’t have. Remember, motion relieves tension. The moment the bell rings and you come into contact with each other, suddenly the opponent seems like everybody else, because now your imagination is dissipated.
“The fight itself is the only reality that matters. Learn to impose your will and take control over that reality.”
It took Tyson a long time to make sense of D’Amato’s ideas. The suspicions lingered. Tyson also began to feel claustrophobic around D’Amato, who was always watching him, checking up, and bearing down with another lecture. D’Amato seemed to want a kind of intimacy that Tyson had never experienced: people bonded by a mutual belief in ideas. The laws of the streets he knew, and the rules of prison, but not D’Amato’s ways. There was an impulse in Tyson to rebel. As the perennial survivor, he expected to be alone in the end anyway.
At first, it was just little things like not cleaning up after himself bringing stolen ice cream into his room, swearing at Ewald, or turning his back and walking away as D’Amato started to lecture. “When he first came it was rather difficult because there was a lack of communication,” said D’Amato in a 1984 interview.
According to D’Amato’s understanding with the state Youth Division, Tyson could train all he wanted as long as he continued with school. In September, Tyson enrolled at Catskill Junior High School. At fourteen, he was the appropriate age for the eighth grade. His academic skills lagged a year behind those of the other students; his body was several years ahead. That, plus the fact that it was the first time in almost three years that he’d been in school, let alone one in a small town, made adjustment difficult.
D’Amato did what he could to prepare the school staff for Tyson. “He would be forceful and effective in trying to explain Mike’s background to us,” said Lee A. Bordick, then the principal at Catskill JHS and now the superintendent of schools in Troy, New York. “Mike was special, he said. Allowances had to be made for him. Cus didn’t want us to dislike Mike because he had problems. He wanted us to understand how, with work, Mike had so much to gain. We worked with him. I personally did constant reality checks for Mike to make sure he understood what was expected of him.”
During the first few months, Tyson could barely sit through an entire forty-five-minute class. Many times he would walk out. He took as much interest in the academics as was required to placate D’Amato and the social worker from the Youth Division assigned to watch over him, Ernestine Coleman. His passion was boxing and only boxing. “Michael and I had arguments all the time about his not applying himself in school,” Coleman recalled. “He knew that I had the power to take him away from Cus and send him back to Tryon, so I won.”
Almost won. Tyson attended school every day, but ignored his homework, D’Amato didn’t tell Coleman, and neither did he force Tyson to do the homework. He was far more interested in Tyson’s aptitude for training than for academics.
Instead of taking the morning bus, Tyson would run the three miles to school. The teachers finally told him to stop because of the smell from the sweat. So Tyson took the bus there, then ran home in the afternoons. At five o’clock, every weekday, he went to the gym for two hours. In the evenings, he talked to D’Amato, watched television, or read boxing books. On weekends, he’d be up at five in the morning, run a few miles, make his own breakfast, nap, then get to the gym again at twelve sharp. Tyson didn’t join any school team or make any “civilian” friends. His friends were the other boys in the house, all of whom boxed.
That year there were racial tensions between the black and white students in the adjoining high school. School officials were concerned that Tyson might become some kind of leader among the black students. But he did not get involved. “I used to take some of the kids to baseball games down in New York on weekends,” said junior high principal Bordick. “I asked Mike to come and he never did. I got the feeling that he had this block about his past, being a black kid from the slums. This was his break, boxing, and he wanted to do that and nothing else.”
The other students made him pay for being different. They ridiculed his size, his lisping voice, and his desire to be a boxer. The black students were particularly cruel. For living with D’Amato and Ewald, they accused him of hating black people, including his own mother. “Three black girls were teasing him in the hallway about his mother,” remembered Bordick. “He got angry, they ran into the bathroom, and he followed them. He punched the paper towel holder off the wall, screamed a lot, nothing else. I had them all in the office and one of the girls kicked him. He held back; I could see he was seething with anger, but he kept it in. I took him outside. I remember it was November. A cold rain drizzled down. We stood there and I told him he couldn’t lash out at people, he had to learn control.”
Bordick realized that Tyson might never be fully socialized into so-called normal society. It was as if everything, and everyone, conspired to keep him different, all of which pushed Tyson further into boxing. “There was more pressure on Michael to behave because he was Mike the boxer with this difficult background. He felt put-upon because the expectations to conform were greater on him than on other students.”
During the second half of the school year, Tyson seemed better able to cope with the taunts of the other students. He also tried to use charm rather than rebellion with his teachers. “He was streetwise,” said Bordick. “He could play with you almost like a con artist. Mike had this ability to deal with adults on their own level.”
Bordick accepted these realities about Tyson. They represented distortions of what boys his age were usually like, but for that matter everything about Tyson seemed distorted. Even the people who cared for him did so for ulterior reasons. D’Amato certainly cared for Tyson, and wanted him to get through school, but Bordick wasn’t blind to the motives involved. Nor did he think Tyson was. “Michael was smart enough to realize that others have their own con. He must have known that Cus wouldn’t have been interested in him if he wasn’t a boxer. Everyone who lived with Cus at the house boxed. Ever since he was a child, Mike got pushed around. The boxing was an escape. The train was going by and he decided to catch it. I think he expected Cus would benefit too.”
Bordick, of course, was right. D’Amato and Tyson were using each other, initially in harmless ways. D’Amato wouldn’t have let Tyson into the house unless he had held some promise as a boxer. Tyson in turn used boxing, D’Amato, his teachers, anyone, to avoid going back to the reformatory. Beneath the surface, however, in the growing subtext to their relationship, another dynamic was taking shape. D’Amato was tending to a boy’s needs, but mostly he was building a champion. The task became an obsession.
* * *
D’Amato generally wouldn’t spend long hours in the gym working with his stable of young fighters. In the early months, that included Tyson. He would go in only on occasion to refine the instruction given by a trainer he’d been grooming for the previous few years: Teddy Atlas.
Atlas fit the mold of the D’Amato protégé: young, tough, troubled, highly impressionable, and consumed by a desire to box. The two met in 1975. Atlas, then twenty-one years old, was about to go to trial in Staten Island on an assault charge. A neighborhood friend, Kevin Rooney, had been training with D’Amato for a few months. Rooney convinced D’Amato that with help and guidance, Atlas could become a fine boxer. D’Amato appeared before the judge and promised to take in and train Atlas, who got off with five years’ probation.
Atlas, however, got no further than the gym. A congenital spinal problem ended his career. D’Amato saw his potential as a trainer, but Atlas, deeply discouraged, returned to New York. Over the next year, he kicked around Staten Island getting into trouble. One street brawl landed Atlas in the hospital with a knife gash down the entire length of his face. That’s when he decided to return to D’Amato.
The first few months back weren’t easy. “I was a selfish kid, with no direction,” recalled Atlas, who at thirty-four has a ruffled, boyish appearance, even with the scar on his face and the flattened nose. There’s a lot of rough vowels in his Staten Island voice. He also tends to slur, as so many boxers do. “Cus wanted me to help these kids with the boxing, but I could barely help myself.” Twice, Atlas attempted suicide—first with pills, then by breathing in car exhaust fumes. D’Amato saved his life both times. That fact was the turning point for Atlas. “Cus taught me principles of life, how to have purpose and do the right thing, and I gave him my loyalty.”
By the time Tyson arrived in 1980, Atlas was training all of the younger fighters who lived in the house. He also ran D’Amato’s boxing program for the local boys. “I did everything for those kids—took them to boxing tournaments, picnics, hand-holding, you name it.”
Tyson began to occupy the majority of Atlas’s time. The trainer knew well D’Amato’s unique boxing system. In fact, he had the benefit of several refinements D’Amato had made over the years.
While Torres trained for his title fight against Willie Pastrano in early 1965, a pudgy man claiming to be a horse trainer from France came into the gym and boasted that he could double the speed of a fighter’s punches. He had devised a numbering system. There were six steps. In the first, the fighter punched a heavy bag once. In the second, he punched twice, and so on through to the last step of six punches thrown in combination. It was simple yet effective. It systematized the process of acquiring punching speed.
The other trainers and boxers scoffed at the Frenchman’s ideas. But D’Amato was impressed. Combination punching played an important role in his much-ridiculed “system.” Anything that could increase punching speed was an improvement. D’Amato’s system, though, used offense and defense in equal portions. The idea was to move into position without getting hit, then punch and defend in one continuous motion. But that was difficult for a fighter to do. D’Amato knew that more speed could help tremendously.
A natural tinkerer, D’Amato took the six steps and added defensive movement. Step one: punch, then move. Step two: punch, move, punch, and move again. By the sixth step, the fighter unleashed a combination of six punches and defensive movements.
The increase in speed on both offense and defense played into other new ideas D’Amato had been working on over the years. D’Amato argued that the most damaging punch, physically and psychologically, was the one a fighter couldn’t see coming. He’d lose that split second of response time needed to try and move away from the blow or to steel himself against the impact. Furthermore, D’Amato believed that a fighter would punch where he last saw the target. To punch and miss was also intensely discouraging. Taking punches that couldn’t be seen and trying to hit a target that wasn’t there—that’s the impact D’Amato wanted his fighters to have on an opponent. Besides wreaking physical damage, it sapped the will.
Just to be sure, D’Amato added a few more advanced refinements. In Torres’s training for the Willie Pastrano fight, D’Amato wrapped two mattresses around a pole. He then numbered the main types of punches, 1 through 7, and wrote those numbers on the makeshift bag. Torres set up in front of the bag and D’Amato called out the combinations.
A “5-4” was a left hook to the body to weaken the opponent, followed by a right uppercut to the chin. The “7-2-3” was a left jab to the head that set up a straight right to the head and a left uppercut. Punch “6” was a straight right to the body and “1” a straight left to the head. Every combination included the requisite defensive movements.
Such numbering increased punching accuracy and created an economical verbal shorthand to use in training and in an actual fight. D’Amato put a series of such numbered combinations on an audiotape that Torres, and many fighters after him, would train to. “Punch and move, punch and move. Cus trained you to fight by habit and instinct,” remembered Torres. “You shouldn’t have to think for half a second.” Torres gave the mattress a name, the “Willie Bag,” after his upcoming opponent, Willie Pastrano.
Boxing people looked skeptically at D’Amato’s system when it was used by Patterson. When he took the title, they began to tolerate it. With Patterson’s defeat and slow demise, the system was all but rejected. Even though it was Patterson who abandoned the system in the second half of his career—he earned the distinction of being knocked down in title bouts more times, sixteen in all, than any other fighter in history—D’Amato’s system, rightly or wrongly, still took partial blame. Torres’s brief success did little to earn it new respect. Torres lacked the interest and the discipline to be consistently evasive in the ring. As he said: “I thought too much. It wasn’t instinctual enough for me.”
The boxing world gave up on D’Amato’s ideas about boxing technique, but he remained stalwart. He continued to tinker with his system, as an inventor would a device he expected to work someday when the right partner came along to help realize its potential. That partner, it turned out, was Mike Tyson.
D’Amato knew that speed, power, and elusiveness in a 200-pound-plus natural heavyweight would have the force of an atomic bomb in the ring. That’s what he saw, or dreamed of, on the day Stewart brought Tyson down from Tryon: the potential to create the most devastating heavyweight in history. He also knew that being thirteen and coming from a boy’s prison, Tyson was eminently pliable. “Mentally, he had no other choices in life because of his background,” said Atlas of his and D’Amato’s thinking at the time. “He was a perfect piece of clay.”
Atlas taught Tyson the basics. The boy already had the speed and power, but virtually no defense. They worked first on avoiding the left jab, the punch commonly used to keep an opponent at bay and to set up combinations. For the first few months, Atlas spent several hours a week throwing jabs at Tyson’s head, requiring him to “slip” to his right. Once Tyson could no longer be hit by a jab, Atlas tried other simple punches. The rule was that Tyson could only elude, not counterpunch.
D’Amato believed that fighters were hit easily by straight right hands because they had a tendency to remain stationary and hold their gloves low. When Tyson slipped to his right, he was taught to keep his left up, but more important, he learned to immediately move again. He’d slip right in a sideways motion, then weave left and slightly forward. In the weave, he was taught not to use the standard “bob” or up-and-down motion. Instead, he moved his head and shoulders in a U shape. The slip took him laterally away from the first punch, then the U-shaped weave moved under the second—whether or not it was delivered.
D’Amato had a bias against the “weave and bob,” a mainstay for the conventionally trained fighter. The weaving he liked; the bobbing, he believed, tended to fix the fighter’s position. To D’Amato’s mind, it created the illusion that by standing still and moving up and down along a vertical plane he could avoid the punches, whereas in fact, the opposite was the case. All the other fighter had to do was time his punch, D’Amato insisted; it was like hitting a jack-in-the-box.
The idea with Tyson was never to let him “hang” on either the outside or the inside. He had to be constantly moving sideways and forward in a seamless sequence. The goal was to get position and once there to deliver a combination of punches—all without getting hit.
That would seem self-evident, but few boxers could, or knew how to, do it. Slipping away made sense, but constantly moving in seemed counterintuitive. It increased the danger of getting hit. Punch and you were doubly exposed to counterpunches. Those were articles of faith to boxers, but only because they never knew how to do otherwise.
“When his defense started working, his offense did, too, because then he was in position to throw combinations of punches that the opponent couldn’t see coming,” said Atlas.
The offense: slip to the right, away from a jab, then throw a left hook to the body and another to the head. Or slip right and weave left under the next jab to get positioning on the opponent’s exposed side, and execute the same combination. Or weave to either side, hook to the body, and uppercut through the gloves. Tyson was in front, on both sides, high and low. He was taught to punch from every conceivable angle.
“We practiced those punches so much that we used to say he couldn’t do it wrong even if he wanted to,” said Atlas. Doing it right meant hitting specific targets. D’Amato laid them out: the liver on the right side, the jawbone just below the ear, the point of the chin, and the floating left-side rib.
In the advanced lessons, Atlas added a unique D’Amato-inspired wrinkle. All fighters were at the least taught to slip jabs by moving to their right. Tyson learned how to also slip a jab by moving left. An opponent expected the slip right; Tyson’s slip left would come as a small but important tactical surprise.
The training completely exploited Tyson’s natural speed and punching power. It also converted into an asset his only potential physical drawback: at five-foot-nine with a reach of a mere seventy-one inches, he was short all around. Since the reign of Jack Johnson in early 1900s, there had been seventeen widely recognized heavyweight champions, and a half dozen or so lesser ones, and in that entire group only two—Rocky Marciano and Joe Frazier—had measured under six feet. Some champions were taller (Jess Willard, the “Pottawatomie Giant” who defeated Jack Johnson in 1914, was six-foot-six-and-one-quarter with a reach of eighty-three inches), and some average (Jack Dempsey, who reigned in the early 1920s, was six-foot-one and seventy-seven inches). Marciano measured five-foot-eleven with a reach of only sixty-eight inches. Frazier was similar in his proportions to Tyson.
Height and reach didn’t determine boxing styles, but they did influence them. When tall fighters confronted shorter opponents, they tended to let their hands drop, which exposed the head. The assumption was that the shorter fighters didn’t have the reach to hit them there.
D’Amato’s techniques to obtain positioning took advantage of that erroneous assumption. Not only would Tyson be able to get within reach, but he would also receive less, and do far more, damage than presumed. D’Amato knew that Tyson’s crouching style would make the taller opponent punch downward. That would feel awkward and so tend to throw the fighter off. In body mechanics, a downward punch also has less force than one made along a horizontal plane. More importantly, a punch angled slightly upward from a crouch carried the greatest amount of force.
Tyson was trained to maximize that force. D’Amato eschewed the orthodox punching stance of putting the left foot slightly forward. Once he gained position, Tyson brought both feet up together, knees slightly bent. That way he could leverage his punches off a combined springing and turning motion of his massive thighs and upper body. His arms, shoulders, back, waist, buttocks, and legs were all moving in concert. At the point of contact Tyson actually ended up leaning forward on the tips of his toes.
Most trainers ridiculed D’Amato’s theories on the positioning of the feet. They argued that it put a shorter fighter off-balance. They were right, but only if the fighter stopped moving—the opposite of what Tyson was trained to do.
When it all came together, Tyson was a rare, and exciting, sight in the ring: he could win a fight with a single knockout punch. And that, in practical terms, was all D’Amato cared about. Just as with Patterson and, to a degree, Torres, he didn’t expect the boxing world, or the casual fan, to be interested in or capable of appreciating the flow, the elegance, of Tyson’s defensive skills. But a knockout punch they couldn’t ignore.
* * *
Theory and practice, as D’Amato preached, often differed. He and Atlas trained Tyson to fight as a professional. But in the practical development of his career, Tyson would first have to work his way up through the amateur tournaments toward an ultimate victory in the Olympics. Tyson’s boxing style wouldn’t go over well in the amateurs, and D’Amato knew it. The crouching, which lowered the head, was against the rules. Amateur officials felt it led to head butts. Without such defensive movement, the shorter Tyson would be far easier to hit. That disadvantage would be compounded by amateur scoring rules. Tyson could knock a foe down, but if the man got up and landed four or five soft jabs, he could win the round on points. In the professionals, a knockdown automatically won the round.
Tyson’s skill with body-and-head combination punches also served little purpose. Amateur fights were only three rounds; there wasn’t time to waste with a lot of body blows. Headgear was also used in amateur fights, which D’Amato vociferously opposed. Headgear, he argued, created a false sense of security that in turn limited a fighter’s confrontation with his own fear.
D’Amato never hid his disdain for amateur rules. He considered them useless in preparing for a professional career. That did not endear him to the amateur boxing establishment. As a result, D’Amato expected Tyson to take a lot of criticism in amateur matches. Fortunately, he had the ability to knock opponents out with a single punch—which made troublesome rules entirely moot.
That left only one major obstacle: Tyson had not yet been tested psychologically. D’Amato and Atlas soon discovered that even with his natural advantages, superior training, and the shortcomings of his opponents, Tyson could be easily, and inexplicably, overwhelmed by his own emotions.
Tyson’s earliest fights were “smokers.” These were held in small boxing clubs in the tough neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx. The beer ran free; people gambled, ate heartily, and cared only for the local favorite. No amateur body sanctioned the fights. They were unofficial and unruly, but were a good way for a young fighter to get experience without his mistakes ever showing up in a record book. It was the old method for bringing a fighter along. D’Amato put Tyson in to test his abilities, but more so, his nerves.
At his first smoker, in the South Bronx, Tyson disappeared a few hours before the fight. He sat two blocks away on a curb in view of a subway station entrance. A few years later he would admit to Tom Patti, a young fighter who moved into the upstate house in 1981, that he struggled desperately over whether to take the half-hour subway ride back to nearby Brownsville and never see Catskill again. Atlas found him before the decision could be made.
Tyson did well in the smokers. He’d knock out grown men in the first and second rounds. “One look at Mike and guys didn’t want to fight him,” said Atlas. “I had to make deals, give the trainers $50 on the side.” A few local tournaments followed and Tyson kept up his streak. By early 1981, D’Amato decided to venture out. Kevin Rooney was by then fighting regularly as a professional. He had a bout in Scranton, Pennsylvania. D’Amato got Tyson a three-round preliminary, or undercard, amateur bout.
The opponent was a young, white, marginally talented fighter. Tyson dropped him twice in the first round. Each time, to Tyson’s amazement, he got up. After the round, Tyson told Atlas that he was tired. “I told him that he couldn’t possibly be tired after one round,” remembered Atlas. “His emotions were taking over.” Tyson knocked his opponent down again in the second, to no great effect. Back in the corner he complained about a broken hand. He couldn’t look Atlas in the eye. Tyson seemed drained of energy, dazed, defeated. Atlas didn’t believe the broken-hand story. He grabbed Tyson’s head and lifted it up. “If you want to become heavyweight champion of the world, this is it, the title,” barked Atlas. “All these dreams end here if you don’t beat this guy.”
In the third and final round, Tyson stopped punching. He let himself be grabbed and easily hit. He punched back, but without the same snap, or, as D’Amato liked to say, “bad intentions.” Atlas had never seen him so passive before, and neither had D’Amato, who sat nearby watching his future champion fizzle. At one point, after taking a straight right and then clinching, Tyson got backed up into the corner and it seemed to Atlas that within seconds he would fall to the canvas and simply give up. “Don’t do it!” he yelled. Tyson stayed on his feet, the round ended, and he won on points.
“We talked afterwards down in a hallway in the arena,” remembered Atlas. “He was thanking me, he couldn’t stop saying it. I told him we made a breakthrough. He knew he wanted to lose. I told him he should never let himself get to that point again.” Atlas made one more crucial point. “What counted, I said, was not that he had those feelings; all fighters do. It’s that he didn’t give in to them.”
The Scranton fight exposed a serious flaw that neutralized every one of Tyson’s natural and acquired advantages. He fell into an intensively passive, trancelike state in which the will to fight and elude punches drained away. When the group got back to Catskill, D’Amato didn’t add much to Atlas’s comments. He went over the same ground about fear, and how will overcomes skill, but he made minimal effort to determine what lay at the heart of Tyson’s sudden passivity. Sometime later, though, he did send Tyson to a hypnotist. D’Amato had done that with other fighters. He felt that it helped them concentrate better in the ring.
D’Amato had decided to remain emotionally detached from Tyson, just as he had done with Torres. It was as if he chose to commit himself to an idea of what Tyson could become rather than grapple with the full reality of all the chaos in the youth’s heart, which would have been more demanding. That, at least, is what Atlas began to see. “Cus was in a hurry with Mike,” said Atlas. “He was so set on getting another world champion, a heavyweight, that he didn’t want to see what Mike was.”
D’Amato may have also been driven by a desire for vindication. It was the rationalization of the egoist. “He knew that no matter what he’d failed to do in the past with Patterson or Torres or whatever, he’d be remembered forever for that one last champion,” said Atlas.
Shortly after the Scranton incident, Tyson went to the National Junior Olympics Tournament in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This time only Atlas accompanied Tyson, who stood out from the other fifteen-year-olds. Their muscles had barely begun to form through the layer of adolescent baby fat; Tyson’s bulged. He also kept to himself mostly, which soon created a mystique about his background. In his first fight, Tyson scored a first-round knockout of a 265-pound Hawaiian boy with a textbook left hook to the liver. Some boys intentionally lost their fights just to avoid meeting Tyson and possibly suffering permanent physical damage. Tyson won the Junior Olympic heavyweight title, his first major victory.
Tyson’s success got big play in the Catskill newspaper. It made him a minor celebrity and, to officials at the junior high school who watched him attend dutifully but learn little, a greater distraction. They decided to matriculate Tyson into the high school without testing. When Tyson’s caseworker, Ernestine Coleman, found out, she was enraged. “They wanted Michael out of their hair and he knew it,” she said. “I think that hurt him, which caused Michael to act out more. He was feeling that if that’s the way they wanted to be, he didn’t need school anyway; he’d be a boxer.”
The principal at Catskill High, Richard Stickles, was far less patient with Tyson than his counterpart at the junior high school, Lee Bordick. The teachers there also decided from the outset to cut Tyson down to size. The racial tensions of the previous year had persisted and they were concerned that he might become a lightning rod for the black students.
Tyson began to be victimized by some of the other boys in the house. “They baited him,” said Tom Patti, who was seventeen years old when he moved into the house that fall to train with D’Amato. “Mike talked back in class, sure. Once a teacher threw a book at him, called him intolerable. He misbehaved. He was never intolerable.” Atlas, however, felt that Tyson exploited the fact that others—namely D’Amato—considered him special. “Cus told Mike he’d be world champion. Mike didn’t believe it, but he knew that whatever he had was letting him do things other people couldn’t do,” said Atlas.
The situation fed on itself. Labeled a miscreant, Tyson increasingly acted like one. He was still being taunted by the black students for living with white people, which led to a few schoolyard scuffles. One day, he asked for milk in the cafeteria just as it closed. He was refused and threw his tray against the wall. He was suspended for a few days. It was the first of several suspensions.
During those suspensions Tyson would disappear from Catskill. D’Amato figured that he had gone back to Brownsville, which was exactly right. D’Amato would ask José Torres to bring him back. “He wasn’t at home. He’d be out on the streets, stealing, mugging people, screwing around,” remembered Torres. When he returned to the house, Tyson would be meek and apologetic. Yet, without provocation, he could turn nasty. Once housemother Ewald asked Tyson to try and shower more often and to keep his gym clothes clean. Tyson angrily called her “a piece of shit.’ Another time, in an argument over one of his Brownsville trips, Tyson spit at D’Amato.
Atlas understood how someone with Tyson’s background—which after all was similar to his own—could have difficulties in a small-town school. But he believed in the principles D’Amato preached in such situations: rise above the other man and control your emotions. Tyson wasn’t doing that. As the conflicts worsened, Atlas realized that D’Amato preferred to contradict his own principles rather than undermine Tyson’s focus on boxing. “I told Cus that if we teach Mike to control himself in the ring, but not out of it, he won’t develop into a responsible person,” said Atlas. “That’s what Cus always taught me: develop a boxer in ways that make him successful in life, whether he becomes a champion or not. With Mike, Cus wanted a champion first, a good person last.”
When other boys in the gym got in trouble at school, Atlas barred them from training for a few days. He did the same to Tyson. D’Amato vetoed that by bringing Tyson in himself. Atlas relented. “I was loyal to Cus. I didn’t want to see what was happening.”
By late fall of 1981, the school administration decided to expel Tyson. D’Amato didn’t protest this time. He contacted Coleman and convinced her that Tyson had been victimized at school, that boxing was still his best form of therapy. He sent her newspaper clippings of his successes in the ring. Clearly, D’Amato knew that Coleman had the power to take Tyson back into state care. He couldn’t risk losing his future champion. D’Amato asked if she would find a tutor. Coleman agreed, and in January 1982, Tyson left the high school.
The tutoring failed. Again, Tyson sat down for the instruction but didn’t apply himself. D’Amato promised the tutor that Tyson would work harder, but he never did. The 1982 National Junior Olympics Tournament was coming up and Tyson had to defend his title.
The mystique about Tyson built. Professional fight promoters who stalked the amateur tournaments looking for prospects talked about Tyson as a sure bet to win the gold at the upcoming Olympic Games in Los Angeles. One manager, Shelly Finkel, had already approached Tyson about his future plans. D’Amato refused to even discuss the matter with Finkel.
At the 1982 Juniors, Tyson again kept mostly to himself, or with Atlas, instead of mixing with the other boys. He knocked out his first four opponents with ease. On the night of the final, as he waited to enter the ring, Tyson broke down in tears. “I’m ‘Mike Tyson,’ everyone likes me now,” he uttered. Atlas did what he could to buttress Tyson’s will and took him to the ring. Tyson let loose a flurry of punches that sent his opponent into a corner, trying desperately to cover up. The referee stopped the fight. Tyson won by a technical knockout.
Tyson’s flaw, his passivity, seemed in control—barely. Atlas didn’t know it, but what had happened at Scranton was only the symptom. Before the Junior Olympic finals, the cause of Tyson’s passivity, of the flaw that drained his willingness to fight, had once again peeked out.
In Scranton, it was not just the prospect of losing the fight that had paralyzed Tyson. It was that in defeat the emotional attachments with D’Amato, Ewald, the other boys in the house, and Atlas would be severed. Fighting, and winning fights, made those bonds possible. Losing confirmed the fear he had lived with since childhood: that he was alone, unloved, and quite possibly unlovable.
So much of Tyson’s behavior from the day he entered Tryon and wanted to see ex-boxer Bobby Stewart sprang from that fear. Boxing was his only way of controlling the intense feelings of isolation, helplessness, and rage. What D’Amato tried to do was make boxing an all-encompassing gestalt: a way for Tyson to recognize and then order his emotions, to use his body as an instrument of his will, and ultimately to situate himself in the world.
The problem for Tyson was that the world—from Tryon to D’Amato’s house, the gym, tournaments, and the Junior Olympics—kept getting bigger and more foreign. It was certainly far different from what he came from and where he expected to end up. It was like being cast in a dramatic narrative as the lead player; they were writing as they went along and Tyson never knew what would happen next, only that one day the climax was supposed to be his coronation as heavyweight champion of the world.
It was a difficult role to play, especially when the leading man felt hollow. Tyson could never see himself becoming champion, because he couldn’t make purchase on his own core identity. That is the affliction of the unloved: without the basic human attachment of love, one comes to doubt that a self exists, and comes to believe that even if it does, it’s probably not worthy of being attached to anyone else. The impulse is toward self-annihilation; the “I” doesn’t exist and so it’s willfully converted to an “it.” The “it,” as Tyson demonstrated during his Brownsville childhood, robs, steals, fights, and ends up in prison. The “it” dies an early death.
Of course, Tyson had already demonstrated the will to survive. He didn’t want to be an “it.” He knew almost instinctually that boxing offered the logical possibility of finding a self. D’Amato, Ewald, and Atlas were all part of the effort. And so, in a sense, what choice did he have but to participate in their drama of making a champion? It was box or be alone. Box or perish.
The stakes, then, were high, and to Tyson they seemed to get higher each day. As he started to win fights, he felt the gap widen between the hope others had invested in him and his own deep, riveting fear of what failure would mean. Emotionally, that sent him bouncing back and fourth between two states. In the one, he believed that the hope of D’Amato, Ewald, and Atlas was grounded in authentic caring, even love. That belief dulled the fear, kept it under control. In the other, however, the fear leapt out like a flame. What if D’Amato’s attentions had nothing to do with Tyson the person, only with Tyson the future heavyweight champion?
The gap widened and Tyson began to live a paradox. He cooperated and then rebelled. He progressed in his boxing abilities, to a seemingly perfect degree, and then radically regressed in the blink of an eye. He’d behave as if he belonged, felt wanted, even loved, and then would act rejected, abandoned, and alone. During the positive phases people saw Tyson as kind, gentle, ambitious, determined, and hardworking; in the negative ones, selfish, conniving, deceptive, and at times inexplicably vicious. He alternated, in other words, between being an “I” and being an “it.”
D’Amato, for all his preaching on the psychology of fear, did not understand Tyson in those terms. After getting into Tyson’s psyche and bringing order to the most obvious confusions, D’Amato realized there were doors in Tyson he didn’t want to open and rooms he refused to enter. After Floyd Patterson, he vowed never again to open those doors in a fighter. Besides, D’Amato didn’t have the time with this one. He might die before the goal could be reached, and he knew it.
Perhaps D’Amato sensed that whatever caused Tyson’s will to fail in Scranton formed the opposite side of that which also made him so devastating. Perhaps that was what lurked behind one of those doors. It created a tension, and an intensity, that won fights. It was as if he entered the ring so emotionally coiled that a psychic energy built up that was desperate for release, and the only place it could go, the only relief for Tyson, was to destroy the other man.
With those forces powering Tyson, he didn’t need Zen. Tyson’s concentration was already so intense that he didn’t need to detach himself, to look down at the task from some spiritually removed place in order to control himself and the opponent. He could win a fight before control became an issue. And so perhaps D’Amato thought to himself, why should I go into one of those dark rooms, reorder and resolve? If I did, I wouldn’t have a champion anymore.
* * *
Tyson’s problems at school, his battle with Atlas, the lack of interest in education, his bolting back to Brownsville, his rudeness toward Ewald—D’Amato rationalized them all away as the price he, and Tyson, had to pay for winning the heavyweight championship of the world.
“Cus took Mike’s selfishness and said fuck it, fuck principles, I see a guy that is going to be a world champion,” said Atlas. “Cus was manipulative, too, but he could use it better. Tyson did it by instinct; Cus knew exactly what he was doing, how to do it, and who it affected.”
Soon after the Junior Olympic tournament, Atlas’s disillusionment with D’Amato increased. “Cus had the greatest tunnel vision, so great he didn’t even care about himself. He’d let Mike spit on him. When I met him, before Mike came along, he wouldn’t put up with that.”
In the spring, Tyson boasted around the gym that he didn’t need a trainer anymore, that he could win without Atlas, or D’Amato. In June, Tyson’s tutor quit. She was frustrated both with his lack of interest and with D’Amato’s lack of support. It was no coincidence that on June 30, Tyson turned sixteen and was thus legally no longer obligated to attend school. Moreover, he left the authority of the Youth Division. D’Amato still had to answer to Coleman, however, until Tyson was formally released. He continued to give Coleman rosy reports of Tyson’s progress, despite contrary accounts from the tutor. Coleman believed D’Amato.
Over the summer, Atlas continued to bump heads with Tyson and D’Amato. Atlas found out that in the late 1970s, D’Amato had secured a $25,000 grant from a federal agency to fund the boxing club—a portion of which was supposed to pay him a salary. Atlas never saw the money. He heard rumors that D’Amato gave certain town officials cash payments for their support and influence, especially on those occasions that Tyson had scrapes with the local law. In one instance, a woman complained to the police that Mike had been having sex with her twelve-year-old daughter. The matter stopped there. Atlas suspected that she’d been paid off. D’Amato also no longer seemed to care about the other boys in the club. Atlas watched D’Amato spend freely to cover Tyson’s expenses for tournaments, but complain when the other boys needed money for new equipment.
That attitude seemed all the more outrageous to Atlas because he knew that D’Amato had another major source of money to fund his efforts with Tyson. D’Amato had convinced his silent benefactors, Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton, that Tyson was the prospect they’d all been waiting for: a champion fighter they could develop from scratch and control completely. Cayton was skeptical. But Jacobs shared D’Amato’s passion, and he had the same obsessive tendencies. He persuaded Cayton to help pay for the additional expenses of bringing Tyson along. The travel, lodging, and other costs of sending everyone, including Jacobs, to a single tournament reached $6,000. With Tyson’s size, speed, and ability, he needed professional sparring, and that was expensive, upwards of $500 a week. They also paid $250 for each pair of Tyson’s custom-made gloves. Extra padding was needed to protect his sparring partners. Jacobs and Cayton even paid for gold fillings in Tyson’s two front teeth.
They had a verbal agreement on taking Tyson professional. D’Amato would decide whom he would fight and for which promoters. He would not, however, be manager of record. That meant showing income, which he would then have to pay in back taxes to the IRS, which D’Amato had no intention of doing. Jacobs would therefore become manager. Cayton at the time was considering retirement. His role remained uncertain, although he had expertise in advertising, marketing, and television, and expected to share in any profits from Tyson’s purses.
In August, Ernestine Coleman discovered that Tyson’s mother had been diagnosed as having inoperable cancer. She told Tyson and D’Amato. Despite all the money available for Tyson’s boxing career, D’Amato spared none for Lorna’s care. Nor had he ever paid for her to visit Tyson in Catskill. Over the past two years, D’Amato had spoken to her only a few times, and then briefly. He didn’t want to reveal her son’s problems in case the information got back to Coleman. D’Amato deemed his obligations as being only to the officials at the Youth Division.
In September, D’Amato paid for Tyson’s one train trip to visit Lorna in the hospital. He went alone. When he came back a few days later, Tyson refused to discuss what he saw, or felt. When his mother died in October, at the age of fifty-two, Tyson again went to New York alone. The trip turned out to be a watershed experience.
When Tyson arrived at his old apartment on Amboy Street in Brownsville, no one was there. Rodney long ago had moved away and had left no new address. When Denise returned home she said that there was no money to bury Lorna. The city would put her in Potter’s Field, a cemetery for the poor on an island northeast of Manhattan in the East River. Convicts from Rikers Island prison dug the graves.
Tyson couldn’t bring himself to go to the burial. He stayed in the apartment for three days. The phone rang several times but he didn’t answer. When he did, finally, it was D’Amato. Tyson said he wasn’t coming back to Catskill and hung up.
The next day, Ernestine Coleman came to the door. He wouldn’t let her into the apartment. They talked in the hallway. “I told Michael that he had to come back to Catskill,” recalled Coleman. “He refused. He was going to stay in Brownsville. I was convinced of that.”
Coleman explained that her own mother had died of cancer; she could empathize with what he felt. Tyson wasn’t moved. He was stuck in his grief and perhaps weighed down by the guilt he felt for letting his mother down all those years. There was also the shame. At Tryon, he tried to tell her how much he was changing, but maybe he hadn’t tried hard enough. If he had called more, cared more, tried harder, as hard as he boxed, maybe he could have earned back her love.
“This was a boy who had more rage than I’d ever seen before, and now he was falling, going into a deep depression. The boxing was a positive direction for him. It was either that or the streets, where he would have ended up dead for sure,” said Coleman.
She wasn’t prepared to let Tyson commit suicide in this manner. So she lied. “I said that if he wanted to stay I’d have to do the paperwork, the police would pick him up, and I’d place him somewhere in New York.”
At sixteen, Tyson was no longer under the authority of the Youth Division. He could do as he pleased. D’Amato had never told him that, and now, when the information would have perhaps determined his future, neither did Coleman. Perhaps, then, it was the prospect of the police, or just the shock value of the ultimatum, that made Tyson see through his own grief to the stark realities of his situation. He returned to Catskill that very day with Coleman.
According to Ewald, Tyson refused to discuss his mother’s death when he returned. But he started to change, radically. “Not long after he got back, Michael told me that he thought he could become the heavyweight champion of the world. Cus had always said that about him before and he knew it. That was the first time Mike said it.”
Coleman detected a shift as well. “Until his mother died, he never saw that house as home. Catskill just amounted to a place where he was and a thing he was doing. Suddenly, Cus, Camille, the house, and boxing was all he had left.”
Soon after Lorna’s death, D’Amato made a move to become Tyson’s legal guardian. When Tyson went to New York on the day of his mother’s funeral and refused to come back, D’Amato realized that his dream of having another champion could be easily stolen. The only control D’Amato could have was legal guardianship. Up until the age of eighteen, Tyson required the approval of a parent, or guardian, to sign a contract.
D’Amato’s duplicity ate away at Atlas like an acid. Every time he tried to discipline Tyson, D’Amato vetoed it. It reached the point where D’Amato had to take over Tyson’s training, while Atlas worked solely with the other boys in the boxing club. In November, matters came to a head. Atlas had gotten married over the previous summer. His wife had a twelve-year-old sister who on occasion came to the gym. The girl told Atlas that Tyson had fondled her. Atlas flew into a rage, got a gun, and confronted Tyson at the gym. Tyson ran out and hid in D’Amato’s house. D’Amato sent him to stay with Bobby Stewart at Tryon until he could sort things out. That consisted of firing Atlas.
Two weeks later, D’Amato used an old friend to expedite his bid to control Tyson. Bill Hagan was the supervisor of Greene County, in which Catskill was located. Hagan had used his Washington connections to secure the $25,000 federal grant for D’Amato years before. D’Amato told him now that some promoters were trying to weasel in on Tyson. The next day, D’Amato went to a local court with his lawyers and a set of already-completed guardianship papers. The judge approved the request without delay.
Atlas believed that D’Amato had intentionally let his dispute with Tyson boil over. “He let the conflict between me and Mike be brought to a climax so I had to leave and he could take Mike over,” said Atlas.
With Atlas gone the issue of who would work in Tyson’s corner arose. Baranski would be tapped to organize the sparring partners and work as cutman during fights. Kevin Rooney just months before lost a fight to Alexis Arguello, and lost so badly that it snuffed out any hope of his earning a shot at the welterweight title. When Atlas left, Rooney, his boyhood friend, took over as Tyson’s trainer.
Atlas was determined to continue working with the other boys in the boxing club. Some of their parents confronted D’Amato about his dismissal. D’Amato lied. He told them that Atlas had quit in order to work with professionals in New York. The parents knew that Atlas hadn’t left Catskill at all. Desperate to cover himself, D’Amato launched a smear campaign against Atlas. He spread rumors among the town officials who supported the club with funding that Atlas had taken up with the Mafia. He recounted tales of Atlas’s troubled youth—the street fights, the suicide attempts, and a score of other factual, and not so factual, stories. Atlas was forced to leave Catskill, but the rumors followed. He couldn’t get work at any of the New York gyms. Eventually, one of the parents, who was also a member of the Catskill Town Recreation Board and an executive at IBM, got the word to one of D’Amato’s supporters that he would have the gym closed if the rumors didn’t stop. They did, and Atlas slowly started to get work training professionals at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, New York.
Looking back on those days with the benefit of hindsight, Atlas didn’t sound angry or bitter. After training professionals on his own for almost ten years, he has learned that some young men can’t be changed, that they are coded somehow to turn out a certain way. When that behavior is enforced by others, there’s not much anyone could do. “We didn’t do everything we could have for Mike. But maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. We could have just been given what was always going to be there,” he said, and then added: “Maybe Cus was right. If we did it my way, Tyson might never have become champion.”
Atlas paused a moment, as if trying to decide whether his next thought would be taken for sour grapes. He didn’t care anymore; for Atlas it was the truth. “This syndrome about Mike when he turned pro, that he was superhuman, Iron Mike, was bullshit. You know, I never thought he’d be a durable champion.”
* * *
After his mother’s death, Tyson became more devoted to D’Amato as a trainer and mentor, and also as a surrogate father. Tyson spoke for the first time of one day being heavyweight champion. He poured himself into boxing to a degree no one involved in his life then—D’Amato, Ewald, Matt Baranski, Kevin Rooney, or Jim Jacobs—had yet seen in him, or in any other boxer past and present.
“Cus would be sitting in one chair, and Mike across from him in the other, both of them reading fight books. For hours Mike would sit there reading and then asking Cus questions,” recalled Ewald.
All the boys in the house had some claim on D’Amato’s attention and his role as mentor. D’Amato never hid his special feelings for Tyson. Tyson, for the first time, seemed to feel the same way. “Mike got very angry if one of the other boys made fun of Cus,” said Ewald.
At the dinner table lectures, Tyson played chief supplicant. “Hey, Cus, was Joe Gans a good fighter?” he would ask, feigning lack of knowledge, because it was likely that Tyson had spent that whole afternoon reading about Gans, a turn-of-the-century lightweight champion known for his courage. Tyson got the bare facts from the books, and could remember them in detail, but D’Amato explained the significance of a fighter’s achievements: the skills he had, or lacked, the mental battles he fought, how he was situated in the great big canvas of the sport. “Mike mastered the facts; he had a photographic memory,” said Ewald.
At that time as well, Tyson asked Jimmy Jacobs to send up old boxing films for him to watch. Every week a shipment would arrive of a half-dozen films or more and Tyson would sit with D’Amato and examine them in detail. Tyson was interested in the boxing, of course, but more so in the personas of the great champions. It was not that important to him how Jack Dempsey, for example, fought. Tyson watched the films to find signs of the champion’s identity. As someone who had trouble establishing his own sense of self, it was a natural impulse to search and borrow from others.
Tyson marveled at the bravado of Jack Johnson, the most famous of black heavyweight champions, who caught punches with his open glove, talked to people in the stands during the fight, and laughed in the faces of his hapless opponents. He liked the Spartan, warrior look of Jack Dempsey. He found out that among the fighters of the 1920s gold teeth were a status symbol, and had two of his upper front teeth capped in gold.
D’Amato also told him the story of how early twentieth-century black fighter Sam Langford, the “Boston Tar Baby,” used to wear a lot of jewelry until he was approached one day on a train by an elderly and distinguished-looking man. “I want to congratulate you on a fine career,” the older man said in a respectful tone, then left. Langford’s manager asked if he recognized the man. He hadn’t. It was steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. “But he wasn’t wearing any jewelry, or nothing fancy,” Langford was reputed to have said. The manager replied, “He doesn’t need to. He knows who he is.” After hearing that story, Tyson vowed never to wear the heavy gold chains and pendants then fashionable among some young blacks.
The departure of Atlas also appeared to make Tyson more determined about his training. It was as if he refused to give in to the thought that the absence of the person who had helped him through so many emotional crises in the ring could stop his rise. Tom Patti remembered the advent of that new intensity. “My room was below Mike’s. At night when we were supposed to be asleep, Mike was up shadowboxing for hours. I could hear the thumping and grunting.”
This new Tyson was devoted to D’Amato and boxing, and more believing in the dream of his future. He lived the role of surrogate son and disciplined fighter, and of course continued to win fights with a single knockout punch. With Lorna dead, and D’Amato and Catskill and becoming champion his only other recourse, Tyson moved himself onto the center stage of the drama. He would believe that the paradox was solved—that D’Amato did truly love him—even if the evidence, the proof, wasn’t in yet. He would live that little fiction. Tyson played the role well, as did D’Amato and everyone else who obtained a stake in his growing career. Tyson would have his lapses, he’d bounce between the light and dark of his personality, but in general he tried to follow the script.
The first big lapse occurred at the 1982 U.S. National Championships. The flaw, the overwhelming passivity, struck again. The opponent, Al Evans, had far more experience, yet not enough to make Tyson look as bad as he did. Evans pummeled Tyson to the canvas three times and won the bout by technical knockout. The same thing happened at the 1983 National Golden Gloves Tournament. Tyson lost to Craig Payne in the final. D’Amato and Rooney would claim that the referees and judges unfairly penalized Tyson for using a professional style. But it was the flaw. Tyson gave in to the opponent’s game plan. He stopped punching, which made him easy to hit, or at least easy enough that in three rounds of boxing his opponent racked up the most points.
When Tyson fought well, he functioned like an efficient machine of destruction. When he fought badly, he picked up some bad habits. Before a fight, in the dressing room, he would work himself up into a fevered intensity, which he would then unleash in the first round. If the opponent didn’t go down under the initial barrage, Tyson would get frustrated. In that state he’d forget D’Amato’s defensive and offensive techniques and look like a fighter out of control. Sometimes that’s as far as the regression went. In those cases Tyson’s natural strength and speed were usually more than adequate for victory. But if he regressed more, into the passivity, he tended to hug his opponent and lock arms—to “clinch. “D’Amato’s excuse was that he clinched in order to rest. The reality was that his will to fight had drained away.
Matt Baranski, who started in Tyson’s corner as cut man right after Atlas left, remembered the first time he witnessed Tyson’s self-defeating tendencies. “Mike was a wild man in the locker room before a fight. He’d shadowbox as hard as he could for an hour. Once when Mike was sixteen, he fought this kid in Boston. The kid was only seventeen; he didn’t have a lot of experience. Mike dropped him in the second round and the kid came back and boxed and boxed. Mike started to get tired. If it had gone another round, he would have lost. I warned Cus about that and he said not to worry about it, Mike’s in great shape.”
Baranski soon saw other problems in Tyson. He knew Tyson was capable of affection and attachment, especially toward D’Amato. He also saw the exact opposite. “He had this dog and once I saw him kick it hard. I told him that if he wasn’t so big I’d punch him out for doing that. He denied it to my face. I was standing right there and he denied it.
“He got pigeons, too, put them in a coop behind the house. Maybe he liked them, but he never cared for them. He’d let them freeze in the winter. It didn’t bother him a bit,” added Baranski.
Baranski doubted the depth of feeling Tyson and D’Amato had for each other. At times, they seemed to be bound by mutual self-interest. “Tyson didn’t care for anything or anybody. Mike had it in his head from the beginning that I got to look out for Mike and that’s all there is to it. He lied to Cus all the time. Once, after a fight, he disappeared for three days. Cus asked me to go find him. He showed up with two pigeons in the backseat of the car, told Cus he’d been gone just that one day. Cus knew it was three days. Everyone did.
“I’d ask Cus why he put up with that shit—the lies, Mike screaming at him, spitting on him even, incredible stuff. He told me he was ready to give up on him. He couldn’t stand Mike acting like an animal.”
Baranski felt that this wasn’t the normal feuding between a mentor and protégé, or even a father and son. There’s no doubt that they felt close, but more in the way of Siamese twins. It was as if they had to be with each other in order to exist. The necessity of the attachment created resentment.
“Cus disregarded a lot of things about Mike because it came with making a champion,” said Baranski. “Like Mike’s burning out in a fight. Cus knew that most of the time he’d knock the other guy out before that fatigue set in. I also thought it was like a way to control Mike and get the best results from him. If he’s fighting, he’s not getting in trouble. And if he’s fighting with bad intentions, which was most of the time, he’s winning.”
In 1983, D’Amato had to start preparing Tyson for the Olympic trials. He put him on what for some fighters would be a punishing schedule. For Tyson, though, maintaining a constant level of intensity suited his desperate urge for psychic release. On August 12, Tyson entered the Ohio State Fair National Tournament. On the first day, he knocked out his opponent in forty-two seconds of the first round. On the second day, Tyson punched out the two front teeth of his foe and left him unconscious for ten minutes. On the third day, for the tournament championship, his adversary, the young man who had won the National Golden Gloves title that year, quit before the fight with a bad hand.
The day after Tyson won the Ohio State Fair competition by default, he flew to Colorado Springs for the 1983 U.S. National Championships. Six other fighters had entered the heavyweight division. When Tyson arrived, four dropped out. He automatically advanced to the semifinals. Two victories later—both first-round knockouts—he had another amateur title. In early 1984, he won the National Golden Gloves. All that remained was to get through the Olympic trials, then go onto the games in Los Angeles. With the stiffest competition boycotting—Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union—D’Amato felt that a gold medal was certain. Olympic victory, as it had for so many fighters (Floyd Patterson, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, and Sugar Ray Leonard, among others), would launch Tyson’s pro career. D’Amato believed that in two years, three at most, Tyson could capture the heavyweight championship of the world.
Preparations for Tyson’s pro debut had to be made. Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton had by 1984 invested more than $200,000 in Tyson’s development. That included paying $1,000 a week at one point for a single sparring partner, Marvin Stinson, who at the time was working with heavyweight champion Larry Holmes. As soon as the Olympics were over, they planned to sign Tyson to a management contract and start the march to the title. They had handled two other fighters before, and with some success: Wilfred Benitez and Edwin Rosario, both in the lower weight classes. A heavyweight could become a cultural icon. More mass-market appeal meant larger fight purses, product endorsements, and commercials. Tyson’s stunning first-round knockout victories had already garnered him a great deal of attention in regional markets among fight fans. But now that he was about to cross over into the national consciousness at the Olympics, Jacobs and Cayton realized that for publicity purposes they needed a story to tell. That Tyson won fights with a single punch wasn’t enough. They needed something more humanizing.
Jacobs talked to Alex Wallau, a boxing analyst with ABC Sports and a friend since the mid-1970s. Wallau agreed to tape an interview with D’ Amato and Tyson at the house. The idea was to televise a profile of the two during the Olympics. A look at the unedited version of the tape revealed the rough outlines of a story line that Jacobs and Cayton hoped to use as a publicity device at the Olympics.
Wallau’s questions focused on the obvious human-interest news hook: the unique relationship between an old Italian-American fight guru living in the country and a young, black boxing protégé from the bowels of the New York slums.
D’Amato first extolled the virtues of his fighter.
“He’s able to throw a punch, like lightning right next to you, and any punch he throws hits where he was and not where he is and in that position he can let a bomb go without any inhibition whatsoever,” said D’Amato. “I’ve never seen a fighter who can make the adjustment on so little so rapidly and do so much with it. I’ve never seen a fighter like Mike.”
“How would you say that Cus has helped you change your life?” Wallau asked Tyson.
“He’s changed my life by helping me deal with people. Before I couldn’t talk to people. I just wanted to be alone.” Then later Tyson added: “He’s like my father. I never look at it like he’s my trainer or my manager. I go by the way he feels about me and it’s like a father-son relationship.”
Wallau posed the same question to D’Amato.
“I never let my feelings get involved, no matter how much affection I have,” D’Amato said. Then, as if realizing he’d made a mistake, he corrected himself. “Having watched him come from what he was to where he is, I can say honestly I have a very deep affection for him.”
On the subject of his future, Tyson downplayed the hoopla over his prospects as champion. Something in him resisted hype. “Dreams are just when you’re starting off, that’s the image, 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.”
D’Amato wanted to get back to his feelings for Tyson. The core of it turned out to be a soft-pedaled admission of self-interest. “If he weren’t here, I probably wouldn’t be alive today. I believe that a person dies when he no longer wants to live.… 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. I will not leave until that happens.”
D’Amato then gave the whole team—Tyson, himself, Jacobs, and Cayton—a plug. “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, because I have good friends like Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton who are thoroughly and completely honest and competent in every area, who I know will continue doing what I have done, and probably a lot better than I’ve done.”
Tyson ended the interview in the contradictory posture of the cool, calculating professional detached from all other concerns beyond winning—except that he also wanted to please his mentors.
“We just do our jobs and that’s it. I just want to hold up my part of the team. And that’s to succeed and make everybody happy.”
“What will it take to make everybody happy?” asked Wallau.
“Do my job inside the ring, and they do their job outside the ring.”
All the elements of a compelling narrative were there. Here was the fighter with the almost inexplicable abilities (“hits where he was, not where he is”) who could destroy an opponent without “inhibition,” which was as if to say without remorse or pity. Such a persona was frowned on in the amateurs as too much the product of professional training. In the pro ranks, however, the persona of the Ring Destroyer would play well to national television audiences. The one-punch knockout fighter was the stuff of spectacle.
But those were hardly humanizing qualities. What made for good commerce did little to create basic, personal empathy for Tyson. Fortunately, Jacobs and Cayton could serve up his relationship with D’Amato. That would humanize him: D’Amato had saved Tyson from sure self-destruction in the ghetto, had given him a new life, a readymade family, and a father’s love. In return, Tyson had given D’Amato a purpose for living.
Finally, the narrative needed practical expression. Who would take this man-child fighter driven by primal forces and introduce him to the world? Who would convert into reality the Old Sage’s dream to make another champion before his death? Of course, the capable and honest Jacobs and Cayton.
In June, Tyson left for Las Vegas to compete in the Olympic trials. D’Amato and Jacobs considered the trials a mere formality. To everyone’s shock, Tyson lost twice to Henry Tillman, a six-foot-three, 195-pound former gang member from South Central Los Angeles. He would not compete in the Olympics. Tyson later accused Tillman of trying to stick thumbs in his eye. D’Amato blamed the amateur boxing establishment for taking out on Tyson their dislike for him. But a look at the fight proved that although it was close, Tillman won by scoring more points. He simply fought smarter.
That’s how Alex Wallau read the fight. “Mike didn’t fight a very smart fight. He let himself get frustrated and I sensed that he was in conflict about what style he was supposed to use, professional or amateur. He couldn’t make the adjustment to amateur style.”
Tillman’s trainer put it more bluntly. “Tyson boxed like a robot and when Henry started to pick him off with jabs, it was like pulling out a fuse.”
D’Amato and Jacobs were stunned by the loss. All of the promise that had built up around Tyson over the last four years seemed in question. He was capable of spectacular successes, and stunning, inexplicable defeats. Despite all the psychological reordering, the work in the gym, battles with teachers, social workers, and tutors, and all the abuse D’Amato took from Tyson, despite the strings pulled and lies told, the cover-ups and the loss of friends, with all that had been expended, Tyson remained an enigma. For that D’Amato disliked Tyson, deeply. He vented those feelings to a boxing promoter at the trials: “He said that Mike was a piece of shit and an animal and that if he had his way, he’d throw Mike out onto the street,” said the promoter.
But of course D’Amato didn’t have the choice. More than anything, he wanted that third champion. He was obsessed. Just before leaving Las Vegas, he hatched a backup plan to get Tyson the gold medal. Tyson had been selected as an alternate to the team. He’d be permitted to work out at the training camp with the other boys until the competition began. At first, D’Amato was so bitter about the loss that he didn’t want Tyson to go. Then he remembered the rule that if any team member was knocked out in sparring he’d have to rest for several weeks, with the alternate taking his place. “Cus told Mike to go out there to the camp and knock out anybody he could,” said Baranski. “Mike stayed in the camp exactly one day. The other trainers knew what he was up to and didn’t want him around.”
After the Olympics (Tillman won the heavyweight gold medal), D’Amato and Jacobs altered their plan for Tyson’s pro career. They could never be sure which Tyson would step into the ring, the knockout machine or the passive little boy. It seemed that the flaw could strike with almost any opponent. Still, there was a type they had to avoid matching Tyson with. A fighter who combined basic boxing skills with good movement, confidence, and poise—someone who could easily frustrate Tyson—was the riskiest.
Without the fanfare of an Olympic gold medal, promoting Tyson would also be difficult. The television, newspaper, and magazine exposure that came with a gold medal would have sent him into the national consciousness in a ready-made, prepackaged form. His greatness as a fighter would have been largely assumed. Now they had to build his reputation from the bottom up. That posed a whole different series of management and marketing challenges. Jim Jacobs would dive into the task with the same obsession that D’Amato had the training.
