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Chapter One

Not much is known about Lorna Tyson. She was born Loma Smith in 1930, probably in the South. Like so many other blacks after World War II, she migrated north in search of work and more social freedoms. There is no account of her keeping in touch with or ever seeing her parents, siblings, or any other relatives. Mike Tyson had no recollection of such extended family on his mother’s side. He has described Lorna as around five-foot-six with a big, sturdy frame. She had medium-brown skin and dull-gray hair that waved back from her wide face. She wore glasses and had an air of quiet dignity.

At some point during her first years in Brooklyn, New York, she married Percel Tyson, of whom nothing is known. They later divorced. Lorna never remarried. She did fall in love, with Jimmy Kirkpatrick, a heavyset, boisterous roustabout who drove big cars, worked menial construction jobs, and dreamed of owning his own business. Kirkpatrick had sixteen children when he moved in, all of them living with their various mothers. He fathered three more with Lorna. The first was a boy, Rodney, born in 1961. Next came Denise in 1964. Two years later, well into Lorna’s third pregnancy, Kirkpatrick moved out. On June 30, 1966, in Cumberland Hospital, Michael Gerard Tyson was born.

Without the help of Kirkpatrick’s occasional paycheck, Lorna struggled. She worked off and on, once as a nurse’s aide, but made barely enough money to support her family. Another boyfriend, Edward Gillison, moved in. He contributed little. By the time Michael was eight years old, the Tysons had moved four times within Brooklyn. Each move took them deeper into poverty. His last home with Lorna was 178 Amboy Street, Apartment 2A, in the heart of Brownsville, Brooklyn’s most destitute section.

The Tyson family lived in perpetual crisis. Lorna began to drink. She and Gillison argued constantly, and when they fought, Lorna took the worst of it, until one day, while boiling water, she chased Gillison around the apartment and seared him. In between jobs she went on welfare. When the heating bill couldn’t be paid, they all slept in their clothes. Tyson put cardboard in his shoes to cover up the holes. Food was scarce. Meals at times were made of flour and water.

Even genetics seemed to conspire against the family. By the time Rodney was twelve, he weighed a blubbery 280 pounds. Denise also tended to put on weight. They all suffered, but it seemed that the youngest boy suffered most. “Big Head Mike,” as he was known to neighbors in the building, was ridiculed for every little oddity of appearance and character. On the streets, because of his lisp, the other children called Tyson “Little Fairy Boy.” He was bigger than most other children his age, but intensely passive. They beat him up for the lisp, for his shoes, and for whatever he had in his pocket. He wore glasses briefly, and they beat him up for that. Tyson became increasingly withdrawn around other children, and that earned more beatings.

His father had stayed in Brooklyn, and he and the Tysons would have chance meetings. “When Mike was seven, he, Denise, and Rodney were walking down the street in Brownsville and saw their father,” said Camille Ewald, the woman who would later become his surrogate mother. “He dished out a dollar for each of them. Mike threw his on the ground.”

By age nine, Tyson had started keeping pigeons in a coop on the roof of a nearby abandoned building. The family dog, a black Labrador, once killed a half dozen of the birds, piling them up in Tyson’s bedroom. Other kids would steal his pigeons, and he would steal theirs. The only taboo was death. You could steal, but not kill.

One day, Tyson found an older boy taking a bird out of the coop. They argued, and the boy ripped off the bird’s head with a single, vicious twist of his hand. Tyson went into a blind rage and pounced on the boy, punching and kicking with every ounce of strength he could muster.

For any boy, such a battle would have been a watershed event. For a boy raised in Brownsville, it would yield a sense of victory in the perennial battle against overwhelming feelings of helplessness and poverty. Years later, when Tyson became heavyweight champion of the world, that moment of rage would be constructed into an epiphany. Tyson played along. It fit ever so conveniently into his public persona as some primal force of destruction. Tyson would cavalierly recount that and other seminal events as if he had found not just liberation but, when the urges were tempered into systematic violence, empowerment as well.

When he indulged in that persona, he wanted the world to believe that he was a nine-year-old man-child wreaking havoc without a care for the feelings of his victims—a sociopath. He felt nothing and cared for no one. He wanted no one’s love. “I did evil things,” he said in early 1988. His sister, Denise, affirmed the self-portrayal. “It became fun for him to beat up kids,” she said to a reporter also that year. “Everyone was afraid of him. He stopped being called Mike. It became ‘Mike Tyson.’”

The stories tumble out from Tyson. There was the time he and Denise played doctor on a sleeping Rodney. Tyson took a razor black, sliced his arm, and poured in alcohol into the wound. Tyson stopped going to school. He joined a gang, the Jolly Stompers. He drank cheap liquor and smoked cigarettes. He stole from fruit stands. He beat up other kids without provocation. He would offer to carry a woman’s grocery bags, then run off with either the food or her purse. Tyson became an expert pickpocket. He particularly enjoyed ripping gold chains from the necks of women at bus stops. As Tyson once said, he relished a concept of himself as Brownsville’s own Artful Dodger.

Whether those stories were true or not didn’t seem to matter to him. Tyson’s life as champion would reach the point where appearance and reality—what people wanted to believe about him, and who he really was—became hopelessly blurred. He would be raw material to feed cultural curiosity about the nature and origins of sociopathic viciousness. By early 1988, Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith, taking his lead from such stories by Tyson, would succumb to literary romanticism and equate the rage in Tyson with social ethics. “He is justice!” Smith wrote about Tyson after being told about the rooftop battle. “Instincts haven’t made him fight. Outraged innocence has.”

The idea that Tyson became a fighter in order to right the wrongs done to his person, family, neighborhood, class, and race ignored what was probably the most significant point about what really happened on that rooftop. Tyson reveled in a perverse romanticism about his past, to disguise rather than reveal.

The rage was rooted in feelings of confusion about his life—about where his next meal would come from, what his future might be, who would care for him, and most important, whether his mother, or anyone else, loved him. The rage set in motion a vicious cycle in which rage only pushed farther away the people closest to him. It also alienated Tyson from himself. When rage is your only friend, all the other qualities of human nature—kindness, pity, affection—wither. No human being can live that way for long, and Tyson, if ever he was as far from human as he wanted others to believe, surely didn’t. Rage and a life of systematic violence meant death. Within Tyson there was always a whispering voice that sought life. He was a survivor.

By the age of eleven, Tyson was going in and out of juvenile detention centers in Brooklyn. Tyson escaped as often as he could. By the age of twelve, he had graduated to Spofford, a medium-security facility in the Bronx. A dozen times he went there for short stays, until the family courts, and his mother, realized that he had to be sent out of New York. Just thirteen years old, Tyson went to the Tryon School for Boys, two hundred miles upstate in the town of Johnstown. There he would either straighten out or they would keep him until the age of sixteen.

Many of the kids who end up in places like Tryon go on to become adult felons and do a stint or two in prison before making an effort to go straight. Tyson, to the amazement of everyone who knew him then, started his reform early.

In comparison to Spofford, Tryon was a country club. “Instructors” referred to it as a “campus.” The boys lived in “cottages.” There were no chaotic dormitories, fences, barbed wire, or barred windows. Boys lived one to a room. The food was plain, and starchy, but it came three times a day, 365 days of the year. There were movies, school classes, trade instruction, and sports. It was not unusual for some boys to run away a few days before discharge so that they could enjoy the punishment of staying longer. The alternative, after all, was a return to the streets of New York.

There are two different versions of what happened to Tyson soon after he arrived. In the first one, he got locked up in the “secure” cottage called Elmwood after some violent outburst. While there, he found out that one of the supervisors, Bobby Stewart, was a former professional boxer. He pleaded to see him, begged for a lesson, got it, and was discovered.

The second version makes more sense. Muhammad Ali visited Spofford once. Tyson marveled at the man, but more than that reflected on the living, breathing symbolism of his life. Ali was a cultural icon of the black man making it his way in a white world. The allure of Ali promised the acquisition of money and power without compromise. For the boy who had learned to be alone, the idea of Ali, regardless of the realities, promised that, if he so chose, he would never need anyone else again. All he had to do was learn to box. And Bobby Stewart, Tyson decided, would be his teacher.

Bobby Stewart had a reputation around Tryon as tough and unforgiving, a strict disciplinarian who considered most of the kids incapable of reform. His pessimism came from the disappointments of his own life.

He was born and raised in Amsterdam, New York, a small upstate town that had crumbling nineteenth-century mills and a dim future. Stewart played football in high school, married at seventeen, then began to box in the amateurs. In 1974, he won the National Golden Gloves light heavyweight title. Instead of holding out for the 1976 Olympics, which would produce such future boxing stars as Sugar Ray Leonard, he turned pro. Stewart won thirteen fights and lost three, then burned out. He was a small-town boy with an honest heart and few dreams.

After boxing, Stewart managed a family-owned bar. He worked part-time at Tryon, then went on staff in 1978. By the time Tyson arrived in 1980, Stewart was still fit, and he had trimmed down in weight. He was barely six feet tall and sinewy, and he had a small, boxy head, a flush of red in his cheeks, and pummeled-down pug nose. He had boyish Scotchman’s looks but a gruff blue-collar manner and slurred speech, the result of too many blows to the head.

Stewart had been hired to start a boxing program. Several boys wanted to box, but according to Stewart, few had the desire or the discipline to learn more than the basics. Usually, he just laced the gloves on them and let them flail away for a round or two. Tyson would change Stewart’s dismal view of human nature. He differed in every respect.

Once he was placed in Elmwood, Tyson asked for Stewart. For two days, Stewart ignored him. Tyson suddenly became a model inmate. Stewart didn’t fall for it. One night he waited for Tyson to fall asleep, then banged violently on his door.

“What the fuck do you want?” he yelled.

“Mr. Stewart, I want to be a fighter,” Tyson said meekly.

“So do the rest of these scumbags. They wouldn’t be here if they were tough and had balls like a fighter. They’re losers!” Stewart spit out.

Tyson said it again. “I want to be a fighter.”

For two weeks Stewart put Tyson off. With each passing day, Tyson’s behavior improved. Finally, Stewart put Tyson in the ring. There Tyson made an incongruous sight. At thirteen years of age he packed almost two hundred pounds of slablike mass into a five-foot, eight-inch frame. Every part of him looked thick. His head appeared large and out of proportion to his body. He didn’t so much walk as lumber, as if the mass, and its arrangement, was an insupportable burden. The most obvious anomaly was his voice—too high-pitched to match the menacing physique and with a slight, almost farcical lisp.

Stewart didn’t want to take any chances. He dared not let Tyson pummel one of the other boys and become some kind of bully. So into the ring went Stewart himself, and for three rounds he humiliated Tyson.

“After we finished, the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Can we do it again tomorrow?’” Stewart recalled later. “I didn’t care if he could box—I was amazed with his mind. He wanted to better himself. He knew he wanted that at age thirteen. It almost scared me. None of the other kids were like that.”

Tyson became a puzzle to Stewart. If he was such a bad kid, why had he been put in Tryon, a less-then-minimum-security facility? Stewart checked Tyson’s file: all the crimes were petty, the worst being the theft of fruit from a grocery store. In an evaluation by the Tryon teachers, Tyson tested as borderline retarded, but as Stewart discovered, he had been in school a total of two days over the previous year. “Of course he tested badly—he could barely read or write!” Stewart remembered.

Stewart began to see the psychological scars. Tyson didn’t just have self-esteem problems. They were more fundamental. He had no sense of self-worth at all. It was the affliction of the abandoned personality, the unloved. “He felt bad about his body, being so big, and the kids taunted him for it,” Stewart said. “I’d never seen anyone that bad. He was scared of his own shadow. He barely talked, never looked you in the eye. He was a baby.”

They trained together every day, boxed every other. Stewart secretly asked one of the other boys to tutor Tyson. He improved both in the ring and the classroom. Tyson went from a fourth- to a seventh-grade reading level in three months. In the gym he improved too, in strength and in skill. Without any practice, he bench-pressed 245 pounds. His punches also started to become accurate. “He broke my nose with a jab. It almost knocked me down. I had never before been hit that hard with a jab. I had the next week off, so I let it heal at home and never told Tyson what he’d done,” Stewart said.

Emotionally, Tyson did not heal. His size, his prowess, and the aura of inexplicable power made him almost freakish to the other boys. Special treatment by Stewart created suspicions. “To those kids, someone who’s doing well is on the outside,” Stewart said. Nor did Tyson have any desire, it seemed, to use boxing to become a leader. “He didn’t have the confidence to lead.”

Stewart’s support and approval counted for something. But it was Lorna’s love that Tyson wanted most. The boys got to call home every Sunday. When Tyson first called Lorna, he mumbled a few words, then glumly handed the phone to his mentor. “He wanted me to tell her how good he was doing. ‘Tell her, tell her,’ he kept saying. His mother said she had trouble believing that he had changed. She sounded drunk. Mike told me she drank a lot,” Stewart said.

Not once during Tyson’s nine-month stay did Lorna visit the facility, send any Christmas presents, or write a letter.

The boxing gave Tyson purpose and provided a ray of hope about the future. It brought a semblance of order to his feelings, but not resolution—at least not yet. Despite the progress, Stewart sensed the deep-down pain. “I thought his negative self-image could hurt him as a boxer. Everyone always knew he could win, but he convinces himself he can’t.”

Stewart didn’t want Tyson to go back to Brownsville. He could succeed if he had the right help. Stewart knew that Cus D’Amato, a seventy-two-year-old fight manager who lived just outside the town of Catskill, ran an informal boxing camp for boys. Some were from town families. Others, usually the more troubled boys from New York City, stayed in D’Amato’s house. Camille Ewald, his companion, served as den mother. D’Amato was tough, he knew boxing, and he provided a familylike environment. For a kid like Tyson, it was a halfway house back into the world.

Stewart called his own former trainer, Matt Baranski, who had worked with D’Amato since the late 1960s. Baranski agreed to set up a meeting. Stewart prepared Tyson every day for a week. D’Amato didn’t run a charity. He looked for something special in a boy. Desire and determination to succeed impressed D’Amato more than ring skills. Tyson’s glaring emotional problems might put him off. Nonetheless, Stewart gave Tyson a few advanced lessons that he knew would be impressive, like spinning out of a corner and slipping a punch.

For every hour they spent in preparation, Tyson doubled it when alone. He sensed opportunity. “One of the guards went by his room at three in the morning and heard grunting and snorting,” Stewart recalled. “He was working on slipping punches.”

On a chilly weekend in March 1980 they drove down to Catskill. D’Amato had converted a town meeting hall located above the police station into a gym, plopping a boxing ring in the center of a room maybe a hundred feet long and sixty feet wide. There were no windows. Five round Deco-style lamps provided the only light. As in all boxing gyms, the walls were covered with press clippings boasting of the feats of his boys, some fight posters, and a collection of fading black-and-white still photos of heavyweight notables through the ages—Jack Sharkey, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston. Also on the walls were photos of the two champions D’Amato had managed and helped train during the 1950s and 1960s—Floyd Patterson, a heavyweight, and José Torres, who won crowns in two weight classes.

“Mike started to throw me around,” Stewart recalled of the exhibition they gave D’Amato. “He had that incredible speed and power. I caught him with a couple right hands and his nose bled. Cus wanted to stop it. Mike almost cried. ‘No, we always go three rounds. We have to go three.’”

Cus had seen enough. His first words to Stewart would become a centerpiece of the Tyson mythology: “That’s the heavyweight champion of the world,” he said—as if everyone with eyes had to reach the same conclusion.

Afterward, they all went to D’Amato’s home for lunch. D’Amato and Ewald lived four miles outside Catskill in the town of Athens. The house was a quarter mile off the main road in a clearing on a hill. A yellow sign on a tree at the driveway entrance reads Children at Play. The house, built at the turn of the century in a late Victorian design, rose up three stories and was covered in white clapboard. Several dormer windows jutted out from the shale-gray roof. A porch wrapped around three-quarters of the section with the river view. Rosebushes hugged one side. Two towering maple trees shaded part of the well-kept lawn. Nestled back at the edge of the forest sat a barn-shaped coach house. It was the sort of spread, ten acres in all, that once would have belonged to the town judge.

Tyson had never seen anything like it. When they pulled up the driveway, a look of awe spread across his face. “I told him that if he wanted to, he could live here,” Stewart said. “He couldn’t believe it.”

They entered the house through the long, narrow kitchen. The dining room table could seat ten or more. But the heart of the fourteen-room house was the mock-Tudor-style living room. Deep, rich mahogany paneling went halfway up the walls. Broad beams crossed the ceiling. There was a fireplace that had been covered up. The couch looked deep and comfortable; the chairs sported rich leather, and solid, heavy, hardwood frames. One entire wall held a collection of hardcover books. A family lived here. To Tyson it seemed warm, secure, and, with the books, slightly mysterious.

For her guests Ewald cooked a hearty meal. D’Amato did all the talking. To Tyson, he must have seemed an odd old man. D’Amato had a large, round, bald head set on a thick neck and broad, square shoulders. His hair, almost snow-white, was cut short around the sides. His eyes were deep brown and set a bit apart. The nose looked strong. Though only five foot eight, and a bit overweight, D’Amato had an imposing presence. He had a barrel chest, thick forearms, and large hands.

D’Amato’s voice was gravelly and harsh, a voice from some urban New York place that Tyson couldn’t place. The word “champion” came out as “champeen. His eyes was busy. He’d squint, then suddenly his eyebrows would rise up and his eyes would open wide. It made him look alternately skeptical and surprised. He blew air out of his nose in light bursts for no apparent reason and made a “tch” sound with his tongue in the middle of a sentence.

It wasn’t easy to follow his thinking. D’Amato frequently meandered off the point, diverted by some inner music into other ideas, anecdotes, and aphorisms, all related to boxing. He seemed to speak about obvious, self-evident things in complex ways—at times getting lost in the web of his own spun-out thought. Often he would stop himself and ask, “What was I talking about?” Ultimately, he’d manage to return to the original point, which he would then complete as if he’d never strayed.

For Tyson, not used to having to sit and listen for so long to one person, let alone an old white man accustomed to a captive audience, D’Amato must have seemed both foreign and annoying. At the same time, he was also mesmerizing.

Ewald remembered the day. As she watched Tyson drive away with Stewart, the car suddenly stopped. Tyson jumped out and ran back to her. “We had all these rosebushes around the house. He asked if he could take some flowers back to Tryon. ‘I’ve never seen roses before,’ he said. ‘I thought only the very rich people grew roses. I want to show them to the other kids.’”

Ewald found out later that by the time Tyson got back to Tryon, the roses had died.

D’Amato insisted that Stewart provide proof of Tyson’s age. He couldn’t believe that any boy of thirteen was both that physically developed and mentally focused. Stewart looked in the Tryon records, but he couldn’t find a birth certificate. He did, however, get verification of Tyson’s birthday from New York City officials.

Stewart took Tyson back to Catskill for three more visits. All during this period at Tryon, Tyson was conforming even more to the role of model student. “When he did something wrong, any little thing, he’d ask me, ‘Will you still work with me?’ He didn’t want to take the chance of losing me or missing out on the opportunity to live with Cus,” Stewart said.

D’Amato watched him box but didn’t offer much instruction. He spent more time alone with Tyson, talking, but also listening. He was more interested in the boy’s mind than in his body. He wanted to see the bends in Tyson’s mind and the distortions of his heart. Sometimes the more troubled the boy, the better—it gave D’Amato the chance to completely reorder the psychic furniture. That was the core of his method, on which all the other training depended. He’d knock and bang until the boy opened up, and then he’d stomp about inside, pointing to the disorder to make the boy see the truth about himself. And the truth he was most interested in was human fear. D’Amato believed that a boxer, by confronting fear and using it effectively in the ring, assured his success—the imposition of the will through violence.

Of course, D’Amato’s method didn’t always make a champion. Sometimes all that D’Amato’s mind-work produced was a more confident young man, not a champion boxer. Many of the boys left him because he was too strict about what they did, both in and out of the ring. And D’Amato had yet to see any of his protégés—Patterson and Torres included—execute fully his unique style of boxing, a style that, as far back as the 1950s, his critics had ridiculed. The D’Amato style required almost robotlike training, intense concentration, extreme confidence, and superb emotional control. D’Amato believed that when executed to perfection, especially by a fast-punching heavyweight, the style would produce an unbeatable boxer.

Tyson had the kind of hand speed D’Amato required and certainly, given his size at the age of thirteen, the potential to grow into an imposing natural heavyweight. D’Amato also realized that he had a teenager whose psychic furniture was disposed in a chaotic and entangled clutter of fear and insecurity. Tyson wanted desperately to find order and meaning in his life, but didn’t know how. D’Amato did. “After they’d talked for hours, Cus decided Mike had it,” said Ewald. “He told me, ‘Camille, this is the one I’ve been waiting for all my life. My third champion.’”

* * *

Transferring Tyson into D’Amato’s care wasn’t easy. Tyson had been at Tryon only six months when Stewart raised the issue with state officials. There were problems. Tyson was still only thirteen; the mother’s approval was needed. A troubled urban teenager would be put in a small-town school, with unforeseeable consequences. And there was the matter of his support. Who would pay? D’Amato?

D’Amato’s situation looked far better than it actually was. He had declared bankruptcy in 1971 and still owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Internal Revenue Service, a by-product of his turbulent years as a fight manager. Ewald, however, owned the house. And they derived income from a variety of sources. Local and state officials supplied funding for D’Amato and some of his live-in fighters to train local boys in the Catskill gym. Some of the older boys who already lived in the house, and were training to become professionals, worked part-time. And the parents, if they had money, contributed.

One unusual source of funds was Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton, who had a company in New York that licensed out the rights to their collection of fight films. The two also had experience managing fighters. From them D’Amato got a monthly stipend of one thousand dollars. The money covered expenses for the gym, but mostly paid for the house. For their stipend Jacobs and Cayton expected, some day, to get a promotable fighter, who would repay the investment. It was an unusual arrangement, highly speculative from a business standpoint, and tolerated mostly because of D’Amato’s long friendship with Jacobs. So far, the investment hadn’t produced a fighter worthy of professional development.

Stewart and D’Amato prevailed with the state. On June 30, the day he turned fourteen, Tyson was released into D’Amato’s custody. His life was about to become intimately intertwined, for better or worse, with one of boxing’s most unusual personalities.