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ОглавлениеConstantine D’Amato was born January 17, 1908, in a small tenement near the intersection of Southern Boulevard and 149th Street in the area of the Bronx known as Classen Point. His father had come to New York from Italy in 1899 and worked delivering ice and coal. In all, there were eight sons. Three died in infancy. D’Amato was the second youngest. In Italian the first n of his name was not pronounced, so it became Costantine, then Coster, Cos, and eventually Cus.
His mother died when D’Amato was four. His father cared for the boys as best he could but lost them, as it were, to the streets. Love alternated with beatings. Many beatings. The boys respected the father, though. He didn’t put up with injustice. He was the kind of man who showed respect to those he felt deserved it and hatred for those who didn’t.
D’Amato took the beatings with the attitude that he had to accept the consequences of his actions. “I knew I deserved it,” D’Amato said in a 1976 interview titled “The Brujo of Gramercy Gym,” published in a periodical called Observations From the Treadmill. “I knew before I got hit what I was getting hit for, and I knew before I did what I did exactly what was gonna happen, just like day follows darkness. There was nothin’ to be resentful about.”
His father, a former wrestler, loved boxing. D’Amato’s older brother Jerry trained at a gym in the Frog Hollow section of the Bronx. It later became famous as Stillman’s. D’Amato carried Jerry’s bags and watched. One day, Jerry got in a fight with a policeman—and was shot dead.
D’Amato had his share of scraps. At twelve, in a street fight with an older man, he suffered a blow to the head that partially blinded him in the left eye. A deviated septum caused breathing difficulties (hence the odd blowing). Still, D’Amato never backed down from a good fight—that is, when he could fight for what he believed was right.
In old New York, neighborhoods were highly territorial. You didn’t throw your weight around on someone else’s block unless you were ready to back it up with force. One day, a man with a reputation for knife fighting came into D’Amato’s small patch of the Bronx. He started to push some of D’Amato’s friends around. When they pushed back, the man challenged each one to a knife fight. Everyone backed down. The man began to humiliate them, or as D’Amato explained the story to author and friend Norman Mailer, “He said things he shouldn’t have.” D’Amato challenged him to a fistfight. The man insisted on knives. D’Amato agreed.
They were to meet the next morning, shortly after dawn, in an abandoned building. D’Amato, with good reason, couldn’t sleep that night: He had had no experience with knife fighting. He knew boxing, though. At dawn D’Amato taped an ice pick into his left hand and wrapped a coat around his right forearm. He’d fight like that. He arrived at the appointed site a half hour early to check the place out and shadowbox. At seven, the knife fighter wasn’t there. D’Amato waited for several more hours, but still no opponent. The knife fighter never appeared again in the neighborhood. D’Amato became a street hero.
He learned soon after that heroism had its limitations. A rival gang invaded his neighborhood, and D’Amato joined a group of boys ready to do battle. When the two gangs met, D’Amato rushed ahead, screaming a war cry. When he looked around, he found himself alone. The other boys had retreated. The rival gang, respecting his courage, let him be and chased the others.
It was from such incidents that D’Amato later developed a practical psychology of fear and made it the foundation for everything else he taught young boxers. D’Amato argued that no essential difference existed between the coward and the hero. The hero can control his emotions; the coward can’t. “Fear is like fire,” D’Amato said time and again, repeating it like a mantra. “If you don’t control it, it will destroy you and everything around you.”
From boyhood, D’Amato had what could only be called a warrior’s obsessions. He always seemed to be preparing for some battle of life and death. To steel himself against an imaginary enemy who threatened starvation, he would fast for days at a time. Even though the sight in his left eye was poor, he insisted on closing the right eye when reading. That led to a habit of squinting with the bad eye.
He believed deeply in Catholicism. The deterministic concept of heaven held special appeal. As a boy, he would watch funeral processions go by and long for death. If heaven was the ultimate good, D’Amato thought, there was no point of mortal life on Earth.
D’Amato dropped out of Morris High School to hang around boxing gyms. His father got him work in a mill that made iceboxes. D’Amato, then seventeen, couldn’t help pointing out to the other men how to do their jobs. That led to a lot of fights. In one, he nearly beat a man to death. D’Amato quit a year later and went back to the gym. Money didn’t interest him. “To me, working was a waste of time. It was a bore,” he once said. His favorite reading material then was the National Police Gazette, a magazine popular among boxing sportsmen since the mid-nineteenth century.
In 1939, D’Amato and two other friends opened a gym at 116 East Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. In 1942, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. The ascetic in him found heaven on Earth. He slept on the floor. At mess hall meals he traded his cake for bread. During bivouac there were always so many flies around the food that D’Amato once promised himself to eat the next mouthful regardless. A spider crawled into it. He hated spiders, but he ate it anyway—with bread.
D’Amato made a perfect soldier. He took orders well and kept his locker neat and spotless. D’Amato’s commanding officer put him up for a commission. At the test, he refused to recite the General Orders. D’Amato knew them, he just didn’t want to be an officer. He preferred the rigors of the lowly G.I.
D’Amato stayed Stateside during the war and afterward returned to his gym on East Fourteenth. He lived in a back room on a cot with a dog—a boxer—named Cus. He believed that extraterrestrial beings came to Earth on occasion, and he bought a telescope to watch for them. He felt that upon arrival they were likely to seek him out. D’Amato also harbored a deep mistrust of women.
D’Amato told friends that he wanted one day to have three champions. They laughed. Managers and promoters had taken away, by hook or by crook, other men’s champions, but no one in the sport of boxing had ever developed and held on to three. D’Amato would train anybody that came up the two flights of stairs and walked through the door. He especially wanted the boys who came alone. The more afraid they were, the better. Fear was always his window into their souls.
“He was so charismatic and persuasive with those ideas about fear,” said Joe Fariello, one of those boys. “He understood better than anybody else that all fighters are afraid. And that’s good. Otherwise, they’d be walking into punches. He taught you how to control it, make it work. He taught you what would happen in the ring, why and how you could correct it.”
Fariello met D’Amato in 1952. They were from the same neighborhood in the Bronx. Fariello didn’t know his father. His mother worked occasionally. The family lived on welfare. He got kicked out of high school for fighting. Fariello boxed for a few years, then at age seventeen stopped because of a broken nose and hand. D’Amato asked him to train the other fighters. Fariello moved into D’Amato’s apartment on Fifty-third Street. “Cus was the only man I looked up to as a father,” said Fariello, now a highly respected New York trainer.
Fariello worked with D’Amato and some of his fighters until 1965, when the two men had a falling-out. He remembered D’Amato as a son would remember a father with whom he battled constantly, or as a disillusioned disciple would remember his master.
“I realized that Cus couldn’t control his own emotions. He was afraid to drive; he wouldn’t fly; he feared heights, elevators, tunnels, water, thunder and lightning,” Fariello said. “That’s okay, but he acted like he wasn’t contradicting himself. He didn’t deal with those fears; he rationalized them away, made things the way he wanted them to be.”
But that, in the end, isn’t what caused the split. D’Amato was the kind of person someone coming into manhood had to get away from. “His whole philosophy on boxing and on life was a brainwashing. That’s why he wanted young kids from the beginning. He could start with a fresh mind,” Fariello maintained.
Fariello moved out of D’Amato’s apartment, got married, and started to develop his own ideas about boxing. He had wanted to make more money, but D’Amato didn’t care much about the size of his fighters’ purses, only that they were developing as he wanted them to. And Fariello had made his mistakes. He had a weakness for gambling. D’Amato could rationalize away his own quirks of character, but couldn’t tolerate either Fariello’s independence or his faults.
“He always said his whole purpose was to make you independent of him. But he never knew when to cut the cord and let someone go out and make his own mistakes,” Fariello said.
D’Amato eventually found the battle he had been preparing for since childhood.
At the outset of 1949, Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion for twelve years, decided to retire. Harry Mendel, a leading press agent in boxing, hatched an idea for an elimination tournament among the top contenders to determine the new champion. The idea, though, needed financial backing and a promoter. Mike Jacobs, who had promoted Louis for the past twelve years, also wanted to retire. Mendel pitched his idea to a Chicago business man named James D. Norris, the son of a wealthy Midwest commodities merchant known as the “Grain King.” Norris had used his share of the family fortune to buy several major baseball stadiums, indoor arenas, and the Detroit Red Wings hockey team. He accepted the invitation into boxing.
Norris and his partner, Arthur M. Wirtz, created the International Boxing Club. For $100,000 it bought Jacobs’s lease and promotional rights to stage fights at the mecca of boxing, New York’s Madison Square Garden. The I.B.C. also cornered boxing rights at the outdoor Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium, and a few smaller arenas. Joe Louis secured the signatures of the four top contenders for the tournament and sold the contracts to the I.B.C. for $150,000 and a $15,000-per-year salary as vice president. Just to keep a lock on the Garden, Norris and Wirtz bought thirty-nine percent of its public stock.
Every fighter who entered the tournament, including the eventual winner, signed multifight contracts binding them to the I.B.C. Norris used the same tactics in all the major weight classes. Soon, no contender could hope for a shot at any title without also signing up. The I.B.C. dictated purse amounts, rematch terms, the date of the title shot, and in some cases the outcome of the fight. Some managers had to relinquish control of their fighters entirely. The I.B.C. loaned money out to fighters and managers as a means of obligating them in future deals.
Between June 1949 and May 1953, the I.B.C. and its affiliates around the country promoted thirty-six of the forty-four championship bouts that took place in the United States. Champions Ezzard Charles (who won the tournament), Jersey Joe Walcott, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMotta, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Joey Maxim all did their deals with the devil, as it were, for the money and the fame.
The I.B.C. took on the imprimatur of a big business, but its ethics arose from the underworld. Though raised to be a blueblood, Norris indulged in a prurient taste for the unsavory. As a Chicago college student in the 1920s he befriended Sammy Hunt, one of Al Capone’s bodyguards. They remained close up through to the 1940s, when Hunt introduced Norris to a New Yorker named John Paul Carbo, alias “The Uncle,” “The Southern Gentleman,” “Jerry the Wop,” or just plain “Frankie.” The moniker “Mr. Gray” stuck because of his understated style of dressing.
Carbo, mild-mannered, polite, soft-spoken, had a long history of murder charges. He once served twenty months for manslaughter. Notoriety came in 1939 when he was indicted and tried for killing Harry (“Big Greenie”) Greenberg under contract to the Jewish mob organization, “Murder Inc.” The chief witness against Carbo mysteriously fell to his death from a Coney Island hotel. Two of the twelve jurors refused to believe the remaining evidence. A hung jury set Carbo free. Norris relied on Carbo for inspiration, ideas and enforcement. Carbo was always seen sitting just a few feet away from Norris in his office. Several Carbo associates became promoters and managers in I.B.C. fights.
In the 1976 “Brujo” interview, D’Amato said that as soon as the I.B.C. was formed he became passionately determined to break its monopoly, on the grounds of principle. However, he needed the means to achieve that end. “I knew that when I made my move, I had to do it with a certain kind of fighter,” D’Amato said. “So I was waiting for the right type of guy, that had the right type of character and personality and loyalty to make a champion. I hadda have a guy who would listen, because the things I’d hafta do would require the complete cooperation of the person I was managing. Patterson was the first guy to have the qualities I’m speaking of.”
Floyd Patterson, like Fariello, was a lost boy. D’Amato met Patterson in 1949 when Floyd was only fourteen and going to a “600 School” in New York, a new type of classroom for inner-city children considered emotionally disturbed. Patterson was deeply withdrawn, sensitive, highly impressionable, a scrawny 147 pounds, and, most important for D’Amato, full of fear. D’Amato helped train him for the 1952 Olympics. Patterson won the middleweight gold medal. D’Amato told the boxing press that he would make Patterson the future heavyweight champion.
For the next four years, Patterson won a series of middleweight fights with non-I.B.C. opponents in small arenas in New York and around the country. On January 4, 1956, Patterson’s twenty-first birthday, D’Amato published an open letter challenging all top heavyweights, including undefeated champion Rocky Marciano.
The boxing community did not take the challenge seriously. Marciano had forty-one knockouts to his credit; Patterson had yet to fight beyond eight rounds. At 182 pounds he was similar in weight to Marciano but was not known to have as powerful a punch. Most of all, Patterson’s boxing style was odd.
American boxing style had its roots in early-eighteenth-century England. Traditional style, stripped down, put the left foot forward and the left hand out. The left hand jabbed into the opponent’s face. It also set up the right, which remained cocked back. Various other types of punches were added onto that basic form: left and right hooks that arched out and then into the side of the head or body, crosses, and uppercuts.
The fundamental problem for all boxers who used that form, no matter what punch they threw, was exposure. Throwing a punch, almost by definition, left one open to a counterpunch. Defenses were concocted—stopping the punch with an open glove, crossing the arms in front of the face, and of course moving back or away—but they didn’t help much. In order to inflict pain, a boxer had to take it.
D’Amato didn’t accept that premise. He devised a style for Patterson that limited risk yet at the same time delivered maximum punishment. D’Amato called it his “system,” and it was described in detail by A. J. Liebling, who wrote on boxing, among other subjects, for the New Yorker from 1935 until his death in 1963. In the system, both hands were up around either side of the head, the elbows tucked against the body. That created, in Liebling’s words, a defensive “shell.” D’Amato then put Patterson in a crouch, with the feet along a horizontal line. Movement looked awkward, off-balance, like “a man going forward carrying a tray of dishes,” Liebling observed.
Fariello disputed D’Amato’s claim to sole authorship of the “system.” D’Amato had taught him to box in the traditional style. Then, as Fariello became a trainer in the late 1950s, one of his fighters, Georgie Colon, said he felt more comfortable putting both hands up around the head. “D’Amato got pissed off with me about using that style,” Fariello said. “But it caught on with the other fighters. Even Torres used it.” Charlie Goldman, who trained heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, ridiculed it as the “peek-a-boo” style. When Life magazine did a feature on D’Amato and his stable of fighters, and the distinctive peek-a-boo, D’Amato claimed authorship. “It got so much publicity he had to endorse it. That’s when Cus started teaching the peek-a-boo to Patterson.”
Whatever the origins of the hand placement, D’Amato took the basic idea and made a variety of tactical and strategic additions. He realized that the stance, though awkward, was potent. It baffled opponents. Patterson didn’t telegraph his punches. He could shoot out just as easily with a left or a right. Still, there were risks. Patterson found it awkward to move backward in his shell. He had to go forward, and he had to get close enough to deliver.
D’Amato didn’t want Patterson to get hit doing either. He drilled Patterson on how, while keeping his hands up around the head, to move the whole upper body from side to side as he went forward to elude the jabs—in other words, to “slip” (the sideways motion) and “weave” (the duck-and-move-forward motion). Once that series of elusive movements brought him in close enough, Patterson attacked. D’Amato taught him to exploit the moment by throwing a combination of two or more punches.
The system had drawbacks. It was a highly mechanical, robotlike technique that required intense training to master. A fighter could go in only one direction, forward, and to do that without getting hit he had to have naturally good reflexes. Combination punching also required fast hand speed. And then there remained the problem of exposure as the combinations were being thrown. That posed a dilemma. Moving back gave up the offensive opportunity, but staying in risked getting hit by straight rights and uppercuts.
In order to resolve that problem, D’Amato insisted that Patterson should attempt the nearly impossible: once in position, to attack and defend in a continuous motion. In almost the same instant that he threw a punch, he had to anticipate the counterpunch and elude. One moment’s lapse of concentration and he could get hit, easily and at close range.
D’Amato’s most interesting wrinkle had nothing to do with technical training. He believed that training alone, no matter how diligent, wasn’t enough to master such a ying-yang synthesis of offense and defense. It had to be instinctual. He tried to teach Patterson to see the counterpunch in his mind before it happened. It was almost a spiritual thing for D’Amato. Years later, he discovered that what he tried to teach Patterson also lay at the foundation of Zen archery.
In the “Brujo” interview, D’Amato described how in the late 1950s he once saw a Texan named Lucky Daniels shoot a BB pellet out of the air with another BB, a seemingly impossible task. Daniels challenged D’Amato to a mock gunfight. D’Amato got to hold his gun pointed and cocked; Daniels’s gun stayed in its holster. As D’Amato pulled his trigger, Daniels was able to draw and shoot first. D’Amato picked Daniels’s mind and found out that he had been applying the same principles to boxing. When, in the late 1960s, he told the story to Norman Mailer, he was given a book on Zen archery. “I was doing what the guy said in the book!” D’Amato said.
First, then, the concentration. Second, detachment. “Eventually a pro becomes impersonal, detached in his thinking while he’s performing. You separate and watch yourself from like the outside the whole time,” D’Amato said.
D’Amato believed in out-of-body experiences. “Everything gets calm and I’m outside watching myself. It’s me, but not me. It’s as if my mind and body aren’t connected, but they are connected and I know exactly what to do. I get a picture in my mind what it’s gonna be. I can actually see the picture, like a screen,” D’Amato said.
He also believed that this gave him immense power over others. “I can take a fighter who’s just beginning and I can see exactly how he’s gonna end up, what I have to teach him and how he’ll respond,” he added. “When that happens, I can watch a guy fight and I know everything there is to know about the guy. I can actually see the wheels in his head. It’s as if I am the guy. I’m inside him!”
Presumably, that’s what D’Amato had in mind for Patterson. He should see the punch coming before it came, through some kind of spiritual detachment. In other words, he was taught, don’t look at the man’s hand or it will hit you. Instead, see a concept of the fight in which you know all the things your opponent might do and use that knowledge to advantage.
In precisely what terms D’Amato explained those ideas to Patterson, or if he explained them at all, is not known. Clearly, after first reordering Patterson’s psychic furniture—via the lessons on fear—he instructed him in the basics of the system. The advanced lessons on spirituality would seem heady stuff for anyone, let alone the young Patterson. He did well enough with the basics. As a middleweight with naturally quick reflexes, Patterson managed, far better than his peers, to hit without getting hit. But the heavyweight division posed new challenges and increased risk. The added bulk on his own body slowed him down. And a true heavyweight opponent, close to or above 200 pounds, would hit with bigger punches. The question was whether Patterson could make the system work as a heavyweight. Not just with his body, but also with his mind.
D’Amato’s public challenge to the heavyweight division was, at most, a thorn in the side of the I.B.C. Norris and Carbo had no reason to put their franchise fighter, Rocky Marciano, at risk, so D’Amato started to play the ends against the middle. Publicly, he bombarded the I.B.C. with accusations about its monopolistic practices. Privately, he borrowed money from Norris: $15,000 on June 7, 1956, and another $5,000 two months later. D’Amato wanted to lull Norris into thinking that he had fallen into line with all the other managers who served their fighters up to the I.B.C. The debts, in other words, would obligate D’Amato to keep Patterson under I.B.C. control should he beat Marciano.
In April 1956, Marciano unexpectedly retired from the ring as an undefeated champion. An elimination tournament was set up by the I.B.C. to fill the vacant title. D’Amato entered Patterson, who beat “Hurricane” Jackson, barely, in a split decision. On November 30, Patterson fought Marciano’s last victim, thirty-nine-year-old Archie Moore, and won. At twenty-one he became the youngest heavyweight champion ever.
With the title in his grasp, D’Amato felt no obligations to Norris and the I.B.C. He agreed to a rematch with Jackson in the first defense eight months later, then took Patterson off into a series of independently promoted bouts. That snub, he insisted later, broke the I.B.C. monopoly. Not exactly. The United States government did that.
In 1951, the Justice Department charged the I.B.C. under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The I.B.C. won a ruling that boxing, like baseball, was beyond the limits of the antitrust laws. The government appealed to the Supreme Court and won. After a trial that finally ended on March 8, 1957, Norris and his codefendants were found guilty. They appealed the conviction to the Supreme Court, which upheld it. On January 12, 1959, the I.B.C. was ordered to dissolve and sell its stock in Madison Square Garden. Three justices dissented and called the dissolution “futile.” New corporations, they argued, would be formed to attempt similar monopolies.
Soon after, Norris died of a heart attack. Frankie Carbo was convicted on November 30, 1959, on three misdemeanor charges—conspiracy, undercover managing of boxers, and undercover matchmaking—and sentenced to two years in prison. Upon his release, he stood trial in Los Angeles on racketeering charges for attempting through threats and extortion to muscle in on the management and promotion of Don Jordan, a welterweight champion. He was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years at Alcatraz. Around that same time, a U.S. Senate subcommittee held hearings on mob influence in boxing. The “Kefauver Committee,” as it was known, wrenched from middleweight champion Jake LaMotta the admission that he was forced by the I.B.C. to lose to Billy Fox in a 1947 bout as a condition for a title shot.
During the seven years of trials and appeals, not once did D’Amato give testimony for the government’s case against the I.B.C.; nor did he appear at the Kefauver hearings. And assuming that he was in fact threatened by Carbo henchmen, he could have, like Jackie Leonard, the manager of Don Jordan, gone to the police and cooperated in phone taps to build an official case. D’Amato did none of that. He fought the I.B.C. his way, which turned out to have little effect. The early Patterson fights he staged at another New York arena were small and insignificant, more a minor annoyance than major competition. At best, his public rantings brought attention to the monopoly, but even then only long after the government had begun its prosecution.
The significant point is that D’Amato wanted to be portrayed as the lone white knight championing the cause of justice. In fact, he was more dedicated to using Patterson to make a play for his own control of the heavyweight division.
He didn’t do that for the money but, as was usual with D’Amato, for the fulfillment of an idea. This one, however, got twisted around. The idea, he claimed, was to do everything for the benefit of the fighter. But D’Amato pursued that objective obsessively. He ended up using some of the same tactics as his enemies. The effort drove him into a state of paranoia, and in the end the fighter was not well served. Without his champion, and disgraced by his meddling in the promotion of Patterson’s fights, D’Amato was pushed into obscurity—until Mike Tyson came along and D’Amato was rediscovered, repackaged, and made sagelike to a new generation.
Even though the I.B.C. slowly crumbled, D’Amato continued during Patterson’s reign to see the enemy in every dark corner. Years later, he told people that someone once tried to push him in front of a subway train. In another story, Rocky Marciano supposedly knocked at his door. When D’Amato opened it, he found the boxer in the company of two mobsters. According to D’Amato, he spun the double-crosser Marciano around, put an ice pick to his throat, and said, “Get outta here or the champ dies.”
Perhaps that happened. Perhaps not. To the men who knew him well then, it seemed more likely that D’Amato couldn’t stop fighting an imaginary war. Fariello held this view. “It was all because of the I.B.C., he said. They were out to get him, hurt him. I never saw anything that justified those fears.”
D’Amato enjoyed food and drink on the town, but he feared that someone would spike his beer, so he stopped going out. He was afraid someone might drop drugs in his pocket, so he sewed the pockets of his jackets. When the phone rang, he never spoke first, choosing instead to listen until he could identify the caller. He kept a hatchet under his bed and an ice pick in his pocket. To anyone riding in an elevator with him, D’Amato, fearing that some I.B.C. hit man was at the controls and waiting with a gun, would say, “If it goes down to the basement, we’re dead.”
D’Amato went to great lengths to protect Patterson from these imaginary enemies. He assumed that any big-time New York promoter was I.B.C.-connected. D’Amato sought out inexperienced and easily controlled independents. Between July 1957 and June 1959, Patterson defended his title only three times. He fought in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis. The opponents, all nearly unknowns, barely tested Patterson’s abilities. Pete Rademacher, the 1956 Olympic champion, had his first pro fight with Patterson; not surprisingly, he lost by a knockout in the sixth. A year later, Patterson fought Roy Harris, a schoolteacher and club fighter from Cut and Shoot, Texas. A year after that, he disposed of a British journeyman named Brian London.
D’Amato’s paranoia began to destroy the proverbial Golden Goose. The long layoffs and easy matchups dulled Patterson’s unique boxing skills. In the Harris and London fights it took Patterson thirteen and eleven rounds, respectively, to do the job. “I couldn’t put anything together,” Patterson told Liebling of his performance against Harris. “I said to Cus he’s got to get me more fights.”
The London promotion showcased D’Amato’s obsession with total control. When London arrived to complete his training for the fight, he went to D’Amato’s gym, where he used a hand-picked D’Amato trainer and Patterson’s own sparring partners. D’Amato appointed a U.S. “representative” to co-manage London for a cut of his purse. He barred the press from interviewing London. Those were all tactics used by the I.B.C.
D’Amato eventually fired the first inexperienced promoter. The second, Bill Rosensohn, had only one fight to his credit, the Harris match. Rosensohn was young, eager to please, and, so D’Amato thought, easily controlled. He also worked for TelePrompter Corporation, recently formed to exploit the relatively new concept of closed-circuit theater television.
Traditionally, promoters made money on the radio broadcast and ticket sales, less fighters’ purses and expenses. With the advent of television in the 1950s—at one point fights could be seen three nights a week on the small screen—advertiser revenue expanded the pie. Managers fought bitterly with the I.B.C. and its promoters at Madison Square Garden to get a share of the television revenues. They didn’t get very far.
Closed-circuit posed a new opportunity, and D’Amato, as manager of the heavyweight champion, knew he could exploit it. Now he, and not the I.B.C., controlled the promoter. D’Amato dictated the split of the closed-circuit revenues.
Rosensohn, a thirty-eight-year-old, ambitious, heavy-eyed, slimfaced, Princeton-educated dandy, readily accepted D’Amato’s terms. In the Harris fight, D’Amato brought in a friend, Charlie Black, to profit from the promotion. D’Amato and Black were boyhood friends, and despite Black’s convictions for bookmaking, plus his underworld ties, Cus kept up the friendship. Black, after all, was the kind of man who could come in handy. D’Amato ordered Rosensohn to pay Black 50 percent of the net profits. He paid, but profits were low, and Rosensohn made only a few thousand dollars. D’Amato, in another classic I.B.C. move, also put a lock on Harris should he beat Patterson. He required Harris to sign a managerial contract with Black.
Rosensohn started to get hungry. He tried to initiate his own deal and signed Ingemar Johansson, a capable Swedish heavyweight, to a forty-day option for $10,000. During that time, Rosensohn had to get him a match with Patterson or lose the money. Rosensohn felt he had a tailor-made D’Amato opponent: non-I.B.C., not much of a threat, easily controlled.
D’Amato stonewalled. Perhaps he felt that Johansson, known for having a thunderous right hand, would be no pushover. But it’s more likely that D’Amato delayed as a pressuring tactic to keep Rosensohn in line.
Rosensohn gambled heavily and usually lost more than he won. He needed money to finance the promotion, plus some way to make D’Amato cooperate. Rosensohn went to his bookmaker, Gilbert Beckley, for help. Beckley had once introduced him to an East Harlem-based mobster named Anthony (“Fat Tony”) Salerno. Rosensohn asked Salerno to finance the promotion in exchange for a share of the profits, adding that there was one problem: he had already promised Charlie Black 50 percent of the net. Not to worry, said Salerno. He knew Black; a deal would be made. Rosensohn ended up with $25,000 for the promotion and a $10,000 loan for himself. He gave Salerno and Black each one-third ownership in his company, Rosensohn Enterprises.
Not long after that, D’Amato delivered Patterson. But he had a new demand. D’Amato wanted 100 percent of all ancillary rights (closed-circuit, radio, and movie) plus half the net from ticket sales. Rosensohn felt he’d been set up in an elaborate plan to trade off the promoter’s rights so that D’Amato, Black, Salerno, and Patterson could profit. D’Amato threw in one more zinger. When Johansson arrived, D’Amato assigned another friend, Harry Davidow, as “representative” for a 10 percent purse cut.
The only piece of the pie D’Amato left intact was the option on Johansson’s next fight if he should win. Unlike in the deal with Harris, he gave that to Rosensohn. It proved a big mistake.
It drizzled a warm, wet rain on the night of the fight, June 26, 1959. Ticket sales were dismal. Patterson, wrote Liebling, “came out to prove himself.” He shot jabs out at Johansson, who merely retreated. Johansson looked patient and held his mysterious right hand—dubbed the “Hammer of Thor” by the press—in reserve. In the third it became clear that for Patterson almost three years of easy opponents and infrequent bouts had taken their toll. Johansson hit him with a straight right that virtually ended the fight. Patterson got up, stunned. Johansson dropped him seven times before the referee called it quits.
The whole, sordid mess blew open a month after the fight. Rosensohn’s joy over lucking into promotional control of the new heavyweight champion didn’t last long. He lost $40,000 on the fight. He personally owed $10,000 to a gangster. Rosensohn then found out that Salerno and Black, in an effort to hide their roles, had transferred their ownership in his company to a front man, Vincent Velella, a Republican state politician from East Harlem, then also making a bid for a municipal court judgeship. Rosensohn made an unwise power bid. He went public with the story that he’d been forced to sell two-thirds of his company, perhaps to arm-twist Salerno and Black into selling back their interest or risk exposure.
The bid backfired. The New York State Athletic Commission and the attorney general’s office both conducted investigations. Rosensohn was stripped of his promoter’s license and forced to sell his rights to the rematch. He moved to California, became a salesman, and in 1988 committed suicide. Salerno, Black, and Velella were barred from boxing. Salerno rose in the mob; then, in 1985, old and sick, he was convicted in the infamous “Pizza Connection” heroin-smuggling case and sent to prison for what remained of his life. Finally, the scandal prompted Senator Estes Kefauver to establish the Senate Antimonopoly Subcommittee to investigate boxing.
D’Amato was the only principal who refused to testify. He fled to Puerto Rico during the hearings. Always wary of his enemies, D’Amato traveled under the name Carl Dudley. The Athletic Commission criticized D’Amato for trying to wrest control of the heavyweight division by acting as both manager and promoter, and revoked his manager’s license. The state attorney general also began preparing an antitrust action against D’Amato, then dropped the case. D’Amato blamed it all on old enemies at the I.B.C. “They are trying to destroy me,” he told Gay Talese, then a reporter for the New York Times.
Other reporters were not so gentle with D’Amato. His only diehard supporter among the New York sportswriting community, columnist Jimmy Cannon, was a close friend until he inquired about D’Amato’s meddling with Brian London. D’Amato said he “wasn’t at liberty to discuss it.” Cannon became one of D’Amato’s biggest critics. He was “Cus the Mus” from then on in Cannon’s column. During the Patterson/Johansson scandal, Harold Weissman, sports columnist for the tabloid New York Mirror, dubbed him the “Neurotic Napoleon.” Dan Parker, another columnist at the Mirror, ridiculed D’Amato’s new boxing “system,” in which the writer included business practices: “guaranteed to get everyone in trouble and your fighter knocked out.”
What did D’Amato know and when did he know it? Perhaps he didn’t conspire to drive Rosensohn to Salerno and Black. Maybe Rosensohn was just a loose cannon moved by his own inexperience, bad judgment, and greed. D’Amato apparently never discussed the details of what happened with anyone. It’s hard to believe, however, that a man so obsessed with control would not have known about the Salerno-Black connection. “He was too close to Charlie Black not to know,” said José Torres, who became D’Amato’s next boxing protégé.
And so an observer’s proposition: D’Amato at the least knew about Salerno and Black, felt the promotion slip from his grasp, and rationalized the problem away. “He forgot that a shining knight on a white horse was not supposed to do those things,” opined Fariello.
Patterson made $600,000 from the purse and ancillary income. The scandal, though, set in motion Patterson’s disillusionment with his domineering father figure-mentor-manager. D’Amato won back his manager’s license back on a legal technicality. He stayed in Patterson’s corner through his next three victories, all against Johansson. Beginning with the first rematch, Patterson eschewed D’Amato’s “system” for the conventional style. It was the act of a young man seeking his own identity. Fortunately for Patterson, Johansson proved to be an inconsistent boxer.
A new group of promoters, conniving with and far more savvy than those D’Amato selected, took over Patterson’s fights. They sped up his disillusionment with stories about D’Amato’s supposed mob ties and paranoiac behavior. Matters came to a head when Patterson, egged on by his new promoters, accepted a fight against a former convict and rising contender, Sonny Liston. D’Amato warned him not to fight Liston. Without the benefit of the “system,” D’Amato felt, Patterson offered too easy and too vulnerable a target to a much bigger, harder-punching heavyweight. Patterson fired D’Amato, not to his face but through a lawyer. He was tired, he said, of being “dominated.”
Liston knocked Patterson out in the first round. Patterson never again, despite three attempts, won the title. In a final ironic twist, Liston’s management group included none other than mobster Frankie Carbo.
After the split with Patterson, the part of D’Amato that lusted for power died. So, too, did his willingness to ever again get emotionally attached to a fighter. “When my feelings are involved I become a chump,” he told an interviewer in 1976. “That’s why I never trust anything. I just trust that detachment. My feelings got involved with Patterson.”
Everything else about D’Amato remained virtually intact, from an unflagging belief in the technical and spiritual merits of his “system” to the wracking paranoia. He also still wanted to develop another champion.
* * *
José Torres was eighteen years old when he won the silver medal as a middleweight in the 1956 Olympics. The second of seven children, he was born and raised in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Torres’s father owned a small trucking business. A family friend introduced Torres to D’Amato after the Olympics and D’Amato took him on, reluctantly.
Torres had basic talent but little taste for D’Amato’s many disciplines. Though married with children, he frequently bolted camp to carouse or spend a few days with a mistress. Torres then often lied to D’Amato about why he wasn’t training. “José wasn’t such a bad guy,” said Fariello, his trainer. “He got stupid about things. His judgment was dumb.”
Besides being distracted with Patterson, D’Amato never had the confidence in Torres’s abilities to actively develop his career. That, and the lingering fears about the I.B.C., kept Torres in a perennial backwater. D’Amato’s emotional detachment also may have affected his management of Torres. By deciding not to get as intimate with Torres as he had gotten with Patterson, D’Amato didn’t mine the deepest parts of Torres’s potential. “With Torres everything was done cold, cool, and calculating,” admitted D’Amato in a 1965 Sports Illustrated article.
For six years Torres fought and won, first as a middleweight and then as a light heavyweight, against a gaggle of lackluster opponents. D’Amato refused to let him fight at Madison Square Garden for the larger purses. Instead, Torres fought at smaller local arenas and in a host of other cities and towns, such as Boston and Toronto, which lacked constituencies of Puerto Ricans to boost ticket sales. During those six years he earned a total of only $60,000. D’Amato, claiming that he had earned enough money from Patterson’s career, did not take a manager’s cut.
Finally, against D’Amato’s wishes, Torres fought chàmpion Willie Pastrano for the light heavyweight title at the Garden in March 1965. Although not favored, he won on a punch to Pastrano’s liver. That turned out to be the climax of his career. After a few defenses against unknowns, he lost the title just over a year later to Dick Tiger in a listless performance. Torres tried to win the title back in a May 1967 rematch, but lost again. Puerto Ricans in the audience were so angered with Torres (he was already disliked for favoring the New York literary salons and the company of Norman Mailer over the environs of El Barrio) that they showered the ring with bottles and chairs in a melee that lasted twenty minutes. Torres announced soon afterwards that he would retire to write an “autobiographical novel.”
After Torres, D’Amato wallowed. In 1966, he moved upstate to the town of New Paltz to manage Buster Mathis, a journeyman heavyweight prospect who gained some cachet when he beat Joe Frazier in the 1965 U.S. Olympic trials. They met again in 1968, Frazier won (and went on to considerable fame when he defeated Muhammad Ali in 1971, a match generally regarded as one of boxing’s greatest displays of ability and courage), and Mathis’s career fizzled out.
Even before Mathis finally flagged in the ring, D’Amato’s paranoia ended his role as manager. He became convinced that Mathis’s backers—four well-heeled New York executives all in their twenties—were out to kill him. At one point, D’Amato, disoriented and fearful, locked himself in a room at the training camp for two days.
In 1971, D’Amato declared personal bankruptcy. He claimed liabilities of $30,276 and, despite purse cuts from Patterson that should have amounted to well over a million dollars, assets of only $500. It was actually much worse. D’Amato owed $200,000 in back taxes to the IRS.
What happened to his money, whether he even got it, and what he did with it were all questions that became shrouded by D’Amato’s self-generated hero’s lore. He once said that he spent thousands of dollars on a network of spies and informants used to battle the I.B.C.
Sometime during the 1960s, D’Amato also bought a large, white, Victorian house near the town of Catskill. He gave title to the house to Camille Ewald, who also lived there. They had first met in the early 1950s. Ewald’s sister had married Tony D’Amato, one of Cus’s older brothers. Cus and Camille kept up a relationship, but never lived together for any length of time, nor did they marry or have children.
In 1968, D’Amato finally moved in with Ewald. There he stayed, training young boys, being visited by disciples every now and then, proffering advice to the odd professional boxer who came through (Ali reputedly often called for guidance) and developing the careers of a few, without much result.
It was as if he had decided to sleep for a while, just as Rip Van Winkle had, according to the fable, in the nearby Catskill mountains. Winkle logged a full twenty years. D’Amato did thirteen before being awakened by Mike Tyson. In a sense, D’Amato expected Tyson, or someone like him, a third champion, to one day come calling.
“What do you think about when you think about the future,” he was asked in 1976.
“Lately, I began to think … I said I never used power,” D’Amato responded. “See, I’m involved over here and my involvements are forms of distraction because these kids involve my undivided attention. How could I give these boys my undivided attention, which constitutes a distraction, and still be able to concentrate this power on getting somebody and doing something? I’d have to quit here and then sit down and you’d call it meditate. If I did that hard enough, and deep enough, I would get a picture and it would happen.”
“This picture, it would be for you to manage an important fighter?”
“Yes.”
To make another champion?”
“Yes.”
