Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

Thinking back, Schuyler recalled how strained it all was. “There was a desperation about it all. Like, ‘Let’s get this guy a title before he gets into serious trouble. Let’s keep him busy.’ I believe that Jimmy and Bill thought that Mike was really not a nice person, that he wasn’t responsible to anyone but himself. He gives you that little-boy voice, but he’s capable of doing anything. He’s a creature of impulse.”

Sure enough, on February 23, the Albany Knickerbocker News reported on an incident in the Crossgates Mall. Tyson had entered Filene’s department store and come on to a white salesgirl. She declined. Tyson got angry, threw some clothes around, knocked over racks, and insulted the girl and anyone else who came by. That same day, Jacobs denied to the New York reporters that Tyson had done anything wrong. A reporter from the Times Union in Albany went back to the mall a few days later to find out the real story. The salesgirl, her managers, and the mall security personnel all refused to comment. The salesgirl implied that if she did, she’d be fired. Rumors circulated that Jacobs and Cayton had paid off people at the mall to stay mum on the incident. They no doubt also relied on the local police to turn a blind eye. “The Albany police commissioner was valuable in taking care of Mike Tyson in many ways,” admitted Cayton. “Steps were taken with the help of the police to put lids on things.” In return, Cayton made sure that the commissioner of police got ringside tickets to Tyson’s upstate fights. Moreover, twice a year he bought advertisements in the Albany Police Department’s newspaper.

Newsday’s Matthews confronted Jacobs about the mall incident, fruitlessly. “He lied to me. You’d call him on it in stories and later he’d admit that he lied to protect Tyson. That was Jacobs for you. He held the press up to very high standards of truthfulness and accuracy—his versions of both—but he never stood up to them himself.”

Up to the Ferguson fight, Jacobs handled all questions from the press in his role as manager and front man. That would now change. Cayton had to step forward. They would both be needed to handle Tyson’s public image.

For the New York boxing reporters, dealing with Cayton wasn’t exactly a breath of fresh air. Yet, compared to Jacobs, almost anybody was preferable. “Jimmy was a propagandist. If he approached anything that made him uneasy, he just closed down on you,” said Phil Berger of the New York Times. “Sometimes it was innocent things. I once asked him what his father did. He got very uptight and said, ‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything. ’Then he called me back and lied, told me that his father was in the office supplies business.” Berger took advantage of Cayton’s sudden availability. “I only had perfunctory conversations with Jacobs after Ferguson. When I needed to find out something important, I talked to Cayton.”

Matthews had similar dealings with Jacobs—namely, pointless ones. “If he didn’t like your question, he’d ridicule you. He’d play word games with your head. I’d ask a simple question and Jacobs would say things like, ‘Wally, that’s like saying is it colder in the mountains or colder in the winter’ or ‘Wally, that’s like asking me if I’m going to paint the fence green.’ After a half hour of that, I’d forget my question!”

Although Cayton was more likely to give straight answers, he could also be trying. “Everything Jimmy said was right and you were supposed to accept it,” recalled the AP’s Ed Schuyler. “But I could argue with Jimmy if I wanted to. Cayton treated me like I was on the payroll. Cayton I wanted to hit.”

Jacobs and Cayton attempted to keep the boxing reporters, and any other inquiring journalist, devoted to what they deemed the key issues: Tyson’s indomitable ring prowess, the inevitability of his becoming champion, and whether he would go for the title via the HBO series or by some other independent route. For the most part, they were extremely successful. That was the news, after all, the stuff of sports page headlines. It was also presumably what people wanted to read about at that stage of Tyson’s career. And reporters who had to meet the pressure of deadlines two or three days a week might well not have the time or the appetite to delve into the subtler aspects of the Tyson story—especially when getting the basic news from Jacobs and Cayton was such a task.

But the fact remains that the subtleties were missed. One in particular, the issue of just who managed Tyson would later surface as a central drama of his career.

Starting in late 1985, and more frequently at the outset of 1986, Jacobs and Cayton asserted that they were comanagers. No such status existed in the boxing rules and regulations of New York State boxing and they knew it. Jacobs was sole manager, and Cayton a partner sharing in the manager’s purse cut. Still, the boxing reporters parroted and endorsed that fictitious label—even though no major boxer in memory ever had more than one manager.

“Boxing being the business it is, what do they call it, an assignee? That’s how they did it to become comanagers,” said Berger of the New York Times. Ed Schuyler also recalled having dismissed the subject of precisely who managed Tyson. “I believe the [New York State Athletic] Commission said Jacobs had a legitimate managerial contract. It never questioned the contract, so I never questioned it. It’s such a shady business. I mean, who manages who? There are so many people who have pieces of fighters, so many conflicts of interest. Doesn’t make it right, but that’s the way the game is.”

Taking a lead from the New York State Athletic Commission was not a good idea, especially when the chairman was José Torres.

Torres retired from boxing in 1969. He did do that promised book, not a novel, but a biography, Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story, published in 1971. Torres spent the 1970s writing for the New York Post. On the side he dabbled in politics. He campaigned in the New York Latino community for John Lindsay’s mayoral campaign and for Jimmy Carter. For a brief period of time in the late 1970s, he became an ombudsman for the New York City Council. Four years later, in 1983, Torres was appointed a commissioner of the New York State Athletic Commission by the office of Governor Mario Cuomo. By 1985, just as Tyson turned professional, Torres had been elevated to chairman.

That was the official version of his career outside the ring. On paper it looked impressive. Torres was the first chairman ever to have been a boxing champion. He promised to represent the needs of the fighters, not the managers or promoters. For Torres, that wouldn’t be easy. He had a penchant for letting himself be compromised.

As Athletic Commission chairman, Torres had an implicit obligation to act impartially, When it came to Tyson he did precisely the opposite. Torres frequently visited the Catskill gym to offer him boxing advice. He also went to almost all of Tyson’s early upstate fights, at the taxpayer’s expense. That in itself wasn’t improper, but his ringside behavior was. Torres always cheered wildly for Tyson and derided his opponent. At fight’s end, Torres often jumped into the ring to embrace and congratulate him. On a few occasions, he would still be sent by Jacobs to track down Tyson in Brownsville during his many disappearances. Torres provided other unofficial services as well. “He used to introduce Mike to Puerto Rican girls all the time,” said Tom Patti. “I think he wanted to quit the commission and get involved managing Mike.”

That seemed unrealistic. He was, though, at the least willing to see things from the point of view of Tyson’s management. And that was a clear conflict of interest. Starting in 1985, he went on record several times stating that Jacobs and Cayton were both the managers of Tyson.

The boxing reporters knew of Torres’s partiality, of his incestuous ties to the Tyson camp. They talked about it in cynical asides among themselves. Rarely was it revealed in their news stories. It seemed that a news judgment had been made—perhaps, put in the context of the times, a fairly understandable one.

Recording the emergence of Mike Tyson, the next great heavyweight, was like being swept along by the titles of history. Reporters had the feeling that they weren’t just observing, but also participating somehow. They saw the gaps, the rough edges, the inconsistencies, and the conflicts of interest, but they were apparently overwhelmed by the phenomenon. Both the persona of Mike Tyson, and the process by which he emerged in the national consciousness, became extremely seductive. “Tyson wasn’t just another boxing story,” Matthews admitted. “He was ‘the story.’ We all got caught up in it.”

* * *

By late February, Jacobs and Cayton had reached agreement with HBO on the three-fight deal. Tyson would earn $1.35 million, or $450,000 per fight. Once again, he broke all records of financial reward for a fighter of his age and experience.

Tyson’s next fight was set for March 10 against Steve Zouski at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. It was designed as a breather fight, an easy victory to bolster Tyson for the subsequent series of tougher matches on ABC and HBO.

Zouski was another appropriate opponent for the purposes of the business plan. He looked better than he actually was. Zouski claimed never to have been knocked down, let alone out, in a record of twenty-five wins and nine losses. The problem was that eight of those losses had occurred in his last ten bouts, putting Zouski on the downward slope of his career arc. Whatever muscle he had seemed to have softened up in large, billowing puffs around an ordinary frame. For two rounds, Tyson used Zouski to showcase his combination-punching abilities. It was over in the third—by a knockout.

Tyson was to meet James (“Quick”) Tillis three weeks later. He developed an ear infection and the bout was put off until May 3. That was the longest layoff of his professional career, just over three months. In a sense, it was fortuitous. Tillis was expected to be a watershed fight. Although twenty-eight years old and near the end of his career, Tillis was still considered a fringe contender for the title. In his prime, he’d fought hard-nosed veterans like Earnie Shavers and Gerrie Coetzee. He had also matched up against some of the better fighters of his own peer group, such as Carl Williams and Pinklon Thomas. He had a tough chin, came to a fight in good condition, could employ a full arsenal of boxing skills, and moved well in the ring. Beating Tillis would gain Tyson a measure of confidence, prepare him for the emotional pressures of the next stage in his pursuit of the heavyweight championship.

A crowd of eight thousand people jammed into the Glens Falls Civic Center in upstate New York, and every one of them seemed to be a Tyson fan. When he entered the arena, Tyson got a standing ovation. He had won all nineteen of his fights by knockout. That’s what people expected to see, but it was not what he was prepared to deliver. “After coming off the ear injury, he needed one easy fight before Tillis to get into it,” Steve Lott recalled. “The pressure of fighting someone as experienced as Tillis made him nervous, and that reduced him to a one-dimensional fighter.”

Tillis became a problem that Tyson had trouble solving. Tillis moved well in both directions, which made him a difficult target. And as he moved, he jabbed to keep Tyson at bay. When Tyson did get into punching proximity, Tillis blocked the blows or tied him up. By the second round much of Tyson’s aggression seemed to have drained away. He was racking up points, but many of his punches didn’t connect solidly. He worked the body, but rarely followed in combination with a blow to the head. And he took punches, too—jabs, uppercuts, and a few left hooks.

Tillis fought far better than expected. He came into the bout seven pounds lighter than usual, which helped his movement, and improved his hand speed. When he took a punch, he struck back, usually in combination. He looked tight, measured, confident, and determined not to get knocked out. But he made one costly error. Near the end of the fourth, Tillis threw a wide, off-balance left hook that turned him around. Before he could turn back, Tyson looped in a hook that sent Tillis down. He got up quickly, though, and fought hard in the fifth, knowing that Tyson would try and end it. To his amazement, and everyone else’s, Tyson didn’t capitalize on the knockdown. He kept throwing single punches, and in clinches didn’t ram blows into Tillis’s body. He was still winning rounds, but barely. In rounds six through nine, he gave up trying to capture the inside positioning so essential for his ballet of defense and offense to work effectively. Tyson let himself be pushed back and tied up, and at times just followed Tillis around the ring in a passive, acquiescent state. In the latter half of the tenth and final round Tillis, no doubt thinking that if he scored heavily he could win the fight, stood toe to toe with Tyson. They exchanged blows for a spirited finale. As it turned out, Tillis was close to being right. The judges scored the fight for Tyson, but without the knockdown in the fourth, it would have ended in a draw. The judges gave all the middle rounds to Tillis.

The Tillis fight made Jacobs and Cayton, for the first time, nervous about Tyson’s prospects. Did he come away from Tillis feeling that he’d passed a test or failed it? He’d won, but what had Tyson discovered about himself? Did he think that he was the future champion? Or did he see in his feeling of failure an irrepressible urge to give in?

The match with Mitch (“Blood”) Green took place seventeen days after the Tillis bout in the 20,000-seat-plus main arena of Madison Square Garden. It was Tyson’s first fight on HBO and the first under the promotional banner of Don King. Green had a respectable record of sixteen wins, one loss, and one draw. Ten of his victories had came by knockout. He was not a contender for the title. Still, he was ranked seventh in the estimation of the World Boxing Council. Green was also big (six-foot-five and 225 pounds of sculpted muscle), and he fought with a lot of macho pride in a wide-open, undisciplined style.

The first round set the pattern for the entire fight. Green had been told by his trainer to punch and move out of harm’s way, and if he did get caught inside to tie Tyson up. The plan, like Tillis’s, was to take Tyson into the later rounds, where he’d not often been and would perhaps be vulnerable. But this time, it didn’t work. Tyson had come to fight.

Green, a former leader of the Black Spades gang of the Bronx, was overcome by his own recklessness. He tried to grab, but Tyson punched his way out. Instead of continuing with that tactic, or at least to punch, move, and then grab, Green decided every now and then to stand and trade blows. He took the worst of it. Tyson kept eluding Green’s best punch—his left jab—then crowding in and delivering. As Green backed up for room to swing, he only gave Tyson more space to get his punches in first, which he did, repeatedly.

Tyson put on a boxing clinic as he scored with left and right hooks, body shots, and uppercuts, almost all in combination. One of his jabs knocked Green’s mouthpiece onto the ring apron—embedded in it were a bridge and two false teeth. By the end of the fourth round, Tyson had thrown 109 body punches alone, 70 (or 64 percent) of which connected. That was an unheard-of statistic for most heavyweights, who usually aren’t fast or well conditioned enough to do anything else but headhunt.

In the fifth, Tyson evoked one of Teddy Atlas’s training techniques. As Green swung away, Tyson feinted, slipped, weaved, dipped, and bobbed in a series of eighteen separate defensive movements. He avoided every one of Green’s punches without countering with a blow of his own. It was a display of pride in his superior abilities, and a bit of arrogance.

The fight went the full ten rounds. Tyson didn’t seem to care whether he could knock Green down, or out. He was taking pleasure in the process of chopping Green up, like a cleaver against a side of beef. He sometimes smiled through his mouthpiece at Green and at other times sneered. In the corner before the ninth, while trainer Kevin Rooney yammered away, he leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

On the judge’s scorecards, Tyson won all but one round. Afterwards, at a press conference, Tyson spoke about the win in cool, professional terms. He had been well coached by Jacobs on his postfight posturing since the Ferguson incident. There was no Ali-style histrionics, none of Liston’s glum bluntness. “Not to be egotistical, but I won this fight so easy. I refuse to be beaten in there. I refuse to let anybody get in my way.”

Tyson had clearly recovered from the Tillis fight. His technical prowess returned in fine form. More important he didn’t get frustrated with being unable to win by knockout. Tyson’s remarks afterwards also displayed a measure of confidence that Jacobs and Cayton wanted to bolster, and a maturity they had to protect. There would be no more risks like Tillis. They’d set up a string of breather fights until the final approach to the title could be determined.

Still on his breakneck schedule, Tyson fought Reggie Gross about three weeks later (June 13, 1986), also at the Garden and under the promotional banner of Don King. Gross, with an eighteen-and-four record, had long arms but a lazy, inaccurate left jab that dangled out like a heavy salami. Near the end of the first round, Gross moved into the center of the ring and opened up with a series of five punches that Tyson easily avoided as he looked patiently for an opening. He put Gross down twice before the referee called it over. Gross protested. Tyson tried to console him.

Fourteen days passed. Tyson traveled up to Troy to fight William Hosea. Hosea seemed like a fighter who could do a little bit of everything in the ring with a little bit of proficiency: except take a punch. It was over within two minutes and three seconds. Lorenzo Boyd came next—on July 11. A combination right hook to the body and a right uppercut on the chin ended the fight halfway through the second. Tyson was beginning to look bored.

On July 26, Tyson met Marvis Frazier, the son of former champion Joe Frazier. Father was both manager and trainer. That was more a liability than an asset against the technically superior Tyson. Marvis was molded in his father’s image. He too bobbed and weaved. Tyson and trainer Kevin Rooney studied tapes of Marvis’s fights and noticed that when he crouched, he didn’t so much bend at the knees as he did at the waist. In the dressing room before the fight, Tyson announced his fight strategy. “As Frazier bent over, Tyson would time a right uppercut,” said Baranski.

In the first round, Tyson launched at Frazier, backed him up into the corner, and, as per plan, sent in the right uppercut at the appropriate moment. That was enough to do the job, but Tyson added a left hook and another right. Frazier crumpled to the canvas thirty seconds into the round. It was Tyson’s quickest knockout. He tried to help the fallen fighter up, but by then Frazier’s mother and father had swarmed in. Tyson turned away, leapt up, and punched the air in a war dance. Jacobs rushed over and whispered something in his ear and Tyson calmed. “By then, we had him coached on what to say afterwards,” Steve Lott remembered. “With a name fighter like Frazier, we didn’t want Mike to be disrespectful. People liked Joe Frazier. I sat Mike down before the fight and told him what to say, word for word.”

On August 17, in Atlantic City, the betting line against José Ribalta beating Mike Tyson was 7 to 1. Ribalta had a respectable record of twenty-two wins, three losses, and one draw. Sixteen of the wins had come by knockout. The problem was that about a year earlier Ribalta had been knocked out in one round by Marvis Frazier. He was expected to go no more than a few rounds, if that, with Tyson.

What the experts didn’t expect, however, was that Tyson, coming off a series of easy fights, had lost some of his intensity and concentration. Gone were the elaborate slip-and-weave movements. He tried to win the fight the lazy heavyweight’s way—that is, on a single punch.

In the first round, Ribalta easily saw the punches coming and used a combination of leaning away, covering up, and putting Tyson in a clinch to avoid them. In the second round, realizing that he had to be technically sharper, Tyson doubled up with a right hook to the body and a right uppercut that knocked Ribalta down. The look on Ribalta’s face showed more shock than pain. He clearly hadn’t seen the uppercut coming. He got up and fought gamely for several more rounds. Tyson fell back into more of a conventional style, connecting often but without effect. He didn’t get frustrated; it seemed more like boredom. He wanted to win, but he’d lost interest in scoring a knockout. He appeared comfortable just being a good conventional fighter rather than a unique and spectacular one. The conclusion, at any rate, was foregone. Tyson wore Ribalta down with a total of 328 punches, 68 percent of which landed. A moment’s inspiration in the tenth sent in a flurry of punches that solidly connected. The referee ended the fight on a technical knockout.

Asked later if he was disappointed by his performance, a nonchalant Tyson opined: “What can I say? This happens. You don’t knock everybody out.”

Jacobs was also interviewed after the fight. He claimed not to be disappointed either. He talked about deciding within the week about whether to enter Tyson into the HBO series and to then, within a few months, fight for the title. He had the smug air of someone confident that all was proceeding by plan.

In a sense, he and Cayton had reason to be content. They had achieved the near miraculous. In twenty-six fights over nineteen months, Tyson had been steered to a top ten ranking. Although not yet ranked as a number one contender, he was being perceived by boxing and mainstream audiences alike as the next great heavyweight. He had been sold to America, via the fable of Cus and the Kid, as inoffensive outside the ring and indestructible within it. People believed that it was not a matter of whether he became heavyweight champion, but when.

Privately, however, Jacobs was still nagged by doubts about Tyson’s ability to perform at the higher levels of psychological pressure. Fighting for the championship would pit him against the most seasoned and capable fighters. And there could be no more breather bouts with which to protect his sometimes fragile emotional profits from the fights that did test Tyson’s character.

He had passed several important tests in the ring, both of his skills and his character. Still, as the Halpin, Sims, Jameson, and Tillis fights demonstrated, he remained completely unpredictable. It didn’t seem like a matter of choice for Tyson; it was not as if in those fights he had decided to win in some other way besides by knockout, to take control of the fight, box, try new things, manipulate the opponent, pick his punches, and add up the victory points in his head.

Tyson was capable of a small degree of such control, or “ring generalship,” as it is termed. He displayed it with Ferguson and Green. But that wasn’t a reliable quality in him as far as Jacobs was concerned. Nor was it the style of boxing he’d been trained in. D’Amato had honed Tyson to be a knockout artist. He’d always believed that was the best use of Tyson’s burning, rage-filled, psychic intensity. Jacobs agreed with D’Amato. He, too, feared that if Tyson didn’t knock his man out as soon as possible, the chances were high that he’d burn out and regress into a passive, acquiescent state. And so, despite the fact that Jacobs had everyone convinced Tyson would be champion, when it came down to it, he feared that he quite possibly possessed the dark, troubled heart of a loser.

That was the hole at the center of the entire elaborate and emerging spectacle of Tyson’s life. In retrospect, it seems incredible that more people didn’t recognize the problem at the time. Everything about Tyson was paradoxical.

The problem went beyond almost diametrically opposed performances in the ring. The Albany mall incident offered a glimpse into a counterlife vastly different from the one served up by Cus and the Kid. It just didn’t make sense that Tyson was the sum of his dual personas: surrogate son to D’Amato and robotic Ring Destroyer. How could those two beings exist in one, barely grown-up man? “It was very eerie to see Tyson break people’s faces in the ring, then sit down with him and hear that sweet little boy’s voice,” recalled Newsday’s Matthews. “I felt there was something I wasn’t seeing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”