Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)
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.
Chapter Two
Constantine 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.