Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

Chapter Three

When Tyson moved into D’Amato’s house, eight other boys lived there, all aspiring boxers, every one of them white, tough, and confident. They lived two to a room. Ewald cooked the dinners and the boys cleaned up. All other meals they cooked for themselves. Food was for the taking, though Ewald expected no one to consume more than his fair share, especially of the cookies and ice cream.

For the first few weeks, Tyson stayed in awe of his new surroundings. He did as he was asked, talked little, and acted shyly. At dinner, he closely watched the other boys to learn table manners. D’Amato, of course, lectured constantly. Most of the time, Tyson could barely follow his train of thought. A week into his stay, D’Amato gave him a book, Zen and the Art of Archery. Tyson couldn’t get past the first page. He was more interested in reading the books on boxing.

Tyson’s feelings of awe gave way to suspicion. Through most of that summer of 1980, D’Amato spent far more time talking with Tyson than training him in the gym. Every night and morning he told him to repeat out loud the words “Day by day in every way, I’m getting better and better.” D’Amato came into Tyson’s room at night and woke him up to complete a thought from the day’s lecture, one of the many that got lost in his meanderings. Remembered Ewald of Tyson: “He was always saying, ‘What the white dude want to do with the black kid?”’

D’Amato drilled him on fear those first few months. “Who is your best friend?” D’Amato asked Tyson early on. Before he could answer, D’Amato cut in, “Fear is your best friend.”

He’d go on, “Fear is like fire … fear is like a snowball going down a hill—if you don’t learn to control it, it will get bigger and out of control … fear is like an ugly friend who smells bad but saves you from drowning.

“Control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is psychological, the excuse of the man who wants to quit.

“The night before a fight you won’t sleep. Don’t worry—the other guy didn’t either. You’ll go to the weigh-in and he looks so much bigger than you, and calmer, like ice, but he’s burning up with fear inside. Your imagination is going to credit him with abilities he doesn’t have. Remember, motion relieves tension. The moment the bell rings and you come into contact with each other, suddenly the opponent seems like everybody else, because now your imagination is dissipated.

“The fight itself is the only reality that matters. Learn to impose your will and take control over that reality.”

It took Tyson a long time to make sense of D’Amato’s ideas. The suspicions lingered. Tyson also began to feel claustrophobic around D’Amato, who was always watching him, checking up, and bearing down with another lecture. D’Amato seemed to want a kind of intimacy that Tyson had never experienced: people bonded by a mutual belief in ideas. The laws of the streets he knew, and the rules of prison, but not D’Amato’s ways. There was an impulse in Tyson to rebel. As the perennial survivor, he expected to be alone in the end anyway.

At first, it was just little things like not cleaning up after himself bringing stolen ice cream into his room, swearing at Ewald, or turning his back and walking away as D’Amato started to lecture. “When he first came it was rather difficult because there was a lack of communication,” said D’Amato in a 1984 interview.

According to D’Amato’s understanding with the state Youth Division, Tyson could train all he wanted as long as he continued with school. In September, Tyson enrolled at Catskill Junior High School. At fourteen, he was the appropriate age for the eighth grade. His academic skills lagged a year behind those of the other students; his body was several years ahead. That, plus the fact that it was the first time in almost three years that he’d been in school, let alone one in a small town, made adjustment difficult.

D’Amato did what he could to prepare the school staff for Tyson. “He would be forceful and effective in trying to explain Mike’s background to us,” said Lee A. Bordick, then the principal at Catskill JHS and now the superintendent of schools in Troy, New York. “Mike was special, he said. Allowances had to be made for him. Cus didn’t want us to dislike Mike because he had problems. He wanted us to understand how, with work, Mike had so much to gain. We worked with him. I personally did constant reality checks for Mike to make sure he understood what was expected of him.”

During the first few months, Tyson could barely sit through an entire forty-five-minute class. Many times he would walk out. He took as much interest in the academics as was required to placate D’Amato and the social worker from the Youth Division assigned to watch over him, Ernestine Coleman. His passion was boxing and only boxing. “Michael and I had arguments all the time about his not applying himself in school,” Coleman recalled. “He knew that I had the power to take him away from Cus and send him back to Tryon, so I won.”

Almost won. Tyson attended school every day, but ignored his homework, D’Amato didn’t tell Coleman, and neither did he force Tyson to do the homework. He was far more interested in Tyson’s aptitude for training than for academics.

Instead of taking the morning bus, Tyson would run the three miles to school. The teachers finally told him to stop because of the smell from the sweat. So Tyson took the bus there, then ran home in the afternoons. At five o’clock, every weekday, he went to the gym for two hours. In the evenings, he talked to D’Amato, watched television, or read boxing books. On weekends, he’d be up at five in the morning, run a few miles, make his own breakfast, nap, then get to the gym again at twelve sharp. Tyson didn’t join any school team or make any “civilian” friends. His friends were the other boys in the house, all of whom boxed.

That year there were racial tensions between the black and white students in the adjoining high school. School officials were concerned that Tyson might become some kind of leader among the black students. But he did not get involved. “I used to take some of the kids to baseball games down in New York on weekends,” said junior high principal Bordick. “I asked Mike to come and he never did. I got the feeling that he had this block about his past, being a black kid from the slums. This was his break, boxing, and he wanted to do that and nothing else.”

The other students made him pay for being different. They ridiculed his size, his lisping voice, and his desire to be a boxer. The black students were particularly cruel. For living with D’Amato and Ewald, they accused him of hating black people, including his own mother. “Three black girls were teasing him in the hallway about his mother,” remembered Bordick. “He got angry, they ran into the bathroom, and he followed them. He punched the paper towel holder off the wall, screamed a lot, nothing else. I had them all in the office and one of the girls kicked him. He held back; I could see he was seething with anger, but he kept it in. I took him outside. I remember it was November. A cold rain drizzled down. We stood there and I told him he couldn’t lash out at people, he had to learn control.”

Bordick realized that Tyson might never be fully socialized into so-called normal society. It was as if everything, and everyone, conspired to keep him different, all of which pushed Tyson further into boxing. “There was more pressure on Michael to behave because he was Mike the boxer with this difficult background. He felt put-upon because the expectations to conform were greater on him than on other students.”

During the second half of the school year, Tyson seemed better able to cope with the taunts of the other students. He also tried to use charm rather than rebellion with his teachers. “He was streetwise,” said Bordick. “He could play with you almost like a con artist. Mike had this ability to deal with adults on their own level.”

Bordick accepted these realities about Tyson. They represented distortions of what boys his age were usually like, but for that matter everything about Tyson seemed distorted. Even the people who cared for him did so for ulterior reasons. D’Amato certainly cared for Tyson, and wanted him to get through school, but Bordick wasn’t blind to the motives involved. Nor did he think Tyson was. “Michael was smart enough to realize that others have their own con. He must have known that Cus wouldn’t have been interested in him if he wasn’t a boxer. Everyone who lived with Cus at the house boxed. Ever since he was a child, Mike got pushed around. The boxing was an escape. The train was going by and he decided to catch it. I think he expected Cus would benefit too.”

Bordick, of course, was right. D’Amato and Tyson were using each other, initially in harmless ways. D’Amato wouldn’t have let Tyson into the house unless he had held some promise as a boxer. Tyson in turn used boxing, D’Amato, his teachers, anyone, to avoid going back to the reformatory. Beneath the surface, however, in the growing subtext to their relationship, another dynamic was taking shape. D’Amato was tending to a boy’s needs, but mostly he was building a champion. The task became an obsession.

* * *

D’Amato generally wouldn’t spend long hours in the gym working with his stable of young fighters. In the early months, that included Tyson. He would go in only on occasion to refine the instruction given by a trainer he’d been grooming for the previous few years: Teddy Atlas.

Atlas fit the mold of the D’Amato protégé: young, tough, troubled, highly impressionable, and consumed by a desire to box. The two met in 1975. Atlas, then twenty-one years old, was about to go to trial in Staten Island on an assault charge. A neighborhood friend, Kevin Rooney, had been training with D’Amato for a few months. Rooney convinced D’Amato that with help and guidance, Atlas could become a fine boxer. D’Amato appeared before the judge and promised to take in and train Atlas, who got off with five years’ probation.

Atlas, however, got no further than the gym. A congenital spinal problem ended his career. D’Amato saw his potential as a trainer, but Atlas, deeply discouraged, returned to New York. Over the next year, he kicked around Staten Island getting into trouble. One street brawl landed Atlas in the hospital with a knife gash down the entire length of his face. That’s when he decided to return to D’Amato.

The first few months back weren’t easy. “I was a selfish kid, with no direction,” recalled Atlas, who at thirty-four has a ruffled, boyish appearance, even with the scar on his face and the flattened nose. There’s a lot of rough vowels in his Staten Island voice. He also tends to slur, as so many boxers do. “Cus wanted me to help these kids with the boxing, but I could barely help myself.” Twice, Atlas attempted suicide—first with pills, then by breathing in car exhaust fumes. D’Amato saved his life both times. That fact was the turning point for Atlas. “Cus taught me principles of life, how to have purpose and do the right thing, and I gave him my loyalty.”

By the time Tyson arrived in 1980, Atlas was training all of the younger fighters who lived in the house. He also ran D’Amato’s boxing program for the local boys. “I did everything for those kids—took them to boxing tournaments, picnics, hand-holding, you name it.”

Tyson began to occupy the majority of Atlas’s time. The trainer knew well D’Amato’s unique boxing system. In fact, he had the benefit of several refinements D’Amato had made over the years.

While Torres trained for his title fight against Willie Pastrano in early 1965, a pudgy man claiming to be a horse trainer from France came into the gym and boasted that he could double the speed of a fighter’s punches. He had devised a numbering system. There were six steps. In the first, the fighter punched a heavy bag once. In the second, he punched twice, and so on through to the last step of six punches thrown in combination. It was simple yet effective. It systematized the process of acquiring punching speed.

The other trainers and boxers scoffed at the Frenchman’s ideas. But D’Amato was impressed. Combination punching played an important role in his much-ridiculed “system.” Anything that could increase punching speed was an improvement. D’Amato’s system, though, used offense and defense in equal portions. The idea was to move into position without getting hit, then punch and defend in one continuous motion. But that was difficult for a fighter to do. D’Amato knew that more speed could help tremendously.

A natural tinkerer, D’Amato took the six steps and added defensive movement. Step one: punch, then move. Step two: punch, move, punch, and move again. By the sixth step, the fighter unleashed a combination of six punches and defensive movements.

The increase in speed on both offense and defense played into other new ideas D’Amato had been working on over the years. D’Amato argued that the most damaging punch, physically and psychologically, was the one a fighter couldn’t see coming. He’d lose that split second of response time needed to try and move away from the blow or to steel himself against the impact. Furthermore, D’Amato believed that a fighter would punch where he last saw the target. To punch and miss was also intensely discouraging. Taking punches that couldn’t be seen and trying to hit a target that wasn’t there—that’s the impact D’Amato wanted his fighters to have on an opponent. Besides wreaking physical damage, it sapped the will.

Just to be sure, D’Amato added a few more advanced refinements. In Torres’s training for the Willie Pastrano fight, D’Amato wrapped two mattresses around a pole. He then numbered the main types of punches, 1 through 7, and wrote those numbers on the makeshift bag. Torres set up in front of the bag and D’Amato called out the combinations.

A “5-4” was a left hook to the body to weaken the opponent, followed by a right uppercut to the chin. The “7-2-3” was a left jab to the head that set up a straight right to the head and a left uppercut. Punch “6” was a straight right to the body and “1” a straight left to the head. Every combination included the requisite defensive movements.

Such numbering increased punching accuracy and created an economical verbal shorthand to use in training and in an actual fight. D’Amato put a series of such numbered combinations on an audiotape that Torres, and many fighters after him, would train to. “Punch and move, punch and move. Cus trained you to fight by habit and instinct,” remembered Torres. “You shouldn’t have to think for half a second.” Torres gave the mattress a name, the “Willie Bag,” after his upcoming opponent, Willie Pastrano.

Boxing people looked skeptically at D’Amato’s system when it was used by Patterson. When he took the title, they began to tolerate it. With Patterson’s defeat and slow demise, the system was all but rejected. Even though it was Patterson who abandoned the system in the second half of his career—he earned the distinction of being knocked down in title bouts more times, sixteen in all, than any other fighter in history—D’Amato’s system, rightly or wrongly, still took partial blame. Torres’s brief success did little to earn it new respect. Torres lacked the interest and the discipline to be consistently evasive in the ring. As he said: “I thought too much. It wasn’t instinctual enough for me.”

The boxing world gave up on D’Amato’s ideas about boxing technique, but he remained stalwart. He continued to tinker with his system, as an inventor would a device he expected to work someday when the right partner came along to help realize its potential. That partner, it turned out, was Mike Tyson.

D’Amato knew that speed, power, and elusiveness in a 200-pound-plus natural heavyweight would have the force of an atomic bomb in the ring. That’s what he saw, or dreamed of, on the day Stewart brought Tyson down from Tryon: the potential to create the most devastating heavyweight in history. He also knew that being thirteen and coming from a boy’s prison, Tyson was eminently pliable. “Mentally, he had no other choices in life because of his background,” said Atlas of his and D’Amato’s thinking at the time. “He was a perfect piece of clay.”

Atlas taught Tyson the basics. The boy already had the speed and power, but virtually no defense. They worked first on avoiding the left jab, the punch commonly used to keep an opponent at bay and to set up combinations. For the first few months, Atlas spent several hours a week throwing jabs at Tyson’s head, requiring him to “slip” to his right. Once Tyson could no longer be hit by a jab, Atlas tried other simple punches. The rule was that Tyson could only elude, not counterpunch.

D’Amato believed that fighters were hit easily by straight right hands because they had a tendency to remain stationary and hold their gloves low. When Tyson slipped to his right, he was taught to keep his left up, but more important, he learned to immediately move again. He’d slip right in a sideways motion, then weave left and slightly forward. In the weave, he was taught not to use the standard “bob” or up-and-down motion. Instead, he moved his head and shoulders in a U shape. The slip took him laterally away from the first punch, then the U-shaped weave moved under the second—whether or not it was delivered.

D’Amato had a bias against the “weave and bob,” a mainstay for the conventionally trained fighter. The weaving he liked; the bobbing, he believed, tended to fix the fighter’s position. To D’Amato’s mind, it created the illusion that by standing still and moving up and down along a vertical plane he could avoid the punches, whereas in fact, the opposite was the case. All the other fighter had to do was time his punch, D’Amato insisted; it was like hitting a jack-in-the-box.

The idea with Tyson was never to let him “hang” on either the outside or the inside. He had to be constantly moving sideways and forward in a seamless sequence. The goal was to get position and once there to deliver a combination of punches—all without getting hit.

That would seem self-evident, but few boxers could, or knew how to, do it. Slipping away made sense, but constantly moving in seemed counterintuitive. It increased the danger of getting hit. Punch and you were doubly exposed to counterpunches. Those were articles of faith to boxers, but only because they never knew how to do otherwise.

“When his defense started working, his offense did, too, because then he was in position to throw combinations of punches that the opponent couldn’t see coming,” said Atlas.

The offense: slip to the right, away from a jab, then throw a left hook to the body and another to the head. Or slip right and weave left under the next jab to get positioning on the opponent’s exposed side, and execute the same combination. Or weave to either side, hook to the body, and uppercut through the gloves. Tyson was in front, on both sides, high and low. He was taught to punch from every conceivable angle.

“We practiced those punches so much that we used to say he couldn’t do it wrong even if he wanted to,” said Atlas. Doing it right meant hitting specific targets. D’Amato laid them out: the liver on the right side, the jawbone just below the ear, the point of the chin, and the floating left-side rib.

In the advanced lessons, Atlas added a unique D’Amato-inspired wrinkle. All fighters were at the least taught to slip jabs by moving to their right. Tyson learned how to also slip a jab by moving left. An opponent expected the slip right; Tyson’s slip left would come as a small but important tactical surprise.

The training completely exploited Tyson’s natural speed and punching power. It also converted into an asset his only potential physical drawback: at five-foot-nine with a reach of a mere seventy-one inches, he was short all around. Since the reign of Jack Johnson in early 1900s, there had been seventeen widely recognized heavyweight champions, and a half dozen or so lesser ones, and in that entire group only two—Rocky Marciano and Joe Frazier—had measured under six feet. Some champions were taller (Jess Willard, the “Pottawatomie Giant” who defeated Jack Johnson in 1914, was six-foot-six-and-one-quarter with a reach of eighty-three inches), and some average (Jack Dempsey, who reigned in the early 1920s, was six-foot-one and seventy-seven inches). Marciano measured five-foot-eleven with a reach of only sixty-eight inches. Frazier was similar in his proportions to Tyson.

Height and reach didn’t determine boxing styles, but they did influence them. When tall fighters confronted shorter opponents, they tended to let their hands drop, which exposed the head. The assumption was that the shorter fighters didn’t have the reach to hit them there.

D’Amato’s techniques to obtain positioning took advantage of that erroneous assumption. Not only would Tyson be able to get within reach, but he would also receive less, and do far more, damage than presumed. D’Amato knew that Tyson’s crouching style would make the taller opponent punch downward. That would feel awkward and so tend to throw the fighter off. In body mechanics, a downward punch also has less force than one made along a horizontal plane. More importantly, a punch angled slightly upward from a crouch carried the greatest amount of force.

Tyson was trained to maximize that force. D’Amato eschewed the orthodox punching stance of putting the left foot slightly forward. Once he gained position, Tyson brought both feet up together, knees slightly bent. That way he could leverage his punches off a combined springing and turning motion of his massive thighs and upper body. His arms, shoulders, back, waist, buttocks, and legs were all moving in concert. At the point of contact Tyson actually ended up leaning forward on the tips of his toes.

Most trainers ridiculed D’Amato’s theories on the positioning of the feet. They argued that it put a shorter fighter off-balance. They were right, but only if the fighter stopped moving—the opposite of what Tyson was trained to do.

When it all came together, Tyson was a rare, and exciting, sight in the ring: he could win a fight with a single knockout punch. And that, in practical terms, was all D’Amato cared about. Just as with Patterson and, to a degree, Torres, he didn’t expect the boxing world, or the casual fan, to be interested in or capable of appreciating the flow, the elegance, of Tyson’s defensive skills. But a knockout punch they couldn’t ignore.