Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

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Theory and practice, as D’Amato preached, often differed. He and Atlas trained Tyson to fight as a professional. But in the practical development of his career, Tyson would first have to work his way up through the amateur tournaments toward an ultimate victory in the Olympics. Tyson’s boxing style wouldn’t go over well in the amateurs, and D’Amato knew it. The crouching, which lowered the head, was against the rules. Amateur officials felt it led to head butts. Without such defensive movement, the shorter Tyson would be far easier to hit. That disadvantage would be compounded by amateur scoring rules. Tyson could knock a foe down, but if the man got up and landed four or five soft jabs, he could win the round on points. In the professionals, a knockdown automatically won the round.

Tyson’s skill with body-and-head combination punches also served little purpose. Amateur fights were only three rounds; there wasn’t time to waste with a lot of body blows. Headgear was also used in amateur fights, which D’Amato vociferously opposed. Headgear, he argued, created a false sense of security that in turn limited a fighter’s confrontation with his own fear.

D’Amato never hid his disdain for amateur rules. He considered them useless in preparing for a professional career. That did not endear him to the amateur boxing establishment. As a result, D’Amato expected Tyson to take a lot of criticism in amateur matches. Fortunately, he had the ability to knock opponents out with a single punch—which made troublesome rules entirely moot.

That left only one major obstacle: Tyson had not yet been tested psychologically. D’Amato and Atlas soon discovered that even with his natural advantages, superior training, and the shortcomings of his opponents, Tyson could be easily, and inexplicably, overwhelmed by his own emotions.

Tyson’s earliest fights were “smokers.” These were held in small boxing clubs in the tough neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx. The beer ran free; people gambled, ate heartily, and cared only for the local favorite. No amateur body sanctioned the fights. They were unofficial and unruly, but were a good way for a young fighter to get experience without his mistakes ever showing up in a record book. It was the old method for bringing a fighter along. D’Amato put Tyson in to test his abilities, but more so, his nerves.

At his first smoker, in the South Bronx, Tyson disappeared a few hours before the fight. He sat two blocks away on a curb in view of a subway station entrance. A few years later he would admit to Tom Patti, a young fighter who moved into the upstate house in 1981, that he struggled desperately over whether to take the half-hour subway ride back to nearby Brownsville and never see Catskill again. Atlas found him before the decision could be made.

Tyson did well in the smokers. He’d knock out grown men in the first and second rounds. “One look at Mike and guys didn’t want to fight him,” said Atlas. “I had to make deals, give the trainers $50 on the side.” A few local tournaments followed and Tyson kept up his streak. By early 1981, D’Amato decided to venture out. Kevin Rooney was by then fighting regularly as a professional. He had a bout in Scranton, Pennsylvania. D’Amato got Tyson a three-round preliminary, or undercard, amateur bout.

The opponent was a young, white, marginally talented fighter. Tyson dropped him twice in the first round. Each time, to Tyson’s amazement, he got up. After the round, Tyson told Atlas that he was tired. “I told him that he couldn’t possibly be tired after one round,” remembered Atlas. “His emotions were taking over.” Tyson knocked his opponent down again in the second, to no great effect. Back in the corner he complained about a broken hand. He couldn’t look Atlas in the eye. Tyson seemed drained of energy, dazed, defeated. Atlas didn’t believe the broken-hand story. He grabbed Tyson’s head and lifted it up. “If you want to become heavyweight champion of the world, this is it, the title,” barked Atlas. “All these dreams end here if you don’t beat this guy.”

In the third and final round, Tyson stopped punching. He let himself be grabbed and easily hit. He punched back, but without the same snap, or, as D’Amato liked to say, “bad intentions.” Atlas had never seen him so passive before, and neither had D’Amato, who sat nearby watching his future champion fizzle. At one point, after taking a straight right and then clinching, Tyson got backed up into the corner and it seemed to Atlas that within seconds he would fall to the canvas and simply give up. “Don’t do it!” he yelled. Tyson stayed on his feet, the round ended, and he won on points.

“We talked afterwards down in a hallway in the arena,” remembered Atlas. “He was thanking me, he couldn’t stop saying it. I told him we made a breakthrough. He knew he wanted to lose. I told him he should never let himself get to that point again.” Atlas made one more crucial point. “What counted, I said, was not that he had those feelings; all fighters do. It’s that he didn’t give in to them.”

The Scranton fight exposed a serious flaw that neutralized every one of Tyson’s natural and acquired advantages. He fell into an intensively passive, trancelike state in which the will to fight and elude punches drained away. When the group got back to Catskill, D’Amato didn’t add much to Atlas’s comments. He went over the same ground about fear, and how will overcomes skill, but he made minimal effort to determine what lay at the heart of Tyson’s sudden passivity. Sometime later, though, he did send Tyson to a hypnotist. D’Amato had done that with other fighters. He felt that it helped them concentrate better in the ring.

D’Amato had decided to remain emotionally detached from Tyson, just as he had done with Torres. It was as if he chose to commit himself to an idea of what Tyson could become rather than grapple with the full reality of all the chaos in the youth’s heart, which would have been more demanding. That, at least, is what Atlas began to see. “Cus was in a hurry with Mike,” said Atlas. “He was so set on getting another world champion, a heavyweight, that he didn’t want to see what Mike was.”

D’Amato may have also been driven by a desire for vindication. It was the rationalization of the egoist. “He knew that no matter what he’d failed to do in the past with Patterson or Torres or whatever, he’d be remembered forever for that one last champion,” said Atlas.

Shortly after the Scranton incident, Tyson went to the National Junior Olympics Tournament in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This time only Atlas accompanied Tyson, who stood out from the other fifteen-year-olds. Their muscles had barely begun to form through the layer of adolescent baby fat; Tyson’s bulged. He also kept to himself mostly, which soon created a mystique about his background. In his first fight, Tyson scored a first-round knockout of a 265-pound Hawaiian boy with a textbook left hook to the liver. Some boys intentionally lost their fights just to avoid meeting Tyson and possibly suffering permanent physical damage. Tyson won the Junior Olympic heavyweight title, his first major victory.

Tyson’s success got big play in the Catskill newspaper. It made him a minor celebrity and, to officials at the junior high school who watched him attend dutifully but learn little, a greater distraction. They decided to matriculate Tyson into the high school without testing. When Tyson’s caseworker, Ernestine Coleman, found out, she was enraged. “They wanted Michael out of their hair and he knew it,” she said. “I think that hurt him, which caused Michael to act out more. He was feeling that if that’s the way they wanted to be, he didn’t need school anyway; he’d be a boxer.”

The principal at Catskill High, Richard Stickles, was far less patient with Tyson than his counterpart at the junior high school, Lee Bordick. The teachers there also decided from the outset to cut Tyson down to size. The racial tensions of the previous year had persisted and they were concerned that he might become a lightning rod for the black students.

Tyson began to be victimized by some of the other boys in the house. “They baited him,” said Tom Patti, who was seventeen years old when he moved into the house that fall to train with D’Amato. “Mike talked back in class, sure. Once a teacher threw a book at him, called him intolerable. He misbehaved. He was never intolerable.” Atlas, however, felt that Tyson exploited the fact that others—namely D’Amato—considered him special. “Cus told Mike he’d be world champion. Mike didn’t believe it, but he knew that whatever he had was letting him do things other people couldn’t do,” said Atlas.

The situation fed on itself. Labeled a miscreant, Tyson increasingly acted like one. He was still being taunted by the black students for living with white people, which led to a few schoolyard scuffles. One day, he asked for milk in the cafeteria just as it closed. He was refused and threw his tray against the wall. He was suspended for a few days. It was the first of several suspensions.

During those suspensions Tyson would disappear from Catskill. D’Amato figured that he had gone back to Brownsville, which was exactly right. D’Amato would ask José Torres to bring him back. “He wasn’t at home. He’d be out on the streets, stealing, mugging people, screwing around,” remembered Torres. When he returned to the house, Tyson would be meek and apologetic. Yet, without provocation, he could turn nasty. Once housemother Ewald asked Tyson to try and shower more often and to keep his gym clothes clean. Tyson angrily called her “a piece of shit.’ Another time, in an argument over one of his Brownsville trips, Tyson spit at D’Amato.

Atlas understood how someone with Tyson’s background—which after all was similar to his own—could have difficulties in a small-town school. But he believed in the principles D’Amato preached in such situations: rise above the other man and control your emotions. Tyson wasn’t doing that. As the conflicts worsened, Atlas realized that D’Amato preferred to contradict his own principles rather than undermine Tyson’s focus on boxing. “I told Cus that if we teach Mike to control himself in the ring, but not out of it, he won’t develop into a responsible person,” said Atlas. “That’s what Cus always taught me: develop a boxer in ways that make him successful in life, whether he becomes a champion or not. With Mike, Cus wanted a champion first, a good person last.”

When other boys in the gym got in trouble at school, Atlas barred them from training for a few days. He did the same to Tyson. D’Amato vetoed that by bringing Tyson in himself. Atlas relented. “I was loyal to Cus. I didn’t want to see what was happening.”

By late fall of 1981, the school administration decided to expel Tyson. D’Amato didn’t protest this time. He contacted Coleman and convinced her that Tyson had been victimized at school, that boxing was still his best form of therapy. He sent her newspaper clippings of his successes in the ring. Clearly, D’Amato knew that Coleman had the power to take Tyson back into state care. He couldn’t risk losing his future champion. D’Amato asked if she would find a tutor. Coleman agreed, and in January 1982, Tyson left the high school.

The tutoring failed. Again, Tyson sat down for the instruction but didn’t apply himself. D’Amato promised the tutor that Tyson would work harder, but he never did. The 1982 National Junior Olympics Tournament was coming up and Tyson had to defend his title.

The mystique about Tyson built. Professional fight promoters who stalked the amateur tournaments looking for prospects talked about Tyson as a sure bet to win the gold at the upcoming Olympic Games in Los Angeles. One manager, Shelly Finkel, had already approached Tyson about his future plans. D’Amato refused to even discuss the matter with Finkel.

At the 1982 Juniors, Tyson again kept mostly to himself, or with Atlas, instead of mixing with the other boys. He knocked out his first four opponents with ease. On the night of the final, as he waited to enter the ring, Tyson broke down in tears. “I’m ‘Mike Tyson,’ everyone likes me now,” he uttered. Atlas did what he could to buttress Tyson’s will and took him to the ring. Tyson let loose a flurry of punches that sent his opponent into a corner, trying desperately to cover up. The referee stopped the fight. Tyson won by a technical knockout.

Tyson’s flaw, his passivity, seemed in control—barely. Atlas didn’t know it, but what had happened at Scranton was only the symptom. Before the Junior Olympic finals, the cause of Tyson’s passivity, of the flaw that drained his willingness to fight, had once again peeked out.

In Scranton, it was not just the prospect of losing the fight that had paralyzed Tyson. It was that in defeat the emotional attachments with D’Amato, Ewald, the other boys in the house, and Atlas would be severed. Fighting, and winning fights, made those bonds possible. Losing confirmed the fear he had lived with since childhood: that he was alone, unloved, and quite possibly unlovable.

So much of Tyson’s behavior from the day he entered Tryon and wanted to see ex-boxer Bobby Stewart sprang from that fear. Boxing was his only way of controlling the intense feelings of isolation, helplessness, and rage. What D’Amato tried to do was make boxing an all-encompassing gestalt: a way for Tyson to recognize and then order his emotions, to use his body as an instrument of his will, and ultimately to situate himself in the world.

The problem for Tyson was that the world—from Tryon to D’Amato’s house, the gym, tournaments, and the Junior Olympics—kept getting bigger and more foreign. It was certainly far different from what he came from and where he expected to end up. It was like being cast in a dramatic narrative as the lead player; they were writing as they went along and Tyson never knew what would happen next, only that one day the climax was supposed to be his coronation as heavyweight champion of the world.

It was a difficult role to play, especially when the leading man felt hollow. Tyson could never see himself becoming champion, because he couldn’t make purchase on his own core identity. That is the affliction of the unloved: without the basic human attachment of love, one comes to doubt that a self exists, and comes to believe that even if it does, it’s probably not worthy of being attached to anyone else. The impulse is toward self-annihilation; the “I” doesn’t exist and so it’s willfully converted to an “it.” The “it,” as Tyson demonstrated during his Brownsville childhood, robs, steals, fights, and ends up in prison. The “it” dies an early death.

Of course, Tyson had already demonstrated the will to survive. He didn’t want to be an “it.” He knew almost instinctually that boxing offered the logical possibility of finding a self. D’Amato, Ewald, and Atlas were all part of the effort. And so, in a sense, what choice did he have but to participate in their drama of making a champion? It was box or be alone. Box or perish.

The stakes, then, were high, and to Tyson they seemed to get higher each day. As he started to win fights, he felt the gap widen between the hope others had invested in him and his own deep, riveting fear of what failure would mean. Emotionally, that sent him bouncing back and fourth between two states. In the one, he believed that the hope of D’Amato, Ewald, and Atlas was grounded in authentic caring, even love. That belief dulled the fear, kept it under control. In the other, however, the fear leapt out like a flame. What if D’Amato’s attentions had nothing to do with Tyson the person, only with Tyson the future heavyweight champion?

The gap widened and Tyson began to live a paradox. He cooperated and then rebelled. He progressed in his boxing abilities, to a seemingly perfect degree, and then radically regressed in the blink of an eye. He’d behave as if he belonged, felt wanted, even loved, and then would act rejected, abandoned, and alone. During the positive phases people saw Tyson as kind, gentle, ambitious, determined, and hardworking; in the negative ones, selfish, conniving, deceptive, and at times inexplicably vicious. He alternated, in other words, between being an “I” and being an “it.”

D’Amato, for all his preaching on the psychology of fear, did not understand Tyson in those terms. After getting into Tyson’s psyche and bringing order to the most obvious confusions, D’Amato realized there were doors in Tyson he didn’t want to open and rooms he refused to enter. After Floyd Patterson, he vowed never again to open those doors in a fighter. Besides, D’Amato didn’t have the time with this one. He might die before the goal could be reached, and he knew it.

Perhaps D’Amato sensed that whatever caused Tyson’s will to fail in Scranton formed the opposite side of that which also made him so devastating. Perhaps that was what lurked behind one of those doors. It created a tension, and an intensity, that won fights. It was as if he entered the ring so emotionally coiled that a psychic energy built up that was desperate for release, and the only place it could go, the only relief for Tyson, was to destroy the other man.

With those forces powering Tyson, he didn’t need Zen. Tyson’s concentration was already so intense that he didn’t need to detach himself, to look down at the task from some spiritually removed place in order to control himself and the opponent. He could win a fight before control became an issue. And so perhaps D’Amato thought to himself, why should I go into one of those dark rooms, reorder and resolve? If I did, I wouldn’t have a champion anymore.

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Tyson’s problems at school, his battle with Atlas, the lack of interest in education, his bolting back to Brownsville, his rudeness toward Ewald—D’Amato rationalized them all away as the price he, and Tyson, had to pay for winning the heavyweight championship of the world.

“Cus took Mike’s selfishness and said fuck it, fuck principles, I see a guy that is going to be a world champion,” said Atlas. “Cus was manipulative, too, but he could use it better. Tyson did it by instinct; Cus knew exactly what he was doing, how to do it, and who it affected.”

Soon after the Junior Olympic tournament, Atlas’s disillusionment with D’Amato increased. “Cus had the greatest tunnel vision, so great he didn’t even care about himself. He’d let Mike spit on him. When I met him, before Mike came along, he wouldn’t put up with that.”

In the spring, Tyson boasted around the gym that he didn’t need a trainer anymore, that he could win without Atlas, or D’Amato. In June, Tyson’s tutor quit. She was frustrated both with his lack of interest and with D’Amato’s lack of support. It was no coincidence that on June 30, Tyson turned sixteen and was thus legally no longer obligated to attend school. Moreover, he left the authority of the Youth Division. D’Amato still had to answer to Coleman, however, until Tyson was formally released. He continued to give Coleman rosy reports of Tyson’s progress, despite contrary accounts from the tutor. Coleman believed D’Amato.

Over the summer, Atlas continued to bump heads with Tyson and D’Amato. Atlas found out that in the late 1970s, D’Amato had secured a $25,000 grant from a federal agency to fund the boxing club—a portion of which was supposed to pay him a salary. Atlas never saw the money. He heard rumors that D’Amato gave certain town officials cash payments for their support and influence, especially on those occasions that Tyson had scrapes with the local law. In one instance, a woman complained to the police that Mike had been having sex with her twelve-year-old daughter. The matter stopped there. Atlas suspected that she’d been paid off. D’Amato also no longer seemed to care about the other boys in the club. Atlas watched D’Amato spend freely to cover Tyson’s expenses for tournaments, but complain when the other boys needed money for new equipment.

That attitude seemed all the more outrageous to Atlas because he knew that D’Amato had another major source of money to fund his efforts with Tyson. D’Amato had convinced his silent benefactors, Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton, that Tyson was the prospect they’d all been waiting for: a champion fighter they could develop from scratch and control completely. Cayton was skeptical. But Jacobs shared D’Amato’s passion, and he had the same obsessive tendencies. He persuaded Cayton to help pay for the additional expenses of bringing Tyson along. The travel, lodging, and other costs of sending everyone, including Jacobs, to a single tournament reached $6,000. With Tyson’s size, speed, and ability, he needed professional sparring, and that was expensive, upwards of $500 a week. They also paid $250 for each pair of Tyson’s custom-made gloves. Extra padding was needed to protect his sparring partners. Jacobs and Cayton even paid for gold fillings in Tyson’s two front teeth.

They had a verbal agreement on taking Tyson professional. D’Amato would decide whom he would fight and for which promoters. He would not, however, be manager of record. That meant showing income, which he would then have to pay in back taxes to the IRS, which D’Amato had no intention of doing. Jacobs would therefore become manager. Cayton at the time was considering retirement. His role remained uncertain, although he had expertise in advertising, marketing, and television, and expected to share in any profits from Tyson’s purses.

In August, Ernestine Coleman discovered that Tyson’s mother had been diagnosed as having inoperable cancer. She told Tyson and D’Amato. Despite all the money available for Tyson’s boxing career, D’Amato spared none for Lorna’s care. Nor had he ever paid for her to visit Tyson in Catskill. Over the past two years, D’Amato had spoken to her only a few times, and then briefly. He didn’t want to reveal her son’s problems in case the information got back to Coleman. D’Amato deemed his obligations as being only to the officials at the Youth Division.

In September, D’Amato paid for Tyson’s one train trip to visit Lorna in the hospital. He went alone. When he came back a few days later, Tyson refused to discuss what he saw, or felt. When his mother died in October, at the age of fifty-two, Tyson again went to New York alone. The trip turned out to be a watershed experience.

When Tyson arrived at his old apartment on Amboy Street in Brownsville, no one was there. Rodney long ago had moved away and had left no new address. When Denise returned home she said that there was no money to bury Lorna. The city would put her in Potter’s Field, a cemetery for the poor on an island northeast of Manhattan in the East River. Convicts from Rikers Island prison dug the graves.

Tyson couldn’t bring himself to go to the burial. He stayed in the apartment for three days. The phone rang several times but he didn’t answer. When he did, finally, it was D’Amato. Tyson said he wasn’t coming back to Catskill and hung up.

The next day, Ernestine Coleman came to the door. He wouldn’t let her into the apartment. They talked in the hallway. “I told Michael that he had to come back to Catskill,” recalled Coleman. “He refused. He was going to stay in Brownsville. I was convinced of that.”

Coleman explained that her own mother had died of cancer; she could empathize with what he felt. Tyson wasn’t moved. He was stuck in his grief and perhaps weighed down by the guilt he felt for letting his mother down all those years. There was also the shame. At Tryon, he tried to tell her how much he was changing, but maybe he hadn’t tried hard enough. If he had called more, cared more, tried harder, as hard as he boxed, maybe he could have earned back her love.

“This was a boy who had more rage than I’d ever seen before, and now he was falling, going into a deep depression. The boxing was a positive direction for him. It was either that or the streets, where he would have ended up dead for sure,” said Coleman.

She wasn’t prepared to let Tyson commit suicide in this manner. So she lied. “I said that if he wanted to stay I’d have to do the paperwork, the police would pick him up, and I’d place him somewhere in New York.”

At sixteen, Tyson was no longer under the authority of the Youth Division. He could do as he pleased. D’Amato had never told him that, and now, when the information would have perhaps determined his future, neither did Coleman. Perhaps, then, it was the prospect of the police, or just the shock value of the ultimatum, that made Tyson see through his own grief to the stark realities of his situation. He returned to Catskill that very day with Coleman.