Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

According to Ewald, Tyson refused to discuss his mother’s death when he returned. But he started to change, radically. “Not long after he got back, Michael told me that he thought he could become the heavyweight champion of the world. Cus had always said that about him before and he knew it. That was the first time Mike said it.”

Coleman detected a shift as well. “Until his mother died, he never saw that house as home. Catskill just amounted to a place where he was and a thing he was doing. Suddenly, Cus, Camille, the house, and boxing was all he had left.”

Soon after Lorna’s death, D’Amato made a move to become Tyson’s legal guardian. When Tyson went to New York on the day of his mother’s funeral and refused to come back, D’Amato realized that his dream of having another champion could be easily stolen. The only control D’Amato could have was legal guardianship. Up until the age of eighteen, Tyson required the approval of a parent, or guardian, to sign a contract.

D’Amato’s duplicity ate away at Atlas like an acid. Every time he tried to discipline Tyson, D’Amato vetoed it. It reached the point where D’Amato had to take over Tyson’s training, while Atlas worked solely with the other boys in the boxing club. In November, matters came to a head. Atlas had gotten married over the previous summer. His wife had a twelve-year-old sister who on occasion came to the gym. The girl told Atlas that Tyson had fondled her. Atlas flew into a rage, got a gun, and confronted Tyson at the gym. Tyson ran out and hid in D’Amato’s house. D’Amato sent him to stay with Bobby Stewart at Tryon until he could sort things out. That consisted of firing Atlas.

Two weeks later, D’Amato used an old friend to expedite his bid to control Tyson. Bill Hagan was the supervisor of Greene County, in which Catskill was located. Hagan had used his Washington connections to secure the $25,000 federal grant for D’Amato years before. D’Amato told him now that some promoters were trying to weasel in on Tyson. The next day, D’Amato went to a local court with his lawyers and a set of already-completed guardianship papers. The judge approved the request without delay.

Atlas believed that D’Amato had intentionally let his dispute with Tyson boil over. “He let the conflict between me and Mike be brought to a climax so I had to leave and he could take Mike over,” said Atlas.

With Atlas gone the issue of who would work in Tyson’s corner arose. Baranski would be tapped to organize the sparring partners and work as cutman during fights. Kevin Rooney just months before lost a fight to Alexis Arguello, and lost so badly that it snuffed out any hope of his earning a shot at the welterweight title. When Atlas left, Rooney, his boyhood friend, took over as Tyson’s trainer.

Atlas was determined to continue working with the other boys in the boxing club. Some of their parents confronted D’Amato about his dismissal. D’Amato lied. He told them that Atlas had quit in order to work with professionals in New York. The parents knew that Atlas hadn’t left Catskill at all. Desperate to cover himself, D’Amato launched a smear campaign against Atlas. He spread rumors among the town officials who supported the club with funding that Atlas had taken up with the Mafia. He recounted tales of Atlas’s troubled youth—the street fights, the suicide attempts, and a score of other factual, and not so factual, stories. Atlas was forced to leave Catskill, but the rumors followed. He couldn’t get work at any of the New York gyms. Eventually, one of the parents, who was also a member of the Catskill Town Recreation Board and an executive at IBM, got the word to one of D’Amato’s supporters that he would have the gym closed if the rumors didn’t stop. They did, and Atlas slowly started to get work training professionals at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, New York.

Looking back on those days with the benefit of hindsight, Atlas didn’t sound angry or bitter. After training professionals on his own for almost ten years, he has learned that some young men can’t be changed, that they are coded somehow to turn out a certain way. When that behavior is enforced by others, there’s not much anyone could do. “We didn’t do everything we could have for Mike. But maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. We could have just been given what was always going to be there,” he said, and then added: “Maybe Cus was right. If we did it my way, Tyson might never have become champion.”

Atlas paused a moment, as if trying to decide whether his next thought would be taken for sour grapes. He didn’t care anymore; for Atlas it was the truth. “This syndrome about Mike when he turned pro, that he was superhuman, Iron Mike, was bullshit. You know, I never thought he’d be a durable champion.”

* * *

After his mother’s death, Tyson became more devoted to D’Amato as a trainer and mentor, and also as a surrogate father. Tyson spoke for the first time of one day being heavyweight champion. He poured himself into boxing to a degree no one involved in his life then—D’Amato, Ewald, Matt Baranski, Kevin Rooney, or Jim Jacobs—had yet seen in him, or in any other boxer past and present.

“Cus would be sitting in one chair, and Mike across from him in the other, both of them reading fight books. For hours Mike would sit there reading and then asking Cus questions,” recalled Ewald.

All the boys in the house had some claim on D’Amato’s attention and his role as mentor. D’Amato never hid his special feelings for Tyson. Tyson, for the first time, seemed to feel the same way. “Mike got very angry if one of the other boys made fun of Cus,” said Ewald.

At the dinner table lectures, Tyson played chief supplicant. “Hey, Cus, was Joe Gans a good fighter?” he would ask, feigning lack of knowledge, because it was likely that Tyson had spent that whole afternoon reading about Gans, a turn-of-the-century lightweight champion known for his courage. Tyson got the bare facts from the books, and could remember them in detail, but D’Amato explained the significance of a fighter’s achievements: the skills he had, or lacked, the mental battles he fought, how he was situated in the great big canvas of the sport. “Mike mastered the facts; he had a photographic memory,” said Ewald.

At that time as well, Tyson asked Jimmy Jacobs to send up old boxing films for him to watch. Every week a shipment would arrive of a half-dozen films or more and Tyson would sit with D’Amato and examine them in detail. Tyson was interested in the boxing, of course, but more so in the personas of the great champions. It was not that important to him how Jack Dempsey, for example, fought. Tyson watched the films to find signs of the champion’s identity. As someone who had trouble establishing his own sense of self, it was a natural impulse to search and borrow from others.

Tyson marveled at the bravado of Jack Johnson, the most famous of black heavyweight champions, who caught punches with his open glove, talked to people in the stands during the fight, and laughed in the faces of his hapless opponents. He liked the Spartan, warrior look of Jack Dempsey. He found out that among the fighters of the 1920s gold teeth were a status symbol, and had two of his upper front teeth capped in gold.

D’Amato also told him the story of how early twentieth-century black fighter Sam Langford, the “Boston Tar Baby,” used to wear a lot of jewelry until he was approached one day on a train by an elderly and distinguished-looking man. “I want to congratulate you on a fine career,” the older man said in a respectful tone, then left. Langford’s manager asked if he recognized the man. He hadn’t. It was steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. “But he wasn’t wearing any jewelry, or nothing fancy,” Langford was reputed to have said. The manager replied, “He doesn’t need to. He knows who he is.” After hearing that story, Tyson vowed never to wear the heavy gold chains and pendants then fashionable among some young blacks.

The departure of Atlas also appeared to make Tyson more determined about his training. It was as if he refused to give in to the thought that the absence of the person who had helped him through so many emotional crises in the ring could stop his rise. Tom Patti remembered the advent of that new intensity. “My room was below Mike’s. At night when we were supposed to be asleep, Mike was up shadowboxing for hours. I could hear the thumping and grunting.”

This new Tyson was devoted to D’Amato and boxing, and more believing in the dream of his future. He lived the role of surrogate son and disciplined fighter, and of course continued to win fights with a single knockout punch. With Lorna dead, and D’Amato and Catskill and becoming champion his only other recourse, Tyson moved himself onto the center stage of the drama. He would believe that the paradox was solved—that D’Amato did truly love him—even if the evidence, the proof, wasn’t in yet. He would live that little fiction. Tyson played the role well, as did D’Amato and everyone else who obtained a stake in his growing career. Tyson would have his lapses, he’d bounce between the light and dark of his personality, but in general he tried to follow the script.

The first big lapse occurred at the 1982 U.S. National Championships. The flaw, the overwhelming passivity, struck again. The opponent, Al Evans, had far more experience, yet not enough to make Tyson look as bad as he did. Evans pummeled Tyson to the canvas three times and won the bout by technical knockout. The same thing happened at the 1983 National Golden Gloves Tournament. Tyson lost to Craig Payne in the final. D’Amato and Rooney would claim that the referees and judges unfairly penalized Tyson for using a professional style. But it was the flaw. Tyson gave in to the opponent’s game plan. He stopped punching, which made him easy to hit, or at least easy enough that in three rounds of boxing his opponent racked up the most points.

When Tyson fought well, he functioned like an efficient machine of destruction. When he fought badly, he picked up some bad habits. Before a fight, in the dressing room, he would work himself up into a fevered intensity, which he would then unleash in the first round. If the opponent didn’t go down under the initial barrage, Tyson would get frustrated. In that state he’d forget D’Amato’s defensive and offensive techniques and look like a fighter out of control. Sometimes that’s as far as the regression went. In those cases Tyson’s natural strength and speed were usually more than adequate for victory. But if he regressed more, into the passivity, he tended to hug his opponent and lock arms—to “clinch. “D’Amato’s excuse was that he clinched in order to rest. The reality was that his will to fight had drained away.

Matt Baranski, who started in Tyson’s corner as cut man right after Atlas left, remembered the first time he witnessed Tyson’s self-defeating tendencies. “Mike was a wild man in the locker room before a fight. He’d shadowbox as hard as he could for an hour. Once when Mike was sixteen, he fought this kid in Boston. The kid was only seventeen; he didn’t have a lot of experience. Mike dropped him in the second round and the kid came back and boxed and boxed. Mike started to get tired. If it had gone another round, he would have lost. I warned Cus about that and he said not to worry about it, Mike’s in great shape.”

Baranski soon saw other problems in Tyson. He knew Tyson was capable of affection and attachment, especially toward D’Amato. He also saw the exact opposite. “He had this dog and once I saw him kick it hard. I told him that if he wasn’t so big I’d punch him out for doing that. He denied it to my face. I was standing right there and he denied it.

“He got pigeons, too, put them in a coop behind the house. Maybe he liked them, but he never cared for them. He’d let them freeze in the winter. It didn’t bother him a bit,” added Baranski.

Baranski doubted the depth of feeling Tyson and D’Amato had for each other. At times, they seemed to be bound by mutual self-interest. “Tyson didn’t care for anything or anybody. Mike had it in his head from the beginning that I got to look out for Mike and that’s all there is to it. He lied to Cus all the time. Once, after a fight, he disappeared for three days. Cus asked me to go find him. He showed up with two pigeons in the backseat of the car, told Cus he’d been gone just that one day. Cus knew it was three days. Everyone did.

“I’d ask Cus why he put up with that shit—the lies, Mike screaming at him, spitting on him even, incredible stuff. He told me he was ready to give up on him. He couldn’t stand Mike acting like an animal.”

Baranski felt that this wasn’t the normal feuding between a mentor and protégé, or even a father and son. There’s no doubt that they felt close, but more in the way of Siamese twins. It was as if they had to be with each other in order to exist. The necessity of the attachment created resentment.

“Cus disregarded a lot of things about Mike because it came with making a champion,” said Baranski. “Like Mike’s burning out in a fight. Cus knew that most of the time he’d knock the other guy out before that fatigue set in. I also thought it was like a way to control Mike and get the best results from him. If he’s fighting, he’s not getting in trouble. And if he’s fighting with bad intentions, which was most of the time, he’s winning.”

In 1983, D’Amato had to start preparing Tyson for the Olympic trials. He put him on what for some fighters would be a punishing schedule. For Tyson, though, maintaining a constant level of intensity suited his desperate urge for psychic release. On August 12, Tyson entered the Ohio State Fair National Tournament. On the first day, he knocked out his opponent in forty-two seconds of the first round. On the second day, Tyson punched out the two front teeth of his foe and left him unconscious for ten minutes. On the third day, for the tournament championship, his adversary, the young man who had won the National Golden Gloves title that year, quit before the fight with a bad hand.

The day after Tyson won the Ohio State Fair competition by default, he flew to Colorado Springs for the 1983 U.S. National Championships. Six other fighters had entered the heavyweight division. When Tyson arrived, four dropped out. He automatically advanced to the semifinals. Two victories later—both first-round knockouts—he had another amateur title. In early 1984, he won the National Golden Gloves. All that remained was to get through the Olympic trials, then go onto the games in Los Angeles. With the stiffest competition boycotting—Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union—D’Amato felt that a gold medal was certain. Olympic victory, as it had for so many fighters (Floyd Patterson, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, and Sugar Ray Leonard, among others), would launch Tyson’s pro career. D’Amato believed that in two years, three at most, Tyson could capture the heavyweight championship of the world.

Preparations for Tyson’s pro debut had to be made. Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton had by 1984 invested more than $200,000 in Tyson’s development. That included paying $1,000 a week at one point for a single sparring partner, Marvin Stinson, who at the time was working with heavyweight champion Larry Holmes. As soon as the Olympics were over, they planned to sign Tyson to a management contract and start the march to the title. They had handled two other fighters before, and with some success: Wilfred Benitez and Edwin Rosario, both in the lower weight classes. A heavyweight could become a cultural icon. More mass-market appeal meant larger fight purses, product endorsements, and commercials. Tyson’s stunning first-round knockout victories had already garnered him a great deal of attention in regional markets among fight fans. But now that he was about to cross over into the national consciousness at the Olympics, Jacobs and Cayton realized that for publicity purposes they needed a story to tell. That Tyson won fights with a single punch wasn’t enough. They needed something more humanizing.

Jacobs talked to Alex Wallau, a boxing analyst with ABC Sports and a friend since the mid-1970s. Wallau agreed to tape an interview with D’ Amato and Tyson at the house. The idea was to televise a profile of the two during the Olympics. A look at the unedited version of the tape revealed the rough outlines of a story line that Jacobs and Cayton hoped to use as a publicity device at the Olympics.

Wallau’s questions focused on the obvious human-interest news hook: the unique relationship between an old Italian-American fight guru living in the country and a young, black boxing protégé from the bowels of the New York slums.

D’Amato first extolled the virtues of his fighter.

“He’s able to throw a punch, like lightning right next to you, and any punch he throws hits where he was and not where he is and in that position he can let a bomb go without any inhibition whatsoever,” said D’Amato. “I’ve never seen a fighter who can make the adjustment on so little so rapidly and do so much with it. I’ve never seen a fighter like Mike.”

“How would you say that Cus has helped you change your life?” Wallau asked Tyson.

“He’s changed my life by helping me deal with people. Before I couldn’t talk to people. I just wanted to be alone.” Then later Tyson added: “He’s like my father. I never look at it like he’s my trainer or my manager. I go by the way he feels about me and it’s like a father-son relationship.”

Wallau posed the same question to D’Amato.

“I never let my feelings get involved, no matter how much affection I have,” D’Amato said. Then, as if realizing he’d made a mistake, he corrected himself. “Having watched him come from what he was to where he is, I can say honestly I have a very deep affection for him.”

On the subject of his future, Tyson downplayed the hoopla over his prospects as champion. Something in him resisted hype. “Dreams are just when you’re starting off, that’s the image, you have the dream to push the motivation. I just want to be alive ten years from now. People say I’m going to be a million-dollar fighter … well, I know what I am and that’s what counts more than anything else, because the people don’t know what I go through. They think I’m born this way. They don’t know what it took to get this way.”

D’Amato wanted to get back to his feelings for Tyson. The core of it turned out to be a soft-pedaled admission of self-interest. “If he weren’t here, I probably wouldn’t be alive today. I believe that a person dies when he no longer wants to live.… But I have a reason with Mike here. He gives me the motivation. And I will stay alive and I will watch him become a success. I will not leave until that happens.”

D’Amato then gave the whole team—Tyson, himself, Jacobs, and Cayton—a plug. “When I leave he will not only know how to fight. He will not only understand many things, but he will also know how to take care of himself, because I have good friends like Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton who are thoroughly and completely honest and competent in every area, who I know will continue doing what I have done, and probably a lot better than I’ve done.”

Tyson ended the interview in the contradictory posture of the cool, calculating professional detached from all other concerns beyond winning—except that he also wanted to please his mentors.

“We just do our jobs and that’s it. I just want to hold up my part of the team. And that’s to succeed and make everybody happy.”

“What will it take to make everybody happy?” asked Wallau.

“Do my job inside the ring, and they do their job outside the ring.”

All the elements of a compelling narrative were there. Here was the fighter with the almost inexplicable abilities (“hits where he was, not where he is”) who could destroy an opponent without “inhibition,” which was as if to say without remorse or pity. Such a persona was frowned on in the amateurs as too much the product of professional training. In the pro ranks, however, the persona of the Ring Destroyer would play well to national television audiences. The one-punch knockout fighter was the stuff of spectacle.

But those were hardly humanizing qualities. What made for good commerce did little to create basic, personal empathy for Tyson. Fortunately, Jacobs and Cayton could serve up his relationship with D’Amato. That would humanize him: D’Amato had saved Tyson from sure self-destruction in the ghetto, had given him a new life, a readymade family, and a father’s love. In return, Tyson had given D’Amato a purpose for living.

Finally, the narrative needed practical expression. Who would take this man-child fighter driven by primal forces and introduce him to the world? Who would convert into reality the Old Sage’s dream to make another champion before his death? Of course, the capable and honest Jacobs and Cayton.

In June, Tyson left for Las Vegas to compete in the Olympic trials. D’Amato and Jacobs considered the trials a mere formality. To everyone’s shock, Tyson lost twice to Henry Tillman, a six-foot-three, 195-pound former gang member from South Central Los Angeles. He would not compete in the Olympics. Tyson later accused Tillman of trying to stick thumbs in his eye. D’Amato blamed the amateur boxing establishment for taking out on Tyson their dislike for him. But a look at the fight proved that although it was close, Tillman won by scoring more points. He simply fought smarter.

That’s how Alex Wallau read the fight. “Mike didn’t fight a very smart fight. He let himself get frustrated and I sensed that he was in conflict about what style he was supposed to use, professional or amateur. He couldn’t make the adjustment to amateur style.”

Tillman’s trainer put it more bluntly. “Tyson boxed like a robot and when Henry started to pick him off with jabs, it was like pulling out a fuse.”

D’Amato and Jacobs were stunned by the loss. All of the promise that had built up around Tyson over the last four years seemed in question. He was capable of spectacular successes, and stunning, inexplicable defeats. Despite all the psychological reordering, the work in the gym, battles with teachers, social workers, and tutors, and all the abuse D’Amato took from Tyson, despite the strings pulled and lies told, the cover-ups and the loss of friends, with all that had been expended, Tyson remained an enigma. For that D’Amato disliked Tyson, deeply. He vented those feelings to a boxing promoter at the trials: “He said that Mike was a piece of shit and an animal and that if he had his way, he’d throw Mike out onto the street,” said the promoter.

But of course D’Amato didn’t have the choice. More than anything, he wanted that third champion. He was obsessed. Just before leaving Las Vegas, he hatched a backup plan to get Tyson the gold medal. Tyson had been selected as an alternate to the team. He’d be permitted to work out at the training camp with the other boys until the competition began. At first, D’Amato was so bitter about the loss that he didn’t want Tyson to go. Then he remembered the rule that if any team member was knocked out in sparring he’d have to rest for several weeks, with the alternate taking his place. “Cus told Mike to go out there to the camp and knock out anybody he could,” said Baranski. “Mike stayed in the camp exactly one day. The other trainers knew what he was up to and didn’t want him around.”

After the Olympics (Tillman won the heavyweight gold medal), D’Amato and Jacobs altered their plan for Tyson’s pro career. They could never be sure which Tyson would step into the ring, the knockout machine or the passive little boy. It seemed that the flaw could strike with almost any opponent. Still, there was a type they had to avoid matching Tyson with. A fighter who combined basic boxing skills with good movement, confidence, and poise—someone who could easily frustrate Tyson—was the riskiest.

Without the fanfare of an Olympic gold medal, promoting Tyson would also be difficult. The television, newspaper, and magazine exposure that came with a gold medal would have sent him into the national consciousness in a ready-made, prepackaged form. His greatness as a fighter would have been largely assumed. Now they had to build his reputation from the bottom up. That posed a whole different series of management and marketing challenges. Jim Jacobs would dive into the task with the same obsession that D’Amato had the training.