Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

Chapter Five

Mike Tyson’s professional career began on March 6, 1985. One year, eight months, and sixteen days later, he would capture the heavyweight championship of the world. The list of firsts which led up to that event in sports history is, by all appearances, mind-boggling.

He would win the title at the age of twenty, younger than any other heavyweight. At that age, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano were still in the amateurs. No other heavyweight ever captured the title in so short a span of time. No other heavyweight ever achieved as high a percentage of first-round knockouts as Tyson—40.5 percent, or fifteen in twenty-seven fights—in his career leading up to the crown.

It wasn’t victory just by brute force. Tyson acquired the subtler though far less recognized distinction of defensive excellence. Due to his training in the D’Amato “system,” he would be hit far fewer times moving forward than had any other notable heavyweight moving in any direction in the ring.

What won’t go into the statistical record books, or the sports lore, is the degree to which those achievements were the product of design. No boxer becomes champion by serendipity. But the careers of some boxers are more intently, and successfully, manipulated than others. In the hands of D’Amato, Jacobs, and Cayton, that manipulation almost reached the level of conspiracy. Recognizing this fact doesn’t severely diminish Tyson’s achievement. But it does put it in proper perspective.

Informing the whole effort was a single, unspoken motive. None of the men could waste any time getting Tyson a shot at the title. Each of them was on borrowed time.

D’Amato was seventy-seven years old. He had little energy to travel long distances, let alone keep up with the punishing regimen of watching over a rising contender. Tyson was his last hurrah.

In 1985, Jacobs entered the fifth year of his leukemia. According to Dr. Gene Brody, the New York specialist who diagnosed and treated Jacobs, in the early years he managed fairly well. Starting in 1982, Jacobs received occasional doses of two drugs—Leukeran and Prednisone—that kept the disease under control. By 1985, the distorting effect of the cancer on his blood cell count made Jacobs increasingly prone to simple infections. He also suffered enlargement of the lymph nodes in his neck. As Jacobs well knew, chronic lymphoid leukemia, or CLL, is incurable. It’s also capricious. He could die with only a few months’ warning.

Cayton, of course, also knew that. Jacobs told him of the disease, and his prognosis, in 1981. Since then Tyson’s success as an amateur, and the prospect of making him champion, had given Cayton a new interest in his business career. He delayed plans for retirement despite recurring attacks of endocarditis, which had been treated successfully with massive doses of antibiotics. Still, Cayton was a sixty-nine-year-old man. He’d probably outlive D’Amato, but it was a toss-up with Jacobs. No doubt, somewhere in the back of his mind, Cayton wondered if he’d be left having to finish (and profit from) the job himself.

With their collectively fragile mortalities as the background, they devised three basic guidelines for developing Tyson’s career.

First and foremost, they could not risk another defeat in the ring. For an amateur losing was excusable. For a professional it would severely diminish the aura they wanted to build around Tyson as an indestructible force in the ring and an inevitable champion of the heavyweight division. Opponents had to be selected carefully, with all factors—such as fight duration, ring size, and glove weight—stacked in Tyson’s favor.

Second, they hoped to schedule a fight at least once a month. That served several purposes. It fit in with the mortality factor. It was also a way of maintaining control over Tyson and sustaining his burning intensity. And as long as he could be kept at that upper level of performance, Tyson’s tendency to fall into a passive state in the ring might just be avoided.

Third, just as D’Amato had with Floyd Patterson, they had to find promoters willing to let them make most of the decisions. That was the best way to retain absolute control over Tyson’s career.

In this first stage of Tyson’s career, they needed a completely malleable promoter. Matt Baranski suggested a husband-and-wife team based in Troy, New York, an hour north of Catskill. The Millers ran a true mom-and-pop promoting business. They rarely made much money and certainly couldn’t afford to lose any. Jacobs and Cayton would finance the whole promotion. The Millers would be paid out of profits from ticket sales, if any. Jacobs and Cayton also promised to cover all losses.

Tyson’s professional debut came against a club fighter named Hector Mercedes on March 6, 1985, in Albany, New York. Tyson’s hair was cropped short at the sides in a homage to the Spartan macho aesthetic of Jack Dempsey. Tyson swarmed over the taller, slower Mercedes, who must have felt as if he were fighting two opponents: one who only punched and another who eluded. Tyson then settled down into a more fluid expression of his unique style. He’d revised the “peek-a-boo” by holding his gloves on either side of the chin instead of the temple. That way his punches got off more quickly. He knocked out Mercedes in the first round.

As expected, the fight did not turn a profit. Jacobs and Cayton paid Tyson a purse of five hundred dollars. D’Amato paid Rooney 10 percent of that, gave Tyson one hundred dollars, and put the remainder away.

Tyson’s second fight came on April 10 against Trent Singleton. This time he looked more studied. He charged straight in, feinted with his head, slipped and weaved, all the while not getting hit. Then, suddenly, Tyson popped up in close range and let go a series of left and right hooks to the body and head. Singleton went down twice within seconds. When he got up, Tyson reverted to a more conventional offense. He pinned Singleton against the ropes and threw a series of punches, displaying textbook “finishing” abilities. Singelton crumbled. Tyson lunged down to hit his prone opponent again—a serious infraction of the rules—but was stopped by the referee. He turned to his cornermen, Kevin Rooney and Matt Baranski, and smirked.

In his third fight, five weeks later, Tyson regressed. His first two opponents had been tall and black. This one, Don Halpin, was the same height as Tyson and white. From the moment the bell rang, Tyson looked sluggish. There was little head and upper body movement. At times, he let his gloves drop.

Halpin made things worse by standing up to Tyson’s punches. He also tended to crouch, which may have confused Tyson. From early in the amateurs, Tyson was always more effective with a taller opponent. It gave him the chance to use his smaller size to advantage. By the second round, he had started to get lazy on the inside, which enabled Halpin to connect with a few straight rights.

By the fourth round, Tyson began to look like any other conventionally trained fighter. Fortunately, because of his superior hand speed and power, he was better at being average than Halpin. Tyson won by a knockout in the fourth, and tried to hit Halpin as he fell. This time the referee openly rebuked him.

It wasn’t Tyson’s foul play—and there would be much more of it to come—that worried D’Amato and Jacobs afterwards. The passivity had struck their prospect once again, and this time with a handpicked, mediocre opponent. They had no idea what to do about it. “They didn’t know Mike,” Baranski said. “He was out of control most of the time.”

For the next fight Jacobs arranged to get Tyson on ESPN, the sports cable station that stages a weekly fightnight to showcase up-and-coming contenders. These events were organized by top Rank Boxing, owned by Bob Arum. Arum was one of the country’s two top promoters, the other being Don King. Jacobs ran a risk letting Tyson come within Arum’s grasp. Like King, he was notorious for spiriting away other people’s fighters with promises of big money. Jacobs had had one such battle with Arum over Wilfred Benitez.

But Arum had something that Jacobs desperately wanted. Due to his losses at the Olympic trials, Tyson had no chance yet of getting on one of the big three broadcast networks. He had to start with cable. Jacobs made an appeal to Arum’s appetite for power. For several years Arum had been battling with King over turf. Arum ended up doing most of the major middleweight fights, and King the heavyweights. Jacobs knew that Arum had always wanted to get his hands on a major heavyweight contender and challenge King for control of that division.

Tyson’s first fight under Arum was against Ricardo Spain on June 20 in Atlantic City at the Resorts International hotel-casino. D’Amato and Jacobs didn’t want to take any chances with Spain. His height, six-foot-two, didn’t worry them, and neither did his record of seven wins, five by knockout. It was his weight, a mere 184¼ pounds, or around thirty pounds under the average for a heavyweight. “They were really afraid that because he was so much lighter than Mike, Spain would run,” said Nick Beck, who was at the fight. “Chasing him around the ring would have made Mike look bad.”

The fight was scheduled for four rounds. They decided the night before to try increasing it to six, which would give Tyson plenty of time to score a knockout. Jacobs called Spain’s manager. He didn’t want to do it. Jacobs demanded to talk to Spain. “He offered Spain a few hundred dollars on top of his purse for two more rounds,” said Beck. Spain took the money.

Tyson knocked him out in thirty-nine seconds of the first round. Spain, whose nom de pug was “The Ram,” had unwisely decided to stand and fight, a mistake with Tyson, as many other fighters would soon discover. Ironically, Jacobs’s offer may have also made Spain overconfident. If they were that worried about their man’s chances, Spain may have reasoned, maybe he wasn’t such a threat. No doubt that was the conclusion they hoped Spain would reach.

A few weeks later, Tyson went on ESPN again, this time to fight six-foot-four, 226½ pound John Alderson, a twenty-one-year-old former West Virginia coal miner. Alderson was four victories into his return from a three-year layoff from the ring. He made the perfect victim for Tyson. He had the tall heavyweight’s habit of leaning away from a punch. That might have worked against Tyson if Alderson also had good hand speed and leg work, plus punch accuracy, but he didn’t. Tyson easily eluded the punches. He then chopped away with combinations at the body and head as if trying to fell an old red oak, bloodying Alderson’s nose and eye, and dropping him twice until the referee called the fight over in the second round.

The ESPN commentator noted that Tyson switched to being a southpaw, or a left-hander, midway through the first round. He had indeed been taught—perhaps after a suggestion by Jacobs, who was lethal with both hands on the handball court—to fight as a right- and left-hander. That confused opponents. They couldn’t figure out which side of Tyson was the bigger threat. The answer, of course, was both.

Jacobs felt that Tyson had proven himself enough to deserve a regular schedule on ESPN. Arum, in one of the biggest blunders of his promoting career, disagreed. Incredibly, he told Jacobs that his matchmakers considered Tyson an average talent. Arum refused to give Jacobs the dates. Jacobs made contact with a promoter in Houston, Jeff Levine, who would go on to handle eight Tyson fights. Jacobs and Cayton, with their long, bitter memories, never forgave Arum his lack of insight. They did one more fight with Arum, then never again let him within a foot of Tyson’s career.

In Tyson’s next fight, against Larry Sims in Poughkeepsie, New York, he faltered. That is, after an unsuccessful initial barrage, he seemed to get frustrated and lose the seamless union of defensive and offensive movement. It took three rounds to knock Sims out. As with all his fights, this one was taped on video. But Jacobs and Cayton would later deny that a tape had been made. The Sims tape was destroyed. They wanted a record of first-round knockouts and nothing less.

Tyson’s next five fights were on average three weeks apart. Every opponent was tall, slow, and used little head or lateral movement—in other words, tailor-made for Tyson. Some of them didn’t deserve to be in the ring against a fighter of Tyson’s caliber. Not surprisingly, he set off on binge of first-round knockouts.

In pro fight number seven, the slow hands of six-foot-two Lorenzo Canady proved his downfall. Tyson simply ducked underneath, dipped to his left, and let go a concussive left hook to the head. Next was Mike (“Jack”) Johnson, fighting his first bout in more than two years. He sank to the canvas after Tyson slipped, then ripped into him with a left hook to the ribs. Johnson got up and Tyson delivered a straight right through the gloves that dislodged two front teeth, which remained stuck in the hard, rubber mouth guard. Tyson turned to Rooney and pointed at Johnson with a gleeful look that said, “Look at that! Did you see what I just did!”

Donnie Long was dubbed “The Master of Disaster.” He, too, had recently come back after a two-year layoff. Long had a tendency to hold his gloves out as if displaying a sign. That left a big space, through which Tyson drove a straight right. A few more punches and Long was out. Back in his corner, Tyson blew a kiss at the camera.

“Big Bob” Colay, another tall opponent, came on a platter. He held his hands low and tried to dance, but he lacked the leg speed to move out of Tyson’s way. He pawed with left jabs that Tyson easily slipped—to both the right and left, to Colay’s amazement. His trademark left hook to the head put Colay out in thirty-seven seconds of the first round.

After knocking out Sterling Benjamin with another left hook, Tyson didn’t bother to wait for the count to make sure he stayed down. He walked over to Rooney and Baranski and thrust his hands through the ropes, saying nothing, just demanding with the gesture that the gloves be removed. He’d finished. Job done. As they were about to cut the tape away and undo the strings, Tyson glanced over his shoulder to make sure Benjamin remained prone. After all, the unexpected could happen.

It did. Three days later—November 4, 1985—D’Amato died of pneumonia. Through most of October, D’Amato had battled the illness at home. Always distrustful of doctors, he wouldn’t go to the hospital. Finally, he had no choice. By then it was too late. D’Amato spent a week in a nearby local hospital but didn’t respond to the drugs. He moved down to Mount Sinai in New York, and died a few days later.

The only person with him during those last days was not Jacobs or Tyson or Torres, but Tom Patti, who still lived in the house even though he’d given up boxing. “I don’t know why Mike didn’t come,” said Patti. “Maybe he didn’t want to see Cus like that. Cus looked bad, all bloated up.” Patti paused a moment. “Jimmy Jacobs should have been there. I learnt something about Jimmy after that.”

D’Amato was buried in a Catholic cemetery on the outskirts of Catskill. The gravestone is a simple pink granite slab, a few feet high, a few feet wide. Chiseled on it are D’Amato’s own words:

“A boy comes to me with a spark of interest. I feed the spark and it becomes a flame. I feed the flame and it becomes a fire. I feed the fire and it becomes a roaring blaze.” And then beneath, “Cus.” The day after the funeral, Tyson returned by himself and poured a bottle of champagne over the grave.

It was Jacobs’s idea to put those words on the gravestone. They focused on a small part of what D’Amato’s life represented. But they were more apt in describing Jacobs’s primary commercial ambition: promoting heavyweight contender Mike Tyson. Patterson was at most a flickering flame, Torres a mere glow. Only Tyson blazed.

Jacobs didn’t overtly exploit the event of D’Amato’s death to advance his interest with Tyson. He did, however, subtly leverage from it as Patti noticed at the November 19 memorial service that Jacobs organized at D’Amato’s former gym, the Gramercy, on Fourteenth Street. Dozens of people came; old fighters long forgotten, boys whom D’Amato had helped, and friends from his childhood. Jacobs asked only authors Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and Budd Schulberg, among others, to give eulogies—which he then videotaped.

“He wanted to have segments just in case they came in handy promoting Mike,” said Tom Patti. “Jimmy was using Mike’s relationship with Cus. He wrote a program for the memorial service and quoted Cus about fighting and what makes a great fighter. Beneath the quote he wrote in things like ‘and Mike Tyson is what Cus meant.’ That was true, but what Jimmy did wasn’t right. He was thinking about himself, not Cus or Mike.”

With D’Amato gone, Jacobs could think about the opportunity of Mike Tyson in different terms. He no longer had the benefit of D’Amato’s wisdom on managing a fighter. But he’d listened to D’Amato for years on the principles of the job, and had practiced them with other lesser fighters. “Cus had gone over the plan for Mike endlessly with Jimmy: how often he should fight, who the best opponents would be, when he’d probably be ready for the title, how to handle promoters—everything you could think of,” said Baranski. “Then he told Jimmy what Mike was probably going to be like after he won the title. How he’d change, what to look for to head off problems, guys muscling in on him. Cus had the plan, and all Jimmy had to do was follow it.”

Without D’Amato around, Jacobs knew that the management of Tyson had become greatly simplified. “It would have eventually come to a head between Jimmy and Cus,” continued Baranski. “The bigger Mike got, the more say Cus would have wanted. That would have drove Jimmy nuts. Bill, too. With Cus gone they breathed a lot easier.”

Maybe so. But it’s almost a moot point, because if conflicts had arisen over management issues, D’Amato wouldn’t have had much legal recourse. Once Tyson turned eighteen, D’Amato’s guardianship approval wasn’t needed anymore on documents. Jacobs and Cayton had tied Tyson into a series of agreements that gave them control over every aspect of his career.

They stuck to the plan of Jacobs as manager and Cayton working behind the scenes on contract negotiations. That suited their temperaments and abilities. They also didn’t have any choice. According to the rules and regulations of the New York State Athletic Commission, a body that oversees boxing and wrestling, a boxer is permitted to have only one manager of record.

Still, Cayton had solidified his background role. On September 28, 1984, he obtained Tyson’s signature on a contract that made him “exclusive personal manager” for the extraordinary long term of seven years. He would represent Tyson for commercial appearances, product endorsements, and all entertainment activities under the corporate name of Reel Sports, Inc.

Cayton was sole owner of Reel Sports. He also had a private agreement with Jacobs to share evenly the personal manager’s commission. That was the other unusual aspect of the contract besides the lengthy term. Personal service agents for athletes usually claim a commission of from 10 to 15 percent. Cayton took 33⅓ percent.

D’Amato, who for so long had prided himself on working in the fighter’s interests, did not object to either the term of the Reel Sports agreement or the commission. Nor did he advise Tyson to get a lawyer to review the contract.. Perhaps D’Amato felt that his review was sufficient. He signed the agreement. Under his name it read “Cus D’Amato, Adviser to Michael Tyson, who shall have final approval of all decisions involving Michael Tyson.” D’Amato’s legal position was shaky. He didn’t have a separate contract with Tyson making him exclusive adviser.

A few weeks after the Reel Sports agreement was signed, Jacobs officially contracted with Tyson to become manager. That agreement used the standard Athletic Commission boxer-manager form. Nothing in the specified term (four years) or purse split (two-thirds for Tyson, one-third for Jacobs) was unusual. That same day, Jacobs and Cayton used another Athletic Commission form to put their division of Tyson’s purses in writing. The “assignment of manager’s contract” enabled Jacobs to legally give Cayton 50 percent of his earnings from Tyson.

* * *

Ever since doing the Alex Wallau interview with ABC, Jacobs and Cayton had looked for new media opportunities to push the narrative of the relationship between D’Amato and Tyson. They knew that every great fighter, if he was going to cross over into the mainstream audience, needed a story. The more empathetic the tale, the better. In other words, the more Tyson could be defined through a device America understood, the more likely he’d achieve general acceptance and popularity. Given Tyson’s continued bent for the wild side—all through 1985 he continued to disappear for days at a time in Albany and New York, and on one occasion mugged a man in an elevator for his wallet—that story had to move center stage. It would popularize, sanitize, and create the ever-ready, all-purpose rationalization.

Soon after Tyson turned professional, Jacobs pitched a documentary profile of D’Amato and Tyson to the producers of CBS “Sunday Morning,” hosted by the avuncular Charles Kuralt. On June 2, 1985, the piece aired. Narrative had been refined into the fable of Cus and the Kid.

The initial image showed Kuralt and D’Amato strolling across the lawn of the house. Kuralt’s voice-over cut in: “Cus D’Amato lived a full, rich, embattled life in the big cities. He managed Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight championship of the world almost thirty years ago. But boxing passed him by. And left him in exile in the country.”

The image cut to D’Amato in the Catskill gym.

“He considered himself a teacher, a shaper of character … and then suddenly Cus D’Amato is handling fire again. Michael Tyson, a wild, angry teenager from a nearby reform school. Cus, who never married, adopted Michael, took him into his home, taught him about jabbing through fear.”

Kuralt talked about each giving the other the same gift, “a future.” The piece flashed back to D’Amato’s time with Patterson and their eventual estrangement. Kuralt then dug up Patterson and asked if he had any advice for Tyson: “Have faith, confidence in the man you trust. In Cus.”

D’Amato claimed, rather incredibly, for Tyson had had only three pro fights up to that point, that he could “go down in history as the greatest fighter of all time.”

Kuralt then all but sainted D’Amato. “Cus D’Amato is more than a manager of champions. He’s a savior of souls. He saved Floyd Patterson and he is saving Mike Tyson.”

D’Amato struck the self-sacrificing pose of a man more interested in souls than the dictates of his own ego: “I succeed when he becomes champion of the world and independent of me.”

Kuralt’s final remarks tried to strike an ominous note, as if we had only seen the prologue: “But they need each other now. Because someday soon they will be coming out of the country, coming hard and coming fast for the lights of the city.”

The following September, an Albany television station added its own flourishes to the fable. The voice-over described Tyson as “a very quiet and gentle man outside the ring,” a fighter who didn’t want to be the “boss,” a “boxing historian” whose “gentle side shows with his pigeons.” Tyson claimed that D’Amato never had to worry about where he was because at “nighttime I’m at my coop looking after my birds.”