Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers,

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992

First published by Birch Lane Press 1991

Copyright © Monteith M. Illingworth 1991

Monteith Illingworth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780586216781

Ebook Edition © MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780008193355

Version: 2016-05-13

Dedication

For Crystal, the love of my life

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

* * *

“You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re part of all the sound and anguish and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.”

—Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: The Champion Made

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Two: The Champion Betrayed

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Part Three: The Man Remade

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

PART ONE

The Champion Made

Chapter One

Not much is known about Lorna Tyson. She was born Loma Smith in 1930, probably in the South. Like so many other blacks after World War II, she migrated north in search of work and more social freedoms. There is no account of her keeping in touch with or ever seeing her parents, siblings, or any other relatives. Mike Tyson had no recollection of such extended family on his mother’s side. He has described Lorna as around five-foot-six with a big, sturdy frame. She had medium-brown skin and dull-gray hair that waved back from her wide face. She wore glasses and had an air of quiet dignity.

At some point during her first years in Brooklyn, New York, she married Percel Tyson, of whom nothing is known. They later divorced. Lorna never remarried. She did fall in love, with Jimmy Kirkpatrick, a heavyset, boisterous roustabout who drove big cars, worked menial construction jobs, and dreamed of owning his own business. Kirkpatrick had sixteen children when he moved in, all of them living with their various mothers. He fathered three more with Lorna. The first was a boy, Rodney, born in 1961. Next came Denise in 1964. Two years later, well into Lorna’s third pregnancy, Kirkpatrick moved out. On June 30, 1966, in Cumberland Hospital, Michael Gerard Tyson was born.

Without the help of Kirkpatrick’s occasional paycheck, Lorna struggled. She worked off and on, once as a nurse’s aide, but made barely enough money to support her family. Another boyfriend, Edward Gillison, moved in. He contributed little. By the time Michael was eight years old, the Tysons had moved four times within Brooklyn. Each move took them deeper into poverty. His last home with Lorna was 178 Amboy Street, Apartment 2A, in the heart of Brownsville, Brooklyn’s most destitute section.

The Tyson family lived in perpetual crisis. Lorna began to drink. She and Gillison argued constantly, and when they fought, Lorna took the worst of it, until one day, while boiling water, she chased Gillison around the apartment and seared him. In between jobs she went on welfare. When the heating bill couldn’t be paid, they all slept in their clothes. Tyson put cardboard in his shoes to cover up the holes. Food was scarce. Meals at times were made of flour and water.

Even genetics seemed to conspire against the family. By the time Rodney was twelve, he weighed a blubbery 280 pounds. Denise also tended to put on weight. They all suffered, but it seemed that the youngest boy suffered most. “Big Head Mike,” as he was known to neighbors in the building, was ridiculed for every little oddity of appearance and character. On the streets, because of his lisp, the other children called Tyson “Little Fairy Boy.” He was bigger than most other children his age, but intensely passive. They beat him up for the lisp, for his shoes, and for whatever he had in his pocket. He wore glasses briefly, and they beat him up for that. Tyson became increasingly withdrawn around other children, and that earned more beatings.

His father had stayed in Brooklyn, and he and the Tysons would have chance meetings. “When Mike was seven, he, Denise, and Rodney were walking down the street in Brownsville and saw their father,” said Camille Ewald, the woman who would later become his surrogate mother. “He dished out a dollar for each of them. Mike threw his on the ground.”

By age nine, Tyson had started keeping pigeons in a coop on the roof of a nearby abandoned building. The family dog, a black Labrador, once killed a half dozen of the birds, piling them up in Tyson’s bedroom. Other kids would steal his pigeons, and he would steal theirs. The only taboo was death. You could steal, but not kill.

One day, Tyson found an older boy taking a bird out of the coop. They argued, and the boy ripped off the bird’s head with a single, vicious twist of his hand. Tyson went into a blind rage and pounced on the boy, punching and kicking with every ounce of strength he could muster.

For any boy, such a battle would have been a watershed event. For a boy raised in Brownsville, it would yield a sense of victory in the perennial battle against overwhelming feelings of helplessness and poverty. Years later, when Tyson became heavyweight champion of the world, that moment of rage would be constructed into an epiphany. Tyson played along. It fit ever so conveniently into his public persona as some primal force of destruction. Tyson would cavalierly recount that and other seminal events as if he had found not just liberation but, when the urges were tempered into systematic violence, empowerment as well.

When he indulged in that persona, he wanted the world to believe that he was a nine-year-old man-child wreaking havoc without a care for the feelings of his victims—a sociopath. He felt nothing and cared for no one. He wanted no one’s love. “I did evil things,” he said in early 1988. His sister, Denise, affirmed the self-portrayal. “It became fun for him to beat up kids,” she said to a reporter also that year. “Everyone was afraid of him. He stopped being called Mike. It became ‘Mike Tyson.’”

The stories tumble out from Tyson. There was the time he and Denise played doctor on a sleeping Rodney. Tyson took a razor black, sliced his arm, and poured in alcohol into the wound. Tyson stopped going to school. He joined a gang, the Jolly Stompers. He drank cheap liquor and smoked cigarettes. He stole from fruit stands. He beat up other kids without provocation. He would offer to carry a woman’s grocery bags, then run off with either the food or her purse. Tyson became an expert pickpocket. He particularly enjoyed ripping gold chains from the necks of women at bus stops. As Tyson once said, he relished a concept of himself as Brownsville’s own Artful Dodger.

Whether those stories were true or not didn’t seem to matter to him. Tyson’s life as champion would reach the point where appearance and reality—what people wanted to believe about him, and who he really was—became hopelessly blurred. He would be raw material to feed cultural curiosity about the nature and origins of sociopathic viciousness. By early 1988, Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith, taking his lead from such stories by Tyson, would succumb to literary romanticism and equate the rage in Tyson with social ethics. “He is justice!” Smith wrote about Tyson after being told about the rooftop battle. “Instincts haven’t made him fight. Outraged innocence has.”

The idea that Tyson became a fighter in order to right the wrongs done to his person, family, neighborhood, class, and race ignored what was probably the most significant point about what really happened on that rooftop. Tyson reveled in a perverse romanticism about his past, to disguise rather than reveal.

The rage was rooted in feelings of confusion about his life—about where his next meal would come from, what his future might be, who would care for him, and most important, whether his mother, or anyone else, loved him. The rage set in motion a vicious cycle in which rage only pushed farther away the people closest to him. It also alienated Tyson from himself. When rage is your only friend, all the other qualities of human nature—kindness, pity, affection—wither. No human being can live that way for long, and Tyson, if ever he was as far from human as he wanted others to believe, surely didn’t. Rage and a life of systematic violence meant death. Within Tyson there was always a whispering voice that sought life. He was a survivor.

By the age of eleven, Tyson was going in and out of juvenile detention centers in Brooklyn. Tyson escaped as often as he could. By the age of twelve, he had graduated to Spofford, a medium-security facility in the Bronx. A dozen times he went there for short stays, until the family courts, and his mother, realized that he had to be sent out of New York. Just thirteen years old, Tyson went to the Tryon School for Boys, two hundred miles upstate in the town of Johnstown. There he would either straighten out or they would keep him until the age of sixteen.

Many of the kids who end up in places like Tryon go on to become adult felons and do a stint or two in prison before making an effort to go straight. Tyson, to the amazement of everyone who knew him then, started his reform early.

In comparison to Spofford, Tryon was a country club. “Instructors” referred to it as a “campus.” The boys lived in “cottages.” There were no chaotic dormitories, fences, barbed wire, or barred windows. Boys lived one to a room. The food was plain, and starchy, but it came three times a day, 365 days of the year. There were movies, school classes, trade instruction, and sports. It was not unusual for some boys to run away a few days before discharge so that they could enjoy the punishment of staying longer. The alternative, after all, was a return to the streets of New York.

There are two different versions of what happened to Tyson soon after he arrived. In the first one, he got locked up in the “secure” cottage called Elmwood after some violent outburst. While there, he found out that one of the supervisors, Bobby Stewart, was a former professional boxer. He pleaded to see him, begged for a lesson, got it, and was discovered.

The second version makes more sense. Muhammad Ali visited Spofford once. Tyson marveled at the man, but more than that reflected on the living, breathing symbolism of his life. Ali was a cultural icon of the black man making it his way in a white world. The allure of Ali promised the acquisition of money and power without compromise. For the boy who had learned to be alone, the idea of Ali, regardless of the realities, promised that, if he so chose, he would never need anyone else again. All he had to do was learn to box. And Bobby Stewart, Tyson decided, would be his teacher.

Bobby Stewart had a reputation around Tryon as tough and unforgiving, a strict disciplinarian who considered most of the kids incapable of reform. His pessimism came from the disappointments of his own life.

He was born and raised in Amsterdam, New York, a small upstate town that had crumbling nineteenth-century mills and a dim future. Stewart played football in high school, married at seventeen, then began to box in the amateurs. In 1974, he won the National Golden Gloves light heavyweight title. Instead of holding out for the 1976 Olympics, which would produce such future boxing stars as Sugar Ray Leonard, he turned pro. Stewart won thirteen fights and lost three, then burned out. He was a small-town boy with an honest heart and few dreams.

After boxing, Stewart managed a family-owned bar. He worked part-time at Tryon, then went on staff in 1978. By the time Tyson arrived in 1980, Stewart was still fit, and he had trimmed down in weight. He was barely six feet tall and sinewy, and he had a small, boxy head, a flush of red in his cheeks, and pummeled-down pug nose. He had boyish Scotchman’s looks but a gruff blue-collar manner and slurred speech, the result of too many blows to the head.

Stewart had been hired to start a boxing program. Several boys wanted to box, but according to Stewart, few had the desire or the discipline to learn more than the basics. Usually, he just laced the gloves on them and let them flail away for a round or two. Tyson would change Stewart’s dismal view of human nature. He differed in every respect.

Once he was placed in Elmwood, Tyson asked for Stewart. For two days, Stewart ignored him. Tyson suddenly became a model inmate. Stewart didn’t fall for it. One night he waited for Tyson to fall asleep, then banged violently on his door.

“What the fuck do you want?” he yelled.

“Mr. Stewart, I want to be a fighter,” Tyson said meekly.

“So do the rest of these scumbags. They wouldn’t be here if they were tough and had balls like a fighter. They’re losers!” Stewart spit out.

Tyson said it again. “I want to be a fighter.”

For two weeks Stewart put Tyson off. With each passing day, Tyson’s behavior improved. Finally, Stewart put Tyson in the ring. There Tyson made an incongruous sight. At thirteen years of age he packed almost two hundred pounds of slablike mass into a five-foot, eight-inch frame. Every part of him looked thick. His head appeared large and out of proportion to his body. He didn’t so much walk as lumber, as if the mass, and its arrangement, was an insupportable burden. The most obvious anomaly was his voice—too high-pitched to match the menacing physique and with a slight, almost farcical lisp.

Stewart didn’t want to take any chances. He dared not let Tyson pummel one of the other boys and become some kind of bully. So into the ring went Stewart himself, and for three rounds he humiliated Tyson.

“After we finished, the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Can we do it again tomorrow?’” Stewart recalled later. “I didn’t care if he could box—I was amazed with his mind. He wanted to better himself. He knew he wanted that at age thirteen. It almost scared me. None of the other kids were like that.”

Tyson became a puzzle to Stewart. If he was such a bad kid, why had he been put in Tryon, a less-then-minimum-security facility? Stewart checked Tyson’s file: all the crimes were petty, the worst being the theft of fruit from a grocery store. In an evaluation by the Tryon teachers, Tyson tested as borderline retarded, but as Stewart discovered, he had been in school a total of two days over the previous year. “Of course he tested badly—he could barely read or write!” Stewart remembered.

Stewart began to see the psychological scars. Tyson didn’t just have self-esteem problems. They were more fundamental. He had no sense of self-worth at all. It was the affliction of the abandoned personality, the unloved. “He felt bad about his body, being so big, and the kids taunted him for it,” Stewart said. “I’d never seen anyone that bad. He was scared of his own shadow. He barely talked, never looked you in the eye. He was a baby.”

They trained together every day, boxed every other. Stewart secretly asked one of the other boys to tutor Tyson. He improved both in the ring and the classroom. Tyson went from a fourth- to a seventh-grade reading level in three months. In the gym he improved too, in strength and in skill. Without any practice, he bench-pressed 245 pounds. His punches also started to become accurate. “He broke my nose with a jab. It almost knocked me down. I had never before been hit that hard with a jab. I had the next week off, so I let it heal at home and never told Tyson what he’d done,” Stewart said.

Emotionally, Tyson did not heal. His size, his prowess, and the aura of inexplicable power made him almost freakish to the other boys. Special treatment by Stewart created suspicions. “To those kids, someone who’s doing well is on the outside,” Stewart said. Nor did Tyson have any desire, it seemed, to use boxing to become a leader. “He didn’t have the confidence to lead.”

Stewart’s support and approval counted for something. But it was Lorna’s love that Tyson wanted most. The boys got to call home every Sunday. When Tyson first called Lorna, he mumbled a few words, then glumly handed the phone to his mentor. “He wanted me to tell her how good he was doing. ‘Tell her, tell her,’ he kept saying. His mother said she had trouble believing that he had changed. She sounded drunk. Mike told me she drank a lot,” Stewart said.

Not once during Tyson’s nine-month stay did Lorna visit the facility, send any Christmas presents, or write a letter.

The boxing gave Tyson purpose and provided a ray of hope about the future. It brought a semblance of order to his feelings, but not resolution—at least not yet. Despite the progress, Stewart sensed the deep-down pain. “I thought his negative self-image could hurt him as a boxer. Everyone always knew he could win, but he convinces himself he can’t.”

Stewart didn’t want Tyson to go back to Brownsville. He could succeed if he had the right help. Stewart knew that Cus D’Amato, a seventy-two-year-old fight manager who lived just outside the town of Catskill, ran an informal boxing camp for boys. Some were from town families. Others, usually the more troubled boys from New York City, stayed in D’Amato’s house. Camille Ewald, his companion, served as den mother. D’Amato was tough, he knew boxing, and he provided a familylike environment. For a kid like Tyson, it was a halfway house back into the world.

Stewart called his own former trainer, Matt Baranski, who had worked with D’Amato since the late 1960s. Baranski agreed to set up a meeting. Stewart prepared Tyson every day for a week. D’Amato didn’t run a charity. He looked for something special in a boy. Desire and determination to succeed impressed D’Amato more than ring skills. Tyson’s glaring emotional problems might put him off. Nonetheless, Stewart gave Tyson a few advanced lessons that he knew would be impressive, like spinning out of a corner and slipping a punch.

For every hour they spent in preparation, Tyson doubled it when alone. He sensed opportunity. “One of the guards went by his room at three in the morning and heard grunting and snorting,” Stewart recalled. “He was working on slipping punches.”

On a chilly weekend in March 1980 they drove down to Catskill. D’Amato had converted a town meeting hall located above the police station into a gym, plopping a boxing ring in the center of a room maybe a hundred feet long and sixty feet wide. There were no windows. Five round Deco-style lamps provided the only light. As in all boxing gyms, the walls were covered with press clippings boasting of the feats of his boys, some fight posters, and a collection of fading black-and-white still photos of heavyweight notables through the ages—Jack Sharkey, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston. Also on the walls were photos of the two champions D’Amato had managed and helped train during the 1950s and 1960s—Floyd Patterson, a heavyweight, and José Torres, who won crowns in two weight classes.

“Mike started to throw me around,” Stewart recalled of the exhibition they gave D’Amato. “He had that incredible speed and power. I caught him with a couple right hands and his nose bled. Cus wanted to stop it. Mike almost cried. ‘No, we always go three rounds. We have to go three.’”

Cus had seen enough. His first words to Stewart would become a centerpiece of the Tyson mythology: “That’s the heavyweight champion of the world,” he said—as if everyone with eyes had to reach the same conclusion.

Afterward, they all went to D’Amato’s home for lunch. D’Amato and Ewald lived four miles outside Catskill in the town of Athens. The house was a quarter mile off the main road in a clearing on a hill. A yellow sign on a tree at the driveway entrance reads Children at Play. The house, built at the turn of the century in a late Victorian design, rose up three stories and was covered in white clapboard. Several dormer windows jutted out from the shale-gray roof. A porch wrapped around three-quarters of the section with the river view. Rosebushes hugged one side. Two towering maple trees shaded part of the well-kept lawn. Nestled back at the edge of the forest sat a barn-shaped coach house. It was the sort of spread, ten acres in all, that once would have belonged to the town judge.

Tyson had never seen anything like it. When they pulled up the driveway, a look of awe spread across his face. “I told him that if he wanted to, he could live here,” Stewart said. “He couldn’t believe it.”

They entered the house through the long, narrow kitchen. The dining room table could seat ten or more. But the heart of the fourteen-room house was the mock-Tudor-style living room. Deep, rich mahogany paneling went halfway up the walls. Broad beams crossed the ceiling. There was a fireplace that had been covered up. The couch looked deep and comfortable; the chairs sported rich leather, and solid, heavy, hardwood frames. One entire wall held a collection of hardcover books. A family lived here. To Tyson it seemed warm, secure, and, with the books, slightly mysterious.

For her guests Ewald cooked a hearty meal. D’Amato did all the talking. To Tyson, he must have seemed an odd old man. D’Amato had a large, round, bald head set on a thick neck and broad, square shoulders. His hair, almost snow-white, was cut short around the sides. His eyes were deep brown and set a bit apart. The nose looked strong. Though only five foot eight, and a bit overweight, D’Amato had an imposing presence. He had a barrel chest, thick forearms, and large hands.

D’Amato’s voice was gravelly and harsh, a voice from some urban New York place that Tyson couldn’t place. The word “champion” came out as “champeen. His eyes was busy. He’d squint, then suddenly his eyebrows would rise up and his eyes would open wide. It made him look alternately skeptical and surprised. He blew air out of his nose in light bursts for no apparent reason and made a “tch” sound with his tongue in the middle of a sentence.

It wasn’t easy to follow his thinking. D’Amato frequently meandered off the point, diverted by some inner music into other ideas, anecdotes, and aphorisms, all related to boxing. He seemed to speak about obvious, self-evident things in complex ways—at times getting lost in the web of his own spun-out thought. Often he would stop himself and ask, “What was I talking about?” Ultimately, he’d manage to return to the original point, which he would then complete as if he’d never strayed.

For Tyson, not used to having to sit and listen for so long to one person, let alone an old white man accustomed to a captive audience, D’Amato must have seemed both foreign and annoying. At the same time, he was also mesmerizing.

Ewald remembered the day. As she watched Tyson drive away with Stewart, the car suddenly stopped. Tyson jumped out and ran back to her. “We had all these rosebushes around the house. He asked if he could take some flowers back to Tryon. ‘I’ve never seen roses before,’ he said. ‘I thought only the very rich people grew roses. I want to show them to the other kids.’”

Ewald found out later that by the time Tyson got back to Tryon, the roses had died.

D’Amato insisted that Stewart provide proof of Tyson’s age. He couldn’t believe that any boy of thirteen was both that physically developed and mentally focused. Stewart looked in the Tryon records, but he couldn’t find a birth certificate. He did, however, get verification of Tyson’s birthday from New York City officials.

Stewart took Tyson back to Catskill for three more visits. All during this period at Tryon, Tyson was conforming even more to the role of model student. “When he did something wrong, any little thing, he’d ask me, ‘Will you still work with me?’ He didn’t want to take the chance of losing me or missing out on the opportunity to live with Cus,” Stewart said.

D’Amato watched him box but didn’t offer much instruction. He spent more time alone with Tyson, talking, but also listening. He was more interested in the boy’s mind than in his body. He wanted to see the bends in Tyson’s mind and the distortions of his heart. Sometimes the more troubled the boy, the better—it gave D’Amato the chance to completely reorder the psychic furniture. That was the core of his method, on which all the other training depended. He’d knock and bang until the boy opened up, and then he’d stomp about inside, pointing to the disorder to make the boy see the truth about himself. And the truth he was most interested in was human fear. D’Amato believed that a boxer, by confronting fear and using it effectively in the ring, assured his success—the imposition of the will through violence.

Of course, D’Amato’s method didn’t always make a champion. Sometimes all that D’Amato’s mind-work produced was a more confident young man, not a champion boxer. Many of the boys left him because he was too strict about what they did, both in and out of the ring. And D’Amato had yet to see any of his protégés—Patterson and Torres included—execute fully his unique style of boxing, a style that, as far back as the 1950s, his critics had ridiculed. The D’Amato style required almost robotlike training, intense concentration, extreme confidence, and superb emotional control. D’Amato believed that when executed to perfection, especially by a fast-punching heavyweight, the style would produce an unbeatable boxer.

Tyson had the kind of hand speed D’Amato required and certainly, given his size at the age of thirteen, the potential to grow into an imposing natural heavyweight. D’Amato also realized that he had a teenager whose psychic furniture was disposed in a chaotic and entangled clutter of fear and insecurity. Tyson wanted desperately to find order and meaning in his life, but didn’t know how. D’Amato did. “After they’d talked for hours, Cus decided Mike had it,” said Ewald. “He told me, ‘Camille, this is the one I’ve been waiting for all my life. My third champion.’”

* * *

Transferring Tyson into D’Amato’s care wasn’t easy. Tyson had been at Tryon only six months when Stewart raised the issue with state officials. There were problems. Tyson was still only thirteen; the mother’s approval was needed. A troubled urban teenager would be put in a small-town school, with unforeseeable consequences. And there was the matter of his support. Who would pay? D’Amato?

D’Amato’s situation looked far better than it actually was. He had declared bankruptcy in 1971 and still owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Internal Revenue Service, a by-product of his turbulent years as a fight manager. Ewald, however, owned the house. And they derived income from a variety of sources. Local and state officials supplied funding for D’Amato and some of his live-in fighters to train local boys in the Catskill gym. Some of the older boys who already lived in the house, and were training to become professionals, worked part-time. And the parents, if they had money, contributed.

One unusual source of funds was Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton, who had a company in New York that licensed out the rights to their collection of fight films. The two also had experience managing fighters. From them D’Amato got a monthly stipend of one thousand dollars. The money covered expenses for the gym, but mostly paid for the house. For their stipend Jacobs and Cayton expected, some day, to get a promotable fighter, who would repay the investment. It was an unusual arrangement, highly speculative from a business standpoint, and tolerated mostly because of D’Amato’s long friendship with Jacobs. So far, the investment hadn’t produced a fighter worthy of professional development.

Stewart and D’Amato prevailed with the state. On June 30, the day he turned fourteen, Tyson was released into D’Amato’s custody. His life was about to become intimately intertwined, for better or worse, with one of boxing’s most unusual personalities.

Chapter Two

Constantine D’Amato was born January 17, 1908, in a small tenement near the intersection of Southern Boulevard and 149th Street in the area of the Bronx known as Classen Point. His father had come to New York from Italy in 1899 and worked delivering ice and coal. In all, there were eight sons. Three died in infancy. D’Amato was the second youngest. In Italian the first n of his name was not pronounced, so it became Costantine, then Coster, Cos, and eventually Cus.

His mother died when D’Amato was four. His father cared for the boys as best he could but lost them, as it were, to the streets. Love alternated with beatings. Many beatings. The boys respected the father, though. He didn’t put up with injustice. He was the kind of man who showed respect to those he felt deserved it and hatred for those who didn’t.

D’Amato took the beatings with the attitude that he had to accept the consequences of his actions. “I knew I deserved it,” D’Amato said in a 1976 interview titled “The Brujo of Gramercy Gym,” published in a periodical called Observations From the Treadmill. “I knew before I got hit what I was getting hit for, and I knew before I did what I did exactly what was gonna happen, just like day follows darkness. There was nothin’ to be resentful about.”

His father, a former wrestler, loved boxing. D’Amato’s older brother Jerry trained at a gym in the Frog Hollow section of the Bronx. It later became famous as Stillman’s. D’Amato carried Jerry’s bags and watched. One day, Jerry got in a fight with a policeman—and was shot dead.

D’Amato had his share of scraps. At twelve, in a street fight with an older man, he suffered a blow to the head that partially blinded him in the left eye. A deviated septum caused breathing difficulties (hence the odd blowing). Still, D’Amato never backed down from a good fight—that is, when he could fight for what he believed was right.

In old New York, neighborhoods were highly territorial. You didn’t throw your weight around on someone else’s block unless you were ready to back it up with force. One day, a man with a reputation for knife fighting came into D’Amato’s small patch of the Bronx. He started to push some of D’Amato’s friends around. When they pushed back, the man challenged each one to a knife fight. Everyone backed down. The man began to humiliate them, or as D’Amato explained the story to author and friend Norman Mailer, “He said things he shouldn’t have.” D’Amato challenged him to a fistfight. The man insisted on knives. D’Amato agreed.

They were to meet the next morning, shortly after dawn, in an abandoned building. D’Amato, with good reason, couldn’t sleep that night: He had had no experience with knife fighting. He knew boxing, though. At dawn D’Amato taped an ice pick into his left hand and wrapped a coat around his right forearm. He’d fight like that. He arrived at the appointed site a half hour early to check the place out and shadowbox. At seven, the knife fighter wasn’t there. D’Amato waited for several more hours, but still no opponent. The knife fighter never appeared again in the neighborhood. D’Amato became a street hero.

He learned soon after that heroism had its limitations. A rival gang invaded his neighborhood, and D’Amato joined a group of boys ready to do battle. When the two gangs met, D’Amato rushed ahead, screaming a war cry. When he looked around, he found himself alone. The other boys had retreated. The rival gang, respecting his courage, let him be and chased the others.

It was from such incidents that D’Amato later developed a practical psychology of fear and made it the foundation for everything else he taught young boxers. D’Amato argued that no essential difference existed between the coward and the hero. The hero can control his emotions; the coward can’t. “Fear is like fire,” D’Amato said time and again, repeating it like a mantra. “If you don’t control it, it will destroy you and everything around you.”

From boyhood, D’Amato had what could only be called a warrior’s obsessions. He always seemed to be preparing for some battle of life and death. To steel himself against an imaginary enemy who threatened starvation, he would fast for days at a time. Even though the sight in his left eye was poor, he insisted on closing the right eye when reading. That led to a habit of squinting with the bad eye.

He believed deeply in Catholicism. The deterministic concept of heaven held special appeal. As a boy, he would watch funeral processions go by and long for death. If heaven was the ultimate good, D’Amato thought, there was no point of mortal life on Earth.

D’Amato dropped out of Morris High School to hang around boxing gyms. His father got him work in a mill that made iceboxes. D’Amato, then seventeen, couldn’t help pointing out to the other men how to do their jobs. That led to a lot of fights. In one, he nearly beat a man to death. D’Amato quit a year later and went back to the gym. Money didn’t interest him. “To me, working was a waste of time. It was a bore,” he once said. His favorite reading material then was the National Police Gazette, a magazine popular among boxing sportsmen since the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1939, D’Amato and two other friends opened a gym at 116 East Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. In 1942, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. The ascetic in him found heaven on Earth. He slept on the floor. At mess hall meals he traded his cake for bread. During bivouac there were always so many flies around the food that D’Amato once promised himself to eat the next mouthful regardless. A spider crawled into it. He hated spiders, but he ate it anyway—with bread.

D’Amato made a perfect soldier. He took orders well and kept his locker neat and spotless. D’Amato’s commanding officer put him up for a commission. At the test, he refused to recite the General Orders. D’Amato knew them, he just didn’t want to be an officer. He preferred the rigors of the lowly G.I.

D’Amato stayed Stateside during the war and afterward returned to his gym on East Fourteenth. He lived in a back room on a cot with a dog—a boxer—named Cus. He believed that extraterrestrial beings came to Earth on occasion, and he bought a telescope to watch for them. He felt that upon arrival they were likely to seek him out. D’Amato also harbored a deep mistrust of women.

D’Amato told friends that he wanted one day to have three champions. They laughed. Managers and promoters had taken away, by hook or by crook, other men’s champions, but no one in the sport of boxing had ever developed and held on to three. D’Amato would train anybody that came up the two flights of stairs and walked through the door. He especially wanted the boys who came alone. The more afraid they were, the better. Fear was always his window into their souls.

“He was so charismatic and persuasive with those ideas about fear,” said Joe Fariello, one of those boys. “He understood better than anybody else that all fighters are afraid. And that’s good. Otherwise, they’d be walking into punches. He taught you how to control it, make it work. He taught you what would happen in the ring, why and how you could correct it.”

Fariello met D’Amato in 1952. They were from the same neighborhood in the Bronx. Fariello didn’t know his father. His mother worked occasionally. The family lived on welfare. He got kicked out of high school for fighting. Fariello boxed for a few years, then at age seventeen stopped because of a broken nose and hand. D’Amato asked him to train the other fighters. Fariello moved into D’Amato’s apartment on Fifty-third Street. “Cus was the only man I looked up to as a father,” said Fariello, now a highly respected New York trainer.

Fariello worked with D’Amato and some of his fighters until 1965, when the two men had a falling-out. He remembered D’Amato as a son would remember a father with whom he battled constantly, or as a disillusioned disciple would remember his master.

“I realized that Cus couldn’t control his own emotions. He was afraid to drive; he wouldn’t fly; he feared heights, elevators, tunnels, water, thunder and lightning,” Fariello said. “That’s okay, but he acted like he wasn’t contradicting himself. He didn’t deal with those fears; he rationalized them away, made things the way he wanted them to be.”

But that, in the end, isn’t what caused the split. D’Amato was the kind of person someone coming into manhood had to get away from. “His whole philosophy on boxing and on life was a brainwashing. That’s why he wanted young kids from the beginning. He could start with a fresh mind,” Fariello maintained.

Fariello moved out of D’Amato’s apartment, got married, and started to develop his own ideas about boxing. He had wanted to make more money, but D’Amato didn’t care much about the size of his fighters’ purses, only that they were developing as he wanted them to. And Fariello had made his mistakes. He had a weakness for gambling. D’Amato could rationalize away his own quirks of character, but couldn’t tolerate either Fariello’s independence or his faults.

“He always said his whole purpose was to make you independent of him. But he never knew when to cut the cord and let someone go out and make his own mistakes,” Fariello said.

D’Amato eventually found the battle he had been preparing for since childhood.

At the outset of 1949, Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion for twelve years, decided to retire. Harry Mendel, a leading press agent in boxing, hatched an idea for an elimination tournament among the top contenders to determine the new champion. The idea, though, needed financial backing and a promoter. Mike Jacobs, who had promoted Louis for the past twelve years, also wanted to retire. Mendel pitched his idea to a Chicago business man named James D. Norris, the son of a wealthy Midwest commodities merchant known as the “Grain King.” Norris had used his share of the family fortune to buy several major baseball stadiums, indoor arenas, and the Detroit Red Wings hockey team. He accepted the invitation into boxing.

Norris and his partner, Arthur M. Wirtz, created the International Boxing Club. For $100,000 it bought Jacobs’s lease and promotional rights to stage fights at the mecca of boxing, New York’s Madison Square Garden. The I.B.C. also cornered boxing rights at the outdoor Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium, and a few smaller arenas. Joe Louis secured the signatures of the four top contenders for the tournament and sold the contracts to the I.B.C. for $150,000 and a $15,000-per-year salary as vice president. Just to keep a lock on the Garden, Norris and Wirtz bought thirty-nine percent of its public stock.

Every fighter who entered the tournament, including the eventual winner, signed multifight contracts binding them to the I.B.C. Norris used the same tactics in all the major weight classes. Soon, no contender could hope for a shot at any title without also signing up. The I.B.C. dictated purse amounts, rematch terms, the date of the title shot, and in some cases the outcome of the fight. Some managers had to relinquish control of their fighters entirely. The I.B.C. loaned money out to fighters and managers as a means of obligating them in future deals.

Between June 1949 and May 1953, the I.B.C. and its affiliates around the country promoted thirty-six of the forty-four championship bouts that took place in the United States. Champions Ezzard Charles (who won the tournament), Jersey Joe Walcott, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMotta, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Joey Maxim all did their deals with the devil, as it were, for the money and the fame.

The I.B.C. took on the imprimatur of a big business, but its ethics arose from the underworld. Though raised to be a blueblood, Norris indulged in a prurient taste for the unsavory. As a Chicago college student in the 1920s he befriended Sammy Hunt, one of Al Capone’s bodyguards. They remained close up through to the 1940s, when Hunt introduced Norris to a New Yorker named John Paul Carbo, alias “The Uncle,” “The Southern Gentleman,” “Jerry the Wop,” or just plain “Frankie.” The moniker “Mr. Gray” stuck because of his understated style of dressing.

Carbo, mild-mannered, polite, soft-spoken, had a long history of murder charges. He once served twenty months for manslaughter. Notoriety came in 1939 when he was indicted and tried for killing Harry (“Big Greenie”) Greenberg under contract to the Jewish mob organization, “Murder Inc.” The chief witness against Carbo mysteriously fell to his death from a Coney Island hotel. Two of the twelve jurors refused to believe the remaining evidence. A hung jury set Carbo free. Norris relied on Carbo for inspiration, ideas and enforcement. Carbo was always seen sitting just a few feet away from Norris in his office. Several Carbo associates became promoters and managers in I.B.C. fights.

In the 1976 “Brujo” interview, D’Amato said that as soon as the I.B.C. was formed he became passionately determined to break its monopoly, on the grounds of principle. However, he needed the means to achieve that end. “I knew that when I made my move, I had to do it with a certain kind of fighter,” D’Amato said. “So I was waiting for the right type of guy, that had the right type of character and personality and loyalty to make a champion. I hadda have a guy who would listen, because the things I’d hafta do would require the complete cooperation of the person I was managing. Patterson was the first guy to have the qualities I’m speaking of.”

Floyd Patterson, like Fariello, was a lost boy. D’Amato met Patterson in 1949 when Floyd was only fourteen and going to a “600 School” in New York, a new type of classroom for inner-city children considered emotionally disturbed. Patterson was deeply withdrawn, sensitive, highly impressionable, a scrawny 147 pounds, and, most important for D’Amato, full of fear. D’Amato helped train him for the 1952 Olympics. Patterson won the middleweight gold medal. D’Amato told the boxing press that he would make Patterson the future heavyweight champion.

For the next four years, Patterson won a series of middleweight fights with non-I.B.C. opponents in small arenas in New York and around the country. On January 4, 1956, Patterson’s twenty-first birthday, D’Amato published an open letter challenging all top heavyweights, including undefeated champion Rocky Marciano.

The boxing community did not take the challenge seriously. Marciano had forty-one knockouts to his credit; Patterson had yet to fight beyond eight rounds. At 182 pounds he was similar in weight to Marciano but was not known to have as powerful a punch. Most of all, Patterson’s boxing style was odd.

American boxing style had its roots in early-eighteenth-century England. Traditional style, stripped down, put the left foot forward and the left hand out. The left hand jabbed into the opponent’s face. It also set up the right, which remained cocked back. Various other types of punches were added onto that basic form: left and right hooks that arched out and then into the side of the head or body, crosses, and uppercuts.

The fundamental problem for all boxers who used that form, no matter what punch they threw, was exposure. Throwing a punch, almost by definition, left one open to a counterpunch. Defenses were concocted—stopping the punch with an open glove, crossing the arms in front of the face, and of course moving back or away—but they didn’t help much. In order to inflict pain, a boxer had to take it.

D’Amato didn’t accept that premise. He devised a style for Patterson that limited risk yet at the same time delivered maximum punishment. D’Amato called it his “system,” and it was described in detail by A. J. Liebling, who wrote on boxing, among other subjects, for the New Yorker from 1935 until his death in 1963. In the system, both hands were up around either side of the head, the elbows tucked against the body. That created, in Liebling’s words, a defensive “shell.” D’Amato then put Patterson in a crouch, with the feet along a horizontal line. Movement looked awkward, off-balance, like “a man going forward carrying a tray of dishes,” Liebling observed.

Fariello disputed D’Amato’s claim to sole authorship of the “system.” D’Amato had taught him to box in the traditional style. Then, as Fariello became a trainer in the late 1950s, one of his fighters, Georgie Colon, said he felt more comfortable putting both hands up around the head. “D’Amato got pissed off with me about using that style,” Fariello said. “But it caught on with the other fighters. Even Torres used it.” Charlie Goldman, who trained heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, ridiculed it as the “peek-a-boo” style. When Life magazine did a feature on D’Amato and his stable of fighters, and the distinctive peek-a-boo, D’Amato claimed authorship. “It got so much publicity he had to endorse it. That’s when Cus started teaching the peek-a-boo to Patterson.”

Whatever the origins of the hand placement, D’Amato took the basic idea and made a variety of tactical and strategic additions. He realized that the stance, though awkward, was potent. It baffled opponents. Patterson didn’t telegraph his punches. He could shoot out just as easily with a left or a right. Still, there were risks. Patterson found it awkward to move backward in his shell. He had to go forward, and he had to get close enough to deliver.

D’Amato didn’t want Patterson to get hit doing either. He drilled Patterson on how, while keeping his hands up around the head, to move the whole upper body from side to side as he went forward to elude the jabs—in other words, to “slip” (the sideways motion) and “weave” (the duck-and-move-forward motion). Once that series of elusive movements brought him in close enough, Patterson attacked. D’Amato taught him to exploit the moment by throwing a combination of two or more punches.

The system had drawbacks. It was a highly mechanical, robotlike technique that required intense training to master. A fighter could go in only one direction, forward, and to do that without getting hit he had to have naturally good reflexes. Combination punching also required fast hand speed. And then there remained the problem of exposure as the combinations were being thrown. That posed a dilemma. Moving back gave up the offensive opportunity, but staying in risked getting hit by straight rights and uppercuts.

In order to resolve that problem, D’Amato insisted that Patterson should attempt the nearly impossible: once in position, to attack and defend in a continuous motion. In almost the same instant that he threw a punch, he had to anticipate the counterpunch and elude. One moment’s lapse of concentration and he could get hit, easily and at close range.

D’Amato’s most interesting wrinkle had nothing to do with technical training. He believed that training alone, no matter how diligent, wasn’t enough to master such a ying-yang synthesis of offense and defense. It had to be instinctual. He tried to teach Patterson to see the counterpunch in his mind before it happened. It was almost a spiritual thing for D’Amato. Years later, he discovered that what he tried to teach Patterson also lay at the foundation of Zen archery.

In the “Brujo” interview, D’Amato described how in the late 1950s he once saw a Texan named Lucky Daniels shoot a BB pellet out of the air with another BB, a seemingly impossible task. Daniels challenged D’Amato to a mock gunfight. D’Amato got to hold his gun pointed and cocked; Daniels’s gun stayed in its holster. As D’Amato pulled his trigger, Daniels was able to draw and shoot first. D’Amato picked Daniels’s mind and found out that he had been applying the same principles to boxing. When, in the late 1960s, he told the story to Norman Mailer, he was given a book on Zen archery. “I was doing what the guy said in the book!” D’Amato said.

First, then, the concentration. Second, detachment. “Eventually a pro becomes impersonal, detached in his thinking while he’s performing. You separate and watch yourself from like the outside the whole time,” D’Amato said.

D’Amato believed in out-of-body experiences. “Everything gets calm and I’m outside watching myself. It’s me, but not me. It’s as if my mind and body aren’t connected, but they are connected and I know exactly what to do. I get a picture in my mind what it’s gonna be. I can actually see the picture, like a screen,” D’Amato said.

He also believed that this gave him immense power over others. “I can take a fighter who’s just beginning and I can see exactly how he’s gonna end up, what I have to teach him and how he’ll respond,” he added. “When that happens, I can watch a guy fight and I know everything there is to know about the guy. I can actually see the wheels in his head. It’s as if I am the guy. I’m inside him!”

Presumably, that’s what D’Amato had in mind for Patterson. He should see the punch coming before it came, through some kind of spiritual detachment. In other words, he was taught, don’t look at the man’s hand or it will hit you. Instead, see a concept of the fight in which you know all the things your opponent might do and use that knowledge to advantage.

In precisely what terms D’Amato explained those ideas to Patterson, or if he explained them at all, is not known. Clearly, after first reordering Patterson’s psychic furniture—via the lessons on fear—he instructed him in the basics of the system. The advanced lessons on spirituality would seem heady stuff for anyone, let alone the young Patterson. He did well enough with the basics. As a middleweight with naturally quick reflexes, Patterson managed, far better than his peers, to hit without getting hit. But the heavyweight division posed new challenges and increased risk. The added bulk on his own body slowed him down. And a true heavyweight opponent, close to or above 200 pounds, would hit with bigger punches. The question was whether Patterson could make the system work as a heavyweight. Not just with his body, but also with his mind.

D’Amato’s public challenge to the heavyweight division was, at most, a thorn in the side of the I.B.C. Norris and Carbo had no reason to put their franchise fighter, Rocky Marciano, at risk, so D’Amato started to play the ends against the middle. Publicly, he bombarded the I.B.C. with accusations about its monopolistic practices. Privately, he borrowed money from Norris: $15,000 on June 7, 1956, and another $5,000 two months later. D’Amato wanted to lull Norris into thinking that he had fallen into line with all the other managers who served their fighters up to the I.B.C. The debts, in other words, would obligate D’Amato to keep Patterson under I.B.C. control should he beat Marciano.

In April 1956, Marciano unexpectedly retired from the ring as an undefeated champion. An elimination tournament was set up by the I.B.C. to fill the vacant title. D’Amato entered Patterson, who beat “Hurricane” Jackson, barely, in a split decision. On November 30, Patterson fought Marciano’s last victim, thirty-nine-year-old Archie Moore, and won. At twenty-one he became the youngest heavyweight champion ever.

With the title in his grasp, D’Amato felt no obligations to Norris and the I.B.C. He agreed to a rematch with Jackson in the first defense eight months later, then took Patterson off into a series of independently promoted bouts. That snub, he insisted later, broke the I.B.C. monopoly. Not exactly. The United States government did that.

In 1951, the Justice Department charged the I.B.C. under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The I.B.C. won a ruling that boxing, like baseball, was beyond the limits of the antitrust laws. The government appealed to the Supreme Court and won. After a trial that finally ended on March 8, 1957, Norris and his codefendants were found guilty. They appealed the conviction to the Supreme Court, which upheld it. On January 12, 1959, the I.B.C. was ordered to dissolve and sell its stock in Madison Square Garden. Three justices dissented and called the dissolution “futile.” New corporations, they argued, would be formed to attempt similar monopolies.

Soon after, Norris died of a heart attack. Frankie Carbo was convicted on November 30, 1959, on three misdemeanor charges—conspiracy, undercover managing of boxers, and undercover matchmaking—and sentenced to two years in prison. Upon his release, he stood trial in Los Angeles on racketeering charges for attempting through threats and extortion to muscle in on the management and promotion of Don Jordan, a welterweight champion. He was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years at Alcatraz. Around that same time, a U.S. Senate subcommittee held hearings on mob influence in boxing. The “Kefauver Committee,” as it was known, wrenched from middleweight champion Jake LaMotta the admission that he was forced by the I.B.C. to lose to Billy Fox in a 1947 bout as a condition for a title shot.

During the seven years of trials and appeals, not once did D’Amato give testimony for the government’s case against the I.B.C.; nor did he appear at the Kefauver hearings. And assuming that he was in fact threatened by Carbo henchmen, he could have, like Jackie Leonard, the manager of Don Jordan, gone to the police and cooperated in phone taps to build an official case. D’Amato did none of that. He fought the I.B.C. his way, which turned out to have little effect. The early Patterson fights he staged at another New York arena were small and insignificant, more a minor annoyance than major competition. At best, his public rantings brought attention to the monopoly, but even then only long after the government had begun its prosecution.

The significant point is that D’Amato wanted to be portrayed as the lone white knight championing the cause of justice. In fact, he was more dedicated to using Patterson to make a play for his own control of the heavyweight division.

He didn’t do that for the money but, as was usual with D’Amato, for the fulfillment of an idea. This one, however, got twisted around. The idea, he claimed, was to do everything for the benefit of the fighter. But D’Amato pursued that objective obsessively. He ended up using some of the same tactics as his enemies. The effort drove him into a state of paranoia, and in the end the fighter was not well served. Without his champion, and disgraced by his meddling in the promotion of Patterson’s fights, D’Amato was pushed into obscurity—until Mike Tyson came along and D’Amato was rediscovered, repackaged, and made sagelike to a new generation.

Even though the I.B.C. slowly crumbled, D’Amato continued during Patterson’s reign to see the enemy in every dark corner. Years later, he told people that someone once tried to push him in front of a subway train. In another story, Rocky Marciano supposedly knocked at his door. When D’Amato opened it, he found the boxer in the company of two mobsters. According to D’Amato, he spun the double-crosser Marciano around, put an ice pick to his throat, and said, “Get outta here or the champ dies.”

Perhaps that happened. Perhaps not. To the men who knew him well then, it seemed more likely that D’Amato couldn’t stop fighting an imaginary war. Fariello held this view. “It was all because of the I.B.C., he said. They were out to get him, hurt him. I never saw anything that justified those fears.”

D’Amato enjoyed food and drink on the town, but he feared that someone would spike his beer, so he stopped going out. He was afraid someone might drop drugs in his pocket, so he sewed the pockets of his jackets. When the phone rang, he never spoke first, choosing instead to listen until he could identify the caller. He kept a hatchet under his bed and an ice pick in his pocket. To anyone riding in an elevator with him, D’Amato, fearing that some I.B.C. hit man was at the controls and waiting with a gun, would say, “If it goes down to the basement, we’re dead.”

D’Amato went to great lengths to protect Patterson from these imaginary enemies. He assumed that any big-time New York promoter was I.B.C.-connected. D’Amato sought out inexperienced and easily controlled independents. Between July 1957 and June 1959, Patterson defended his title only three times. He fought in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis. The opponents, all nearly unknowns, barely tested Patterson’s abilities. Pete Rademacher, the 1956 Olympic champion, had his first pro fight with Patterson; not surprisingly, he lost by a knockout in the sixth. A year later, Patterson fought Roy Harris, a schoolteacher and club fighter from Cut and Shoot, Texas. A year after that, he disposed of a British journeyman named Brian London.

D’Amato’s paranoia began to destroy the proverbial Golden Goose. The long layoffs and easy matchups dulled Patterson’s unique boxing skills. In the Harris and London fights it took Patterson thirteen and eleven rounds, respectively, to do the job. “I couldn’t put anything together,” Patterson told Liebling of his performance against Harris. “I said to Cus he’s got to get me more fights.”

The London promotion showcased D’Amato’s obsession with total control. When London arrived to complete his training for the fight, he went to D’Amato’s gym, where he used a hand-picked D’Amato trainer and Patterson’s own sparring partners. D’Amato appointed a U.S. “representative” to co-manage London for a cut of his purse. He barred the press from interviewing London. Those were all tactics used by the I.B.C.

D’Amato eventually fired the first inexperienced promoter. The second, Bill Rosensohn, had only one fight to his credit, the Harris match. Rosensohn was young, eager to please, and, so D’Amato thought, easily controlled. He also worked for TelePrompter Corporation, recently formed to exploit the relatively new concept of closed-circuit theater television.

Traditionally, promoters made money on the radio broadcast and ticket sales, less fighters’ purses and expenses. With the advent of television in the 1950s—at one point fights could be seen three nights a week on the small screen—advertiser revenue expanded the pie. Managers fought bitterly with the I.B.C. and its promoters at Madison Square Garden to get a share of the television revenues. They didn’t get very far.

Closed-circuit posed a new opportunity, and D’Amato, as manager of the heavyweight champion, knew he could exploit it. Now he, and not the I.B.C., controlled the promoter. D’Amato dictated the split of the closed-circuit revenues.

Rosensohn, a thirty-eight-year-old, ambitious, heavy-eyed, slimfaced, Princeton-educated dandy, readily accepted D’Amato’s terms. In the Harris fight, D’Amato brought in a friend, Charlie Black, to profit from the promotion. D’Amato and Black were boyhood friends, and despite Black’s convictions for bookmaking, plus his underworld ties, Cus kept up the friendship. Black, after all, was the kind of man who could come in handy. D’Amato ordered Rosensohn to pay Black 50 percent of the net profits. He paid, but profits were low, and Rosensohn made only a few thousand dollars. D’Amato, in another classic I.B.C. move, also put a lock on Harris should he beat Patterson. He required Harris to sign a managerial contract with Black.

Rosensohn started to get hungry. He tried to initiate his own deal and signed Ingemar Johansson, a capable Swedish heavyweight, to a forty-day option for $10,000. During that time, Rosensohn had to get him a match with Patterson or lose the money. Rosensohn felt he had a tailor-made D’Amato opponent: non-I.B.C., not much of a threat, easily controlled.

D’Amato stonewalled. Perhaps he felt that Johansson, known for having a thunderous right hand, would be no pushover. But it’s more likely that D’Amato delayed as a pressuring tactic to keep Rosensohn in line.

Rosensohn gambled heavily and usually lost more than he won. He needed money to finance the promotion, plus some way to make D’Amato cooperate. Rosensohn went to his bookmaker, Gilbert Beckley, for help. Beckley had once introduced him to an East Harlem-based mobster named Anthony (“Fat Tony”) Salerno. Rosensohn asked Salerno to finance the promotion in exchange for a share of the profits, adding that there was one problem: he had already promised Charlie Black 50 percent of the net. Not to worry, said Salerno. He knew Black; a deal would be made. Rosensohn ended up with $25,000 for the promotion and a $10,000 loan for himself. He gave Salerno and Black each one-third ownership in his company, Rosensohn Enterprises.

Not long after that, D’Amato delivered Patterson. But he had a new demand. D’Amato wanted 100 percent of all ancillary rights (closed-circuit, radio, and movie) plus half the net from ticket sales. Rosensohn felt he’d been set up in an elaborate plan to trade off the promoter’s rights so that D’Amato, Black, Salerno, and Patterson could profit. D’Amato threw in one more zinger. When Johansson arrived, D’Amato assigned another friend, Harry Davidow, as “representative” for a 10 percent purse cut.

The only piece of the pie D’Amato left intact was the option on Johansson’s next fight if he should win. Unlike in the deal with Harris, he gave that to Rosensohn. It proved a big mistake.

It drizzled a warm, wet rain on the night of the fight, June 26, 1959. Ticket sales were dismal. Patterson, wrote Liebling, “came out to prove himself.” He shot jabs out at Johansson, who merely retreated. Johansson looked patient and held his mysterious right hand—dubbed the “Hammer of Thor” by the press—in reserve. In the third it became clear that for Patterson almost three years of easy opponents and infrequent bouts had taken their toll. Johansson hit him with a straight right that virtually ended the fight. Patterson got up, stunned. Johansson dropped him seven times before the referee called it quits.

The whole, sordid mess blew open a month after the fight. Rosensohn’s joy over lucking into promotional control of the new heavyweight champion didn’t last long. He lost $40,000 on the fight. He personally owed $10,000 to a gangster. Rosensohn then found out that Salerno and Black, in an effort to hide their roles, had transferred their ownership in his company to a front man, Vincent Velella, a Republican state politician from East Harlem, then also making a bid for a municipal court judgeship. Rosensohn made an unwise power bid. He went public with the story that he’d been forced to sell two-thirds of his company, perhaps to arm-twist Salerno and Black into selling back their interest or risk exposure.

The bid backfired. The New York State Athletic Commission and the attorney general’s office both conducted investigations. Rosensohn was stripped of his promoter’s license and forced to sell his rights to the rematch. He moved to California, became a salesman, and in 1988 committed suicide. Salerno, Black, and Velella were barred from boxing. Salerno rose in the mob; then, in 1985, old and sick, he was convicted in the infamous “Pizza Connection” heroin-smuggling case and sent to prison for what remained of his life. Finally, the scandal prompted Senator Estes Kefauver to establish the Senate Antimonopoly Subcommittee to investigate boxing.

D’Amato was the only principal who refused to testify. He fled to Puerto Rico during the hearings. Always wary of his enemies, D’Amato traveled under the name Carl Dudley. The Athletic Commission criticized D’Amato for trying to wrest control of the heavyweight division by acting as both manager and promoter, and revoked his manager’s license. The state attorney general also began preparing an antitrust action against D’Amato, then dropped the case. D’Amato blamed it all on old enemies at the I.B.C. “They are trying to destroy me,” he told Gay Talese, then a reporter for the New York Times.

Other reporters were not so gentle with D’Amato. His only diehard supporter among the New York sportswriting community, columnist Jimmy Cannon, was a close friend until he inquired about D’Amato’s meddling with Brian London. D’Amato said he “wasn’t at liberty to discuss it.” Cannon became one of D’Amato’s biggest critics. He was “Cus the Mus” from then on in Cannon’s column. During the Patterson/Johansson scandal, Harold Weissman, sports columnist for the tabloid New York Mirror, dubbed him the “Neurotic Napoleon.” Dan Parker, another columnist at the Mirror, ridiculed D’Amato’s new boxing “system,” in which the writer included business practices: “guaranteed to get everyone in trouble and your fighter knocked out.”

What did D’Amato know and when did he know it? Perhaps he didn’t conspire to drive Rosensohn to Salerno and Black. Maybe Rosensohn was just a loose cannon moved by his own inexperience, bad judgment, and greed. D’Amato apparently never discussed the details of what happened with anyone. It’s hard to believe, however, that a man so obsessed with control would not have known about the Salerno-Black connection. “He was too close to Charlie Black not to know,” said José Torres, who became D’Amato’s next boxing protégé.

And so an observer’s proposition: D’Amato at the least knew about Salerno and Black, felt the promotion slip from his grasp, and rationalized the problem away. “He forgot that a shining knight on a white horse was not supposed to do those things,” opined Fariello.

Patterson made $600,000 from the purse and ancillary income. The scandal, though, set in motion Patterson’s disillusionment with his domineering father figure-mentor-manager. D’Amato won back his manager’s license back on a legal technicality. He stayed in Patterson’s corner through his next three victories, all against Johansson. Beginning with the first rematch, Patterson eschewed D’Amato’s “system” for the conventional style. It was the act of a young man seeking his own identity. Fortunately for Patterson, Johansson proved to be an inconsistent boxer.

A new group of promoters, conniving with and far more savvy than those D’Amato selected, took over Patterson’s fights. They sped up his disillusionment with stories about D’Amato’s supposed mob ties and paranoiac behavior. Matters came to a head when Patterson, egged on by his new promoters, accepted a fight against a former convict and rising contender, Sonny Liston. D’Amato warned him not to fight Liston. Without the benefit of the “system,” D’Amato felt, Patterson offered too easy and too vulnerable a target to a much bigger, harder-punching heavyweight. Patterson fired D’Amato, not to his face but through a lawyer. He was tired, he said, of being “dominated.”

Liston knocked Patterson out in the first round. Patterson never again, despite three attempts, won the title. In a final ironic twist, Liston’s management group included none other than mobster Frankie Carbo.

After the split with Patterson, the part of D’Amato that lusted for power died. So, too, did his willingness to ever again get emotionally attached to a fighter. “When my feelings are involved I become a chump,” he told an interviewer in 1976. “That’s why I never trust anything. I just trust that detachment. My feelings got involved with Patterson.”

Everything else about D’Amato remained virtually intact, from an unflagging belief in the technical and spiritual merits of his “system” to the wracking paranoia. He also still wanted to develop another champion.

* * *

José Torres was eighteen years old when he won the silver medal as a middleweight in the 1956 Olympics. The second of seven children, he was born and raised in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Torres’s father owned a small trucking business. A family friend introduced Torres to D’Amato after the Olympics and D’Amato took him on, reluctantly.

Torres had basic talent but little taste for D’Amato’s many disciplines. Though married with children, he frequently bolted camp to carouse or spend a few days with a mistress. Torres then often lied to D’Amato about why he wasn’t training. “José wasn’t such a bad guy,” said Fariello, his trainer. “He got stupid about things. His judgment was dumb.”

Besides being distracted with Patterson, D’Amato never had the confidence in Torres’s abilities to actively develop his career. That, and the lingering fears about the I.B.C., kept Torres in a perennial backwater. D’Amato’s emotional detachment also may have affected his management of Torres. By deciding not to get as intimate with Torres as he had gotten with Patterson, D’Amato didn’t mine the deepest parts of Torres’s potential. “With Torres everything was done cold, cool, and calculating,” admitted D’Amato in a 1965 Sports Illustrated article.

For six years Torres fought and won, first as a middleweight and then as a light heavyweight, against a gaggle of lackluster opponents. D’Amato refused to let him fight at Madison Square Garden for the larger purses. Instead, Torres fought at smaller local arenas and in a host of other cities and towns, such as Boston and Toronto, which lacked constituencies of Puerto Ricans to boost ticket sales. During those six years he earned a total of only $60,000. D’Amato, claiming that he had earned enough money from Patterson’s career, did not take a manager’s cut.

Finally, against D’Amato’s wishes, Torres fought chàmpion Willie Pastrano for the light heavyweight title at the Garden in March 1965. Although not favored, he won on a punch to Pastrano’s liver. That turned out to be the climax of his career. After a few defenses against unknowns, he lost the title just over a year later to Dick Tiger in a listless performance. Torres tried to win the title back in a May 1967 rematch, but lost again. Puerto Ricans in the audience were so angered with Torres (he was already disliked for favoring the New York literary salons and the company of Norman Mailer over the environs of El Barrio) that they showered the ring with bottles and chairs in a melee that lasted twenty minutes. Torres announced soon afterwards that he would retire to write an “autobiographical novel.”

After Torres, D’Amato wallowed. In 1966, he moved upstate to the town of New Paltz to manage Buster Mathis, a journeyman heavyweight prospect who gained some cachet when he beat Joe Frazier in the 1965 U.S. Olympic trials. They met again in 1968, Frazier won (and went on to considerable fame when he defeated Muhammad Ali in 1971, a match generally regarded as one of boxing’s greatest displays of ability and courage), and Mathis’s career fizzled out.

Even before Mathis finally flagged in the ring, D’Amato’s paranoia ended his role as manager. He became convinced that Mathis’s backers—four well-heeled New York executives all in their twenties—were out to kill him. At one point, D’Amato, disoriented and fearful, locked himself in a room at the training camp for two days.

In 1971, D’Amato declared personal bankruptcy. He claimed liabilities of $30,276 and, despite purse cuts from Patterson that should have amounted to well over a million dollars, assets of only $500. It was actually much worse. D’Amato owed $200,000 in back taxes to the IRS.

What happened to his money, whether he even got it, and what he did with it were all questions that became shrouded by D’Amato’s self-generated hero’s lore. He once said that he spent thousands of dollars on a network of spies and informants used to battle the I.B.C.

Sometime during the 1960s, D’Amato also bought a large, white, Victorian house near the town of Catskill. He gave title to the house to Camille Ewald, who also lived there. They had first met in the early 1950s. Ewald’s sister had married Tony D’Amato, one of Cus’s older brothers. Cus and Camille kept up a relationship, but never lived together for any length of time, nor did they marry or have children.

In 1968, D’Amato finally moved in with Ewald. There he stayed, training young boys, being visited by disciples every now and then, proffering advice to the odd professional boxer who came through (Ali reputedly often called for guidance) and developing the careers of a few, without much result.

It was as if he had decided to sleep for a while, just as Rip Van Winkle had, according to the fable, in the nearby Catskill mountains. Winkle logged a full twenty years. D’Amato did thirteen before being awakened by Mike Tyson. In a sense, D’Amato expected Tyson, or someone like him, a third champion, to one day come calling.

“What do you think about when you think about the future,” he was asked in 1976.

“Lately, I began to think … I said I never used power,” D’Amato responded. “See, I’m involved over here and my involvements are forms of distraction because these kids involve my undivided attention. How could I give these boys my undivided attention, which constitutes a distraction, and still be able to concentrate this power on getting somebody and doing something? I’d have to quit here and then sit down and you’d call it meditate. If I did that hard enough, and deep enough, I would get a picture and it would happen.”

“This picture, it would be for you to manage an important fighter?”

“Yes.”

To make another champion?”

“Yes.”

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

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.

Chapter Four

James Leslie Jacobs was born on February 18, 1930, in St. Louis, Missouri. He had one sibling—a sister, Dorothy, who was five years older. Both of his parents descended from German—Jewish immigrants, the first of whom arrived in the United States in the mid-1800s. The families plodded along through the generations. Jacobs’s maternal grandfather owned a small wholesale grocery business. His paternal grandfather was a salesman. During the Depression, Jacobs’s father sold women’s ready-to-wear clothing at a retail outlet in St. Louis. He did well and rose to manager. In 1935, the family moved to Atlanta, where he managed a department store. Within a year, they were back in St. Louis starting over. In 1936, Jacobs’s father went alone to Los Angeles to work as a liquor salesman for the Al Hart distillery. The family joined him a year later.

They lived in a three-bedroom apartment in the then largely Jewish Fairfax district. The Jewish holidays were not observed. Dorothy went to Sunday school. “We were Jewish only because we were born Jewish,” said Dorothy, who still lives in the Fairfax area under the name of Zeil, the first of her three husbands. The family did not prosper. “My father rose no further than salesman and he spent every nickel he had on the family,” she added.

For four years, the children were close. In their fantasy games, Jacobs was the hero. “There was a radio show, Little Beaver and Red Rider. Jimmy always got to play Beaver; he solved all the problems. He also played Robin and I was Batman,” remembered Dorothy. “If he had a problem, of any kind, he’d fantasize it away by saying, “What would Robin do?”

When Jacobs was eleven, his parents divorced. The family dynamics shifted dramatically. The mother, also named Dorothy, aligned with her son and purged the daughter. “There was a photo of Jimmy and me taken in St. Louis. I was eight and Jimmy was three. After the divorce, she cut me out and put it back on the wall,” said Zeil, a small, thin woman of sixty-five whom years of chain-smoking had left with emphysema and a thin, raspy voice. She mustered just enough wind for one sentence at a time, then had to stop and breathe in deeply. “After the divorce it became his house and my mother’s house. She kept us apart. My mother hated me. She told me that. She got pregnant with me on her honeymoon and she said because of me she was unable to get a divorce. What you have to know is that she never got close to anyone, ever, except Jimmy. He was the only man she loved.”

And Jacobs loved mother, deeply. “He defended her always. I could never say how I felt about her,” said Zeil. “It was incredible, just incredible how cruel he was able to be if anyone even attempted to say anything critical about her. And it was always ‘my mother,’ never ‘our mother.’”

At about the same time Zeil moved out to join the Navy during World War II, Jacobs discovered a passion for sports. He was thirteen, physically strong, and highly coordinated. Jacobs could play virtually any type of game—basketball, football, baseball—and he did it with a relentless determination not just to win but to dominate. Handball was a favorite. Boxing too. His mother, though, refused to let him box. To fulfill that passion, Jacobs turned to fantasy.

Nick Beck was twelve and Jacobs fourteen when they met. Beck remembered seeing Jacobs around the Hollywood YMCA, strutting around in tank tops, wearing his various medals on a watch chain. “I had a very strange experience with him the first time we met,” said Beck. “I used to punch the heavy bag at the “Y”. Jimmy came up one day to work out and we started talking. He told me that his father was a famous fighter. I was a big fight fan so I asked who. He said that his father was Buddy Baer, the brother of Max Baer, a former heavyweight. I challenged him on that. He stuck with the story and eventually we just agreed not to talk about it anymore. Jimmy could do that. He told some outrageous lies.”

The friendship continued. Both boys started collecting old fight films, Jacobs in 16 mm and Beck in 8 mm. In the mid-1940s, before television, vintage fight films sat around in attics. People were glad to get any money for them at all. “We’d lend films to each other every now and then to show to other people. Whenever Jimmy didn’t want to do that he’d say that his film was in a secret vault in Santa Monica and there was only one key, which his father had. I didn’t believe him. He couldn’t afford a vault. Jimmy rarely had any money as a kid.”

Jacobs quit high school to pursue his other ambition: handball. By the late 1940s he could beat easily any member of the Hollywood YMCA. In 1950, he met Robert Kendler, a millionaire Chicago builder and patron of the sport. Kendler hired young handball champions to work for his company, live together, and teach each other. Jacobs stayed a year, learned from the masters of that time, and then got drafted into the Army. After the Army, he returned to Los Angeles, worked as a business machine salesman, and in his spare time rose slowly through the national handball ranks. In 1955, Jacobs won his first national singles championship. He reigned as the king of handball for the next ten years. Five other singles titles followed, plus six doubles titles. Jacobs never lost a championship tournament. The years he didn’t win were those in which, because of injuries, he didn’t compete. Jacobs became known as the “Babe Ruth of Handball.” A 1966 Sports Illustrated profile claimed that “there is no athlete in the world who dominates his sport with the supremacy [of] Jimmy Jacobs.”

In handball circles, Jacobs was dubbed “The Los Angeles Strongboy.” He brought more than strength to the game. His tactics and strategies, combined with an unshakable will, were so refined, so well planned and executed, that he rarely lost. As the Sports Illustrated story pointed out, “He leaves absolutely nothing to chance.”

Jacobs’s style of play set the pattern for how he pursued everything else in life, particularly the management of fighters. He sought the position on court that afforded the most control over his opponent. Jacobs also didn’t so much win a game as force the other man to lose. There were men who hated that aspect of Jim Jacobs. He played to emasculate.

“Everyone else played haphazardly compared to Jimmy,” said Steve Lott, who first met Jacobs in 1965 at the 92nd St. “Y” in New York. Lott was then eighteen. Jacobs would become his mentor in handball and later in almost every other aspect of his life as well. “He’d have an opportunity to take a shot which at that moment would score a point and look good. But he wouldn’t do it. He’d make three good defensive shots first to set up the one that put you away without any doubt about the outcome,” said Lott. “Jimmy knew his best shots and your greatest weaknesses. He had his game, and yours, figured out. That way, he’d give you shots that you had to take the greatest risk returning. It’s like making you lose before he had to win.”

Jacobs’s inner game stressed strict self-control. He referred to “Mr. Emotion” as predictable, someone that he wouldn’t let interfere with winning. He explained that concept in the 1966 Sports Illustrated story: “[Mr. Emotion] acts as a reminder to me that the application of the physical talent that I have is under the complete dominance of what I call my control system, my brain.” The brain ordered “Mr. Emotion” as one would “some small child.”

He went into a match confident that he was prepared for every contingency. “I plan how I’m going to win, meaning the type of play I’m going to employ in order to get the desired result,” said Jacobs.

All through the 1950s, Jacobs and Beck continued to build their separate fight film collections. They devised a radical thesis: the great fighters of the turn of the century, contrary to the conventional wisdom, were technical dullards. They grabbed, pushed, tripped, postured, and showed minimal boxing skills. In 1960, Jacobs and Beck put together a mini-documentary to prove their point with old footage from the fights of James J. Corbett, John L. Sullivan, Bob Fitzsimmons, James J. Jeffries, and Jack Johnson. “We showed it at the Hollywood ‘Y’ to the boxing press,” said Beck. “No one had seen these guys before. They groaned. Some of these fighters were just horrible.”

Word of the revolutionary footage spread. They got telegrams from all over the world to show the film. Jacobs and Beck decided to show it next in New York. They intended to use the opportunity as an entry into a fight film business. They’d combine their collections, move to New York, rent the library out, and produce fight films for television. While Beck was on vacation in Mexico, Jacobs went to New York to discuss a showing.

The film was to turn Jacobs, already a well-known sports figure, into a celebrity. He soon met two men who would change the course of his life. The first was Bill Cayton, and the other was Cus D’Amato.

Cayton produced a television series called “Greatest Fights of the Century” using footage from his own extensive fight film collection. Jacobs decided to work for Cayton instead of with Beck, and moved to New York. “I felt that he betrayed me, but you know, that was Jimmy,” said Beck. “No one could stand in his way.”

Beck had seen him do it to other people too. In 1959, while still in Los Angeles, Jacobs met John Patrick, a local fight film collector. Patrick was a close friend of Jess Willard, who in a 1915 Havana match defeated black champion Jack Johnson. Only ten film prints of the fight were known to exist. The negative had long ago disappeared. Patrick and Willard found one of the prints in Australia. They offered to pay Jacobs, then just twenty-nine years old, to go there and buy the film on their behalf. Instead, Jacobs borrowed the money and bought it for himself. Patrick and Willard sued, unsuccessfully.

Cayton was surprised that Jacobs managed to avoid more legal trouble. “Jimmy was never a very sophisticated businessman,” said Cayton. “He came to me and wanted prints of some of my fights. He showed me his but I found out he didn’t own any of the rights. He just showed them to friends. He was likable, very engaging. I hired him as a film editor.”

William D’Arcy Cayton was born in Brooklyn in 1918, the son of a prosperous stockbroker. He did well in school and eschewed sports. After graduating from university, Cayton wrote technical reports for Du Pont. He switched to advertising and in the mid-1940s started his own firm. Cayton Inc. remained a small operation with a few highly profitable national accounts. With the advent of television, he recognized the need for sports programming. Cayton started buying up fight films from retired promoters. “They were the wise guys, the Jewish and Irish mafia from the twenties and thirties,” said Cayton. “By then they’d become wealthy gentlemen. They had all these films of Dempsey and Tunney and Louis gathering dust. They were happy to get anything for them. I paid around twenty-five hundred dollars a fight.” Cayton also bought the film rights from current fights. He made his first of many such deals with none other than Jim Norris of the I.B.C.

Gillette sponsored a series of live fights on television every Friday night. Cayton’s program came on afterwards—and often got better ratings. By the time he met Jacobs, Cayton owned 450 films. Jacobs worked as an editor, then started filming some of the fights himself. He also went around the world buying, with Cayton’s money, more old footage. Eventually, he created and produced his own television programs. One of his first ran on CBS in 1962: the Willard-Johnson fight.

The business prospered. The two men produced a new television series called “Knockout.” Jacobs became an expert on boxing. Cayton invested in fight films. He bought the entire library collection of Madison Square Garden. They set up new companies, such as Big Fights Inc., to handle the growing demand for sports television programming. By the mid-1960s, Cayton cut Jacobs in for one-sixth of the profits from Big Fights. A few years later, that became one-third. Cayton, however, maintained full ownership control. The money rolled in. By the early 1970s, the ABC network was paying $2 million a year for the exclusive use of the Big Fights 17,000-fight film library. “Big Fights made Jim a wealthy man,” said Cayton.

Cus D’Amato also believed that the so-called great heavyweights of the turn of the century were anything but. He sought out Jacobs to see the evidence. They became instant friends. Jacobs moved into D’Amato’s small, cluttered, one-bedroom apartment on Fifty-seventh Street in New York and stayed there ten years until D’Amato, bankrupt and finished as an active manager, moved to Catskill.

It seemed like an “Odd Couple” relationship. D’Amato’s career as a manager had peaked, and fizzled, with the Patterson/Johansson scandal. Once a powerful iconoclast, he became a tolerated oddity, a fringe player in the world of boxing espousing arcane ideas of little seeming relevance. That a young, athletic, popular, and outgoing man like Jacobs would live for so long with the paranoiac D’Amato puzzled a lot of people.

Their differences, however, were more of style than substance. Unlike D’Amato, Jacobs’s thinking processes never wandered. He had a deep and resonant voice, and he spoke in a precise, direct fashion. Jacobs affected the formal, stilted manner of an English professor when he discoursed on boxing. He used such phrases as “Oh, yes, I daresay,” and “My dear friend, you must realize.” The effect, when combined with his dark eyes, strong jaw, and bull-like physique, was, to say the least, imposing.

Like D’Amato, Jacobs respected the views of very few people. He never allowed anyone else to be the expert. D’Amato’s cacophony of thoughts and aphorisms enveloped a person like a dense cloud. Jacobs bore down on, and into, his listener like a jackhammer. They were both impassioned about the rightness of their own ideas, both capable of obsessive tunnel vision. They were egoists focused only on their own ambitions.

D’Amato also found in Jacobs someone who fully understood, could practice and intellectually articulate, the psychology of fear. “Jimmy is one of the few people who have a good grasp of fear,” D’Amato was quoted as saying in the 1966 Sports Illustrated profile. “He is extraordinary. He not only has an excellent mind, but a tremendous physique and stamina. I have never met an athlete like him.”

There were rumors about the pair. It seemed like a simple mentor-protégé bond, but some people suspected a homosexual tie. That’s unlikely. It had more to do with the fact that Jacobs perceived his own father as a fallen man, a failure in business and in marriage, symbolically impotent and made all the more so by a domineering wife. D’Amato had also fallen, of course, but in a great battle, and he had emerged with the power of his ideas intact. His demise was unjust. Jacobs found in D’Amato both a wounded father to rehabilitate and a stronger one to be guided by.

Still, Jacobs’s sexual identity didn’t seem to mature past boyhood. He frequently dated women but had no long-standing relationship and no interest in either marriage or children. He lived for work and he strove to please his mother. Intimacy with her was about all that he seemed to want from the opposite sex. “They’d hold hands, he’d kiss her all the time, and call several times a week,” remembered sister Dorothy Zeil. “They used the same pet name for each other, ‘Doll,’ and signed letters the same way, ‘Hugs.’ Once, when Jimmy found out she’d been dating a younger man he went into a jealous rage and insisted that the relationship end.”

Mother and son became prisoners of their own idealized, inviolate bond. Neither could err in the eyes of the other. Each was perfect. To Zeil it was all an elaborate dance of denial. “My mother was a drug addict. Demerol, barbiturates, everything she could get her hands on,” said Zeil. “And Jimmy kept giving her the money to buy them. I told him to stop but he wouldn’t talk about it. Money solved his problems, but it was me who had to deal with her. When she started having accidents from the drugs, I had to take her to the hospital.”

Jacobs couldn’t even bury his own father, who died in 1965 at the age of sixty-five after a five-year bout with lung cancer. “Mother promised she and Jimmy would come to the funeral,” said Zeil. “I went to pick her up and she came to the door in her robe and said, ‘I’m not going and Jimmy isn’t coming home.’”

When D’Amato retired to Catskill in 1971, Jacobs stayed in the apartment for a few more years. He grew much closer to handball protégé Steve Lott and in 1972 hired him to work at Big Fights. In 1974, Jacobs and Lott moved into different apartments in a building on East Forty-fifth Street. They were inseparable. They walked back and forth to work together each day, and frequently traveled overseas with each other to buy fight films. “Jimmy always referred to Steve as his ‘clone,’” said Zeil.

In 1975, Jacobs became friendly with a neighbor, Loraine Atter. Slowly, she replaced Lott as Jacobs’s primary companion. Loraine was forty-five years old, of Italian descent, and originally from Florida. She worked as an executive at a paper manufacturing company. She was known as an emotionally reserved, fastidious woman, and, according to Zeil, she “worshiped Jimmy.” She was the sort of woman who “took care” of her man. Loraine bought his clothes, arranged his social life, decorated his apartment, indeed did everything but cook. They ate out in restaurants every night. And most important, perhaps, was that she met the approval of Jacobs’s mother. Said childhood friend Nick Beck: “His mother didn’t think any of Jim’s girlfriends were suitable, until Loraine.”

Still, no one who knew Jacobs well expected him to marry her. They did, secretly, in 1981. Beck was shocked. So was Zeil. She suspected that her brother was talked into it. But what neither Zeil nor Beck nor anyone else except Jacobs, his mother, and Loraine knew was that in 1980 Jacobs had been diagnosed with chronic lymphoid leukemia. Death, he was told, could come within seven to eight years. No doubt they married because they were in love. But Jacobs may have also wanted the experience of marriage for its own sake before he died.

Jacobs wasn’t content just collecting and producing fight films, no matter how much money he made. He wanted to manage a boxer, preferably a champion and ideally a heavyweight. One early flirtation came in the late 1970s when he worked as a booking agent for white South African heavyweight Kallie Knoetze. He had D’Amato assert in the boxing press that Knoetze would, without doubt, become champion. Despite D’Amato’s training tips, Knoetze did not advance beyond journeyman status.

Jacobs turned to the lower weight classes where there were far greater numbers of available prospects. In 1978, he used $75,000 of Big Fights Inc. money to buy the managerial contract of Wilfred Benitez, a promising young welterweight. Jacobs and Cayton guided Benitez to a championship title in 1979. Soon after, Jacobs and Benitez split up over a contract dispute, and Benitez’s career fizzled.

As a team, Jacobs and Cayton earned a reputation for being tenacious about getting their boxer the easiest matches for the most money—and being honest about purse cuts. They tried to maintain a unified front, as if there were no really significant division of labor and no personal tensions existed. Jacobs functioned as manager of record. He initiated negotiations for fights, dealt with other managers, selected opponents, and schmoozed with the sports media. Steve Lott worked as his assistant in charge of the day-to-day business of the training camp. That included getting sparring partners, making travel arrangements, and generally catering to the fighter’s daily needs. Cayton preferred to work in the background on the contract negotiations with television networks and promoters. Jacobs and Cayton split the manager’s purse fifty-fifty.

Jacobs strutted about as the boxing expert, fight film nabob, and historian. Whenever news stories were done on their fight film ventures, Jacobs the former handball champion took center stage. He claimed that according to a boxing encyclopedia, he was the world’s leading expert on the sport. Jacobs failed to mention the fact that he wrote the entry himself. Privately, to friends, he derided Cayton as a boxing dilettante. “Jim wouldn’t come out and say anything overtly critical of Bill,” said Nick Beck. “He was more insidious about it. He told me that Bill didn’t know much about boxing and didn’t care about it either. It was just a business to him.”

Jacobs also overstated his status in the team. He told people that he had come to Cayton with an enormous film library and plenty of his own money, and that they had pooled their resources and, as equal partners, made boxing film history. One of the first people in boxing to see through that fiction was Larry Merchant, a boxing analyst for HBO Sports. In 1980, Jacobs came to Merchant with an idea to do a comprehensive fight documentary series on videotape. It required transferring thousands of images from film and using advanced video technologies to create special effects such as slow motion and stop-action replays. Jacobs envisaged selling the series to television, then renting out videocassettes. Merchant would narrate, for which he’d get a fee plus a share in the gross rentals. “When I mentioned to Bill [Cayton] what the deal was, he was shocked. Jimmy never told him about it,” said Merchant. After that, Jacobs never brought it up again.

Jacobs also claimed to Merchant, among others, that his father owned a chain of department stores in St. Louis. In other variations, his father owned a construction business. When his father died, Jacobs claimed to have inherited millions of dollars. “Jimmy talked about all his money. He told me that his father gave him fifty thousand dollars in 1960 to stake him in the fight film business,” said Merchant.

Cayton was aware of Jacobs’s public posturing and outright lies but never confronted him with it. “I found the stories about his supposed wealth very amusing,” said Cayton. “First he told people he had ten million dollars, and when he got away with that the figure went to twenty million, then thirty million.” In Cayton’s value system, they were in business together and as long as they prospered, he didn’t care about Jacobs’s idiosyncrasies. “Essentially, Jim was my employee. I did all the business deals with the fight films and all the boxers. Jim was the front man, the public image. Every deal was made right here, at my desk.”

In fact, Jacobs did have a higher opinion of himself than did his associates in the boxing world. “I liked Jimmy. I was curious about his insights on boxing. So were a lot of other people. But he wasn’t liked as a businessperson. He had a code in a deal. He gave you his idea of what it was worth and that was it—no other opinion was valid. He didn’t negotiate. He said, this is it, take it or leave it,” Merchant added.

According to Cayton, on more than one occasion he had to temper Jacobs in a contract negotiation. “Early on, he was a bit too blunt,” said Cayton. “I taught him everything he knew.”

Perhaps he did. Jacobs was a quick study and a man, once he learned the basics, determined to do it his way to the end. By claiming such high ground, Cayton tried to disguise a measure of envy. Merchant was aware of that: “The ever-popular Jimmy, the astute manager and boxing expert liked by everybody: that’s how Bill perceived Jimmy, and he [Bill] resented him for it.”

Cayton had an almost mirror-opposite existence to that of Jacobs. Besides not ever being athletic, he suffered from recurring back problems and endocarditis, an inflammation of the heart valves. He was lean, and tall, but frail-looking. His personal manner was stiff, formal, unengaging, dispassionate, almost cold. He tried to offset that with frequent smiling, but to no avail. The smile looked forced and far too self-consciously affected. It had a Cheshire cat aspect, as if Cayton were pleased with himself in advance with whatever was about to transpire—probably at the listener’s expense. “Bill was a taker, not a giver,” said Camille Ewald. He avoided social outings, except when it concerned business. Not a single person in boxing claimed him as a friend. “Money and business. He’s all business,” added Ewald.

Not entirely. Cayton had one other abiding interest that may explain part of the reason for his emotional reserve. Every night Cayton would take the 6:40 commuter train to his house in Larchmont, just north of the city. Every weekend is spent at home. One of his three children, a daughter, was born premature in 1947, and then mistakenly given too much oxygen in the incubator, causing blindness and severe retardation. Cayton and his wife, Doris, raised her by themselves at home. “Nothing, no one, could help. Doris devoted herself to her,” said Cayton. Apparently, the younger woman will not eat dinner, or go to bed, until he returns home each night. Whatever Cayton is in business, there must be another, far different man at home. Cayton diligently protected that aspect of his life. He rarely gave out his home telephone number, and he never invited business associates to his house.

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.”

A month after D’Amato’s death, Jacobs and Cayton managed to get Tyson on NBC’s “Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. “Once a thief, and a thief headed for a life in prison, mind you, Mike Tyson joins us this morning as a young man headed for a heavyweight crown,” said Gumbel in introducing Tyson. The interview ran the standard course through the fable until near the end when Gumbel asked Tyson, “Did D’Amato basically save your life?” The answer: “Yes.”

Dan Rather, anchorman for “CBS Evening News,” chimed in to take his turn with the fable later that December. He introduced a segment on Tyson that hit all the high notes and then some. “He’s just nineteen years old, tending his pigeons in the Catskills. A big, strong, country kid …” began the CBS reporter. “His teacher was Cus D’Amato, dead now but living on in his masterpiece … Mike Tyson, age nineteen, has the skills and is determined to win the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. And he has a secret weapon: he wants to do it for Cus.”

Cus and the Kid could be viewed as a human-interest story that celebrated universal values. The implicit messages, however, endorsed two abiding myths of American culture: charity is better then fundamental social change, and love, combined with the human will, conquers all. Cus and the Kid became a paradigm for social reform, but of the most passive variety. It was television fare, after all; pure entertainment. People could watch the problems of the black urban underclass being solved for them in the comfort of their living rooms.

The historical parallels with how other black boxers were packaged are striking. Tyson was made into a black stereotype of the post-civil rights era in which equal political and social rights had supposedly been obtained; economic freedom came to those who were willing to work for it. By that logic, Tyson, with the guidance and love of D’Amato, had fought his way out of poverty toward a certain future of wealth and fame. Heavyweight champion Joe Louis was also made into a stereotype of his era. In the 1930s, equal rights for blacks were a minor issue to most Americans, and yet blacks were still expected to feel empowered by the myth of individual salvation. If only they would “uplift” themselves, the thinking went, their problems would be over. And yet, blacks had to “behave,” especially when they obtained a measure of success that placed them in the public spotlight.

Newspaper and magazine profiles of Louis often described him as “nonpretentious,” “self-effacing,” “Godfearing,” and a “credit to his race.” Ironically, Louis’s manager was also named Jacobs and he, too, was a manipulator of the media. He hired someone to write Louis’s biography, Joe Louis’s Own Story, in which the fighter acknowledged his “duty” not to throw his “race down by abusing my position as a heavyweight challenger.”

In the marketing of Tyson, Jacobs and Cayton had the Joe Louis model in mind. They definitely wanted to avoid the Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston experiences. “Jimmy always believed that Louis represented the right mix of great boxer and astute management,” said Nick Beck. “Ali was uncontrollable in public, and too much his own man. Jimmy also wanted to avoid what he called the ‘Liston syndrome.’ He didn’t want people looking at Mike like he was some barely reformed thug.”

Of course, with Cus and the Kid the medium was also the message. It was a story that could be told in pictures and words within a few minutes. Jacobs and Cayton took that symmetry between form and content the next logical step. In 1983, the VHS format cassette videotape for home and office use was a novel publicity device already being used to sell financial services, travel, and residential real estate. Jacobs and Cayton were the first to apply it to boxing. They made more than five hundred tapes showing all of Tyson’s first-round knockouts and sent them to boxing reporters and the editors of the major sports magazines. Follow-up letters and phone calls were made to set up interviews. In the sports journalism community it came to be known as “The Tape,” a must-see and a status symbol for those who had a VCR.

The knockout tape made an appropriate companion piece to presentations of Cus and the Kid. As communications theorist Marshall McLuhan argued, the means of conveying information often has more influence on people than the information itself. On the “cool medium” of television, Tyson’s knockouts were fast and efficient, like a blast of numbing arctic air that instantly paralyzed an opponent. There was little sweat, minimal struggle, and only occasional blood; nothing, in other words, to suggest that sentient, and suffering, human beings were involved. If you weren’t a boxing fan, you could certainly watch a Tyson fight.

“It wasn’t that Jimmy and Bill did anything new or revolutionary in marketing Tyson,” pointed out boxing analyst Larry Merchant. “They just knew how to use television better than anybody in boxing had ever done before.”

* * *

Nine days after D’Amato died, Tyson went to Houston to fight “Fast” Eddie Richardson. Asked by reporters if the death of D’Amato would adversely affect his performance, he responded like the emotionally detached professional that both D’Amato and Jacobs valued so highly: “I have certain objectives, and I’m going to fulfill them,” said Tyson.

At six-foot-six, Richardson was taller than his average opponent. Tyson came out slipping and weaving and in the first punch of the bout plowed Richardson with a straight right that he couldn’t react swiftly enough to avoid. Richardson stayed on his feet, though not for long. Tyson eluded a right and countered with a left hook to the head that literally lifted Richardson off his feet and sent him to the canvas like a toppled tower.

The television announcers struggled to make historical comparisons to explain what they’d witnessed. They appreciated only half the phenomenon. One announcer said that Tyson threw a left hook from the same crouch as Joe Frazier and that he had the power of Rocky Marciano. In fact, a lot of heavyweights threw hooks from a crouch: not only Frazier, but Max Schmeling, Marciano, and Liston. What Tyson did better than all of them was make the crouch a single component in a complex defensive and offensive ballet. His body mechanics flowed in a poetic motion that delivered the maximum quantity of physical force.

Marciano punched hard from his crouch, but he had comparatively inferior body mechanics. He was more plodding and didn’t blend in as many different types of movements. At a fighting weight of only around 189 pounds, he also had a weaker punch than Tyson, plus nowhere near the same defensive skills. That’s why Archie Moore, in their September 21, 1955, bout, was able to knock Marciano down. Moore had the hand speed to exploit the many openings in his crouch. Marciano did, though, have something that Tyson the boxing historian valued very highly. Tyson felt empathy with Marciano because they both found ways to beat taller opponents. Marciano didn’t do it as well, technically, but he fought much bigger opponents with courage. “He broke their will,” Tyson said of Marciano in a November 1985 Village Voice feature profile.

Just over a week later, Tyson arrived in Latham, New York, to meet Conroy Nelson, the stereotypical opponent. Nelson had done some homework on fighting Tyson and had decided to run rather than stand and trade punches. Tyson stalked relentlessly, eventually caught Nelson, and used him as a punching bag. Nelson had no choice but to throw something back, which was like opening the cookie jar. Tyson’s left hook took him out with ease.

On December 6, Tyson made his debut in the Felt Forum, an auxiliary arena at the famed Madison Square Garden. This would be his first exposure to the New York sports media.

Kuralt and Gumbel had been useful in creating a consumable, living room persona for Tyson. Still, Jacobs and Cayton wanted something more: for the boxing reporters at the influential New York newspapers—Newsday, the Daily News, the New York Post and the New York Times—to anoint Tyson the next great, and inevitable, heavyweight champion. That would be a slow process. They would want to see Tyson undergo several key tests, particularly the all-important “gut check” of his courage against a tough, unrelenting opponent.

That wouldn’t come with “Slamming” Sam Scaff, a white six-foot-six, 250-pound, overweight, lumbering, club fighter from Kentucky. He had had thirteen fights, many of them losses. Partway through the first round, Tyson broke Scaff’s nose. It made a bloody mess of his face, sent ringlets of crimson red down Tyson’s broad brown back, and finished the fight. Scaff, who had once sparred with two world champions, later muttered: “I’ve never been hit that hard in my life.”

Wally Matthews, the boxing reporter for New York Newsday, recalled his thoughts at the time: “I got the tape of Tyson’s knockouts Jacobs and Cayton were sending around. One after the other. They did a masterful job at convincing people that Tyson had incredible punching power. I bought it. I was skeptical, but I bought it. I think back now and I realize they’d proven only that Tyson was a good one-round fighter because he came out like a maniac. And the guys he was knocking out, everyone else did too. Tyson hadn’t been tested yet.”

The test quickly approached. Sticking to the schedule of a fight every two weeks, Tyson met Mark Young and knocked him out in one round. Then, to kick off 1986, he put on a remarkable display of his full range of abilities against David Jaco. That brought Tyson to sixteen wins, all by knockout, twelve in the first round. In the process, Tyson picked up a nom de pug: “Catskill Thunder,” coined by Randy Gordon, an announcer for a sports cable station. In a January cover story, Sports Illustrated came up with “Kid Dynamite.”

Jacobs and Cayton didn’t embrace either name. In fact, they had decided early on to stick with the simplicity of “Mike Tyson.” D’Amato had once suggested “The Tanned Terror,” as a nod to Joe Louis’s “Brown Bomber,” but that wasn’t taken on. As the children of Brownsville had discovered when Tyson started marauding the streets, his mere name, when combined with the menace evoked by his smoldering manner, the almost animal-like physique, and his performance in the ring, was more than suitable.

The Sports Illustrated cover, a slew of new television news segments, more morning show appearances, and talk of his becoming champion—it was a remarkable amount of hype over a nineteen-year-old prospect who had yet to fight anyone ranked near the top ten. What was even more remarkable is that Jacobs began to suggest, in confident asides to reporters, that Tyson would become the savior of the heavyweight division. Its one-time glory, as symbolized in the achievements of Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, and Ali, had been tarnished by the splintering of the title in 1978 into three separate crowns, each awarded by a different sanctioning body. The world had no idea who was the real champion. Tyson, claimed Jacobs, would unify the title, restore its meaning, bring back the public’s faith in boxing, and in so doing join the ranks of the great ones.

“Jacobs’s pitch made for great copy, whether you agreed with him or not,” said Matthews of Newsday. “He knew that. Jacobs figured out what everyone most wanted to hear. They wanted a new myth for boxing.”

Jacobs buttressed that myth by taking every opportunity to identify Tyson with the great fighters. Starting with the Scaff fight, Jacobs asked Tyson to wear only black trunks and sockless black shoes. Up to then, he’d worn white or blue trunks with a different color trim. The idea was to evoke the classic, austere asceticism of Jack Dempsey. Assistant camp manager Steve Lott then came up with the idea of putting a small badge of the American flag on one leg of the trunks. “I felt that the flag would have a subliminal effect on the press,” said Lott. “They’d find it more difficult to write negatively about Mike.”

Without question, Tyson was far better than the men he’d fought so for. They were, after all, professional opponents, statistical cannon fodder for the real contenders. Tyson was also likely to prove himself technically superior to the next level of competition he would meet—including most if not all of the fighters in the top ten rankings. But the savior of boxing? In the same tradition as Ali, Marciano, and Louis? That was stretching it.

In technical terms, and on a strict comparison of achievement at equivalent age and level of experience, Tyson was in some respects better than past greats. Certainly he was more elusive. The power of his punch, especially when combined with the speed with which he delivered it, was also in a class by itself. In practical terms, however, Tyson had not yet shown his character. That would emerge from a test of wills: his against an opponent who didn’t go down in one or two rounds.

At that point in Tyson’s development, such issues didn’t press on Jacobs and Cayton. They were in a hurry to get him the title shot. It didn’t matter to them if the hype surpassed the reality of the performance. They felt that Tyson, if watched carefully, worked on constantly, packaged, and sanitized, would at the least keep the hype valid, even if he couldn’t yet prove it true. He hadn’t faltered in the ring for a long time. The mysterious flaw remained in check.

But not for long. That was the flip side of a string of easy opponents. It created a false sense of security for everyone, Tyson included. And that was the sober truth of the man-child within the hype, of the person behind the dual personas of the well-behaved, pigeon-loving surrogate son and the Ring Destroyer, the champion of destiny: nothing could prevent Tyson from bouncing between the opposite terms of his own paradox. It was far easier to control an image of a man than the man himself.

* * *

On January 24, 1986, Tyson stepped in the ring to box opponent number seventeen, “Irish” Mike Jameson. He looked like all the others Tyson had dispatched, though less muscular and more bulky. Jameson stood six-foot-four and weighed 236 pounds to Tyson’s 215. His record, seventeen wins and nine losses, implied something less than journeyman status. Jameson was also an aged fighter—thirty-one years old. He lived in Cupertino, California, and had never fought east of Chicago. It was expected, and hoped, that Tyson would do away with Jameson rapidly. There was a lot at stake. For the past several weeks, Jacobs and Cayton had been negotiating a multifight deal with ABC Sports. It would be Tyson’s first exposure on a national network television, and the first big purse money.

Jameson was no fool. He knew he didn’t have a chance slugging it out with Tyson, so he used his height, reach, and weight advantage to lean on Tyson and tie him up. After the two were pulled apart by the referee, Tyson would get off a few punches, but they seemed to have little effect. He’d then end up in a clinch again. It seemed that Tyson was letting himself be held. He was acquiescing to the other man’s unwillingness to fight. Tyson looked worse in the second round. He got hit easily by a few left jabs and straight rights, a clear sign that after getting position on the inside, he wasn’t moving enough on defense. In the third, Jameson kept getting his punches off first, then clinching to avoid Tyson’s blows.

By the fourth, Tyson seemed to wake up as if from a trance. He started connecting with more punches. Jameson, older and less fit, ran out of steam. One flurry of five blows in combination—remarkable for a heavyweight—sent Jameson down, but not out. Early in the fifth, Tyson scored a punishing knockdown, and the referee stopped the fight.

The announcers made an astute point about Tyson’s performance: “What happens when this young kid who can punch so hard hits someone and they’re still standing there and comes back and hits him back? Is he going to get discouraged or what?” Apparently, the answer was yes, at least to a degree. That’s what happened with Jameson in the first three rounds. Had Jameson been more fit, and skilled, he could have perhaps exploited that weakness in Tyson and lasted a few more rounds. Instead, Tyson won the fight on his natural gifts of superior punching power and hand speed. Fortunately, that was all he needed to beat Jameson. Tyson would, however, need much more in the next phase of his career. He would soon debut on ABC in the first of a four-match, million-dollar deal. The stakes were rising.

Financially, the Tyson team had come a long way in just over eleven months. In the first three fights Jacobs and Cayton had covered all the expenses—$30,417—including Tyson’s purses of a few hundred dollars. They’d made a profit of only $166.80. Expenses for the remaining fourteen fights, plus a 10 percent fee for trainer Kevin Rooney, were taken out of the gross purses paid by the promoters, $69,955. That left a total net purse of $57,095, of which Tyson earned two-thirds. In other words, $38,063 for about twenty-eight rounds, or one hour and twenty-four minutes of actual boxing. Jacobs and Cayton earned the remainder, or $19,032, from which they paid a 10 percent fee to Steve Lott.

With the $1 million ABC deal, an unheard-of sum of money for a fighter with only seventeen victories, the economics of Mike Tyson were about to change radically. For the first fight he’d earn a purse of $90,000. As Tyson continued to win, the purses increased in size until the $1 million was used up. Futhermore, with convincing victories, Jacobs and Cayton would acquire a significant amount of negotiating leverage with HBO Sports, a division of the pay-cable service owned by communications giant Time Inc.

In March 1986, HBO would launch a series of fights to unify the fractured heavyweight title. It had most, but not all, of the top-ranked contenders and champions signed up. With the hype surrounding Tyson’s rise, HBO became nervous. It faced the nightmare prospect of spending millions of dollars to determine the unified champion only for Tyson to emerge independently as the one true contender, the heir presumptive; the spoiler.

Jacobs and Cayton weren’t yet prepared to sign Tyson up. He didn’t have the experience to deal with the level of competition in the HBO series. They also had other ideas on how to earn a title shot. In one scenario, they’d match Tyson against old but well-known fighters such as former champion Larry Holmes and even Gerry Cooney, the lone white heavyweight of any reputation. That would establish Tyson’s credibility and earn him the right to then match up against the eventual winner of the HBO series.

Both sides of the issue faced a dilemma. HBO couldn’t risk letting Tyson go off on a separate track. And yet with only seventeen victories he didn’t have the credentials, or the national following, to be justifiably included in the unification series. For their part, Jacobs and Cayton were reluctant to trail off on their own in pursuit of the title. There was no way of knowing if the eventual winner of the HBO series would agree to fight Tyson. They would have done several years’ work only to be denied the ultimate prize.

The solution, for both parties, was to get Tyson on a separate but parallel track. In January, Jacobs and Cayton starting discussing with HBO the terms of a three-fight deal. Combined with the ABC fights, they would gain Tyson national television exposure and experience and, if it could be agreed upon, the basis for entry into the HBO series.

There were risks. They had to give up some say over the selection of opponents. ABC and HBO were interested in good ratings, and that meant competitive matchups. It was unlikely Tyson would be scoring many more first-round knockouts. Jacobs and Cayton wondered how well he would stand up under the emotional stress of fighting more seasoned opponents on national television.

First Tyson had to beat Jesse Ferguson in his ABC debut. Ferguson was a young, strong, quick-handed prospect ranked, like Tyson, in the second tier of heavyweights. The more convincing Tyson’s victory, the greater his value to ABC and HBO.

Aware of those stakes, Jacobs stacked the deck in Tyson’s favor. The fight took place in Troy, New York, the heart of Tyson country. Some seven thousand local supporters would be rooting for a knockout. Jacobs also insisted that the fighters wear eight-ounce gloves rather than the more standard ten-ounce versions. That clearly favored Tyson. His fast hands would be even faster with the lighter gloves. Jacobs obtained another advantage by getting Ferguson’s manager to agree to a sixteen-foot, eight-inch ring, smaller by a few feet than standard ring sizes. That way if Ferguson decided to run instead of stand and fight, he wouldn’t have as much room.

Tyson came out in black trunks and black shoes, no socks, and no robe. As he climbed into the ring and the crowd cheered, Tyson held up his arms at a low angle and turned the palms up in the manner of a Roman gladiator—strong, confident, but humbled by both the adulation and his own greatness. His face was expressionless. He paced back and forth, twitching his neck as if trying to remove a kink.

To the relief of the growing group involved in his career, Tyson rose to the occasion. As usual, he came out slipping, weaving, and slugging. He hit Ferguson on both sides with vicious hooks. He doubled up on body shots, going to the ribs first, then coming through the middle with an uppercut. But Ferguson could take a punch. With his own hand speed and sense of timing, he was also able to exploit those few occasions when Tyson stopped moving. He caught Tyson on the inside with a few right uppercuts. Tyson hardly flinched. That answered an important question about his future: he had a tough chin.

Tyson kept connecting through the second, third, and fourth rounds. Ferguson still didn’t go down, but Tyson didn’t get discouraged. He kept up his intensity and maintained nearly perfect stylistic form. It was by far the highest he had yet taken D’Amato’s “system.” Twice he hit Ferguson with low blows, and at the end of the fourth he threw a punch after the bell rang. As the referee pulled them apart, Tyson stuck his tongue out at Ferguson. He was enjoying this.

Ferguson came out in the fifth trying to keep Tyson at bay with a pesky poking of his left jab. Tyson easily slipped away. He then backed Ferguson up against the ropes. Ferguson tried to clinch, but Tyson fought through with a series of body shots and right and left uppercuts. Ferguson still didn’t fall. In the sixth, finally, he had taken enough. He had only the energy to clinch. The referee warned him several times, but Ferguson continued to hold. He was disqualified.

At first, Alex Wallau, the ABC boxing analyst doing the broadcast, thought that meant Tyson would be denied the knockout, thus breaking his streak. Then the referee, perhaps aware of what his decision meant, clarified the decision. He called it a technical knockout. Steve Lott climbed into the ring and kissed Tyson on the cheek. Afterwards, in a postfight interview, Tyson said to the gathering of reporters: “I tried to punch him and drive the bone of his nose back into his brain.”

The New York papers covering the fight quoted Tyson’s remarks with relish. It was as if they’d finally seen the real Mike Tyson behind the hype and it was not a pretty sight. Maybe he was, after all, just another thug like Liston. Jacobs was flooded with calls from reporters eager to unpack this dark, new Tyson that he had obviously kept a secret. One boxing reporter even dug up Ernestine Coleman, Tyson’s Youth Division caseworker. He cited a letter she wrote to Tyson after reading his comment. Coleman advised Tyson “to be a man, not an animal.”

Jacobs’s first reaction was to blame someone other than Tyson. He fired the publicity agent he’d retained for the fights, Mike Cohen. He also impressed on Lott, who was living with Tyson at the time, the importance of baby-sitting: “I had to watch him constantly, remind him how to behave after a fight and rehearse what he should say,” Lott recalled.

A few days later Jacobs invited a group of boxing reporters to have dinner with Tyson at Jake’s, then a New York steak restaurant: Ed Schuyler of the Associated Press, Michael Katz and Bill Gallo from the Daily News and Phil Berger of the New York Times. Two who were shunned—Wallace Matthews and Mike Marley of the New York Post—dubbed it the “Bootlicker’s Ball.” Schuyler remembered the evening: “No notes, no interviews, just talking. Jimmy was very conscious of trying to make Mike likable, to make him seem like a decent person so that if he got in trouble we’d all say, ‘Oh, well, he’s just a kid and that’s how kids are.’”

Thinking back, Schuyler recalled how strained it all was. “There was a desperation about it all. Like, ‘Let’s get this guy a title before he gets into serious trouble. Let’s keep him busy.’ I believe that Jimmy and Bill thought that Mike was really not a nice person, that he wasn’t responsible to anyone but himself. He gives you that little-boy voice, but he’s capable of doing anything. He’s a creature of impulse.”

Sure enough, on February 23, the Albany Knickerbocker News reported on an incident in the Crossgates Mall. Tyson had entered Filene’s department store and come on to a white salesgirl. She declined. Tyson got angry, threw some clothes around, knocked over racks, and insulted the girl and anyone else who came by. That same day, Jacobs denied to the New York reporters that Tyson had done anything wrong. A reporter from the Times Union in Albany went back to the mall a few days later to find out the real story. The salesgirl, her managers, and the mall security personnel all refused to comment. The salesgirl implied that if she did, she’d be fired. Rumors circulated that Jacobs and Cayton had paid off people at the mall to stay mum on the incident. They no doubt also relied on the local police to turn a blind eye. “The Albany police commissioner was valuable in taking care of Mike Tyson in many ways,” admitted Cayton. “Steps were taken with the help of the police to put lids on things.” In return, Cayton made sure that the commissioner of police got ringside tickets to Tyson’s upstate fights. Moreover, twice a year he bought advertisements in the Albany Police Department’s newspaper.

Newsday’s Matthews confronted Jacobs about the mall incident, fruitlessly. “He lied to me. You’d call him on it in stories and later he’d admit that he lied to protect Tyson. That was Jacobs for you. He held the press up to very high standards of truthfulness and accuracy—his versions of both—but he never stood up to them himself.”

Up to the Ferguson fight, Jacobs handled all questions from the press in his role as manager and front man. That would now change. Cayton had to step forward. They would both be needed to handle Tyson’s public image.

For the New York boxing reporters, dealing with Cayton wasn’t exactly a breath of fresh air. Yet, compared to Jacobs, almost anybody was preferable. “Jimmy was a propagandist. If he approached anything that made him uneasy, he just closed down on you,” said Phil Berger of the New York Times. “Sometimes it was innocent things. I once asked him what his father did. He got very uptight and said, ‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything. ’Then he called me back and lied, told me that his father was in the office supplies business.” Berger took advantage of Cayton’s sudden availability. “I only had perfunctory conversations with Jacobs after Ferguson. When I needed to find out something important, I talked to Cayton.”

Matthews had similar dealings with Jacobs—namely, pointless ones. “If he didn’t like your question, he’d ridicule you. He’d play word games with your head. I’d ask a simple question and Jacobs would say things like, ‘Wally, that’s like saying is it colder in the mountains or colder in the winter’ or ‘Wally, that’s like asking me if I’m going to paint the fence green.’ After a half hour of that, I’d forget my question!”

Although Cayton was more likely to give straight answers, he could also be trying. “Everything Jimmy said was right and you were supposed to accept it,” recalled the AP’s Ed Schuyler. “But I could argue with Jimmy if I wanted to. Cayton treated me like I was on the payroll. Cayton I wanted to hit.”

Jacobs and Cayton attempted to keep the boxing reporters, and any other inquiring journalist, devoted to what they deemed the key issues: Tyson’s indomitable ring prowess, the inevitability of his becoming champion, and whether he would go for the title via the HBO series or by some other independent route. For the most part, they were extremely successful. That was the news, after all, the stuff of sports page headlines. It was also presumably what people wanted to read about at that stage of Tyson’s career. And reporters who had to meet the pressure of deadlines two or three days a week might well not have the time or the appetite to delve into the subtler aspects of the Tyson story—especially when getting the basic news from Jacobs and Cayton was such a task.

But the fact remains that the subtleties were missed. One in particular, the issue of just who managed Tyson would later surface as a central drama of his career.

Starting in late 1985, and more frequently at the outset of 1986, Jacobs and Cayton asserted that they were comanagers. No such status existed in the boxing rules and regulations of New York State boxing and they knew it. Jacobs was sole manager, and Cayton a partner sharing in the manager’s purse cut. Still, the boxing reporters parroted and endorsed that fictitious label—even though no major boxer in memory ever had more than one manager.

“Boxing being the business it is, what do they call it, an assignee? That’s how they did it to become comanagers,” said Berger of the New York Times. Ed Schuyler also recalled having dismissed the subject of precisely who managed Tyson. “I believe the [New York State Athletic] Commission said Jacobs had a legitimate managerial contract. It never questioned the contract, so I never questioned it. It’s such a shady business. I mean, who manages who? There are so many people who have pieces of fighters, so many conflicts of interest. Doesn’t make it right, but that’s the way the game is.”

Taking a lead from the New York State Athletic Commission was not a good idea, especially when the chairman was José Torres.

Torres retired from boxing in 1969. He did do that promised book, not a novel, but a biography, Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story, published in 1971. Torres spent the 1970s writing for the New York Post. On the side he dabbled in politics. He campaigned in the New York Latino community for John Lindsay’s mayoral campaign and for Jimmy Carter. For a brief period of time in the late 1970s, he became an ombudsman for the New York City Council. Four years later, in 1983, Torres was appointed a commissioner of the New York State Athletic Commission by the office of Governor Mario Cuomo. By 1985, just as Tyson turned professional, Torres had been elevated to chairman.

That was the official version of his career outside the ring. On paper it looked impressive. Torres was the first chairman ever to have been a boxing champion. He promised to represent the needs of the fighters, not the managers or promoters. For Torres, that wouldn’t be easy. He had a penchant for letting himself be compromised.

As Athletic Commission chairman, Torres had an implicit obligation to act impartially, When it came to Tyson he did precisely the opposite. Torres frequently visited the Catskill gym to offer him boxing advice. He also went to almost all of Tyson’s early upstate fights, at the taxpayer’s expense. That in itself wasn’t improper, but his ringside behavior was. Torres always cheered wildly for Tyson and derided his opponent. At fight’s end, Torres often jumped into the ring to embrace and congratulate him. On a few occasions, he would still be sent by Jacobs to track down Tyson in Brownsville during his many disappearances. Torres provided other unofficial services as well. “He used to introduce Mike to Puerto Rican girls all the time,” said Tom Patti. “I think he wanted to quit the commission and get involved managing Mike.”

That seemed unrealistic. He was, though, at the least willing to see things from the point of view of Tyson’s management. And that was a clear conflict of interest. Starting in 1985, he went on record several times stating that Jacobs and Cayton were both the managers of Tyson.

The boxing reporters knew of Torres’s partiality, of his incestuous ties to the Tyson camp. They talked about it in cynical asides among themselves. Rarely was it revealed in their news stories. It seemed that a news judgment had been made—perhaps, put in the context of the times, a fairly understandable one.

Recording the emergence of Mike Tyson, the next great heavyweight, was like being swept along by the titles of history. Reporters had the feeling that they weren’t just observing, but also participating somehow. They saw the gaps, the rough edges, the inconsistencies, and the conflicts of interest, but they were apparently overwhelmed by the phenomenon. Both the persona of Mike Tyson, and the process by which he emerged in the national consciousness, became extremely seductive. “Tyson wasn’t just another boxing story,” Matthews admitted. “He was ‘the story.’ We all got caught up in it.”

* * *

By late February, Jacobs and Cayton had reached agreement with HBO on the three-fight deal. Tyson would earn $1.35 million, or $450,000 per fight. Once again, he broke all records of financial reward for a fighter of his age and experience.

Tyson’s next fight was set for March 10 against Steve Zouski at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. It was designed as a breather fight, an easy victory to bolster Tyson for the subsequent series of tougher matches on ABC and HBO.

Zouski was another appropriate opponent for the purposes of the business plan. He looked better than he actually was. Zouski claimed never to have been knocked down, let alone out, in a record of twenty-five wins and nine losses. The problem was that eight of those losses had occurred in his last ten bouts, putting Zouski on the downward slope of his career arc. Whatever muscle he had seemed to have softened up in large, billowing puffs around an ordinary frame. For two rounds, Tyson used Zouski to showcase his combination-punching abilities. It was over in the third—by a knockout.

Tyson was to meet James (“Quick”) Tillis three weeks later. He developed an ear infection and the bout was put off until May 3. That was the longest layoff of his professional career, just over three months. In a sense, it was fortuitous. Tillis was expected to be a watershed fight. Although twenty-eight years old and near the end of his career, Tillis was still considered a fringe contender for the title. In his prime, he’d fought hard-nosed veterans like Earnie Shavers and Gerrie Coetzee. He had also matched up against some of the better fighters of his own peer group, such as Carl Williams and Pinklon Thomas. He had a tough chin, came to a fight in good condition, could employ a full arsenal of boxing skills, and moved well in the ring. Beating Tillis would gain Tyson a measure of confidence, prepare him for the emotional pressures of the next stage in his pursuit of the heavyweight championship.

A crowd of eight thousand people jammed into the Glens Falls Civic Center in upstate New York, and every one of them seemed to be a Tyson fan. When he entered the arena, Tyson got a standing ovation. He had won all nineteen of his fights by knockout. That’s what people expected to see, but it was not what he was prepared to deliver. “After coming off the ear injury, he needed one easy fight before Tillis to get into it,” Steve Lott recalled. “The pressure of fighting someone as experienced as Tillis made him nervous, and that reduced him to a one-dimensional fighter.”

Tillis became a problem that Tyson had trouble solving. Tillis moved well in both directions, which made him a difficult target. And as he moved, he jabbed to keep Tyson at bay. When Tyson did get into punching proximity, Tillis blocked the blows or tied him up. By the second round much of Tyson’s aggression seemed to have drained away. He was racking up points, but many of his punches didn’t connect solidly. He worked the body, but rarely followed in combination with a blow to the head. And he took punches, too—jabs, uppercuts, and a few left hooks.

Tillis fought far better than expected. He came into the bout seven pounds lighter than usual, which helped his movement, and improved his hand speed. When he took a punch, he struck back, usually in combination. He looked tight, measured, confident, and determined not to get knocked out. But he made one costly error. Near the end of the fourth, Tillis threw a wide, off-balance left hook that turned him around. Before he could turn back, Tyson looped in a hook that sent Tillis down. He got up quickly, though, and fought hard in the fifth, knowing that Tyson would try and end it. To his amazement, and everyone else’s, Tyson didn’t capitalize on the knockdown. He kept throwing single punches, and in clinches didn’t ram blows into Tillis’s body. He was still winning rounds, but barely. In rounds six through nine, he gave up trying to capture the inside positioning so essential for his ballet of defense and offense to work effectively. Tyson let himself be pushed back and tied up, and at times just followed Tillis around the ring in a passive, acquiescent state. In the latter half of the tenth and final round Tillis, no doubt thinking that if he scored heavily he could win the fight, stood toe to toe with Tyson. They exchanged blows for a spirited finale. As it turned out, Tillis was close to being right. The judges scored the fight for Tyson, but without the knockdown in the fourth, it would have ended in a draw. The judges gave all the middle rounds to Tillis.

The Tillis fight made Jacobs and Cayton, for the first time, nervous about Tyson’s prospects. Did he come away from Tillis feeling that he’d passed a test or failed it? He’d won, but what had Tyson discovered about himself? Did he think that he was the future champion? Or did he see in his feeling of failure an irrepressible urge to give in?

The match with Mitch (“Blood”) Green took place seventeen days after the Tillis bout in the 20,000-seat-plus main arena of Madison Square Garden. It was Tyson’s first fight on HBO and the first under the promotional banner of Don King. Green had a respectable record of sixteen wins, one loss, and one draw. Ten of his victories had came by knockout. He was not a contender for the title. Still, he was ranked seventh in the estimation of the World Boxing Council. Green was also big (six-foot-five and 225 pounds of sculpted muscle), and he fought with a lot of macho pride in a wide-open, undisciplined style.

The first round set the pattern for the entire fight. Green had been told by his trainer to punch and move out of harm’s way, and if he did get caught inside to tie Tyson up. The plan, like Tillis’s, was to take Tyson into the later rounds, where he’d not often been and would perhaps be vulnerable. But this time, it didn’t work. Tyson had come to fight.

Green, a former leader of the Black Spades gang of the Bronx, was overcome by his own recklessness. He tried to grab, but Tyson punched his way out. Instead of continuing with that tactic, or at least to punch, move, and then grab, Green decided every now and then to stand and trade blows. He took the worst of it. Tyson kept eluding Green’s best punch—his left jab—then crowding in and delivering. As Green backed up for room to swing, he only gave Tyson more space to get his punches in first, which he did, repeatedly.

Tyson put on a boxing clinic as he scored with left and right hooks, body shots, and uppercuts, almost all in combination. One of his jabs knocked Green’s mouthpiece onto the ring apron—embedded in it were a bridge and two false teeth. By the end of the fourth round, Tyson had thrown 109 body punches alone, 70 (or 64 percent) of which connected. That was an unheard-of statistic for most heavyweights, who usually aren’t fast or well conditioned enough to do anything else but headhunt.

In the fifth, Tyson evoked one of Teddy Atlas’s training techniques. As Green swung away, Tyson feinted, slipped, weaved, dipped, and bobbed in a series of eighteen separate defensive movements. He avoided every one of Green’s punches without countering with a blow of his own. It was a display of pride in his superior abilities, and a bit of arrogance.

The fight went the full ten rounds. Tyson didn’t seem to care whether he could knock Green down, or out. He was taking pleasure in the process of chopping Green up, like a cleaver against a side of beef. He sometimes smiled through his mouthpiece at Green and at other times sneered. In the corner before the ninth, while trainer Kevin Rooney yammered away, he leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

On the judge’s scorecards, Tyson won all but one round. Afterwards, at a press conference, Tyson spoke about the win in cool, professional terms. He had been well coached by Jacobs on his postfight posturing since the Ferguson incident. There was no Ali-style histrionics, none of Liston’s glum bluntness. “Not to be egotistical, but I won this fight so easy. I refuse to be beaten in there. I refuse to let anybody get in my way.”

Tyson had clearly recovered from the Tillis fight. His technical prowess returned in fine form. More important he didn’t get frustrated with being unable to win by knockout. Tyson’s remarks afterwards also displayed a measure of confidence that Jacobs and Cayton wanted to bolster, and a maturity they had to protect. There would be no more risks like Tillis. They’d set up a string of breather fights until the final approach to the title could be determined.

Still on his breakneck schedule, Tyson fought Reggie Gross about three weeks later (June 13, 1986), also at the Garden and under the promotional banner of Don King. Gross, with an eighteen-and-four record, had long arms but a lazy, inaccurate left jab that dangled out like a heavy salami. Near the end of the first round, Gross moved into the center of the ring and opened up with a series of five punches that Tyson easily avoided as he looked patiently for an opening. He put Gross down twice before the referee called it over. Gross protested. Tyson tried to console him.

Fourteen days passed. Tyson traveled up to Troy to fight William Hosea. Hosea seemed like a fighter who could do a little bit of everything in the ring with a little bit of proficiency: except take a punch. It was over within two minutes and three seconds. Lorenzo Boyd came next—on July 11. A combination right hook to the body and a right uppercut on the chin ended the fight halfway through the second. Tyson was beginning to look bored.

On July 26, Tyson met Marvis Frazier, the son of former champion Joe Frazier. Father was both manager and trainer. That was more a liability than an asset against the technically superior Tyson. Marvis was molded in his father’s image. He too bobbed and weaved. Tyson and trainer Kevin Rooney studied tapes of Marvis’s fights and noticed that when he crouched, he didn’t so much bend at the knees as he did at the waist. In the dressing room before the fight, Tyson announced his fight strategy. “As Frazier bent over, Tyson would time a right uppercut,” said Baranski.

In the first round, Tyson launched at Frazier, backed him up into the corner, and, as per plan, sent in the right uppercut at the appropriate moment. That was enough to do the job, but Tyson added a left hook and another right. Frazier crumpled to the canvas thirty seconds into the round. It was Tyson’s quickest knockout. He tried to help the fallen fighter up, but by then Frazier’s mother and father had swarmed in. Tyson turned away, leapt up, and punched the air in a war dance. Jacobs rushed over and whispered something in his ear and Tyson calmed. “By then, we had him coached on what to say afterwards,” Steve Lott remembered. “With a name fighter like Frazier, we didn’t want Mike to be disrespectful. People liked Joe Frazier. I sat Mike down before the fight and told him what to say, word for word.”

On August 17, in Atlantic City, the betting line against José Ribalta beating Mike Tyson was 7 to 1. Ribalta had a respectable record of twenty-two wins, three losses, and one draw. Sixteen of the wins had come by knockout. The problem was that about a year earlier Ribalta had been knocked out in one round by Marvis Frazier. He was expected to go no more than a few rounds, if that, with Tyson.

What the experts didn’t expect, however, was that Tyson, coming off a series of easy fights, had lost some of his intensity and concentration. Gone were the elaborate slip-and-weave movements. He tried to win the fight the lazy heavyweight’s way—that is, on a single punch.

In the first round, Ribalta easily saw the punches coming and used a combination of leaning away, covering up, and putting Tyson in a clinch to avoid them. In the second round, realizing that he had to be technically sharper, Tyson doubled up with a right hook to the body and a right uppercut that knocked Ribalta down. The look on Ribalta’s face showed more shock than pain. He clearly hadn’t seen the uppercut coming. He got up and fought gamely for several more rounds. Tyson fell back into more of a conventional style, connecting often but without effect. He didn’t get frustrated; it seemed more like boredom. He wanted to win, but he’d lost interest in scoring a knockout. He appeared comfortable just being a good conventional fighter rather than a unique and spectacular one. The conclusion, at any rate, was foregone. Tyson wore Ribalta down with a total of 328 punches, 68 percent of which landed. A moment’s inspiration in the tenth sent in a flurry of punches that solidly connected. The referee ended the fight on a technical knockout.

Asked later if he was disappointed by his performance, a nonchalant Tyson opined: “What can I say? This happens. You don’t knock everybody out.”

Jacobs was also interviewed after the fight. He claimed not to be disappointed either. He talked about deciding within the week about whether to enter Tyson into the HBO series and to then, within a few months, fight for the title. He had the smug air of someone confident that all was proceeding by plan.

In a sense, he and Cayton had reason to be content. They had achieved the near miraculous. In twenty-six fights over nineteen months, Tyson had been steered to a top ten ranking. Although not yet ranked as a number one contender, he was being perceived by boxing and mainstream audiences alike as the next great heavyweight. He had been sold to America, via the fable of Cus and the Kid, as inoffensive outside the ring and indestructible within it. People believed that it was not a matter of whether he became heavyweight champion, but when.

Privately, however, Jacobs was still nagged by doubts about Tyson’s ability to perform at the higher levels of psychological pressure. Fighting for the championship would pit him against the most seasoned and capable fighters. And there could be no more breather bouts with which to protect his sometimes fragile emotional profits from the fights that did test Tyson’s character.

He had passed several important tests in the ring, both of his skills and his character. Still, as the Halpin, Sims, Jameson, and Tillis fights demonstrated, he remained completely unpredictable. It didn’t seem like a matter of choice for Tyson; it was not as if in those fights he had decided to win in some other way besides by knockout, to take control of the fight, box, try new things, manipulate the opponent, pick his punches, and add up the victory points in his head.

Tyson was capable of a small degree of such control, or “ring generalship,” as it is termed. He displayed it with Ferguson and Green. But that wasn’t a reliable quality in him as far as Jacobs was concerned. Nor was it the style of boxing he’d been trained in. D’Amato had honed Tyson to be a knockout artist. He’d always believed that was the best use of Tyson’s burning, rage-filled, psychic intensity. Jacobs agreed with D’Amato. He, too, feared that if Tyson didn’t knock his man out as soon as possible, the chances were high that he’d burn out and regress into a passive, acquiescent state. And so, despite the fact that Jacobs had everyone convinced Tyson would be champion, when it came down to it, he feared that he quite possibly possessed the dark, troubled heart of a loser.

That was the hole at the center of the entire elaborate and emerging spectacle of Tyson’s life. In retrospect, it seems incredible that more people didn’t recognize the problem at the time. Everything about Tyson was paradoxical.

The problem went beyond almost diametrically opposed performances in the ring. The Albany mall incident offered a glimpse into a counterlife vastly different from the one served up by Cus and the Kid. It just didn’t make sense that Tyson was the sum of his dual personas: surrogate son to D’Amato and robotic Ring Destroyer. How could those two beings exist in one, barely grown-up man? “It was very eerie to see Tyson break people’s faces in the ring, then sit down with him and hear that sweet little boy’s voice,” recalled Newsday’s Matthews. “I felt there was something I wasn’t seeing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

Nor could Tyson. He remained a mystery to himself. Despite the years with D’Amato, the twenty-six victories, and all the elaborate packaging as the greatest fighter of his time, Tyson was still unable to get any purchase on a self, on the core of his identity. “When people started to recognize Mike on the streets in New York, he used to tell me that he felt they were thinking he wasn’t really a good boxer,” Lott recalled. “Mike always felt like a fake.”

Tyson knew that D’Amato’s attentions were, in part, motivated by self-interest. But while D’Amato lived, the role of surrogate son could be played. His religion of the fists, as an all-encompassing gestalt, provided emotional order. It put Tyson in the leading role of his own unique drama of both the inner life and the practical world. With D’Amato around, even if he was a fake, it almost didn’t matter. D’Amato made him feel that some kind of self existed. At the least, Tyson felt that he wasn’t hollow.

When D’Amato died, Tyson had to play the role without a director. Soon, the persona of surrogate son no longer seemed to hold any validity. He may have never really believed in the veracity of D’Amato’s love, or if he did, it was perhaps on a leap of faith for the lack of any other choice when, as a boy of thirteen, he was presented with the option of life with D’Amato and all his eccentricities, or going back to the Tryon reformatory. However Tyson came to terms with D’Amato’s attentions, if he did feel loved, the experience left him with no permanent emotional structure. He had, in other words, come full circle. It was like having to go back to the first act of the drama and play it all over again. As Tyson told Sports Illustrated in the January 1986, “Kid Dynamite” feature: “I miss him terribly. The many years we worked over things, and worked over things. He was my backbone. All the things we worked on, they’re starting to come out so well … God, I’m doing so well, but when it comes down to it, who really cares? I like doing my job, but I’m not happy being victorious. I fight my heart out and give it my best, but when it’s over, there’s no Cus to tell me how I did, no mother to show my clippings to.”

Tyson was alone again and second-guessing the motivations of his supposed intimates. The same nagging paradox remained: Did they want him faults and all, or did they want only the future heavyweight champion of the world?

At first it seemed they only wanted the champion. In the months immediately following D’Amato’s death, Jacobs and Cayton were more focused on the business of Mike Tyson than the person. Remembered Camille Ewald: “After every victory, Cus used to have some kind of celebration for Mike. A cake or something. It gave him prestige. Jimmy and Bill didn’t do that. They were losing contact with Mike.”

Cayton didn’t want intimate contact with Tyson. In the four years of Tyson’s amateur career, he visited Catskill only once. His only gesture of intimacy with Tyson after he turned professional was to give him a book on raising pigeons. Tyson threw it in the garbage. “Mike knew he was just a business to Cayton,” said Jay Bright, another of the boys living in the house during the 1980s.

Jacobs didn’t want that kind of intimacy with Tyson, either, but he knew that someone had to step into D’Amato’s role. It was that or run a much higher risk that Tyson would self-destruct, either in or out of the ring. Jacobs revealed those views to Nick Beck: “To Jim, Mike became a business. I think that, despite what he wanted everyone to believe, was what motivated Jim in the relationship.”

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