Atlas (10 page)

He was a kid who was really the opposite of the image that built up around him later on. He grew up in a rough place and got knocked around. He had no father to look up to. He had a mother who for whatever reasons, although I don't want to pass too much judgment on her, wasn't able to raise him the way you'd want to raise a kid. And he suffered. He was made fun of and picked on by other kids, who called him “Stinky Mike” because he didn't bathe. By his own account, he avoided getting beat up by hiding between the walls in abandoned buildings—an image that has always stuck with me.

The point is, this was a kid with no self-confidence, who had this very imposing physical presence, but underneath, though he tried to project power, felt like a fraud. He was a con man and a predator, which was how he ended up in reform school. His real crimes, which very few people know about, were against old ladies. He'd go up to them in the projects
when they were carrying bags of groceries and ask them in that sweet lispy voice, “Can I help you, ma'am?” Just like he was saying “Yes, sir” to me and Cus now. When these old ladies would say, “Yes, thank you, young man,” he'd carry their bags into the elevator, and after the doors closed, he'd knock their teeth out and take their money. The difference was—as he was about to learn—not everybody was as gullible or weak as those old ladies.

Here at the dinner table, he was nervous. He felt that he was still auditioning because he hadn't yet gotten paroled to us. He was on his best behavior.

When Camille said, “Mike, can you please get me a fork? They're right behind you in the cabinet,” he didn't react the way a normal person who was secure with himself would react. He thought that the quicker he got the fork, the more points he'd get. So he jumped up to get it, and one of his legs—and he had big, muscular legs—caught underneath the table and literally picked up that end of the table. The food—all those chicken legs and mashed potatoes and everything—started sliding off.

I had reached the point in my life in Catskill where I was able to step back a little and observe things in an almost detached way. I was noticing more and more how wacky Cus was, how he was this kind of lovable old crank. There was an odd geometry that described his relationships with Camille and me—and now Tyson (everyone else, even Rooney, was in the background). Now in the moment, with the table crashing back to the ground and dishes rattling around and nearly spilling, everyone had a different angle on what was happening. Camille was saying, “Careful, you're going to knock the table over, Mike.” Tyson had his hands up, overreacting as if he'd committed a crime, going, “Oh, my God! I'm sorry. I'm sorry.” Cus was saying, “Look at that power! Wow! What savage raw power!” And I was thinking, “This is weird. This kid is going to be fucking heavyweight champ.” It was just a moment, but it was naked, everyone revealed in their essence, and for that reason it's stayed with me.

It was one of the only times I saw Cus not care about food. If it had been Rooney or Frankie Minicelli, Cus would have said, “Frankie, you jerk, be careful, you're going to knock that kielbasa on the floor.” But
with Tyson everything was different. He was Cus's way back to the big time, to the promised land.

In the end, that would be all that Cus could see.

I
HAD A GUY TRAINING WITH ME NAMED
L
ENNY
Daniels, a 220-pound heavyweight who had played college ball at Lehigh and had a tryout with the Cleveland Browns. Lenny was in his twenties. He was strong and a good athlete. Even so, I had to be really careful letting him spar with Tyson. I had to stand in the ring with them and stay on top of them. I had to remind Tyson, “Have some respect. Do not hurt this guy.”

Then he'd go ahead and hurt him anyway. Even at the age of fourteen or fifteen, Tyson was so strong and so phenomenal that he would hurt these guys no matter what. It was difficult. All my kids meant a lot to me. The thing is, I was training only a few heavyweights that I could put in the ring with Tyson, and he wasn't strong enough emotionally, he wasn't sure enough of himself, so that when I would say, “Go easy here,” he would listen to me. After a round, I'd say, “I told you, don't hit them,” but he'd still sneak in a hard one, and it was such a vicious, ferocious punch that he would damage these guys.

Later on, we wound up paying guys to come down. I remember one day we got this guy Melvin somebody, an older guy, a heavyweight who'd been around a long time. We paid him twenty-five dollars to spar with Tyson. All I kept thinking was,
You got twenty-five dollars but now
you've got to go to the emergency room to get stitches, and that's going to cost you a hell of a lot more than the twenty-five dollars.

Cus went up to Tyson on one occasion as he was getting in the ring against another guy we'd hired, and said, even though he didn't think I could hear him, “Make sure this guy earns his twenty-five dollars.” So of course Tyson practically knocked the guy's head off, which was what Cus wanted. He wanted Tyson to get that confidence. Cus was Frankenstein creating his monster—whatever the expense to other people. It told you something for the future, though I wasn't smart enough at the time to realize what.

The first time I took Tyson down to the Bronx with the rest of the kids was around 1979. It was funny and at the same time predictable. When I was setting up the night's bouts, I said, “Okay, Mike, get on the scale.” Everyone was watching as he stepped on the scale. “Okay,” I said. “Two hundred and five pounds. Zero fights. Twelve years old.” I jotted down his info. All of a sudden the other trainers were in an uproar. “Twelve years old?”

Nelson came over. “Teddy, now you went too far! This beast, this thing here, twelve years old! Teddy, c'mon.”

I said, “Nelson, to make you happy, do you want me to put down sixteen?”

“Sixteen. You see, I knew you were just fooling.”

I said, “No, actually, he is twelve. But I knew you were going to go crazy. So I guess I gotta put down sixteen just to appease you.”

“You're saying he's really twelve?”

“That's right.”

It didn't matter. It wasn't as if I'd be able to find a kid near his age to fight anyway. We wound up matching him with a seventeen-year-old, a Spanish kid with a big Afro who could really fight.

Tyson was spectacular, a perpetual-motion machine of relentless, nonstop aggression. The Spanish kid was a hell of a fighter himself. He had to be to deal with all that power and speed without getting overwhelmed immediately. In the third round, Tyson pinned the kid on the ropes and hit him with a double left hook, one to the body, and then—
bang!
—one to the head. The guy went backward and collapsed on the bottom strand of the ropes and just sat there. He couldn't fall because of the way he had landed against the ropes. Tyson hit him another shot.
The force of the punch snapped his head back and the water and sweat from his Afro went flying into the back of the room and smacked against the wall with a loud
thwack.

The room wasn't huge, maybe twenty feet across, but the water and sweat flew into the wall, followed by the mouthpiece, which landed six rows back. You had to see it to believe it.

Don Shanager was there that night. He didn't come too often, but I had all these kids now, and I needed someone to drive a second car. It was more than that, though. Cus wanted him there. He wanted another set of eyes to report back to him. It was a special night, Tyson's coming-out, his first real competition, and Cus wanted to hear about it from every angle.

When the fight was over, Shanager said, “I never saw anything like that. The sweat from that kid's Afro slammed against the wall. You could hear it!”

Before we got back in the cars to drive back to Catskill, I went over to Santos's bar across the street and called Cus from a pay phone. He answered on the first ring, so I knew he was sitting there in his chair, waiting. He didn't even ask about the other kids. It wasn't, “We won six fights and we lost two,” the way it was on normal nights. I knew exactly where he wanted to start.

“He knocked him out in the third round. He had a good fight.”

We fell into a rhythm, almost a kind of shorthand.

“This guy was a good fighter, then.”

“And experienced.”

“Twenty fights?”

“Between ten and fifteen.”

“Older?”

“Seventeen.”

Cus whistled. “And Tyson never stopped moving?”

“Perpetual motion.”

“Like a heavyweight Henry Armstrong?”

“Yeah.” Cus always said if you could get a heavyweight that could fight like Henry Armstrong, throwing punches nonstop, never giving his opponent a chance to breathe, you'd have a champion. Jimmy Jacobs had these old fight films of Armstrong, and the two of us had watched them with Tyson many times, analyzing Armstrong's style and discussing it. “Imagine,” Cus said. “A guy that could move that quick,
that could fight with that ferocity and passion. That would be a fighter. Because he'd be exciting, too.” Cus never overlooked that. A champion was one thing, but combine that with excitement and you would really have something special.

When I tried to bring up how some of the other kids had done, when I said, “Greg won, too,” he said, “The punch, the final punch, what was it, a left hand?”

“Yes.”

“After the double left hook?”

“After that.”

“When he saw he had him hurt he finished him, huh?”

“Yes.”

That still wasn't enough for him. The next day, he couldn't wait to see Shanager. It was kind of like a guy wanting to hear good things about himself. All these years, he was out of the mainstream, out of the limelight, and now it was right there again, that excitement of being at the beginning of something big.

It actually kind of got to me, watching Cus with Shanager. You know how when you're a kid and you do something and you want to hear the person tell you everything good about it? Like if your parents came to your high school football game. “Did you see my touchdown run? The way I cut around that guy?” You had done it, they weren't telling you anything you didn't know, but you wanted to hear them describe it anyway. “Yeah, I saw the way you faked him out of his shoes. That was beautiful…. And the way you leaped over that guy at the end….”

It was just human nature. “The mouthpiece landed six rows back?” “The sweat hit and you thought it was somebody slamming their hand on the wall?”

There was a purity to it, and there aren't many things in life that are pure once you get beyond childhood. So I was happy for Cus. At that point the joy and excitement over Tyson was untainted. It hadn't gone to where it was going to go. I was happy that I was training his guy and contributing. It felt good to be a part of it. That's why I would feel so betrayed later. I thought Cus appreciated my being a part of that good feeling, and that we were partners.

As far as Tyson, he understood that he had something, a quality and a talent, that made him special. He knew he was going somewhere. At the
same time, he was scared, because he felt like maybe his boxing talent was all he had, and what if it wasn't enough?

Our relationship to that point was based on need more than any kind of real feeling. I was his trainer. I was important to him, maybe more important than anyone else, because Cus was too old and couldn't do what I was doing. He couldn't be in the gym every day, or go to the Bronx. I was the guy Tyson needed to prop him up when he was otherwise alone and scared. But he also had that street understanding of who had the power—so there was no real loyalty possible. Later on, he would realize that
he
was the one with the power. When he was older and more experienced, with a certain level of confidence, he would start playing both ends against the middle. But in the beginning, he was softer and weaker, and he needed me.

One of the toughest problems when you have a kid like Tyson, who can destroy other kids in the ring, is finding people to fight him. You have to get him that experience, but word gets around and nobody wants to put their kid in against him. Cus and I started paying Nelson fifty bucks, which he in turn used to get other trainers at the Bronx club to put their fighters in against Tyson. Fifty bucks—which was actually a lot of money for us—to sacrifice a kid. Here were these trainers, who otherwise wouldn't put their kid in with Tyson, and now, for fifty bucks (or some portion of that amount), they would. It was screwed up, because the kid wasn't getting the money, the trainers were, but that was the reality. We had to get fights.

We probably got twenty fights that way, which, under the circumstances, once Tyson was out of the bag, was a lot. Eventually, though, there came a night when we couldn't get anybody. To sway this one trainer who was on the fence, I said, “Make it an exhibition.” I knew that an exhibition automatically put it on a different level, made it more palatable, removed some of the fear. The trainer said, “Okay. We'll put big gloves on, sixteen-ounce gloves instead of the ten-ounce, and we'll use headgear.”

For me, all that mattered was that Tyson get more experience, that he get in the ring and deal with his imagination and the fear of fighting someone. As far as I was concerned, “exhibition” was just a word; other than the gloves being different, the intent was going to be the same.

Then Tyson went out there, big gloves, headgear and all, and knocked
this Spanish kid out cold. It almost caused a big problem. The trainer and some other guys rushed the ring and they were angry. “Hey, he wasn't supposed to hit him!” Meanwhile, their fighter was still stretched out. Another guy vaulted into the ring and started moving toward Tyson. I jumped between them. “Where are you going?”

“This was supposed to be an exhibition.”

Tyson was standing right behind me. I didn't want him to get involved, but he spoke up anyway.

“I didn't do nothing to him that he wasn't trying to do to me.”

It was true. Everyone knew it was true, and it sort of stopped them. I said, “Listen, back down.” And they did. They backed down.

Not too long after that there was another fight, a good fight, in which Tyson's opponent got in trouble and was hung up on the ropes much the way the kid with the Afro had gotten stuck on the ropes in that first fight. The referee tried to intervene but didn't get there in time, and
pow,
Tyson hit the kid with another shot and knocked him out.

Again, people were upset. A number of them stormed the ring and started going after Tyson. I jumped in and screamed, “I'm telling you right now, you go near him, we got a problem.”

That didn't stop them. Three of them were going after Tyson, trying to get around me. I pushed one of them, and he fell down. It started to turn into a melee. It was bad. I pushed this guy because I knew what type of guys they were, and I knew that once a few of them showed some courage and got into it, I wouldn't have any control, it would get completely out of hand.

Luckily, Nelson did some quick thinking. I had grabbed one of the other guys by the shirt collar and he had me by the shirt, too. We had our fists cocked and were about to start throwing punches, and Nelson jumped in the ring and grabbed the microphone. He said, “This fight is a draw. It's a draw!”

It was the perfect move. In the streets everything is instinct and flashes of brilliance like that. Calling the fight a draw calmed everyone down. A draw meant that no money would change hands, and that lowered the temperature considerably. The guy I was holding let go of my shirt; I let go of his. Tyson and I knew who had won the fight, which was all that mattered to us. Tyson got another win, got some more confidence, and the crowd was placated.

Not long after that fight, we took Tyson out of town, up to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to fight the first white guy he fought. It turned out to be an interesting night. When you're developing a young fighter (a couple of years had gone by and Tyson was fourteen or fifteen at this point), no matter how good or talented he is, the one part of him that requires the most work, the trickiest and ultimately the most important factor in determining his future, is his psyche and his will. Whatever else he's got going for him, his mind and his will are the real ingredients of his ultimate success or failure.

Against this white kid in Scranton, I knew immediately we were in for a test. The kid was big, not very skilled, but tough. Tyson jumped all over him in the first round, coming out strong as he always did, and knocking the kid down a couple of times. Instead of staying down, though, the kid kept getting up. Tyson had never had that happen to him before; when he hit 'em they usually stayed hit. This was new. He got discouraged and started feeling tired. I could see it happening.

Tyson came back to the corner at the end of the first round and flopped down on his stool like it was the last round of a brutal fight. He had dropped the guy two times already. The guy was half out of it, almost drunk from punches, and Tyson had barely been touched. But he was exhausted. “I think my hand is broke,” he said.

I knew right then that there was nothing wrong with his hand, but I had to make sure. I grabbed his glove—he was looking into space—and I squeezed real hard. He didn't react.