by Mike Tyson
“Man, Tommy, look at this, it’s the belt, man,” I said. “I gotta get one of these now. I’m going to train so hard. If I win this, I’m never going to take the belt off.”
I was so happy to be in Benitez’s presence. He inspired me, made me want to become more committed and dedicated.
Thanks to Cus, I also got to talk to Ali. In October of 1980, we all drove up to Albany to watch the closed-circuit broadcast of Ali trying to win back his title from Larry Holmes. Ali got the shit kicked out of him. Cus was mad as a motherfucker; I’d never seen him that angry before. After the fight, he was poker-faced because he had to give interviews and shake people’s hands, but once we got in the car, we could feel that negative energy. We didn’t say a word for the whole forty-five-minute drive home.
The next morning, Ali’s aide Gene Kilroy put Ali on the phone with Cus.
“How did you let that bum beat you? He’s a bum, Muhammad, he’s a bum. No, he’s a bum. Don’t tell me that, he’s a bum. Why did you let that bum hit you like that?”
I was listening to Cus talk and every time he said the word “bum” it was cutting right through me. I started crying. That was a bad day in my life.
Then Cus did a head trip on me.
“I have a young black kid with me. He’s just a boy, but he’s going to be the heavyweight champion of the world. His name is Mike Tyson. Talk to him for me, please, Muhammad. I want you to tell him to listen to me.”
Cus handed me the phone.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I said. I was a little dickhead.
“I was sick,” Ali told me. “I took some medicine and it made me weak and that’s how Holmes beat me. I’m going to get well and come back and beat Holmes.”
“Don’t worry, champ,” I said. “When I get big, I’m going to get him for you.”
A lot of people assume that Ali was my favorite boxer. But I have to say it was Roberto Duran. I always looked at Ali as being handsome and articulate. And I was short and ugly and I had a speech impediment. When I saw Duran fight, he was just a street guy. He’d say stuff to his opponents like, “Suck my fucking dick, you motherfucker. Next time you’re going to the fucking morgue.” After he beat Sugar Ray Leonard in that first fight, he went over to where Wilfred Benitez was sitting and he said, “Fuck you. You don’t have the heart or the balls to fight me.”
Man, this guy is me, I thought. That was what I wanted to do. He was not ashamed of being who he was. I related to him as a human being. As my career progressed and people started praising me for being a savage, I knew that being called an animal was the highest praise I could receive from someone. When I’d go back to the city, I would go to Victor’s Café because I heard Duran hung out there. I’d go and sit at a table by myself and look at the pictures of Duran hanging on the wall. I was living out my dreams.
I was sad when Duran quit during the No Más rematch with Leonard. Cus and I watched that fight in Albany and I was so mad that I cried. But Cus had called it. “He’s not going to do it a second time,” he predicted.
By the time I had moved in with Cus, I was already into the flow of his repertoire. He began to train me hard every day. I never had the privilege of enjoying boxing as a sport or as something to do for fun. Cus was an extremist but I was just as extreme. I wanted to be Achilles right then. I’m the kind of guy they make fun of. “Don’t give the nigga a rope, he’ll want to be a cowboy.” I was the kid who had no hope. But if you give me a glimmer of hope, you’re in trouble. I take it to the moon.
Cus normally had to wake the fighters up in the morning, but when he’d get up to do it, I had already come back from running. Cus would usually set the table for breakfast, but I started doing it after my run. He’d get mad. “Who made up my table?” he’d bark. He was upset that I showed more dedication than he did. Then Cus would cook me my breakfast. He’d throw in a whole slab of bacon, twenty or so strips, into the frying pan and then he’d cook the eggs in that bacon grease. I didn’t drink coffee so I’d have tea. He did that every morning even if he was angry with me.
I think both of us realized that we were in a race with time. Cus was in his seventies, he was no spring chicken, so he would constantly be shoving all this knowledge into me. Shove, shove, shove all this shit in. If you keep shoving it in, you learn it, unless you’re an idiot. I became very adept at boxing but my maturity, my thinking ability as a human being didn’t catch up with my boxing ability. It wasn’t like I was going to go to school and they were building my character to make me a good, productive member of society. No, I was doing this to become heavyweight champion of the world. Cus was aware of that. “God, I wish I had more time with you,” he said. But then he would say, “I’ve been in the fight game for sixty years and I’ve never seen anybody with the kind of interest you have. You’re always talking about fighting.”
I was an extremist. If we got snowed in, Cus trained me in the house. At night, I’d stay up for hours in my room shadowboxing. My life depended on succeeding. If I didn’t, I would just be a useless piece of shit. Plus, I was doing it for Cus too. He had a tough life with a lot of disappointments. So I was here to defend this old Italian man’s ego and pride. Who the fuck did I think I was?
When I wasn’t training, I was watching old fight films for at least ten hours a day. That was my treat on the weekend. I’d watch them alone upstairs, all night long. I’d crank up the volume and the sound would travel through the old house. Then Cus would come up. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Just watching the films,” I said.
“Hey, you gotta go to bed. People want to sleep,” he said. Then he’d walk down the stairs and I’d hear him muttering, “I never met a kid like this. Watching the films all night, waking up the whole damned house.”
Sometimes we’d watch the fight films together and Cus would give me tips on how I could beat Dempsey and Jeffries and Louis.
I was so focused sometimes that I’d actually go to sleep with my gloves on. I was an animal, dreaming about Mike Tyson being a big-time fighter. I sacrificed everything for that goal. No women, no food. I had an eating disorder; I was addicted to food then. And I was going through puberty. I was getting acne, my hormones were raging, all I wanted to do was eat ice cream but I couldn’t lose sight of the goal. I’d talk to Cus about girls and he’d pooh-pooh me, telling me that I was going to have all the women I ever wanted. One time, I was morose.
“Cus, I ain’t never going to have a girl, huh?”
Cus sent someone out and they came back with one of those miniature baseball bats and he presented it to me.
“You’re going to have so many girls that you’ll need this to beat them off you.”
So all I did was jerk off and train, jerk off and train. I thought that after I became champion, I could get as much money and women as I’d need.
In the gym, Cus had some very unusual and unorthodox techniques. Some people laughed at the style he taught, but it was because they didn’t really understand it. They called it the peek-a-boo style. It was very defense-oriented. You’d keep both your hands in front of your face, almost like you were turtling. Your hands and your elbows move with you, so when the guy throws the punch, you block it as you’re coming forward, and then you counter.
Cus’s offense started with a good defense. He thought it was of paramount importance for his fighter not to get hit. To learn to slip punches, he used a slipbag, a canvas bag filled with sand, wrapped around a rope. You had to slip around it by moving your head to avoid it hitting you. I got really good at that.
Then he used something called the Willie, named after the fighter Willie Pastrano. It was a mattress covered in canvas and wrapped around a frame. On the exterior was a sketch of a torso. The body was divided into different zones and each zone had a number associated with it. The odd numbers were left-hand punches, the even numbers were the right-hand ones. Then Cus would play a cassette tape of him calling out the various sequences of numbers. So you’d hear “five
, four” and immediately throw a left hook to the body and a right uppercut to the chin. The idea was that the more you repeated these actions in response to numbers they’d become instinctual and robotic and you wouldn’t have to consciously think about them. After a while, you could throw punches with your eyes closed.
Cus thought that fighters got hit by right hands because they were stationary and had their gloves too low. So he taught me to weave in a U-shape, not just up and down. He had me on the move constantly, sideways and then forward, sideways and forward. When you were punching, Cus believed that you got the maximum effect from your punches when you made two punches sound like one. The closest you could get to that sound, the higher percentage that barrage would result in a knockout.
Even though he emphasized defense, Cus knew that defensive fighters could be boring.
“Boxing is entertainment, so to be successful a fighter must not only win, but he must win in an exciting manner. He must throw punches with bad intentions,” Cus would always say. He wanted me to be an aggressive counterpuncher, forcing my opponents to punch or run. Cus was always trying to manipulate the opponent in the ring. If you kept eluding their punches, they would get frustrated and lose their confidence. And then they were sunk. Slip the punch and counter. Move and hit at the same time. Force the issue. He thought short punches could be harder than long punches. He thought that punching hard had nothing to do with anything physical, it was all emotional. Controlled emotion.
Cus hired the best sparring partners to teach me. My favorite was Marvin Stinson. I believe he was a former Olympian. He had been Holmes’s top sparring partner and then Cus brought him in to work with me. He was an awesome mentor to me, teaching me about movement and throwing punches. When he was finished the first time he came up to spar, he pulled me aside and gave me his running gloves because it was so cold out in the morning when I’d run. He saw that I didn’t have any.
My sparring sessions were like all-out war. Before we fought, Cus would take me aside. “You don’t take it easy, you go out there and do your best,” he said. “You do everything you learned and you do it all full speed. I want you to break these guys’ ribs.”
Break their ribs? Sparring? He wanted to get me prepared for the guys I’d fight and he certainly wanted me to break the ribs of my opponents in an actual fight. When Cus found a good sparring partner for me, he treated them special because he knew that they gave me good workouts. He always paid the sparring partners top dollar. But that didn’t insure that they would stay. Often a guy would come up anticipating sparring for three weeks. But after his first session, we’d go back to the house and he’d be gone. They were so disgusted with getting the shit kicked out of them, they didn’t even bother to get their stuff. When that would happen, Tom and I made a beeline for their room and rummaged through their clothes and shoes and jewelry. If we were lucky, we’d find a stash of weed or at least a pair of shoes that fit.
Sometimes Cus would bring up established fighters to spar with me. When I was sixteen, he brought Frank Bruno to Catskill. Bruno was twenty-two at the time. We sparred for two rounds. Before I’d spar with an established fighter, Cus would take them aside.
“Listen, he’s just a boy but don’t take it easy on him. I’m informing you now, do your best,” he said.
“Okay, Cus,” they would say. “I’ll work with the kid.”
“Hey, do you hear me? Don’t work with him. Do your best.”
We fought to hurt people; we didn’t fight just to win. We talked for hours about hurting people. This is what Cus instilled in me. “You’ll be sending a message to the champ, Mike,” Cus would tell me. “He’ll be watching you.” But we would also be sending a resounding message to the trainers, the managers, the promoters, and the whole boxing establishment. Cus was back.
Besides watching old fight films, I devoured everything I could read on these great fighters. Soon after I moved in with Cus, I was reading the boxing encyclopedia and I started laughing reading about a champion who only held his title for a year. Cus looked at me with his cold piercing eyes and said, “A one-year championship is worth more than a lifetime of obscurity.”
When I started studying the lives of the great old boxers, I saw a lot of similarity to what Cus was preaching. They were all mean motherfuckers. Dempsey, Mickey Walker, even Joe Louis was mean, even though Louis was an introvert. I trained myself to be wicked. I used to walk to school, snapping at everybody. Deep down, I knew I had to be like that because if I failed, Cus would get rid of me and I would starve to death.
Cus had given me a book to read called In This Corner … ! I couldn’t put it down. I saw how these fighters dealt with their emotions, how they prepared for fights. That book gave me such superior insight into the psychology of human beings. What struck me was how hard the old-time fighters worked, how hungry they were. I read that John L. Sullivan would train by running five miles and then he’d walk back the five miles and spar for twenty rounds. Ezzard Charles said he only ran three to four miles a day and boxed six rounds. I thought, Damn, Sullivan trained harder in the 1880s than this guy did in the 1950s. So I started walking four miles to the gym, did my sparring, and then walked back to the house. I started emulating the old-school guys because they were hard-core. And they had long careers.
I drove Cus nuts asking him questions about these old fighters all the time. I know he wanted to talk about boxing but I think I overdid it sometimes. I read all of Cus’s books about boxing, so when we’d sit around the dining room table and Cus would start expounding to the other guys about boxing history and he’d stumble on a name or a date, I’d finish his sentence for him.
“This guy knows everything,” he’d say. “He acts like he was there.”
I was serious about my history because I learned so much from the old fighters. What did I have to do to be like this guy? What discipline did this other guy possess? Cus would tell me how vicious and mean they were outside the ring but when they’re in it, they’re relaxed and calm. I got excited hearing him talk about these guys, seeing that he held them in such high esteem. I wanted so much for someone to talk like that about me. I wanted to be part of that world. I would watch the fights on TV and I’d see the boxers punching with grimaces on their faces and their ripped bodies, and I wanted that to be my face and my body.
We talked about all the greats. I fell in love with Jack Johnson. What a courageous guy. He was really the first black-pride guy. And I loved his arrogance. He got pulled over for speeding at the turn of the century and the ticket was for, like, ten dollars and he gave the cop a twenty and said, “Why don’t you take this twenty because I’m going to be coming back the same way I’m going.”
He was a master of manipulation. When he was training, he’d wrap his penis before he put on his tights to make it look larger and give the white guys an inferiority complex. He’d humiliate his opponents during fights. He was the original trash talker. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you can cut my lip,” he’d say. He’d laugh in the face of his opponents during a round, talk to his white wife and tell her how much he loved her while he was beating the shit out of the guy he was fighting. He was a guy I would have loved to hang with. He spoke several languages and partied with the royal families of Russia and England. Dempsey was the first million-dollar champion. He brought showbiz and glamour to boxing. I related to him the most because he was a real insecure guy, he was always afraid, but he always overcame those feelings to reach his goals.
Cus loved Henry Armstrong the most. He would constantly attack his opponents and wear them down. “Constant attack, no letup,” Cus told me. “Moving his head with a good defense, that’s what Armstrong would do. Break his opponent’s will, destroy his spirit, make all his causes a lie.”
Make all his causes a fucking lie? Whoa. Then Cus would stare at me.
“If you listen to me, you’ll reign with the gods. See the way you’re interested and talk about all these old fighters? By the time you’re champ, i
f you listen to me, the only reason people would know about these guys was because you’d talk about them. You’ll supersede them all. You’ll make them forget about everybody. I watched Jack Dempsey as a boy. I’ve met these guys, shook their hands. They are not what you are. You are a giant; you are a colossus among men.”
I ate that shit up. But all this talk about dedication and discipline and hard work wasn’t enough to keep me from going back to Brooklyn and doing my jostling and robbing. I was playing two heads of the same coin. I’d be up in Catskill and be the choirboy and then I’d go down to Brooklyn and be the devil. Thank God that I never got arrested for anything. That would have broken Cus’s heart.
Cus knew how to make me feel like I could conquer the world. But he also knew how to make me feel like shit. Sometimes he’d tell me, “You allow your mind to get the better of you.” That was his secret, unwritten code way of saying, “You’re a weak piece of shit. You don’t have enough discipline to be one of the greats.” The greats could fight the best fight of their life even if someone had just kidnapped their child or killed their mother. Greats are totally emotionally independent. Performers are like that too, not just boxers. Some of the legendary artists I read about would be high on everything but still be able to go out there and do a record-breaking performance. They couldn’t even walk, but they had great discipline and determination. Sometimes they’d go directly from the arena to a hospital. I wanted to be one of those fighters and performers.
From the first night I moved in with Cus, he started to break me down, see how far he could fuck with me for no reason. He’d come to my room and say, “What did you do in school today, what did you do? Well, you had to do something, you were in school all day. What did you learn? Where’s your homework? Do you have homework today?” The other guys in the house would always say that Cus favored me but they didn’t know what he was saying to me when we were alone.
