by Mike Tyson
I had my little bag with me and I took out the clippings of me getting my gold medals and handed them to her.
“Here, Mom. Read about me.”
“I’ll read it later,” she said.
The rest of the night she didn’t talk to me. She’d just go “um hmm.” She just looked at me with concern, like, “What are these white people doing to you?”
So I went back to Catskill and was feeling on top of the world. I was a spoiled upper-middle-class kid there. A few months after that, Cus told me that my mother was sick. He didn’t tell me the details, but my social worker had found out that my mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The same day that Cus told me, my sister called me.
“Go visit Mommy,” she said. “She’s not feeling well.”
I had seen my mother a few weeks before my sister called and she had had some kind of stroke and her eye on one side of her face was drooping, but I didn’t know she had cancer. The only cancer I knew was my astrological sign. I knew something wasn’t right, but I didn’t know it had anything to do with dying.
But when I got to the hospital, I got a big shock. My mother was lying in the bed, moaning, but she was pretty catatonic. It was painful just to look at her. Her eyes were sunken; her skin was wrapped tight around her cranium; she had lost all this weight. Her bedsheet had fallen off her and you could see some of her breast exposed. So I kissed her and covered her up. I didn’t know what to do. I had never seen anyone with cancer. I’d seen movies, so I expected to see something like “Well, I love you but I’m a goner now, Johnny.” I thought I’d have a chance to talk to her and say good-bye before she died, but she wasn’t even conscious. So I walked out of that hospital room and never went back again.
Every night I’d go back to the apartment and tell my sister that I had seen Mommy and that she looked good. I just didn’t want to deal with the hospital scene, it was too painful. So I went on a house-robbing spree. I ran into Barkim and some other hustlers I knew from the neighborhood and we robbed some houses.
One night before we went out to rob a place, I showed Barkim a photo album I had brought down from Catskill. There were photos of me and Cus and Camille, and me with all these white kids at school.
Barkim couldn’t get over those photos.
“Yo, Mike, this is bugging me out. Are they trying you up there? Do they call you ‘nigga’?”
“No, this is like my family. Cus would kill you if you said that about me,” I told him.
Barkim shook his head.
“What are you doing here, Mike?” he asked. “Go back there with those white people. Shit, man, those white people love you. Can’t you see that, nigga? Man, I wish I had some white people that loved me. Go back, man. There ain’t shit out here for you.”
I thought about what he said. Here I was, a two-time national champ, and I was still robbing houses because you just go back to who you are. Every night I was drinking, smoking angel dust, snorting cocaine, and going to local dances. Anything to get my mind off my mother.
My sister kept telling me, “You came here to see Mommy. Don’t get carried away, you’re not here to play.”
One night Barkim went to pick his girl up and the three of us were walking through one of the Brownsville projects and we saw a couple of my old friends playing dice. Barkim was friends with them too, but he didn’t stop to talk to them, he just kept walking. I went over to say hello to them and they said, “What’s up, Mike?” but they were acting leery. “We’ll talk to you later,” they said. I could feel the vibe that something real bad happened, somebody died or somebody got a lot of shit taken from them.
I later found out that there had been some power struggles going on in the neighborhood and when the smoke had cleared, Barkim was on top. He had all of the cars and the girls and the jewelry and the guns, ’cause he had the neighborhood drug enterprise. The whole street scene had changed since I had lived there. Drugs had come in and people were dying. Guys we used to hang out with were killing one another for turf and money.
Then one day my sister came home. I was hungover, but I heard her key in the door, so I opened it and as soon as it swung open, POW, she punched me right in the face.
“Why did you do that?” I said.
“Why didn’t you tell me Mommy was dead?” she screamed.
I didn’t want to say “I didn’t go to the hospital. It was too painful to see Mom a shell of her old self” because my sister would have killed me, so I said, “Well, I didn’t want you to be hurt. I didn’t want you to know.” I was just too weak to deal with this. My sister was the strongest one in my family. She was good at dealing with tragedy. I couldn’t even go down with my sister and witness the body. My cousin Eric went with her.
My mom’s funeral was pathetic. She had saved up some money for a plot in Linden, New Jersey. There were only eight of us there – me, my brother and sister, my father Jimmy, her boyfriend Eddie, and three of my mother’s friends. I wore a suit that I had bought with some of the money that I had stolen. She only had a thin cardboard casket and there wasn’t enough money for a headstone. Before we left the grave, I said, “Mom, I promise I’m going to be a good guy. I’m going to be the best fighter ever and everybody is going to know my name. When they think of Tyson, they’re not going to think of Tyson Foods or Cicely Tyson, they’re going to think of Mike Tyson.” I said this to her because this was what Cus had been telling me about the Tyson name. Up until then, our family’s only claim to fame was that we shared the same last name as Cicely. My mom loved Cicely Tyson.
After the funeral, I stayed in Brownsville for a few weeks, getting high. One night I saw my friends who had been playing dice a few nights before. They told me that Barkim had been killed.
“Yeah, they got your man,” one of them told me. “I thought they got you too, because last time I saw you, you were walking away from the dice game with him and I haven’t seen you since.”
Barkim’s death had a big impact on me. This was the guy who had first gotten me into robbing, making me his street son. And he had just told me to get out of here and go back with my white family. And it wasn’t just him. All my friends in the neighborhood had big hopes for me and Cus. Cus was going to take me places.
“Stick with that white man, Mike. We’re nothing, Mike, don’t come back here, Mike. I don’t want to hear no bullshit, nigga. You’re the only hope we have. We ain’t going to never go nowhere Mike, we’re going to die right here in Brownsville. We’ve got to tell people before we die that we hung out with you, you were our nigga.”
I was hearing variations of that everywhere I went. They took it seriously. To my friends, Brownsville was pure hell. They all wished they had an opportunity to get out like I did. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to come back, but I went back because I was trying to figure out who I really was. My two lives were so divergent, yet I felt at home in both worlds for different reasons.
One day there was a knock on my door and it was Mrs. Coleman, my social worker. She had come to take my black ass back upstate because I got caught up robbing and stealing. I was supposed to return to Cus’s house three days after my mother’s funeral. Mrs. Coleman was a nice lady who drove over two hours from Catskill to get me. She was very supportive of Cus and thought that boxing was a positive direction for me. I was still out of it, so I told her that I wasn’t going back to Catskill. She informed me that if I wanted to stay in Brooklyn, then she’d have to do some paperwork and the police would pick me up and she’d place me somewhere in New York. I was sixteen by then, so I knew what she was saying was bullshit. Legally, I didn’t have to answer to anybody. But I went back upstate with her. I looked at my apartment and saw how my mother had lived in poverty and chaos and then thought about the way she died. That changed my whole perspective about how I was going to live my life. It might be short, but I was going to make sure it would be glorious.
When I got back to Catskill, Cus really helped get me over my mother’s death. He talked to me
about the day his father died. Cus was in the house with him and his father was screaming. He couldn’t help him because he didn’t know what to do. Cus helped me get strong again. During this time there was a white South African boxer named Charlie Weir who was a top contender for the junior middleweight title. He and his team came to Catskill to train with Cus. This was during the apartheid era and Cus told them, “We have a black boy here. He’s part of our family. You have to treat him with respect. The same way you treat me and Camille, this is how you treat him.”
That was awesome. Nobody ever fought for me like that. Charlie and his team were paying to train with Cus and usually when you pay to train at a fight camp, you run the show. But Cus set them straight. And Cus talked like that at home too.
“Listen, we’re your family now, okay?” he told me. “And you’re our boy now. And you’re going to bring a lot of pride to this family. Pride and glory.”
The three of us would be sitting at the dining room table and Cus would say, “Look at your black son, Camille. What do you think about that?”
Camille would get up and come over to me and kiss me.
But our little idyllic scene got disrupted a month later. I fucked up. Cus was having trouble with my trainer Teddy Atlas. They were fighting over money. Teddy had recently married into a family that Cus was really dubious about, so when Teddy needed money, Cus wouldn’t give him much. Teddy was struggling, so he wanted me to turn pro so he could collect his share of my purses, but turning pro at that time wasn’t in Cus’s plan. So it was common knowledge that Teddy was going to leave Cus and that he would try to take me with him. There was no way in the world I would leave Cus.
But then I did something that made Cus get rid of Teddy. I had known Teddy’s sisters-in-law before Teddy even did. We had all gone to school together and were friends. The girls would always be flirtatious with me, but I never had a sexual thing with them. I was hanging out with his twelve-year-old sister-in-law one day and I grabbed her butt. I really didn’t mean to do anything evil. I was just playing around and I grabbed her butt and I shouldn’t have. It was just a stupid thing to do. I didn’t think it through. I had no social skills with girls because Cus kept me in the gym all the time. As soon as I did it, I immediately regretted it. She didn’t say anything to me but I knew it must have made her uncomfortable.
Later that evening my sparring partner drove me to the gym to work out with Teddy. I got out of the car and Teddy was waiting for me outside. He looked angry.
“Mike, come here. I want to talk to you,” he said.
I went over to him and he pulled out a gun and held it to my head.
“Motherfucker, don’t you ever touch my sister-in-law …”
He shot the gun into the air, right next to my ear. The sound was so deafening, I thought that he might have actually shot my ear off. And then Teddy ran. I would have too, because the gym was on top of a police station.
Whenever Teddy talks about this incident now, he makes it sound like he scared me to shit. The truth was, it wasn’t the first time someone had held a gun to my head, but it wasn’t like I was saying stuff like “C’mon, shoot me, motherfucker.” I was nervous. By the way, it took a while for my hearing to come back. But I just felt that I had fucked something up real bad. I really cared about Teddy. I was pissed, though, and I might have told some people that I was going to get back at him, but I would never do anything to hurt Teddy. He taught me how to fight, he was right there from the beginning.
Camille was furious with Teddy. She wanted Cus to press charges and have him arrested but Cus wouldn’t do that. He knew that Teddy was on probation for some other issue and that he would have gone right to jail. Teddy and his family eventually moved back to the city.
All this was my fault. I’m just sorry all that went down. After Teddy left, I started working with Kevin Rooney, another boxer who Cus converted into a trainer. Rooney and Teddy were childhood friends and Teddy had introduced Kevin to Cus. You can imagine how high the emotions ran when things played out the way they did.
I felt pretty developed by the time I got with Rooney. Normally when guys won tournaments, they’d get choosy about who they’d fight. Not me. I’d fight anybody anywhere: in their hometown, their backyard. Cus would say to me, “Fight them in their living rooms and their families could even be the judges.” I just wanted to fight and I wasn’t afraid of anything. I would fight in Chicago, Rhode Island, Boston, anywhere. And people would say, “That’s Tyson, he won the Junior Olympics twice.”
In December of 1982, I suffered my first loss in a tournament. I was fighting for the U.S. Amateur Championships in Indianapolis and my opponent was Al Evans. I was sixteen then and he was twenty-seven, a hard puncher and a very experienced guy.
I charged him in the first round and threw a ton of punches. I did the same in the second round. I was knocking him from pillar to post. In the third round, I was a little wild and he countered with a left hook and I went down. I got right up and rushed him again. He knocked me down with a right hand this time. I got up and started to charge again and I slipped. That was it, the ref stopped the fight. I wasn’t really hurt. I could have gone on. Cus was screaming at the ref from the corner.
I was crushed. I wanted to win every tournament. I liked the way the champion was treated after he won. I wanted that feeling, I was addicted to that feeling.
Cus might have thought that the loss shook my confidence and my desire, because when we got back to Catskill, he gave me a little lecture.
“Look at the champions you’ve read about in all these books. At some time early in their careers a number of them suffered knockout losses. But they never gave up. They endured. That’s why you’re reading about them. The ones who lost and quit, well their demons will follow them to their grave because they had a chance to face them and they didn’t. You have to face your demons, Mike, or they will follow you to eternity. Remember to always be careful how you fight your fights because the way that you fight your fights will be the way that you live your life.”
I won my next six fights, and then I fought for the National Golden Gloves championship against a guy called Craig Payne. I knocked Payne around the ring for three rounds with very little resistance. So I was confident when the official holding the big trophy walked past me into the ring. Craig and I were on either side of the ref and he was holding our hands waiting for the decision. I started raising my other hand in celebration when I noticed the official holding the trophy giving Craig the thumbs-up sign.
“And the winner in the Super Heavyweight division is … Craig Payne.”
I was stunned. The audience erupted into boos. Go to YouTube and watch that fight. I was robbed. After the fight, Emanuel Steward, the great trainer from Detroit who had Payne in his program, told me that he definitely thought that I had won. Cus was angry about the decision, but he was happy to see that I could handle that type of competition. He knew that we had won morally, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I was crying like a baby for a long time after the fight.
I didn’t have time to sulk. I went right back in the gym to train for more tournaments. In August of 1983, I won the gold medal at the CONCACAF Under-19 tournament. I won it again in 1984. That same year I won the gold medal at the National Golden Gloves tournament by knocking out Jonathan Littles in the first round. I had fought Littles in 1982 at the Junior Olympic trials and he was the only opponent who even made it into the second round with me. Now it was time to start getting ready for the Olympic trials.
While I was training for the Olympics, the boxing commentator Alex Wallau came up to Catskill to do a feature on Cus and me. At one point they had us sit in the living room and talk about each other. Cus was dressed in a conservative gray suit and a plaid sports shirt. I was wearing slacks and a shirt and a fly white Kangol cap.
Alex asked Cus about working with me and Cus went off into an interesting stream-of-consciousness rap.
“All my life I’ve been thinking in terms of d
eveloping a fighter who’s perfect. To me a person can accomplish this. I recognized the quality of a future champion because he was always able to rise to the level and exceed his sparring partners. Taught him movements like in karate so the body would make adjustments during a fight even if your opponent doesn’t make it necessary. He can strike a blow with lightning speed to the complete surprise of his opponents. He had tremendous speed, coordination, and an intuitive sense of timing, which usually comes after ten years of fighting because in the old days they used to box every single day.
“I don’t start teaching until I find out if they’re receptive. I do a great deal of talking to find out what kind of a person he is. For example we are today a sum total of every act and every deed. So in Mike’s case we talk and I try to find out how many layers I have to peel off of him of experience, detrimental and otherwise, until I get down to the man himself and then expose that, so that not only I see but that he can see. The progress begins from that point on more rapidly.”
“When you peeled away the layers on Mike Tyson, what did you find?” Alex asked.
Cus hesitated. “I found what I thought I’d find: a person of basically good character, capable of doing the things that are necessary to be done in order to be a great fighter or champion of the world. When I recognized this, then my next job was to make him aware of these qualities because unless he knew them as well as I did, it wouldn’t help him very much. The ability to apply the discipline, the ability to do what needs to be done no matter how he feels inside, in my opinion, is the definition of a true professional. I think that Mike is rapidly approaching that status, that important point, which I consider Mike must do in order to become the greatest fighter in the world. And for all we know, barring unforeseen incidents, and if this continues without any interruptions, and if we get the sparring and everything else that goes with it, he may go down in history as one of the greatest we ever had, if not the greatest that ever lived.”
