by Mike Tyson
I hardly made any money from those early fights. My first fight lost money for the promoter, but Jimmy gave me $500. Then he took $50 from that to give to Kevin and he put $350 in the bank for me, so I walked away with $100. They were more concerned with spreading my name around than making money on these early fights. Jimmy and Cayton were the first fight managers to make highlight reels of all my knockouts and send VHS tapes to every boxing writer in the country. They were very innovative that way.
I was performing sensationally, but it seemed that Cus was getting grumpier and grumpier. Sometimes I thought that Cus thought I was an Uncle Tom. I would try to be polite to the people I’d meet and give them “Yes, ma’ams” and “No, sirs” and Cus would get on my case.
“Why are you talking to them like that? You think they’re better than you? All those people are phonies,” he’d say. Then when I acted like the god that he kept telling me I was, he’d look at me with disgust.
“You like people looking up to you, huh? Guys like Cayton and them telling you how great you are.”
I think he just needed someone to tear into. My day depended on what side of the bed Cus woke up on. By then, I had gotten my license and I would drive him to various meetings and conferences.
On June twentieth, shortly before my nineteenth birthday, I fought Ricky Spain in Atlantic City. This was my first pro fight outside of Albany, but Cus had sent me to watch big fights in cities all over the country to get me acclimated to the arenas.
“Make this your home, know this arena, know this place with your eyes closed,” he’d tell me. “You are going to be living here for a long time, so get comfortable.” He also took me along when he hung out with big-time fighters. He had me sit with them around a dinner table and get familiar with them so I’d never get intimidated by a fighter.
I was really excited to be fighting in Atlantic City and for it to be broadcast on ESPN. My opponent was unbeaten too, with a 7-0 record with five knockouts. They introduced me as “the Baby Brawler” and I don’t know about the “Baby” part, but I floored Spain twice in the first round and the ref stopped the fight.
Jimmy and Cayton were trying to get me a regular slot on ESPN, but Bob Arum, who was promoting the fights, told them that his matchmakers didn’t think much of my talent. That really pissed Cus off. Cus hated Arum’s matchmakers and after my next fight, they never worked with Arum again.
But all this political stuff didn’t interest me. I couldn’t wait for my next fight. It was in Atlantic City again on July eleventh. I was fighting John Alderson, a big country guy from West Virginia who also had a 4-0 record. This fight was on ESPN and I dropped him a few times in the second round and the doctor stopped the fight after he went back to his corner.
I ran my record to 6-0 in my next fight against Larry Sims, but I really pissed Cus off in doing so. Sims was really slick and awkward, one of those cute fighters. So in the third round, I turned lefty and I knocked him out with a resounding punch. In the dressing room later, Cus confronted me.
“Who taught you that southpaw crap? It might be hard to get you fights now,” he said. “People don’t want to fight southpaws. You’re going to ruin everything I created.” Cus hated southpaws.
“I’m sorry, Cus.” Ain’t that a bitch. There I was apologizing for a spectacular knockout.
I was back in the ring a month later and dispatched Lorenzo Canady in one round, and three weeks later I faced Mike Johnson in Atlantic City. When we lined up for the instructions, Johnson looked so arrogant, like he hated my guts. Within seconds he was down from a left hook to the kidneys and then when he got up, I threw a spectacular right hand that hit him so hard his front two teeth were lodged in his mouthpiece. I knew it would be a long time until he came to. Kevin jumped into the ring and we were laughing and high-fiving like two arrogant little kids. I was, like, “Ha, ha. Look at this dead nigga, Kevin.”
Now I was 8-0 with eight knockouts and Jimmy and Cus were using all their contacts in the press to get me recognition. I’d go down to New York to go to lunch with Jimmy and his newspaper friends. We really courted the press. I also started getting mentioned in the gossip columns because I started hanging out at the New York City hot spots like the restaurant Columbus on the Upper West Side. I became friendly with the great photographer Brian Hamill, and him and his brother Pete, who was a world-famous writer, started introducing me to all these celebrities. Pete would bring me to the bar and we’d sit with Paulie Herman, one of the owners. Paulie was the man in New York at that time. It seemed to me that he was a bigger celebrity than the celebrities themselves. Everybody wanted to be around Paulie, sit at his table, ask him for favors. I thought that he was a Mafia boss or something.
You never knew who you’d meet at Columbus. Sometimes Pete would leave me there with Paulie. Next thing I knew, David Bowie, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Drew Barrymore, this little kid, would be sitting at the same table with us. I’d think to myself, This is deep. You better keep your composure. Then Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci walked in and sat down. We were sitting and talking and the next thing I knew, Paulie said, “Hey, Mike, we all gotta go somewhere.” And, boom, five minutes later I’m at Liza Minnelli’s house sitting on the sofa chilling with Raul Julia.
Eventually I met all those New York social scenesters. Being around them, I realized that something special had died right before I had come onto the scene. It was so powerful, you could still feel it in the music of Elton John and Stevie Wonder and Freddie Mercury. You knew they had been to a special place that wasn’t around any longer.
But even meeting all these superstars didn’t validate my own sense of having made it. That didn’t happen until I met the wrestler Bruno Sammartino. I was a huge wrestling fan growing up. I loved Sammartino and Gorilla Monsoon and Billy Graham. One night I went to a party where I met Tom Cruise, who was just starting out. At the same event, I saw Bruno Sammartino. I was totally starstruck. I just stared at him. Someone introduced us and he had no idea who I was, but I started recounting to him all the great matches I had seen him participate in, against people like Killer Kowalski, Nikolai Volkoff, and George “the Animal” Steele. In my sick, megalomaniac mind I was thinking, This is a sign of my greatness. My hero is here with me. I’m going to be great like him and win the championship.
Cus wasn’t too thrilled that I was spending more and more time in Manhattan. When I went to the city, I’d crash on the couch of Steve Lott, who was Jimmy Jacobs’s right-hand man. Steve was a model junkie and he’d take me to places like the Nautilus Club and other spots where beautiful girls would hang out. At the time I was dedicated to winning that belt so I wasn’t really fooling around with the girls yet. I tried to be a nice guy then, not going too far. My weakness was food. Steve was a great cook and when I went out at night clubbing, I’d come back and have Steve heat up some Chinese leftovers for a late-night snack. I’d go back to Catskill after a few days and Cus would be mad.
“Look at your ass. Your ass is getting fatter,” he’d shake his head.
My next fight was my first real test. On October ninth, I went up against Donnie Long in Atlantic City. Long had gone the distance with both James Broad, a tough heavyweight, and John Tate, the former WBA heavyweight champ. I knew it would make me look good in the boxing world if I dispatched him promptly. Long was confident going into the fight, telling Al Bernstein of ESPN that he could outpunch me. They called Long “the Master of Disaster,” but his night turned disastrous as soon as the opening bell rang. I went after him fast and ferocious and knocked him down seconds into the fight with a lunging left. A little later, a right uppercut dropped him and then I finished him off with a right-uppercut-left-hook combination. It took me under a minute and a half to win.
After the fight, Al Bernstein interviewed me.
“Earlier in the day I really thought that Donnie Long would be a fairly tough opponent for you. He wasn’t!” Al said.
“Well, like I told you earlier today, if I knock him out in one or two
rounds, would you still consider him that?”
“I thought he was supposed to be, but I guess he wasn’t,” Al said.
“Oh, now he wasn’t …” I laughed.
“No, he was a tough man, I’m just saying for you he wasn’t tough, apparently, because you beat him.”
“I knew from the beginning, but everybody else didn’t know that it was no con, it was no con. A lot of people came to look, Jesse Ferguson came to look, the Fraziers came to look. All of you come and get some, because Mike Tyson is out here, he is waiting for you, all come and get some.”
I was almost too focused then; I didn’t really live in reality. I was interviewed for Sports Illustrated and I said, “What bothers me most is being around people who are having a lot of fun, with parties and stuff like that. It makes you soft. People who are only interested in having fun cannot accomplish anything.” I thought I was stronger than people who were weak and partying. I wanted to be in that Columbus celebrity world, but I was fighting that temptation to party.
I still wasn’t having sex. The last time I had gotten laid was at the Olympics with that intern. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex, but I was too awkward with women. I didn’t know how to access them. “Hey, hi, you want to get laid?” I didn’t know how to say that. Around this time, I was supposed to fight on the undercard in Madison Square Garden. My reputation preceded me and my opponent didn’t show up. So I left the Garden and went to a whorehouse on Forty-second Street. I had known about the place since I was a kid hanging out in Times Square.
I walked into the joint and sat down in one of the chairs in the outer room. There was a big-screen TV playing porno films. The girls would come up and they’d sit with you, and ask, “Would you like to date?” If you passed on one of them, another one would come over. I was the youngest guy there, so they thought I was kind of cute. I picked out a nice Cuban girl and we went to a room in the back.
Freud would have had a field day with that scenario. Here I was all ready to focus my aggression and beat up my opponent in the ring, but the fight is canceled and I go and get laid. I was actually extremely excited. During our session, her back went out. She said, “Hey, we have to stop. I pulled something in my back.” I hadn’t finished yet so I asked her for my money back. She changed the subject and asked me for my Edwin Rosario T-shirt that I was wearing. She was too hurt to continue so she said, “Let’s talk.” We talked for a while and then I left with my T-shirt.
After that, Cus began accelerating my pace. Sixteen days after the Long fight I fought Robert Colay and I threw two left hooks. The first one missed, the second one knocked him out. It was over in thirty-seven seconds. A week later I fought Sterling Benjamin upstate in Latham, New York. I knocked him down with a short left hook and then after the eight count, I swarmed him, throwing devastating body blows and uppercuts. He crumbled to the canvas. The ref stopped the fight. The upstate crowd was going wild and I turned to face them, putting my gloves through the upper ropes, palms up, and saluted them gladiator-style.
But I had more important things on my mind than my eleventh pro victory. Cus was very ill. He had been sick since I moved into the house with him and Camille, he was always coughing, but I knew his condition was getting worse when he didn’t travel with us to some of my fights. He stayed home for the Long and the Colay fights, but he made the trip to Latham to see me fight Benjamin. He was too much of an old stubborn Italian man to miss a fight in his backyard. He had no faith in doctors and he was one of the first proponents of vitamins and what we now call “alternative medicine,” and nutritional therapy.
I knew Cus was sick but I was just of the mind-set that he was going to make it through to see me become champ because we always talked about it. He was going to stick around to see me become a success. But when we talked in private, sometimes he’d say, “I might not be around, so you’ve got to listen to me.” I just thought he said that to scare me, to make sure I acted right. Cus always said things to make me apprehensive.
He was admitted to a hospital in Albany, but Jimmy Jacobs had him transferred to Mount Sinai in the city. I went with Steve Lott to visit him. Cus was sitting in his bed eating ice cream. We talked for a few minutes and then Cus asked Steve to leave the room so he could talk to me in private.
That’s when he told me he was dying from pneumonia. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. He didn’t look morbidly ill. He was buffing. He had energy and zest. He was eating ice cream. He was chilling out, but I started freaking out.
“I don’t want to do this shit without you,” I said, choking back tears. “I’m not going to do it.”
“Well, if you don’t fight, you’ll realize that people can come back from the grave, because I’m going to haunt you for the rest of your life.” I told him “Okay,” and then he took my hand.
“The world has to see you, Mike. You’re going to be champ of the world, the greatest out there,” he said.
Then Cus started crying. That was the first time I ever saw him cry. I thought he was crying because he couldn’t see me become heavyweight champion of the world after all we had gone through together. But soon I realized he was crying over Camille. I totally forgot that he had another partner who meant more to him than me. He told me he regretted that he had never married Camille because he had tax problems and he didn’t want her to take them on.
“Mike, just do me one favor,” he said. “Make sure you take care of Camille.”
I left the room in shock. I was staying at Steve’s apartment, and Jimmy lived in the same building. Later that day, Jimmy came by to get me to go with him to the bank to deposit a check for $120,000 for my last fights. By now my name was in the papers and I was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and strangers were stopping me on the street and wishing me well. I was out there, cocky, looking good. I knew all the girls at the bank and normally I’d flirt with them and they’d flirt back.
But right before we walked in the bank, Jimmy stopped.
“Cus is not going to make it through the night, Mike. They say he has a few hours to live.”
I just started crying like it was the end of the world. It was. My world was gone. All the girls at the bank were staring at me.
“Is there a problem?” The manager came up to us.
“We just heard that a dear friend of ours is dying and Mike is taking it very hard,” Jimmy said. He was cool and collected. Just like that, boom, no emotion, just the way Cus trained him to be. Meanwhile, I was still crying like a lost soldier on a mission without a general. I don’t think I ever went back to that bank, I was so embarrassed.
They had Cus’s funeral upstate. I was one of Cus’s pallbearers. Everybody from the boxing world came. It was so sad. In my sick head all I could think about was to succeed for him. I would have done anything to win that title to insure Cus’s legacy. I started feeling sorry for myself, thinking that without Cus, I would have a shitty life. Camille was very composed but when we got back to the house, we cried together.
Shortly after the funeral, Jim Jacobs organized a memorial service for Cus at his old gym, the Gramercy Gym, in the city. All the luminaries were there. Norman Mailer said his influence on boxing was as great as Hemingway’s influence on young American writers. Gay Talese said it was an honor to have known Cus.
“He taught me so many things, not just about boxing, which was a craft and could be mastered, but about living and about life, which is not so easily mastered,” Pete Hamill said.
Jim Jacobs pretty much nailed Cus in his speech. “Cus D’Amato was violently opposed to ignorance and corruption in boxing. While Cus was unyielding to his enemies, he was understanding, compassionate, and incredibly tolerant with his friends.”
I shut down emotionally after Cus died. I got really mean. I was trying to prove myself, show that I was a man, not just a boy. I flew to Texas a week after Cus’s funeral to fight Eddie Richardson. Jimmy and Cayton didn’t even let me mourn. So I brought along a photo of Cus. I was still talking to
Cus, every night.
“I’m going to fight this guy Richardson tomorrow, Cus,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”
Even though I was functioning, I’d lost my spirit, my belief in myself. I lost all my energy to do anything good. I don’t think I ever did get over his death. I was also mad at him when he died. I was so bitter. If he’d only gone to the doctor’s earlier, he could’ve been alive to protect me. But he wanted to be stubborn, so he didn’t get treated and he died and left me out there alone for these animals in the boxing world to take advantage of. After Cus died, I just didn’t care about anything anymore. I was basically fighting for the money. I didn’t really have a dream. It would be good to win the title, but I just wanted to get some wine, have some fun, party, and get fucked up.
But first I fucked Richardson up. The first punch I threw, a right hand, knocked him down. He hung on for a minute more, but then I hit him with a leaping left and because he was so tall he wound up coming down on the other side of the ring.
Conroy Nelson, who had lost to Trevor Berbick years earlier for the Canadian title, was next. He was still ranked the #2 heavyweight in Canada and was a tough, experienced guy, one of those guys with a big Adonis body. All the announcers thought this was the guy who would finally test me. I just worked over his body in the first round. Two or three times he almost went down from body blows. Then the second started and, boom, boom, boom, to the body and then an overhead right broke his nose and a left hook to the chin drove him to the canvas. When the ref stopped the fight, I paraded around the ring, soaking in the adulation of my hometown fans, arms outstretched.
My next fight was in the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden on December sixth. All my friends from Brownsville came. But I was too much in the zone to really think about being in New York and having a good time. I couldn’t wait to get through these fights and get my shot at the title for Cus. My opponent that night was Sammy Scaff. My postfight interview lasted longer than the fight. Scaff was a lumbering 250-pound Kentucky journeyman and I caught him with two awesome left hooks to the head that left his face a mask of blood and his nose mostly rearranged. After the fight, John Condon, the head of boxing at MSG who was doing the color commentary, asked me what was a typical day in the life of Mike Tyson.
