by Mike Tyson
“Mike Tyson is just a hardworking fighter that leads a boring life as an individual. Anyone who says ‘I wish I was in your shoes,’ the hundreds of people who say that don’t know the tenth of it. If they were in my shoes they would cry like babies. They couldn’t handle it.”
We were back in Latham for my next fight. It was the main event and the arena was packed with my fans. My opponent was Mark Young, a tough-looking guy. When we came to the center of the ring for the instructions, I could feel his energy. You got to stare them down during the instructions, but that doesn’t mean anything, that’s just window dressing. You feel that energy from their spirit, you feel it from their soul, and then you go back to your corner and you go “Oh shit” or “This guy’s a pussy.” That night it was “Oh shit, he’s coming to fight.” Kevin felt it too.
“Hit him with hard jabs and move your head,” Kevin said. “Don’t forget to move your head, he’s coming to fight.”
The bell rang and he came out winging. But he was wild and I started throwing hard jabs and moving my head. A little more than a minute in, he threw a wild right, I twisted around him and threw a sneaky vicious right uppercut and, boom, he went up in the air and came down face-first. Ray Mancini was the TV color commentary and he was very complimentary about my skills, but he thought that it was time that my management gave me someone to fight.
But Jimmy stuck to his plan. Two weeks later I was in Albany fighting Dave Jaco. He had a respectable 19-5 record with fourteen KOs including a TKO over Razor Ruddock. He was a tall skinny white guy. He didn’t look like much but was really tough. I kept knocking him down and he kept getting up. They stopped it after my third knockdown of the first round.
That night, I celebrated my victory with some friends. About eight o’clock the next morning, I knocked at Camille’s door. She opened it and I went inside and sat down. I didn’t say anything.
“How did you make out?” Camille asked me.
“I made out good, but I was looking for somebody who wasn’t there,” I said and tears started rolling down my cheeks. “Cus wasn’t there. Everybody tells me I’m doing good, I’m doing good, but nobody tells me if I do bad. It doesn’t matter how good I would have done, Cus would have probably seen something I did wrong.”
I expanded on the way I was feeling when I was interviewed for Sports Illustrated that week.
“I miss Cus terribly. He was my backbone. All the things we worked on, they’re starting to come out 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, 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.”
I put my feelings aside and kept busy. On January 24, 1986, I fought Mike Jameson. He was a big Irishman who had won decisions over Tex Cobb and Michael Dokes. It took me five rounds to stop him because he was a wily veteran and knew when to hold me. It made for a lackluster fight. My next opponent took those tactics to a new level. On February sixteenth, I met Jesse Ferguson in Troy, New York. The fight was on ABC and it was my first national TV appearance. Ferguson had become the ESPN champion when he beat Buster Douglas five months earlier. I was watching him walk around in the arena after he won the championship and I wanted to challenge him for his belt so bad. I fought on the undercard.
I knew it was going to be a tough fight. During the instructions, he didn’t even look me in the eye. He had such a humble and submissive posture. But I didn’t detect even a drop of fear or intimidation from his energy, so I wasn’t going for any of that humble, afraid-to-look-me-in-the-eye shit. I felt that he couldn’t wait to slug me.
I had the hometown advantage – in more ways than one. Jimmy had stacked the deck for my first national exposure. He got us to wear eight-ounce gloves, lighter than usual. We were fighting in a smaller ring than normal. And all the officials were in our corner.
I began the fight with a vicious body assault. But Ferguson was shrewd enough to hold on to me. This continued for the first four rounds. But in the fifth, I got him in the corner and connected with a right uppercut and broke his nose. He barely made it through the round and in the sixth he was in trouble again. Then he just blatantly held on to me and totally ignored the referee’s command to break. It got so bad that the referee stopped the fight. Ironically enough, a disqualification would have stopped my knockout streak. But the next day the local boxing commission changed the result to a TKO.
When I met with the reporters after the fight, I started a controversy. When they asked me about finishing Ferguson off after I had scored with the uppercut, I said, “I wanted to hit him on the nose one more time, so that the bone of his nose would go up into his brain … I would always listen to the doctor’s conclusions. They said that any time that the nose goes into the brain, the consequences of him getting up right away are out of the question.”
The reporters laughed, but maybe it was just nervous laughter. What I said to the reporters was what Cus used to say to me word for word. I didn’t think I said anything wrong. Cus and I always used to talk about the science of hurting people. I wanted to be a cantankerous, malevolent champion. I used to watch these comic book characters on TV, the X-Men and one of my favorites, Apocalypse. Apocalypse would say, “I’m not malevolent, I just am.” Cayton and Jacobs wanted me to be friendly with everybody, sociable, but I knew a man who was friendly with everyone was an enemy to himself.
The next day, the shit hit the fan because of my comment. New York papers had big headlines that read, “Is This the Real Tyson, a Thug?” One reporter even called up my old social worker, Mrs. Coleman, and she advised me to be a man, not an animal. But I didn’t care. I had a job to do. I wasn’t going to be Mike Tyson the heavyweight champion by being a nice guy. I was going to do it in Cus’s name. My opponents had to know that they were going to pay with their life or their health if they contested me.
Jimmy and Cayton tried to muzzle me after that. They assigned Steve Lott to tell me what to say after a fight. Jimmy even fired their P.R. guy because he had sent that quote out on the wires. Shortly after that fight Jimmy invited some handpicked reporters to have dinner with us. Ed Schuyler of the Associated Press was there, and he felt that there was a sense of desperation behind Cayton and Jimmy to get me a title before I got into serious trouble. But that wasn’t what it was. I think they just wanted to grab the money while they could. They didn’t have the respect for the mission I was on.
Cayton and the rest of them wanted to strip me of my history of growing up in Brooklyn and give me a positive image. Cus knew that was bullshit. They were trying to suppress me and make me conform to their standards. I wanted people to see the savage that was within me.
We partied after the Ferguson fight. I was drinking heavily during that time. Not during training, but once the fight was over, it was self-destruction time. I was a full-blown alcoholic. But I drank away from the glare of all the media in the city. We partied in Albany at my friend’s bar called September’s. That was our stomping ground. Sometimes guys went there from the city or from Boston or L.A. for work-related reasons, and they’d act like big shots, like they were gonna stomp on us little upstate guys, so we’d beat the shit out of them. I didn’t want to fight anybody and get sued, but there were people there fighting in place of me. I’d be instigating it, saying shit like, “Just kick that motherfucker. Who does he think he is?” We had a field day with those out-of-towners.
My next fight was against Steve Zouski on March tenth in the Nassau Coliseum. Zouski had never been floored in any of his previous fights, but I scored with several uppercuts in the third round and knocked him out. But I was not impressed with my performance. For one, I had fallen off a ladder in my pigeon coop at Camille’s and suffered a cut on my ear. Zouski hit my ear a few times and it blew up during the fight and started to affect my balance. During the interview after the fight, I alluded to my other problem.
“I didn’t like my performance,” I to
ld Randy Gordon, who had been calling the fight. “I have a lot of personal problems I’m getting over.”
Cayton later told the press that I meant girlfriend problems, but that was absurd. I didn’t have a girlfriend then. I was just depressed because so many of my friends from Brownsville were getting killed. It was barbaric. Friends were killing other friends over money.
After the fight, one of the officials saw that there was a big bulge on my ear. So the next day Jimmy had a specialist check me out and he realized that my cartilage had gotten severely infected and immediately made me check into Mount Sinai on the Upper East Side. He was worried that I might lose my ear if it went untreated. They had me stay in the hospital for ten days and undergo treatment in a hyperbaric chamber twice a day where they forced antibiotics into the cartilage.
The doctors at Mount Sinai told me that it would be good for me to go out and get some fresh air. So every day after my second treatment at three p.m., Tom Patti and my close childhood friend Duran would pick me up in a limo or we’d walk down to Times Square, where we hung out and took pictures with all the prostitutes and the guys who sold pictures of tourists with pythons coiled around their necks. We were having a blast, partying all night. I’d roll back into the hospital at four a.m. and the nurses would freak. “This isn’t a hotel, it’s a hospital.” When I showed the doctors the pictures of me with the prostitute and the python, they freaked too. “No, no, we didn’t mean you should go out all night. We meant go downstairs and sit in Central Park, watch the birds and the squirrels and get some fresh air.”
That was almost two months before my fight with James Tillis in upstate New York. When it was time for the fight, I was out of shape because of my illness and also because I had been drinking and partying way too hard. The fight went ten hard rounds and I was just glad to get the decision. I dropped him once, which probably tipped the scales in my favor, but he was the toughest opponent I had ever faced at that point. He gave me such a body beating that I couldn’t even walk after the fight. I had to stay in the hotel. I couldn’t even drive home. I found out what fighting was really about that night. Several times during the fight I wanted to go down so bad just to get some relief, but I kept grabbing and holding him, trying to get my breath back.
The next day Jimmy Jacobs went into spin mode. He told the press, “The fight was just a hurdle for him. Now we see that he can go the distance.” He was a master at manipulating the press, not to mention the public. He and Cayton masterminded a publicity campaign that was unparalleled. No actor in the world ever got that kind of press before. Everybody does it now, but back then, they were true innovators.
Less than three weeks later, I fought Mitch Green at the Garden. He was truly a crazy motherfucker. He tried to get in my head before the fight by telling the Daily News that I was nineteen years old but I looked like I was forty. When Marv Albert asked me if Green was getting to me, I said, “Mitch Green is a good fighter but he’s not on an eloquent level to disturb me. So not at all.”
This was my first fight on my new HBO contract that Jimmy and Cayton had negotiated. And it was a thrill to fight for the first time in the big arena in Madison Square Garden. But you wouldn’t know it from the prefight interview on HBO. When they asked me if I was enjoying all my newfound attention and wealth, I got morose. “People won’t want to be in my position. ‘Wow, I can make money,’ they say. But if they had to go through some of the things I go through, they would cry. It’s so depressing. Everybody wants something. Just as hard as you’re working in the gym, people are working that hard trying to separate you from your money.” That was me being Cus. You’d think I’d be more upbeat since this was my first time headlining the Garden.
Green was a well-respected fighter then. He was a four-time Golden Gloves champion and he had been undefeated until he lost a decision in 1985 to Trevor Berbick for the USBA title. But I knew I was going to beat him as soon as we entered the ring. I didn’t get any threatening vibes from him at all. The fight went the distance but that was okay. After the Tillis fight, I wanted to be more comfortable going ten rounds. I knew he couldn’t hurt me so I was working on my endurance. I won every round and it wasn’t a dull fight. At one point I knocked out his mouthpiece and bridge with a couple of teeth in it. He took a lot of punishment. I was so loose that between the eighth and ninth rounds when Kevin was literally in my face jabbering on and on, telling me to punch more, I gave him a little kiss.
After the fight I was back to my usual arrogant self.
“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,” I told the press.
Reggie Gross was my next target. He was a tough fighter they called “the Spoiler” because he had upset some good fighters including Bert Cooper and Jimmy Clark, who was a great American Olympian. The fight almost didn’t happen because I was suffering from a bad case of bronchitis that week. I had suffered from bronchitis my entire life and I had gotten used to it, but this was a severe case. They took me to the doctor the day of the fight and he examined me.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to postpone this fight. He’s pretty ill,” the doctor said.
“Can I talk to you for a moment, please, sir,” Jimmy said. I could see the look in Jimmy’s eyes and the next thing I knew I was in the ring fighting. In the first round, I was hitting Gross with a flurry of punches and he was covering up. Suddenly he decided to start trading punches, which was fine with me. He threw a bunch of wild punches that I dodged and then I knocked him down with a vicious left hook and then knocked him down a second time with a succession of punches. The ref stopped the fight because Gross was glassy-eyed, but Reggie complained. “You can’t even walk but you want to fight?” the ref said.
My next two opponents seemed to be going down in caliber. Maybe Jimmy and Cayton just wanted me to get some more one-round knockouts after those two decisions. I obliged them with William Hosea, but it took me two rounds to knock out Lorenzo Boyd. But my lightning-fast right to the rib cage followed quickly by a thundering right uppercut left the crowd wowed. Two weeks later I got everyone’s attention by demolishing Marvis Frazier, Joe’s son, in thirty seconds. I cornered him, set him up with my jab, and then finished him off with my favorite punch, a right uppercut. He looked severely injured so I rushed over to try to help him up. I love Marvis; he’s a beautiful person.
I had just turned twenty a few weeks earlier, and the plan was for me to become the youngest heavyweight champ by the end of 1986. While Jimmy and Cayton were negotiating for that, they had me fight Jose Ribalta in Atlantic City on August seventeenth.
Ribalta was a game fighter who, unlike Green and Tillis, actually engaged me. And he seemed to have the will not to be knocked out. I knocked him down in the second, and again in the eighth, but he got up. In the tenth, he went down a third time and when he got up, I swarmed him on the ropes and the referee stopped the fight.
Besides gaining a lot of respect from the crowd and the commentators on his determination, Ribalta also managed to ruin my night. After the fight, I had a date with a beautiful young coed from Penn State University who I had met at the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. This young lady accompanied me to my room and she began to touch me but I recoiled in pain.
“Hey! Please don’t touch me. It’s nothing personal but you have to go now. I just need some peace,” I told her. She was very understanding and she drove back to her school, but we made up for it the next time I saw her.
She had been at the fight and had seen all the punishment I had absorbed. I had never been through anything like that before. I felt nauseous from all Ribalta’s body blows, even hours after the fight. Ribalta and Tillis were the only two guys who had ever made me feel like that. I never felt that much general pain again. But I remember all the reading I had done chronicling how other great fighters had felt like their heads were halfway off after some of their fights, so I just felt that this was part of my journey
.
The negotiations for a title fight were heating up and Jimmy decided that I should fight in Vegas so I could get used to it before I would fight there later in the year to win the title. We stayed at the house of Dr. Bruce Handelman, a friend of Jimmy’s. I started training at Johnny Tocco’s gym, a wonderfully grungy old-school gym with no amenities, not even air-conditioning. Tocco was an awesome guy who had been friends with Sonny Liston. There were pictures of Johnny and all the old-time greats on the walls.
I was in the locker room one day about to spar when it hit me. I told Kevin that I didn’t like it in Vegas and I wanted to go home. I was really just feeling anxious about the fight. If I didn’t win the Ratliff fight, I wouldn’t qualify to fight Trevor Berbick.
Kevin went out and told Steve Lott. So Steve thought to himself, WWCD? or, What would Cus do? Steve came into the locker room and tried to be positive. “You’re the star of the show. You’re going to knock this guy out in two rounds. You’ll be fantastic. If you don’t like it here, we don’t have to come back here ever again, how’s that?”
Steve always had a charming way of handling situations. Of course, I wasn’t going anywhere, I was just venting. But he didn’t know what Cus would have done. Cus would have looked at me and said, “What? Are you scared of this guy? This guy is a bum. I’m going to fight him for you.”
So on September sixth, I squared off against Alfonzo Ratliff, who was a former cruiserweight champion of the world. I didn’t think he was a step up from Ribalta, but he certainly wasn’t a bum; he was a tough opponent. Apparently, the Vegas oddsmakers didn’t agree because they wouldn’t take bets on the fight itself, only on the over-under of five rounds. You would think I invented over-under in fight betting. Before me it didn’t exist. I took it to a new level of exploitation. The opening bell rang and Ratliff just took off. He made Mitch Green look like one of those power walkers. It was so bad that even the HBO guys were joking. “I wonder if he’s going to use his ten- or twelve-speed bike in the second round,” Larry Merchant said.
