by Mike Tyson
“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 developing 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.”
I was so happy that Cus was talking about me. Then Alex asked Cus if it was hard for a man his age to work with such a young fighter.
“I often say to him, and I know he doesn’t know what I mean but I’m going to tell him now what I mean, because if he weren’t here I probably wouldn’t be alive today. The fact that he is here and doing what he’s doing and doing it so well and improving as he has gives me the motivation and interest in staying alive because I believe that a person dies when he no longer wants to live. Nature is smarter than we think. Little by little we lose our friends that we care about and little by little we lose our interest, until finally we say, ‘What the devil am I doing around here? I have no reason to go on.’ But I have a reason with Mike here. He gives me the motivation and I will stay alive and I will watch him become a success because I will not leave until that happens because when I leave, he will not only know how to fight, he will not only understand many things, but he will also know how to take care of himself.”
Whew. That was just Cus putting this fucking pressure on me again. I know that Cus believed I could handle it, but he also believed that I didn’t believe I could.
Then they asked me about my future and my dreams.
“Dreams are just when you’re starting off. You have the dream to push the motivation. I just want to be alive ten years from now. People say I’m going to be a million-dollar fighter. Well, I know what I am, and that’s what counts more than anything else, because the people don’t know what I go through. They think I’m born this way. They don’t know what it took to get this way.”
“What do you go through?” Alex asked.
“The training. The boxing’s the easy part. When you get into the ring to fight, that’s the vacation. But when you get in the gym, you have to do things over and over till you’re sore and deep in your mind you say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I push that out of my mind. At this particular time it’s the amateurs and it’s all fun, trophies and medals, but I’m like you, I want to make money when it comes to being professional. I like the fancy hairdos and I like to wear fancy clothes, gold, jewelry, and everything. To continue this kind of lifestyle you have to earn the money the right way. You can’t take a gun and go into a bank. You might as well do it in a way that you feel good about yourself by doing something you like.”
I was bitter about working that hard. I had never endured that kind of deprivation and then I had to get up the next day and do it all over again. I worked hard for those Olympics.
The U.S. team officials wouldn’t let me compete at my natural weight, because Cus was feuding with the Olympic boxing guys. It started when they wanted me to fight on the U.S. team at a fight in the Dominican Republic, but Cus wouldn’t let me go because we couldn’t use Kevin as our trainer. I would have had to use their trainers. He also didn’t want me to go because he was afraid that revolutionaries might try to kidnap me.
To get back at Cus, they told him that I would have to fight in the Under-201-pound division. I was fighting at about 215 then so I went on a fast. I put on those vinyl suits again and wore them all day. I loved it; I felt like a real fighter, lose the weight to make the weight. I was so delusional, I thought I was making a great sacrifice.
I had an intense schedule preparing for the Olympic trials. On August 12, 1983, I entered the Ohio State Fair National Tournament. On the first day, I achieved a forty-two-second KO. On the second day, I punched out the front two teeth of my opponent and left him
out cold for ten minutes. Then on the third day, the reigning tournament champ withdrew from the fight.
The next day we went to Colorado Springs for the U.S. National Championship. When I got there, four of the six other fighters dropped out of the competition. Both of my victories were first-round KOs.
On June 10, 1984, I finally got a shot at the Olympics. My qualifying fight was against Henry Tillman, an older and more experienced boxer. In the first round, I knocked him almost through the ropes. Then he was up and I stalked him for the next two rounds. But in amateur boxing, aggression isn’t rewarded and my knockout counted the same as a light tippy-tap jab. When they announced the decision, I couldn’t believe that they gave it to Tillman. Once again, the crowd agreed and they started booing.
I hated these amateur bouts. “We are boxers here,” these stuffed shirts would say.
“Well, I am a fighter, sir. My purpose is to fight,” I’d answer.
The whole amateur boxing establishment hated me. They didn’t like my cocky Brownsville attitude. I was behaving myself but you could still see that New York swagger coming out. And if they didn’t like me, they despised Cus. He could be so over-the-top that sometimes he’d embarrass me. I never let him know; I always stood there and listened to him go after these guys, but I was totally embarrassed by the way he would talk to them. He was very vindictive and always out for revenge. He couldn’t live without enemies, so he created them. I sometimes thought, Damn, why couldn’t I have been with a nonconfrontational kind of white guy? I thought I was getting away from that loud life where people screamed at the top of their lungs. But with Cus, it was a constant reminder that I hadn’t.
I had a chance to avenge my loss to Tillman a month later at the Olympic Box-Offs. Again I pressed him for three rounds and this time he did even less than in the first fight. Even Howard Cosell, who was doing the announcing for ABC and who had thought Tillman had outpointed me in our first fight, had to admit that I had a much better chance of getting the decision.
I was sure I had won and when the ref lifted Tillman’s arm again, I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that they’d give him two bullshit decisions. Again the whole audience started booing the judges. Cus was furious. He started cursing and tried to punch out one of the U.S. Olympic officials. Kevin Rooney and some other officials had to hold him back. I was so self-absorbed at the time that I thought all of this stuff with Cus was about me. As I got older, I understood that this was really a story that went back about thirty years. These were his demons and they really had little to do with me.
It was all about Cus being taken advantage of and robbed of his glory. I didn’t even know until recently that Cus had sent a friend of ours named Mark, who worked for the FBI, to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Albany to investigate the Tillman decisions.
I threw tantrums after the two Tillman decisions. I took the runner-up trophies that they gave me and threw them down and broke them. Cus sent me to the Olympics anyway, to live with the Olympic team. The Olympics were in L.A. that year. He said that I should just go there and enjoy the experience. He got me two tickets to every fight, but I had a pass anyway so I scalped the tickets. And the Olympics weren’t a total loss for me. There was this really cute intern who worked for the U.S. Olympic committee. All of the boxers and the coaches were hitting on her, but I was the one who got her. She liked me. After all those years of deprivation, it was nice to finally have sex.
But even getting laid didn’t take away the disappointment and pain I felt from having my Olympic dream stolen from me. When the Olympics were over, I flew back to New York, but I didn’t go right back to Catskill. I hung around the city. I was really depressed. One afternoon I went to Forty-second Street to see a karate movie. Right before it started, I smoked a joint.
I started getting high and I remembered the time that Cus had caught me with pot. It was right after I had won my second Junior Olympics Championship. One of the other boxers was jealous of me and ratted me out. Before I had a chance to ditch the evidence, Cus had sent Ruth, the German cleaning lady, to my room and she found the weed.
Cus was furious when I came home.
“This must be some good stuff, Mike. I know this must be good because you just let down four hundred years of slaves and peasants to smoke it.”
He broke my spirit that day. He made me feel like an Uncle Tom nigga. And he hated those kinds of people. He really knew how to bring me to my nadir.
So I was sitting in the theater, remembering that, and sinking deeper and deeper into my depression. Then I started crying. When the movie was over, I went straight to the train station and went back to Catskill. The whole trip back, I knew I had to immediately throw myself into full-blown training for professional fighting. I had to be spectacular when I turned pro. As we got closer to Catskill, I started talking to myself.
“They’re never going to see anyone like Tyson. He will transcend the game. He will be in the pantheon of great fighters alongside John L. Sullivan and Joe Louis and Benny Leonard and Joe Gans and the rest. Tyson is magnificent.”
I talked about myself in the third person. Even to myself.
I was completely pumped up when I got off that train and took a cab to Cus’s house. The world was about to see a fighter the likes of which it had never been seen before. I was going to transcend the game. With all due respect, and not to be arrogant, but I was conscious of my future prominence as a boxer then. I knew nothing could stop me and I would be the champion as surely as Friday would come after Thursday. I didn’t lose a fight for the next six years.
4
Coming off of those two losses to Tillman, I wasn’t exactly the hottest property in the boxing world. Cus had planned for me to win the gold medal at the Olympics and then start my career with a lucrative TV contract. But that didn’t work out. No professional promoters were interested in me. Nobody in boxing really believed in Cus’s peek-a-boo style. And a lot of people thought that I was too short to be an effective heavyweight.
I guess all that talk got to Cus. One night I was taking the garbage out and Cus was cleaning up the kitchen.
“Man, I wish you had a body like Mike Weaver or Ken Norton,” he said out of the blue. “Because then you would be real intimidating. You’d have an ominous aura. They don’t have the temperament but they have the physique of an intimidating man. You could paralyze the other boxers with fear just by the way you look.”
I got choked up. To this day, when I recount this story, I still choke up. I was offended and hurt but I wouldn’t tell Cus that because then he’d say, “Oh, you’re crying? What are you, a little baby? How can you handle a big-time fight if you don’t have the emotional toughness?”
Any time I showed my emotions, he despised it. So I held back my tears.
“Don’t worry, Cus.” I made myself sound arrogant. “You watch. One day the whole world is going to be afraid of me. When they mention my name, they’ll sweat blood, Cus.”
That was the day that I turned into Iron Mike; I became that guy 100 percent. Even though I had been winning almost every one of my fights in an exciting fashion, I wasn’t completely emotionally invested in being the savage that Cus wanted me to be. After that talk about me being too small, I became that savage. I even began to fantasize that if I actually killed someone inside the ring, it would certainly intimidate everyone. Cus wanted an antisocial champion, so I drew on the bad guys from the movies, guys like Jack Palance and Richard Widmark. I immersed myself in the role of the arrogant sociopath.
But first I got a Cadillac. Cus couldn’t afford to pay for my expenses while we were building up my career, so he got his friend Jimmy Jacobs and his partner, Bill Cayton, to lay out the money. Jimmy was an awesome guy. He was the Babe Ruth of handball and while he traveled around the world on the handball circuit, he began collecting rare fight films. Eventually he met Bill Cayton, who was a collector himself, and the two of them started Big F
ights, Inc. They cornered the market on fight footage and Cayton later made a fortune selling those fights to ESPN. Cus had lived with Jimmy for ten years when Cus was still in New York, so they were close friends. In fact, Cus had devised a secret plan to train Jimmy as a fighter and for his first fight ever, amateur or professional, to fight Archie Moore for his light-heavyweight title. Jacobs trained intensely for six months with Cus, but the fight never happened because Archie pulled out.
But Cus never liked Jimmy’s partner Cayton. He thought he was too in love with his money. I didn’t like him either. Where Jimmy had a great outgoing personality, Cayton was a pompous cold fish. Jimmy and Cayton had been managing boxers for many years and had Wilfred Benitez and Edwin Rosario in their stable, so despite his dislike of Cayton, Cus promised them a role with me when I turned pro.
I guess Cus saw Jimmy and Bill as investors who wouldn’t interfere with my development and would allow Cus to have total control over my upbringing. By now they had invested over $200,000 in me. When I got back from the Olympics, Jimmy told Cus that he wanted to buy me a new car. I think that they might have been worried that I would leave Cus and go with someone else, cutting them out of the picture. Of course, I would never have done that.
Cus was mad because he thought that I didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t like I had come home with a gold medal. But he took me to a local dealership. Cus was trying to steer me to an Oldsmobile Cutlass because it didn’t cost much.
“Nah, I want the Cadillac, Cus,” I said.
“Mike, I’m telling you . . .”
“If it’s not the Cadillac, I don’t want no car.” I stood my ground.
I got the car and we drove it back to the house and stored it in the barn. I didn’t have a license and I didn’t know how to drive, but when Cus got on my case, I’d grab my car keys, run out to the barn, get in the car, lock myself in, and play music.
