Before Cus, pigeons saved my life. I was a fat Poindexter when I was growing up, the kind of kid who gets his change stolen, his meatball sandwich knocked to the ground, and his glasses broken and shoved down into the gas tank of a truck parked outside his school. I was bullied every day until I was brought up onto a roof near where I lived and told to clean up the pigeon coops by the older, cooler guys who kept their birds there. It didn’t make sense to me. The birds were so small, so insignificant looking. Why would fly guys be so interested? But you could see by the smiles on their faces that these pigeons meant the world to them.
When people saw me up there with those guys, they said, “Don’t fuck with this guy anymore. He knows those guys.” You don’t fuck with pigeon guys. They were known to deal with people messing with their birds by throwing them off the roof.
From being a pigeon gofer I got into a life of petty crime. I never hung out with anybody my own age. I was schooled by my older friends like Bug and Barkim. Because I was smaller, they’d have me climb through a window and unlock the door so they could rob a house. One time I got locked up with Bug. He joked that he would be going to the big house while I got a vacation with cookies and milk at juvie. I was like a professional student, soaking up all these street moves from these older guys.
As I got older, I got bigger but I still felt like that small four-eyed guy who got bullied all the time. I never thought I would be a fighter, but I used to hang out with my friend Wise, who was an amateur boxer. We used to smoke weed and shadowbox. Wise always used to do the Ali shuffle while he shadowboxed. My first fight happened by accident. By then I had used some of my pilfering money to buy my own pigeons. I kept them in an abandoned building next to mine. This guy named Gary Flowers stole one of my birds, and when I confronted him to get it back he pulled it out of his coat and twisted its neck off and rubbed the blood on me. I was furious but I was scared to fight, until one of my friends egged me on. “You’ve got to fight him, Mike.” So I hit with a right and he went down and I was stunned. I didn’t know what to do. Then it dawned on me how cool Wise looked doing the Ali shuffle, so I started shuffling and everybody started clapping. My first taste of applause.
Fighting was big in my neighborhood. If you were a good fighter, you had respect. Nobody would ever try to rob you. So I began to get a rep for my street fighting. I was especially good at that sneaky sucker punch shit. If I was fighting someone and they slipped, I would attack him on the floor. But I didn’t win all my fights. I got beat up a lot because I was fighting older men. I was eleven or twelve and I was fighting guys in their thirties because when I beat them in a dice game, they didn’t want to pay a little kid. And if one guy didn’t pay, then nobody paid. So I attacked the guy. Those men might have had guns, but I didn’t care. They knew I wasn’t a punk and they had to fight or pull out a gun and hit me with it.
When we were young, I thought that all my friends would be together forever. But then life goes on and people start dying. I never knew people who got married and stopped robbing and went on the straight and narrow. I just thought that we’d keep on our life of crime until somebody would kill us or we’d kill them. Sometimes we would go hustle and one of our friends would die—somebody would stab him or shoot him. You would think that we would run home, go and tell his mother what happened, but we were still looking to rob some more shit. We didn’t go home until we got some more money. We were like fucking sharks, just kept moving.
My mother was getting more and more fed up with my petty-criminal life because I was spending more and more time in Spofford. The actual name of the place was Bridges Juvenile Center, a rat-infested hellhole on Spofford Avenue in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. Going in there was like a class reunion, like in Cheers, where everybody knew your name. And while there might not have been air-conditioning, at least you were getting your three hots and a cot. And your cookies and milk.
One of the times while I was in there, just after I had turned twelve, they were showing the movie The Greatest, a 1977 movie where Muhammad Ali plays himself. I liked Ali’s style then but I wasn’t a boxing fan at all. I used to love watching wrestlers like Bruno Sammartino and Killer Kowalski. The only time I saw an Ali fight was when he was fighting Leon Spinks for the second time. I was hanging out on a corner in Brownsville with my friend when we saw a guy going into the corner store. Somebody told us that the guy had food stamps and money on him so we went in after him. I went in the back and got some chips and then made sure I got in front of the guy. Everybody’s eyes were glued to the television that was showing the Ali fight. So I dropped my bag of chips and then bent over to pick it up and the guy stopped and my friend, who was behind him, went into his pockets—boom. I loved Ali but I wasn’t a bit interested in the fight.
But watching his biopic in a room filled with hundreds of kids at Spofford was great. And when the movie was over, the lights came on, and all of a sudden Ali walked out on the stage and the place just exploded. Whoa. Ali started talking to us about being in detention and he was saying how he had been in jail and he had lost his mind. He was saying beautiful, inspirational stuff. That speech was a game changer for me. It’s not that I wanted to become a boxer after hearing him. I just knew that I wanted to be famous. I wanted the feeling that when I walk into a room, people bow down and lose their fucking minds. But I didn’t know what I was going to have to do for people to do that shit.
I was back in Spofford for a burglary rap. I was in my sixth month of an eighteen-month sentence. Spofford is a holding facility, and they were getting ready to transfer me to another juvenile center, so I was hustling to make some bank before I left. You have to be savage and make sure you rob some stuff you can trade when you get to the next place they send you. If you leave broke, then they’re going to think you’re a pussy at your next stop.
I used to team up with my boy Darryl “Homicide” Baum, who was in there with me. The guys from Brownsville all stuck together. They’d tell me that there’s a nigga from the Bronx in the next dorm with some gold on and we’d go get it. I was the robber guy. Everyone knew Brownsville Mike the Robber. Now, to get that gold chain, we’d wait until we had gym with the guy. Most of these guys didn’t take their gold off, they wore it. Homicide and me went to the gym and Hommo spotted him. The guy was cool, though, and I went up to him and he punched me right in my face, boom! I wasn’t expecting it, and then Hommo just jumped on him, boom, boom, boom, boom. We beat that nigga’s ass and took his jewelry.
I was always in trouble in Spofford. Right before they were going to send me out, our dorm was fighting with another dorm and I got caught with a knife. The CO who ran the place came in and read the report from the shift before and then he told me to get up and take my punishment. For being caught with a knife, I had to get ten hits in the head with a half pool stick.
POP. POP. POP. POP . . . Those guards were brutal. They’d beat you like a dog.
A few days after that thrashing, my caseworker came in and told me that I was being sent away to finish the last year of my sentence. They don’t tell you where you’re going so you can’t tell your peeps where you’ll be. The next morning two guards handcuffed me and put me in the backseat of a car and drove me upstate to Johnstown, New York. I was going to a place called Tryon but I had never heard of it. So I’m thinking, “If I don’t know anybody up there, I’ll have to start stabbing some people. That’s just how it is.”
The Tryon School for Boys was light-years away from Spofford. It was in the woods an hour northwest of Albany. All the kids lived in different cottages. There was an indoor swimming pool, a nice gym, and programs that included raising pheasants. Because they didn’t consider me a violent offender, I was initially placed in the Briarwood Cottage, which was an open cottage. I had my own room with no lock on the door.
I immediately began acting out, attacking kids, attacking guards, attacking everyone. I began to get a rep. Mike Tyson—the psycho crazy guy, the sick fuck who would walk up and punch you in the face or throw hot water on you. The final straw came when a kid passed me in the hall as I was walking into one of my classes and he tried to snatch my hat and I pulled it back. I had to wait forty-five minutes for the class to be over and all I could think about was what I was going to do to this guy. When the class was over, I found the guy and beat his ass.
That was it for my freedom. Two guards came and got me and escorted me to Elmwood, the lockdown cottage. Elmwood was a place where you needed to straighten out, because if you didn’t, those huge redneck guards would fuck you up. Elmwood was where the badasses go. For me it was a badge of honor.
Once we got to Elmwood, they locked me in a room, took off my clothes, and took the mattress out of the room. I was on some kind of suicide watch. Every half hour a staff guy would check up on me. I was in isolation but there was a tiny window in the door and I’d hear some inmates walking by. “Hey, what’s going on out there?” I yelled. One of the guys told me that they had just finished sparring with Mr. Stewart, one of the guards at Tryon. I had heard about Bobby Stewart. He had a boxing program and everyone who was in it was always laughing and happy. He’d make the kids miss with a punch and they’d fall down and everybody would crack up. I decided I wanted to get in on that program.
Every time the staff came to check on me, I begged to see Mr. Stewart. Then they’d pick up a phone and call Stewart. “He’s completely calm. He’s polite. He ate and asked to clean up. All he wants to do is talk to you,” they told him. Stewart waited until everybody was in bed, because if I started a commotion he didn’t want any of the other kids involved. Then he came to my room. He smashed the door open and ran into the room.
“What do you want with me?” he yelled.
Just writing that sentence still gives me a chill to this day.
“I want to be a fighter,” I said.
“So do the rest of the guys,” he barked. “If they were fighters, they wouldn’t be here in the first place. They’d be out in the street, going to school, getting a job. We deal with losers here.”
“All I want to do is be a fighter. I’ll do anything you ask me to do,” I said.
Mr. Stewart kept screaming at me and then he changed his tone.
“All right, lookit, let’s see your behavior change. Let’s see you go to your classes with no incidents. Let’s see a month of good behavior and we’ll see what happens.”
Later Stewart told me that he’d been working there for ten years and he had never seen anybody as insecure as me when I came in. He said that he could see me stealing a pocketbook if no one was looking but he couldn’t see me confronting someone. I couldn’t even look him in the eye when he barged into my room. For all my street bravado, I was a shy kid. I was really just a follower, not a leader. All I knew back then was how to cheat, steal, rob, and lie.
Stewart would check the daily logs to see if I was behaving myself. He saw that not only was I doing everything I was supposed to do, but I was actually asking the staff if there was extra work I could do. I’d ask them to write in my request so Stewart would see it. In six days, I got up to the top level for my class. Look, my family is from the South. They taught me how to be calm, how to talk to people, like “Yes, ma’am. No, sir.”
Mr. Stewart started reading my files and he saw a notation that said I was borderline retarded. He went to the staff psychologist and said, “What is this?” She told him that I was intellectually handicapped. “How do they determine that?” he asked. “Well, they give him tests.” “Tests! He can’t read and write properly. How can you determine he’s retarded? I’ve seen this kid for a while now. He’s smart. He just doesn’t know how to read or write. I can’t read or write that good but I’m not retarded!” The psychologist started waffling and Stewart lost his cool and told her that she was retarded. He got written up for that. I love Bobby. He’s one of those Irish guys who talks and doesn’t have any filter.
So I kept behaving and getting good reports and Mr. Stewart seemed impressed. I know he was impressed when he came into the weight room one day. I was about to use the Universal bench press machine.
“What are you doing?” he said to me. “You’ve got two hundred fifty pounds on that machine.”
“The other guys said I can’t do this,” I said.
“Don’t you do it! Take the weight off and start with a hundred thirty-five pounds,” he said.
He turned his back on me, and when he looked back I was pressing the 250 pounds, ten times—without warming up. I was so fucking strong back then. I guess my feat got back to his boss, because when Stewart finally decided he would let me spar with him, his boss was worried.
“Jesus, I know you’re in good shape, but this kid is stronger than all of us put together. You be careful,” he told Bobby. “The staff can’t be seen getting beat up by the kids.”
I was so excited the day we sparred for the first time. The other kids knew about my reputation as a street fighter back in Brooklyn, so they were psyched. We started boxing and I thought I was doing well, because he was covering up and I was getting some punches in. Suddenly he came out of a clinch and the motherfucker hit me in the stomach and I went down. I had never felt pain like that before in my life. I felt like I was ready to throw up everything I had eaten for the last two years. I got right up but I couldn’t breathe.
“Walk it off,” he barked. “Walk it off.” I got my air back and we started boxing again. When we finished, I asked him if he could teach me how to punch a guy in the stomach like that. That was going to be my robbing punch.
Even though he had manhandled me like that, I never quit. The whole dorm, most of the staff, they’d all come out to watch us box. I was so happy to be getting attention. I wanted people to look at me and adore me but then I got mad when they did! I was so crazy then.
Once he saw that I kept coming back even though he was beating my ass, he started to teach me. We’d wait until the other kids went to bed at nine p.m. and then we’d go to an empty dorm room and work from nine-thirty until eleven, when it was time for me to turn in. Mr. Stewart would stand there and throw punches at me and I’d move, then we’d reverse it. I’d never had any goals in my life except for robbing but Bobby gave me something to focus on. I turned the same desire I had for robbing into fighting. When we finished I’d go to my room and, in the total dark, I’d practice what he’d shown me that night until three a.m. I know that Stewart was impressed with my work ethic and that he had a good feeling what we were doing was going to help me outside the ring.
I was so excited that I put him on the phone with my mother one of the times that I was allowed to call her. He told her how much progress I had been making and that if I could continue doing good, I could make something out of myself. She just laughed and thanked him. I had never given her any reason to be hopeful about me.
Mr. Stewart was excited by my progress but he began to worry about what would happen to me when I was released. He knew that if I went back to Brooklyn I might fall back into a criminal mind-set. He thought about finding a gym down there for me to work out of but then he had another idea.
One day, after we sparred, he sat me down.
“Listen, man, my wife is mad. I’m coming home with a broken nose and black eyes. I can’t box with you no more, but I’m going to take you somewhere where they’re going to take you to the next level. Do you think you want to do that? Because I believe when you get out of here, you’re going to get killed or locked up again.”
“No,” I protested. “I don’t want to go. I want to stay here with you.”
“I want you to work with Cus D’Amato. He’s a famous trainer. He took Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight title. He made José Torres into a light heavyweight champ. He takes kids in if they behave and work hard. Maybe you could stay at his house with him.”
Before Bobby called Cus, he showed me a few moves that were meant to impress the old trainer. One was a diagonal side step that enabled me to swing coming out of the corner. I practiced that and got good at it. Then Stewart called Cus and asked him if he’d take a look at me.
“Absolutely,” Cus said. “If you think he’s got potential, then bring him down tomorrow.”
On the way there, Stewart tried to tamp down my expectations.
“Cus may not even like you the first time, I don’t know,” he said. “But maybe he’ll say we can come back. If he does, then we’ll work harder and then we’ll come back and come back until he sees we can do it.”
Cus’s gym was on top of the police station in Catskill. Inside it was old and musky and there was a small ring. There were also a lot of weather-beaten newspaper clips on the wall. There were a few older white guys there along with a younger guy named Teddy Atlas who was assisting Cus. I was introduced to Cus and in a second I could see that he was totally in control of everything there. He just sucked up all the air in the room. He shook my hand and there wasn’t a trace of a smile on his face. He showed no emotions.
Right away Teddy Atlas took one look at me and said, “We’ve got nobody to box with him.” Stewart said that he was going to box me and we got in the ring. I was really good that first round, pressing Mr. Stewart and banging away at him. We did that spinout move that we had been practicing and I looked over and saw Cus smile for the first time. “Wow! Wow!” he said. “That’s beautiful.”
I kept pressing Stewart in the second round and he got me with a couple of shots and my nose started bleeding profusely. It looked a lot worse than it felt and Atlas jumped into the ring.
“All right, Bobby. We’ve seen enough,” he said.
“No, no,” I protested. “Mr. Stewart says we don’t quit. If we start, we have to go three rounds.”
Bobby looked over at Cus, and he said it was like watching a movie. Cus’s face turned red and he looked over at his friends who were there and everyone was smiling. Bobby later told me it was like Cus’s body had miraculously transformed. “His whole face lit up. You ever see a guy who gets scared and his hair stands up? Well, Cus had no hair but that’s what it reminded me of. His eyes opened wide and it was like ‘I have life again.’”
Cus let us go a third round and I did pretty good. Teddy took my gloves off and Cus started helping Mr. Stewart with his gloves.
I saw them talking but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I couldn’t get a read from looking at Cus’s face. He was impassive. I wouldn’t find out until later that Cus asked Bobby, “Would he be interested in working here?” Bobby knew I wanted to do that but he played it cool and said he’d have to talk to me.
On the way to our car I was almost bursting with anticipation.
“Can I come back? How did he think I did?” I peppered Bobby.
Bobby pushed me. “Guess what he said?”
“He said I can’t come back?” I said. I was such a low-esteem schmuck.
“No! He said, ‘Bobby, barring outside distractions, that is the heavyweight champion of the world and possibly the universe.’ But only if you continue to work like you’ve been working.”
I pushed him back. “Come on,” I said. And then I started crying.
“I’m telling you, that’s what he thinks of you,” Bobby said. “See, you’re not a scumbag. You’re not a loser. He said all that about you the first time he saw you. Do you realize what that means? But you can screw it up in one second. You’ve gotta work.”
“I’m ready,” I said through my tears. “I’m ready to work.”