With my psychological training in full swing, Cus began to work on my boxing skills. And he brought the same innovation to the physical side of boxing. Cus devised a new style of boxing, a style that his enemies dismissed with the name “peekaboo.” The style was based on Cus’s admiration for the way Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom boxed. Slapsie fought 274 times and he was knocked out only twice, while winning 207 times. He learned fighting the old-fashioned way; at first he got his ass kicked, so he became a technical fighter and kept his hands up to protect himself. He’d stand in the middle of the ring and his opponents would throw punches but he’d slip every single one of them. He wasn’t a hard puncher, but he would slap the shit out of great fighters, just slap them to death.
Maxie made good fighters look bad but he was a boring fighter. So Cus modified Maxie’s style to enable his fighters to go forward and become aggressive counterpunchers. In 1959, Cus told a Life magazine reporter the origins of the peekaboo style. It came out of the fear that every boxer exhibits. “To stop that fear you gotta be protected—not part of the time, not most of the time, but all of the time. You can’t gamble by using the open stance. Because every time you gamble and lose you get hurt. And when a fighter gets hurt, he’s intimidated, he thinks he’s tired, pooped. He covers up. Now, in my style you cover up from the start. You never gamble. The right arm is always protecting the liver, the left the solar plexus. The hands are protecting the chin. When you flick out with your left, the arm works like a piston. When you move, you move like an owl. Then suddenly you’re not being hit and that means you’re not being hurt. And when you’re not being hurt is when boxing becomes fun. As soon as it’s fun for a fighter, nothing’s going to stop him.”
Cus was mocked in the press and dubbed “Cautious Cus,” but his niece Betty said that caution was a family trait, along with being prepared for any event. Al Caruso, one of the first fighters to learn this style from Cus, attributed it to Cus’s cautious nature too. But he also recognized the aggressive component Cus added. “The peekaboo style is not designed to make a guy miss, miss, miss, miss. You make them miss once and twice and then you get in,” Caruso said. When a guy keeps missing punches, Cus knew it would have devastating effects on their psyche. A monstrous puncher who can’t connect with anything and then is on the receiving end of a counter becomes intimidated. And their greatest asset all of a sudden becomes a weakness.
Some people compared the style to that of a turtle. But Cus got his inspiration from cats. Cus told Eugene “Cyclone” Hart, a pro fighter he was training, “I would wake up sometimes and think about how a cat fights. I used to have a cat. The cat would claw at me and I’d try to grab his paws and he’d hit me with three hundred punches before you can grab him.” Cus equated everything with fighting. He’d watch two roaches fight, and he’d say, “Did you see that? He’s jabbing.” Cats are very agile. They move side to side, they feint. They’re the best killing machines on the planet. Cus said I moved like a cat.
It’s not easy using the peekaboo. It’s a lot of hard work because you have to keep moving your head to slip punches. “Move your head, move your head”—that was his mantra. And not every fighter found it easy to keep their hands up. My housemate Tom Patti’s father, Anthony, first trained with Cus in the forties. When Anthony kept bugging Cus for a fight, Cus said, “You haven’t learned how to keep your hands up yet. The day you learn to hold them up, I’ll get you a fight.” And then he had Anthony train in front of a mirror with his right hand tied around his neck so he wouldn’t keep dropping it.
You never knew where Cus would get his inspiration from—cats, cockroaches. When Cus was down south trying to put together a fight for Floyd Patterson, one of his opponent’s rich backers introduced Cus to an amazing guy named Bobby Lamar “Lucky” McDaniel, who had a unique talent. McDaniel took a BB gun with the sights removed. Then he’d take a metal washer that had a hole in the center like a doughnut. He’d throw that up in the air and he was able to hit all around the outside. Then he was able to take the washer and hit it around the inside of the hole with the BBs. Then he would take a piece of membrane or tissue and put it on there and he was able to put the BB right through it. But the amazing thing was he could teach anyone to do this within an hour and they’d never miss. That was some Matrix shit. It turned out that McDaniel was training the unconscious mind of his pupils, similar to how a Zen monk taught archery.
Cus realized that if you did that in an area with a dark background you could watch the BB go through the hole. The human brain was that amazing. A BB moves somewhere around four hundred feet per second. No human hand moves that fast. So Cus’s theory was that if your eye could see the BB, then why can’t your eye see a punch coming? You get hit with it because you haven’t trained your body in sequence with your brain to move from that punch. You want the guy to be already in motion with that punch; then, as it’s coming, he can’t pull back, and he’ll miss and you’ll counter him. Cus then understood that he could train a fighter to slip punches, and he came up with something he called the slip bag.
Actually Cus’s brother Nick, a chiropractor who lived on a farm on Long Island, devised the slip bag. Floyd Patterson described the bag in his autobiography: “Nick took a regular leather speed bag, but instead of having it blown up, he filled it with about ten pounds of sand. It was hung from a chain from the ceiling so that it was suspended about at the height of my own face when I crouched. I’d push the bag forward and wait until it swung back toward me. I’d try to wait until it almost touched my face. The idea was to ‘slip’ the bag, just as a fighter slips a punch being thrown at him.”
Cus started me on the slip bag right away. You had to both slip and weave so you wouldn’t get hit by the bag on its way back. It was a U-shaped movement. It was hard to do at first, but I got used to it and became pretty proficient at it.
Besides the slip bag, Cus also hung a clothesline between two walls and the fighters had to bob and weave, up and down, back and forth, crouching low to get underneath it. One of Cus’s favorite moves to counterpunch was a move where you’d jump to the left and then throw an uppercut. Cus told Al Caruso that he got that move from sidestepping into a revolving door in an office building in Manhattan.
But the most innovative training invention of Cus’s was what he called the Willie Bag. He came up with this device when José Torres was training to fight Willie Pastrano. The Willie was five mattresses strapped to a frame. The front mattress had an outline sketch of a man on it, and various parts of the body were numbered as targets. Number 1 was a left hook to the jaw, 2 was a right hook to the jaw, 3 was a left uppercut, 4 was a right uppercut, 5 was a left hook to the liver, 6 was a right hook to the spleen, 7 was a jab to the head, and 8 was a jab to the solar plexus. Cus then made a tape of his voice calling out numbers. The boxer would deliver a punch to the corresponding number on the Willie. At first, Cus’s voice would call out one punch every five seconds. But as the tape progressed, the tempo increased. Again the idea was to get to a Zen state where by sheer repetition you’d act on instinct, you’d be on the outside, doing it without thinking about it.
Cus first thought about creating this when he came across a European pianist who developed a system for teaching piano. The Willie Bag was also inspired by Cus’s trips to racetracks, where jockeys would whip their horses in sensitive areas and the horse would react to the whipping and run faster. Back in the forties, a friend of his developed a technique for improving the typing speed of office secretaries. He recorded an album that dictated sentences, slow at first, and then increasing the tempo as the typists improved their speed. Cus spoke about his innovation in a documentary about José Torres.
CUS: This apparatus develops the speed, power, accuracy, coordination, and stamina. As a result of using this apparatus, it took about six weeks to two months to build up, so that Torres was able to throw a six-punch combination in two-fifths of a second. INTERVIEWER: That’s so hard to believe. CUS: Of course, but I had the stopwatch and in the presence of all the newspapermen, I timed him five or six times consecutively. Now the question was brought by a reporter, What good is this when Pastrano is not stationary? So I pointed out to him that Pastrano must remain stationary at least for one second sometimes, and if Torres is in a position to punch, all he needs is two-fifths of a second to get up four or five blows.
What was great about this system was that it could be used during a fight. Cus could be in his boxer’s corner yelling out random numbers and the other trainer and fighter would have no idea what the numbers meant.
Cus was very big on throwing short punches. They have to travel shorter distances and they have more impact when they connect. Cus thought that punching hard didn’t have anything to do with a person’s physical strength. He thought that it was all about precise, controlled emotion. Another technique Cus taught was throwing combinations in rapid succession. He used to tell me, “The biggest effect you’ll get out of your punches will be when you make two punches sound like one.” He thought speed was energy. The closest you can get to that POP, where two punches sound like one—that was perfection to him. Cus also thought that people only got knocked down by punches that they didn’t see. So the element of surprise was also a big component of boxing. Speed, timing, movement, precision, and the element of surprise, all delivered with a relaxed, confident demeanor while under fire. That was the ultimate.
Cus was so ahead of his time. He hung around with Dr. Robert Gross, who, with his wife, Joy, cofounded the Pawling Health Manor in upstate New York. Cus learned about state-of-the-art nutrition and supplements from them. He also learned some elementary chiropractic techniques from his brother Nick. I was working so hard once that I threw my back out. Cus had me hang my leg over the staircase and told me to relax, and he cracked my back and then my neck. One time Cus worked on me so hard that I couldn’t walk the next morning, and then I had to go to a licensed chiropractor.
—
NOW THAT I WAS LIVING in the house, I had access to all the old fight films 24/7. Some days I would watch them for ten hours at a time. I was getting my Ph.D. in boxing history. And I started to idolize some of those old-time fighters. I loved Dempsey. I loved that he was extremely aggressive, but what attracted me more to Dempsey was that he was very famous and very rich at the time. Dempsey was a great dresser and all the prominent women of his time were fans of his. He was bigger than boxing, bigger than sports back then, bigger than Babe Ruth.
I also admired Joe Gans. Gans was the first African American world champ in the twentieth century. He was considered one of the greatest lightweights of all time and was known as the “Old Master.” But what impressed me the most about him was the way that the white racist reporters around the turn of the century wrote about him. They considered him a god because no one could beat him. He never lost a fight legitimately until he contracted tuberculosis, which eventually killed him. All the other losses on his record were because he threw fights to take care of his family. But everyone knew no one could beat him. Every now and then you would have white fighters who had pride and believed in themselves and said, “No man is going to take a dive for me. I can beat any man in the world in a fair fight.” And he would knock them out so easy it was funny. Gans was less threatening than Jack Johnson. He knew how to get around—he knew his place, so to speak—but he was masterful.
Benny Leonard was another lightweight I adored. He was a real arrogant prick who transcended boxing. Leonard didn’t take shit from anyone. During World War I all the big boxers trained at a gym owned by a German guy who claimed that the Jews caused the war. Plenty of tough Jewish boxers trained there and they didn’t say shit, but Benny was the man. He left the German guy’s gym and went to Stillman’s to train, which was owned by a Jewish guy but it wasn’t doing well. But when Leonard left, everybody, even the non-Jews, followed him to Stillman’s. I was attracted to fighters who weren’t only great technicians but were leaders too. Guys like Gans and Leonard were only 130 pounds but they were big boys, little giants, in and out of the ring.
Cus and I would talk about the old fighters for hours and hours. You know what we talked about a lot? Fighters who were child champions, guys like Jimmy McLarnin and Georges Carpentier, guys who fought as babies. Georges Carpentier fought his first pro fight when he was fourteen years old. He fought anybody and everybody. He was champion in every weight division in Europe by the age of nineteen.
Cus loved Henry Armstrong. “Constant attack, no letup, moving his head with a good defense. That’s what Armstrong would do, break his opponent’s will, destroy his spirit, make all his causes a fucking lie,” Cus said. Cus knew him very well. He knew all the old fighters. When all the old fighters saw him, they called him “Mr. Cus.” Take Beau Jack. Cus loved that guy, he was his favorite lightweight. He was fighting one time and he slipped and dislocated his knee. The referee went to talk to the other guy’s cornermen and Beau Jack jumped up, hopping to the guy, ready to fight. So every time Beau Jack would walk by Cus, Cus would take his hat off and say, “Listen, I take my hat off to that man. He fought on one leg, hopping to his opponent. I’ve never seen bravery like that.”
Cus was so in love with these old fighters that he would make excuses for some of their behavior. Jack Dempsey would smoke a cigar when he fought and Cus would say something like “Back then they liked to have a cigar in their mouth as a symbol of success, but he never lit it.” I knew that was a lie. He would use only the qualities of a champion that would inspire me and make me do the right thing. They didn’t have any bad qualities, they were perfect. He would impress on me how vicious and mean they were in the ring but they were so calm and relaxed doling out punishment. I used to get so excited hearing him tell these stories—how this guy went over here and fought this great guy. How this black fighter went there by himself, even with all these white guys saying they were going to kill him, and he goes there and he wins.
Cus was always about me being a warrior. “If you don’t have the spiritual warrior in you,” he said, “you’ll never be a fighter, I don’t care how big or strong you are.” He was constantly reinforcing that theme by talking about great warriors from antiquity. I didn’t know who they were so I’d hear Cus mention a name like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan and talk about them like they were the shit so I’d be interested in finding out who they were and I’d look into them. We’d talk about history and he would mention names like Hannibal and say he conquered Italy and I’d run to the encyclopedia. These figures from antiquity became my role models. I read about the Punic Wars, I read about the Venetian wars, I read about how these guys conquered by force and they fought among their brothers, and sisters too, for power. I quickly learned that power was worth dying and killing for.
I heard people talking about Machiavelli and quoting him and I got into him. I read about Charles Martel, Clovis, Shaka Zulu, the Jugurthine War. I admired Vercingetorix. He never got his shot because Caesar killed him, but before that he was a magnificent warrior. Cus talked to me about Spartacus. He explained to me that the Africans and the Italians had been fighting wars since the beginning of time. He said that’s why Sicilians got the reputation of being black, because they interbred with a lot of African warriors in antiquity.
Cus was a great storyteller. He would talk about such minute things but he would make it sound like an earth-shattering event. He’d get all of us so excited, so engrossed in every word he was saying. And Cus talked with such enthusiasm because enthusiasm is contagious and people will do things when they get enthused. To the day he died he was so enthusiastic. He would talk about a shitty little slice of pizza from Catskill like it was cooked by Wolfgang Puck. “I’ve been all over the world, and this is the best pizza I ever tasted!” Everything was the best in the world. He made the tiniest thing so big. He could take the most boring subject and make it exciting. He had that power.
Cus was a master salesman. That guy made me believe I was the heavyweight champion the first time I met him. What kind of salesman is that? He put me on this fucking mission. I’m just this dumb-ass kid, I don’t know how I’m going to do this shit. But it was so adventurous I romanticized it. And why not? I’m reading about all these boxing legends and he’s telling me that I could be one of them. He told me, “You’ll make everybody forget them and the only reason people will know them is that you’ll have to tell them about them.” He used to tell me that all the fucking time. This guy had me hungering for glory like a mad dog. I would do anything—cheat, lie, steal—I had to get there, to that place.
One of the reasons I was so devoted was that I knew Cus had my back. Cus was hard and cold and talked about racism in this country as if he were a bitter black man. He considered himself a nigga as an Italian kid who grew up with a lot of prejudice directed at him from the Irish in his neighborhood in the Bronx. Cus had a big chip on his shoulder. He used to say even slaves were worth some money but “an Italian ain’t worth two dimes. At least the slaves ate. They didn’t feed the Italians. They starved to death.” When his father got sick, they couldn’t take him to a real doctor. They had to wait for some little Italian medicine man to come to the house carrying his little box on the top of his bicycle.
Nobody made me more conscious of being a black man than Cus. “They think they’re better than you, Mike,” he told me about white people. And he backed up his words with action. A few months after I moved in, Cus was hosting the South African boxing team, which, during apartheid, was all white. The first thing Cus did was to go to them and say, “There’s a young black boy in this house and he’s our family member. You treat him with the same respect you treat us, you understand?” He said it respectfully but he said it deadly. And they said, “Yes, sir.”
That touched me to my heart. How could I not love this guy? All he talked about was how great I could become, how I could improve myself day by day, in every way.
You know what Cus found out about me early on. “Oh, you’re a chameleon, aren’t you?” he said to me one day. He said that because when I would come downstairs after hours and hours of watching the old fighters that he knew, I started talking like them and I would imitate their fighting styles. I even morphed into Cus’s personality. I didn’t play—I was dead serious about training.
Many nights Camille would be upstairs while Cus and I sat downstairs and plotted out our conquest of the world. We hadn’t done shit. I hadn’t even had an amateur fight yet, but we’re talking about traveling to Europe as royalty, how “no” will be a foreign word to me, if I just listened to Cus. Who talks like that? This was some sick shit. Imagine a kid hears, “‘No’ will be a foreign word to you.” A white guy telling him that shit too. And the white guy seems to have some juice because you got guys like Norman Mailer, who’s constantly on TV and in the papers, and guys like Budd Schulberg all showing him mad respect. Can you believe that shit? Two bums, a has-been and a fucking slum dweller, sitting in a room in upstate New York, plotting world domination.