Cus is Cus, so it didn’t take long for him to put down some boxing roots in Catskill. Shortly after moving in with Camille in 1970 he opened up the Catskill Boxing Club in a city building that also housed the police department. Cus was really doing community service because, after a while, the schools began sending over kids they couldn’t control. They’d train from four-thirty to seven p.m. He had come full circle from his early days at the Gramercy Gym.
But then he began bringing some promising fighters up to the house in Catskill, guys like Joey Hadley and Paul Mangiamele, who was related to Al Caruso. And before long that big Victorian house was filled with boxers. Just like I’m sure Cus envisioned it all along. Camille used to talk about being tired and closing the house down and going to Florida, where two of her sisters were living, but Cus would tell her that when she felt tired, it was just boredom and she’d get bored a lot faster down in Florida.
Cus was exactly where he wanted to be, but he had no money to support all the fighters and that’s where Jimmy Jacobs and Bill Cayton came in. By 1974 they had started managing fighters, as well as making tons of money from their fight-film business. Their first fighter was Eugene “Cyclone” Hart, a hard-punching middleweight from Philadelphia. Jimmy brought him up to Catskill to work with Cus but he drove Cus crazy. Cus told me he was a great puncher but if he didn’t knock his opponent dead he had a tendency to quit. You can’t do that with Cus. He used to tell me, “If you quit in the ring, you’re useless as a human being. You could run a fifty-billion-dollar company but if you quit on anything, there’s no reason for you to live. Why do you want to live? Facing the slightest struggle you know you’re going to give in.”
Hart remembers his time with Cus a bit differently. “Cus was a gentleman who believed everything he’d say and do would work,” he said. “He always gave me confidence that everything he gives me will be successful. I learned all the things that he taught me to protect myself. It worked, but it didn’t work that much in the ring with Cus, because when I went to fight, I had so many fights already underneath my belt that I depend on doing it the way I was doing it from being in Philly. I didn’t know anything about the peekaboo style. And he learned me that I could hit that other guy, and that the other guy couldn’t hit me.” Cyclone said that he couldn’t adapt to Cus’s style and I agree. It’s very complex. Most people are loose and Cus’s style was very closed. And it’s intimidating too, constantly moving, boom, boom, boom.
In 1977, Jacob and Cayton bought the contract of Wilfred Benitez from his father. Benitez was the youngest world champion in boxing history, having won the WBA Light Welterweight Championship in 1976 when he was just seventeen. Jacobs and Cayton hired Emile Griffith to train Wilfred and then named Cus as a special adviser. In January of 1979 they held a press conference at a restaurant in New York City to announce Benitez’s upcoming fight against Carlos Palomino for his share of the welterweight title. For the first time in years, Cus was back in the boxing limelight. Michael Katz covered the luncheon for The New York Times. “The remaining hairs around the fringe are white, but D’Amato remains an imposing figure, a cement block in a gray suit,” he wrote. Cus told him that he was seventy-one, “that’s physically. Actually I’m about 40.” Griffith was named as the trainer but then Jacobs laid out Cus’s role. “Cus is above the trainer. Cus supervises the overall training, not just the physical aspects. He gets more into the psychological aspects.”
That’s Cus. Don King was at the luncheon and he announced that it was “good seeing Cus around again.” Cus objected. “I’ve never been away,” Cus said. He explained that he’d been in Catskill working with Wilfred and “paying no attention to time as it passes by. I don’t think about the past except to apply its lessons to the present. What the hell, nobody wants to talk about the past anyway. My reasons for not being involved are no longer there.” Cus didn’t want to bring up his old battles but he did want to talk about cementing his legacy and the dozen amateur fighters he was training upstate.
“I teach my fighters how to teach,” he told Katz. “It’s like the Encyclopedia Britannica. All that knowledge inside doesn’t mean a thing if nobody picks it up and opens it to read. When I die, my fighters will know what I know. I’m better than most trainers around. People say I’m egotistical. But it is not that. It is just that most everyone else is very incompetent. You don’t have to be a genius to be better.”
Cus was so prideful. Kevin Rooney told me about the time that Al D’Amato, then the Republican senator from New York, met Cus at a function. D’Amato was curious if they were related, but Cus completely dissed him, probably because he was a Republican.
Ali’s right-hand man, Gene Kilroy, remembered the time that he got Cus a room in Vegas for a fight. Gene went in to talk to Cus but Cus wouldn’t begin the conversation until he opened up the bathroom door and turned on the bathtub so nobody could bug their talk.
People would say he’s paranoid. But Cus truly loved conflict and fighting. The word out there was that Cus was a nice, kind, old white man. But this guy was an irritant. Look, Cus was never really appreciated. All that hard work and he never got anything. He had Floyd for a second and those guys snatched that from him. People would marvel at his ideas and say things to him like “How do you know that?” He’d tell me, “I don’t know nothing, I figured everybody knew it. I feel like I’m stupid, I don’t think I’m smart.” Yeah, but if you’d challenge him, uh-oh, the monster would come out. Isn’t that wild? Some guy who didn’t think much about himself, boom, all the energy comes back and shakes the fucking hemisphere.
I’m an extreme kind of guy, but Cus could be too extreme even for me. Cus bumped into Buddy McGirt, who was being trained and managed by this old-school boxing guy Al Certo back then. They were in a posh clothing store on Madison Avenue in the city. At that time Kevin Rooney was still boxing for Cus and it was years before Certo would be named as an “associate” of the Gambino crime family by Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, an allegation that Certo passionately denied. This was the first time that Buddy met Cus, and it was memorable. Cus walked up to Certo and said, “If Kevin Rooney’s name ever comes out of your mouth again, I’m going to kick your fucking ass.” “Get the fuck out of here,” I said to Buddy. “Cus didn’t say that.” Buddy replied, “Yes, he did. That’s how I met Mr. D’Amato.”
Now, Buddy McGirt is as straight as they come. Cus goes into the store, gets into Certo’s face, like he’s some young guy, and then he’s talking some gangster shit? This is the guy who’s telling me that gangsters ain’t shit, the mob ain’t shit, the only thing they do is hurt Italians anyway. Whoa. You can’t embarrass Cus. He ain’t afraid of nobody. Cus is like the government. He works on people’s fears.
Mark D’Attilio trained with Cus and became an FBI agent with Cus’s encouragement. They were at a tournament I was boxing in up in Lake Placid in 1984. Gerry Cooney, who was undefeated until he lost to Larry Holmes for the heavyweight crown two years earlier, was managed by two guys, Mike Jones and Dennis Rappaport. One of them went up to Cus and said, “Hey, Cus, how are you?” Cus didn’t say anything, didn’t put his hand out, he just stared at him. “Cus, don’t you remember me? I’m Mike Jones,” he said, and stuck his hand out to shake. Cus just let it dangle. “Mike Jones. I remember who the hell you are. You’re partners with that other thief Dennis Rappaport.” Jones turned red and walked away.
But when Cus wanted to charm and persuade someone, he could turn it on. In 1979, Cus went to a party at his sportswriter friend Robert Boyle’s house in Cold Spring, New York. Cus showed up with a guy who was seven-foot-two. Cus said, “Bob, see that guy? He’s seven-two, he’s a truck driver, and he’s forty-two years old. He is going to be the oldest, tallest guy ever to win the heavyweight title. You watch.” Boyle never heard anything about the guy again. Then he met up with Cus a year later. “Bob, I’ve got the shortest, youngest guy, and he’s going to win the heavyweight championship.” Boyle said, “Who is that?” Cus said, “He’s a kid named Mike Tyson.”
Cus put the hope in the air. Positive affirmations. The more you say something, the more it will happen. That’s what happened with my crazy ass. Cus works with the crazy ones. What does Bob Marley say? The last will be first, the first will be last.
Cus was so hard to understand. How did he get Jimmy and Cayton to bankroll his training camp? Were they really hoping to find a potential champion among the Catskill Boxing Club kids? Why, when all of a sudden Cus finds me, a young kid from the gutter, doesn’t he tell Jimmy and Bill about me? The day after I sparred for Cus he called up his friend Brian Hamill and told him to come over to see me. When Brian said he’d come over the next week, Cus urged him to come the next day. He told a lot of his friends about me. Just not Jim and Bill. But José Torres came up to visit to tell Cus all the gossip in the city, and he saw me spar, and ran back to tell Jim and Bill about me.
Right away they called up. “Cus, what’s this we hear about a fourteen-year-old kid up there?” Cus said, “Hey, he’s just a street kid. We don’t know what he’s capable of doing.” Cus was downplaying me. He was pissed at José for opening his mouth. Maybe he was trying to get another sponsor before he had to go to those guys and then José blew it up? José was probably talking like “Oh, this young kid, his punches, I’ve never . . . !” Just like Cus, making it sound better than it actually is.
There was often strange shit happening with Cus up in Catskill. Cus was still friendly with Charlie Black and although I never met the gentleman, Joe Colangelo told me that Charlie would visit Cus often. But it was a visit Charlie made to someone else in Catskill that was really interesting. Years later I was told this story. Before I got to the house, my future roommate Frankie Mincelli got a job washing dishes at a posh Italian inn near Catskill. One day Frankie was washing dishes and the owner was pushing his buttons—as he was known to do—and he pushed Frankie over the line. Frankie got mad and threw some dishes. He was wrong to do it and he offered to pay for the dishes he broke, but the owner wanted his whole check.
Frankie told Cus and then Cus asked Joe Colangelo what he knew about the place. Joe said that they acted like they were connected with the mob but he didn’t know for sure. He knew that Fat Tony Salerno used to eat there a lot but that didn’t mean anything. So Cus and Joe decided to pay the owner a visit and work out the problem with Frankie’s paycheck. Joe went in first and the owner started getting all excited. “Listen, calm the fuck down,” Joe told him. “Let me just say this to you. If I was you, I would give the kid his check. You want replacement value for the dishes, whatever he broke, then we’ll give you replacement value based on what they cost. But if you push the envelope on this, you’re messing with the wrong people, you are.”
Then Cus walked into the office. Colangelo said that Cus gave the owner a stare that could “pierce through ten feet of solid steel. You could see him melt right then and there.” Frankie’s check was returned, they figured out a payment schedule, and all was good. Except that somehow Charlie Black found out about the story. The next thing you know, Charlie paid a little visit to the owner. “If you even think anything bad about Cus, never mind say it, if you even think it, you’re going to be hung up on piano wire.”
Charlie Black wasn’t the only person from Cus’s past who came up to see him in Catskill. Jacobs came up to the gym while I was sparring one day. I must have been about sixteen at the time. Jim was accompanied by an older Italian-looking gentleman. I saw him talking with Cus and then, after my workout, we exchanged a few words. The gentleman said that I looked like Henry Armstrong. He knew all those fighters from back in the day. He seemed like a sweet, retired old dude. Only while doing research for this book did I learn from Joe Colangelo’s interview that that man was Fat Tony Salerno! He did live close by, in Rhinebeck, so he didn’t have to go out of his way to visit. I remember other visits from some smooth-talking Italian guys who came from Cus’s old neighborhood. Some of them were old fighters who trained with Cus and then turned to the mob, like Nicky the Blond. I’m no fool—even though I was a young kid, I could see their personality, the barometer. These guys come up there, they have no care in the world, you know what I mean? You don’t see stress lines on their faces.
They weren’t businessmen. They looked good, they had the business clothes but they didn’t have no business lingo. These guys seemed harmless. They didn’t have any bodyguards with them, unless they were hidden somewhere where I couldn’t see them. Listen, this is tricky. Cus was paranoid about everybody. Now he’s got Fat Tony and other guys hanging out in the gym on a number of occasions.
Cus was always adamant about fighting against these guys. What could he or Jim possibly owe them? There were rumors in the boxing world that Fat Tony always had a piece of Patterson’s action, even after he sold his share in Rosensohn Enterprises. It could have been through Roy Cohn, who was his lawyer and who promoted the next five Patterson fights until Liston took him out of the picture. It wasn’t as if Jim and Cayton needed money—they were loaded. But it was widely believed that Jim had accumulated a lot of his old fight films from mob guys.
Because of Fat Tony’s undercover promotion of the first Ingo fight, Cus had been barred from getting a license in New York. You’d think he’d still hold that grudge, as he did with so many others. Cus had an enemies list longer than Richard Nixon’s. Norris, Cohn, Julius November, Hoover, Cardinal Spellman, President Reagan, Bob Arum, Teddy Brenner. He’d always be talking about Roy Cohn. Sometimes when he would mention his name, Cus would then spit on the floor.
I remember us driving on the turnpike one day and a bus passed us that had FUGAZY painted on the side. “That’s probably Bill Fugazy’s bus,” Cus snorted. Cus also hated Bob Arum. One time he said, “Bob Arum is the worst man in the western hemisphere, and if he was in the eastern hemisphere, he’d be the worst man there.”
Cus sometimes talked about killing some of his foes. He’d see somebody he didn’t like on TV and he’d just growl and say, “Oh, I wish I could kill that guy. The guy gives me so much trouble.” He’d see an ad for Fugazy Travel and he’d go off on how he’d like to kill Bill Fugazy. Look, I came from Brownsville, everybody’s got problems, everybody is always bitching and shit. We always think that the white life is so much better. So I move in with Cus, and this old man is bitter, whoa! Some of these enemies of his are dead already and he’s still talking about killing them. He even had a bitter falling-out with his brother Rocco over a lawn mower! Rocco sold a piece-of-shit lawn mower to Camille, and Cus went ballistic. “You’re cut off, you’re not family. Family doesn’t do that to family.” Cus was such a rage-aholic. He’d yell at Camille if she moved his stuff while cleaning and he couldn’t find it. He’d scream at people he was talking to over the phone.
Cus had a passionate opinion about everything. We’d be watching the fights on TV and the announcer would be saying what a great performance one of the fighters was putting on and Cus would be screaming, “The guy is a bum! What is this guy talking about? The guy’s a bum! The other guy’s not throwing back!”
Sometimes being around Cus was like being at a pity party. Usually it was just me and Cus and Camille, and Cus would start a monologue about the past. “I spent so much money fighting the IBC. I invested so much time in people who disappointed me the most. All my fighters betrayed me.” And he wanted revenge. Cus wouldn’t let go. I wanted to help him too with that Count of Monte Cristo shit. I wanted to hurt people in the ring because I knew it would make Cus happy. Isn’t that some sick shit?
Yet the one person who really betrayed Cus the worst always got a pass from him. I didn’t like the excuses Cus gave for Patterson. Cus never said anything derogatory about him. He always defended him. He got me up here being the killer, and he’s giving this guy excuses? I didn’t have any excuses. I didn’t like what Patterson did to Cus at that time. I couldn’t understand why Cus held him in such high regard. Cus loved him. Cus said only beautiful things about him. It pissed me off. I saw how he betrayed Cus. I wanted Cus to talk about me like he talked about Patterson. But it wasn’t my time yet.
I’m not like Cus. I get too involved emotionally with this stuff and it bothers me. I hated to hear Cus talking about how good a fighter Patterson was. I want to say something kind, but Patterson couldn’t fight. I’d see guys who were better than Patterson fighting and Cus would tell me they were bums. So I’m smart enough to realize what’s going on. I’m a disciple, but I’m a great reasoner because of Cus. I used reason and knew Patterson wasn’t better than those guys.
I was jealous of Patterson. Cus loved him so much. He never told me he loved me. He didn’t tell me nothing, everybody else had to tell me. He told me to clean the fucking gym. I was respectful to Patterson only because of Cus. I never said two words to him when I met him in person, though.
Patterson’s excuses for why he sold Cus out were all over the place. I think he just looked at Cus as invincible, that he could do everything for him and then he saw Cus lose in a power struggle with Cohn and November. Cus pretty much got kicked out of boxing so Floyd looked at him like, “He can’t help me no more. He can’t protect me.” In one interview Floyd claimed that he stopped talking to Cus because Jim Jacobs ripped him off on that documentary they made that didn’t sell anywhere because Patterson had no charisma. But when he spoke to Peter Heller for that great book “In This Corner . . . !” he blamed November for turning him against Cus. “I was blinded of many, many things. I was taken to a lawyer and he used some kind of psychology and not having a mature enough mind, he was able to make me see things other than the way they were. I began to see Cus different. Then, as time passed, this lawyer kept me aware of every move Cus was making and he distorted everything Cus was saying, doing, everything. So then it got to a point that I felt that it would be better that Cus and I separate because there was some Mafia or gangster stuff that came out and the lawyer really jumped on this and tore it up although it was just an innocent thing.”
When he was interviewed for a CBS program, Floyd said, “If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t change one bit of it, I’d keep it just the way it was, except one thing. Cus would have been there in the end. He was there in the beginning.”
Sometimes Cus would actually say that he was testing Floyd, giving him enough rope to see what Floyd would do. A true test, as Cus put it. I guess I passed the test, I was with him to his end. But if he was testing Floyd’s character, why did he say that Floyd wasn’t responsible for his actions because his mind was “poisoned”? His mind may have been poisoned, but he still could have given Cus his half of the money.
Cus and Patterson reconciled while I was living with Cus. It was at some amateur fights at Columbia-Greene Community College. They couldn’t avoid each other and they sat in the stands and talked for two hours. Tom Patti was with Cus, and when Patterson said good-bye, Tom and Cus headed for the car. Cus put his arm on Tom’s shoulder and said, “I never realized how little he knew about all that I did for him. I protected him so much, I kept him in the dark about all these dangers in the sport around him. He was naive to all of it and therefore he never knew or appreciated all I did for him.”
My personal opinion is that Cus was always looking for an out for this guy. He always gave Patterson excuses and that guy hurt him bad. I just don’t understand human beings. The more somebody hurts you, the more you love them. It’s weird. Cus would say it again and again, “The people I invested the most time in disappointed me the most.” He was probably talking about Patterson. And November. Maybe José Torres. Definitely his two trainers, Dan Florio and Joey Fariello, who had both left him. He said that the biggest mistake he made was letting his feelings get involved with Floyd. He got taken and he never made himself vulnerable again. He had to detach his feelings from his work. I had to sacrifice for Floyd’s betrayal. I would have had a normal adolescence, I would have had a guy showing his love and verbalizing it, instead of everything being regimented. Regimented love. But I got that unconditional love from Camille, which helped balance me. In retrospect, I realized that had I received that kind of “soft” love from Cus, I probably wouldn’t be who I am now. I was always trying to be the best, hoping to prove myself to Cus.
The funny thing is that Cus was afraid that I was going to leave him. One time I got up the nerve to tell Cus that I didn’t think Patterson cared about him, and that I did. Cus looked at me and said, “You don’t know. They got his mind twisted up. One day maybe they’ll twist your mind up and then you’ll leave me too.”
He’d always say that. “You’re going to leave me too. Just like everyone else.” I didn’t know if he was giving me a mind trip, because that’s what he’d do, or if this was just him feeling sorry for himself. I thought he was losing his mind. I’m sitting reading a book, and Cus was walking around the house in his robe. “Yeah, you too, they’ll take you away too, you’ll leave me just like everybody else, wouldn’t you?” “What? Who’s going to take me?” “You know, all those guys.” Cus never gave me the credit I deserved for being loyal to him.
But Cus would feed my vanity. He’d feed it with love and hate and gasoline and nuclear potions. Can you believe I told people, “How dare these guys challenge me with their primitive skills? These mere mortals.” I was a sick fuck! I think about this a lot. It’s this old washed-up dude and this young street urchin, this fucking slum dweller. That’s what I was, a slum dweller. And we’re up there and the dude is telling me shit and I’m believing it. I think I’m invincible. Now I’m scared to even think the way I thought back then. Cus had me thinking I was this invincible fucking monster from another galaxy. A mean, vicious, ferocious savage, he used to call me. I’m sure he called Patterson that too. Patterson never believed it. But I did.
—
IN FEBRUARY 1983, I was coming off two Junior Olympic titles and continuing my amateur career. I was still only sixteen but I was rated the number eight amateur super-heavyweight in the country when I went to the Western Massachusetts Golden Gloves tournament in Holyoke. One of the tournament officials told Cus that he didn’t think I could handle all the experienced fighters who were in the tournament and that I should fight in the novice class. “He’ll get killed in there with those experienced fighters,” the guy told Cus. Cus just laughed. “Yeah? Just watch him.”
I got byes to the finals because nobody wanted to fight me, and those fights wound up as defaults. So my first actual fight was on February 12, against Jimmy Johnson, a tough kid from Springfield, Massachusetts. He was a big, muscular, tall guy, and he had brought his wife, his kids, and all his relatives to the fight. Just seconds into the fight, we clinched and when the referee parted us, I knocked him cold with a right hand. His wife, carrying his newborn baby, and his two other little kids ran into the ring, crying. I told Cus that and he laughed. “What? The babies and the mother were crying? Boo-hoo-hoo.” He was so happy.
I won the New England Golden Gloves championship by default when the guy I was supposed to fight came up with a sprained ankle. I started to get some national publicity and Cus had me sparring with pros. One of them was Carl “The Truth” Williams. We drove down to White Plains to spar with him. He was the new up-and-coming guy and I was the amateur guy. Eventually I defended my title against him, but that first time I boxed with him he beat the shit out of me. I pounded him hard, I hurt him sometimes, and he hurt me. It was a war. “Michael was coming in and Williams hit him with a straight right hand,” Kevin Rooney remembered. “It was like Michael wasn’t hit, he just kept coming. An ordinary person would have gone down; he’s not ordinary. Needless to say, we didn’t get invited back.”
I never fit into the amateur system. You could be rewarded the same amount of points for a harmless jab as for a punch that sent your opponent down. The amateur officials considered themselves genteel. But I was out for blood. Sometimes I’d get points deducted before the fight even started because they didn’t like the way I was staring down my opponent. “We are boxers,” they’d say. “I didn’t come here to box. I’m here to fight, sir,” I’d tell them. They didn’t like my Brownsville attitude. Cus and I took on the whole amateur system. We didn’t win but we fought them hard.
Sometimes Cus’s reputation probably cost me fights. I made it to the National Golden Gloves finals and on March 26, 1983, I’d just beaten the two-time defending champion, Warren Thompson, and now I was going to fight Craig Payne, who had been beaten by Warren Thompson the year before. I clearly won every round. I was the aggressor, I punched more, and I should have had the decision. But I was robbed with impunity. Just watch the fight, you’ll hear all the boos from the crowd. I was crying like a baby after that decision but Cus started chasing the amateur officials. Kevin and a police officer who was escorting us around had to get in between Cus and them. That made me feel so good to see Cus taking up for me. A lot of those officials were lackeys for Norris and his crew when they were younger. They never gave me a fair shake my whole amateur career.
A few months later I went back to Nelson’s smokers in the Bronx. I fought a tough guy named Bill Sammo and battered him around for two rounds but he wouldn’t go down. So in the third I started jabbing and opened up a nasty cut over his left eye and the ref stopped the fight. Cus always liked me to jab. I don’t jab much, but I have an awesome jab. Sometimes I’d knock the teeth to the back of a guy’s head using my jab.
In August I won the Ohio State Fair, knocking my opponent out in the first round. Then I won the U.S. Amateur Boxing Championships later that month with another first-round KO. In September we traveled to Lake Placid, New York, for a U.S.–Germany tournament, and I knocked out Peter Geier in the first round. I won the Adirondack Regionals in October when my opponent didn’t show up. Then I went on to win the New England–New York Olympic Regionals at the end of the month when my opponent didn’t show up there also. Then I hit a wall. On November 8, I fought Kommel Odom in Colorado Springs in the Amateur Boxing Federation National Championships. Odom was a journeyman but I wasn’t into the fight. I wasn’t hurt but I held him and I was disqualified in the second round. Kevin called Cus with the news and he was as confused as I was when he talked to a local reporter. “I think they said Mike was holding, which I don’t understand. This Odom was probably the weakest fighter in the class. I can’t really explain it, except that Mike is out of the tournament. These things happen in boxing. Now we have to go back to the gym and work.”
That fight was so out of character for me. I was always up for tournament fights. I wasn’t like the rest of the guys I was fighting; this was my whole life. Those trophies were my life source. Cus would take my trophies and use them to decorate the house. When I got back to Catskill we discussed the fight and then we just kept on training, getting hypnotized, and sparring. I guess Cus knew what he was doing, because I got better.
Cus always used to say that I could become heavyweight champ barring any distractions. I’ll tell you what “no distractions” meant. No distractions was going to the gym, maybe twice a day, and then when you go home you do your washing and your chores and you go upstairs and you watch fight films for ten hours. Then you do some exercises in the room. Then you go to bed, and when you wake up you go running. Then you come back from running, you go back upstairs, take a shower, and then watch some more films until it’s time to eat breakfast and go to school—when I was still attending high school. At school I learn nothing and then I come back home, I eat dinner, I watch some fight films until it’s time to go to the gym and train and spar. Then I come back home and take a shower and go watch some fight films again until it’s time to go to sleep. That’s my regimen, that’s “no distractions.”
Cus got a little concerned about my total devotion to fighting. I was spurning the advances of girls who were my fans because I was too in love with myself to think about anything else. Cus would urge me to go out dancing or something but I would rather curl up with a book about Benny Leonard or Joe Gans. The writers who wrote about those guys did a magnificent job of making my heroes almost human gods with flaws. That was my Iliad.
“They had a life, Mike,” Cus told me. “You’re too young not to have a life. There’s something not right. I’ve been at this sixty years and I never saw anyone with your dedication.”
I would complain about not having any girlfriends, but I wasn’t the suavest when it came to girls. I had a lot of crushes on girls but I never got to second base because I never tried. I never said a word to them. They were all crushes in my mind. As I got better known in town, girls started flirting with me but I didn’t know how to handle that. I didn’t want to deal with that, I might start arguing with them.
But then when I was about seventeen I got my first girlfriend. Her name was Angie and she was a wonderful girl. Her parents were well educated. Her father was the manager of the J.J. Newberry variety store in Catskill. Her uncle won a national scholastic contest for Boy of the Year when he was a kid. They gave him a big parade and Cus said, “I want to do that for you too. You’re going to have a parade just like that one.” That stayed in Cus’s mind, that they gave this guy a parade. That got Cus excited.
So Cus started pushing me to marry Angie! She was Cus’s idea of a positive black person, the one who goes to church and prays. He wanted me in that family. “Her family has a very good reputation in the neighborhood.” Reputation was everything to Cus, even if he acted like it wasn’t. I think Cus believed that if I got married, I’d be a calmer guy and that would make me a better fighter. Cus wanted to control my life to a T, even who I married.
But Camille took my side against Cus. She told me, “You should go out with Angie but you can have as many girlfriends as you want. You should bring them all over, everybody should be friends. Nobody should get married yet.” Cus would go, “Ah, Camille, he’s a fighter, he just needs to focus on one woman who’s his wife and be focused and determined to take care of his family.” When Camille said no, I knew that wasn’t good advice from Cus. When I started seeing a girl named Holly at the same time as Angie, Cus got mad and said it was the first sign of trouble with my character, although he liked Holly too.
Cus probably thought marriage would make me more mature. I wasn’t having sex with Angie and wouldn’t become a sexual animal until later in my career after Cus was gone. But he predicted it when he was interviewed about me once. “You don’t know where sex can take him, he had a lot of potential, but he doesn’t know where he’s going to go. Sex can take a young man places he never can believe.” And it did. Cus knew me too well. He knew that I was an extreme person and I had sacrificed so much, including sex, because I wanted to rule so badly.
I went to my first strip club up in Montreal early in 1984. Cus and a few of the fighters drove up to see one of the Hilton brothers fight. It was always great hanging around the Hiltons. When they showed up to train in Catskill it was a fun time. So we got to Montreal and Davey Hilton took us to Chez Parée, one of the world’s best strip clubs. We sat down and the waitress came over and I told Tom Patti, who was collecting the orders, to get me an orange juice. Well, Tom told her to add some vodka.
“Oh man, this orange juice!” I made a face. “Mike, this is Montreal, it’s special orange juice. Drink it, or you’re going to insult them,” Tom told me. So I drank the first one and that one led to the second and to the third and fourth. Meanwhile, Tom went over to one of the strippers circulating in the room. “Listen, see the black guy who’s with us? He’s a very shy guy. I need you to help break him out of his shell.” He was trying to get me laid. “Maybe you can go over and say hello, warm him up, because he’s really quiet.” Tom was talking to her with his back to me. The stripper took one look over his shoulder and asked, “Which one is quiet and shy?” “The black guy,” Tom said. “You mean the one who’s jumping on the tables?”
Tom turned around and he saw me dancing and jumping from tabletop to tabletop, flying and spinning through the air. After a few hours we left the club, and got back to the hotel about one-thirty in the morning. I was staying in a room with Cus, and Tom and Davey were in the other room. So I went to my room and I knocked on the door. “Cus, it’s Mike, let me in. Come on, Cus, I’m tired, let me in.” Meanwhile, Tom had run to his room because he didn’t want to get blamed for taking me to a strip club. I was knocking and pleading and I heard Cus from the other side of the door. “Who is this? The Mike Tyson I know wouldn’t be out this late. You must be an imposter. Go away. The real Mike Tyson wouldn’t do this.”
So I went over to Tom’s room and begged him to let me in. “You can’t stay here, I’m going to get in trouble,” Tommy told me. Then he lay down on his bed and passed out. He woke up about an hour later and found me nearly levitating above the floor, trying to lie on the six inches of space on the mattress that he wasn’t occupying. I guess I learned that from Cus too. He used to tell me about how he slept while standing up in the Army. A few hours later Cus knocked on the door and chewed us all out for staying out so late.
I began to train seriously for the Olympic Trials, which were scheduled for June 1984. In April, I won the National Golden Gloves with a first-round KO of Jonathan Littles. We were back in Catskill before going to Texas for the trials, when Alex Wallau, an ABC sports commentator, came up to interview me and Cus. Alex and Cus were old friends because Alex started out producing Howard Cosell. He was also close friends with Jim Jacobs, who urged him to get out from behind the cameras and be an on-air commentator. So this wasn’t your usual shallow interview. In fact, it might have been the most in-depth interview that Cus had ever done. We sat down to tape it in the living room. Cus had gotten dressed up for the occasion, putting a gray suit jacket on over his plaid lumberjack shirt. I was looking fly, wearing slacks and a shirt and a white Kangol cap, embellished with a gold chain and pinky rings.
Alex began by asking Cus how he’d met me and asking me about my background. I said some heavy stuff about crime that was right from that Jean Valjean character in Les Misérables that I had read at the house. Alex turned to Cus now. “You talk about peeling away the layers to find out what makes somebody tick. When you peeled away the layers on Mike Tyson, what did you find?” “I found what I thought I’d find. A person of basically good character, a person who is capable of doing the things that are necessary to be done in order to be a great fighter or a champion of the world. When I recognized this, then my next job was to make him become aware because unless he knew them as well as I did, it wouldn’t help him very much. So I had to make him aware by constantly bringing to his attention the little incidents which would tend to reveal himself, so to speak, to himself. And enable him to get the real solid, deep-down, inner belief in himself.
“A man who is able to do what needs to be done, no matter how he feels within, is a professional. I think that Mike is rapidly approaching that status, that important point which I consider he must do in order to be the greatest fighter in the world.”
I’m sucking this up. I believe I am that fucking guy. I’m keeping it real, right? I’d been living with Cus for years, I’ve been used to hearing him talk, and it took me back, but that was good to hear there. Cus was a master of dropping bombs on you, even when he was talking to someone else.
“And for all we know, barring unforeseen incidents and if this continues without any interruption, I’m going to say something that most people would think, well, he’s a biased person. It’s entirely possible that if he gets the sparring and everything else that goes with it, whatever he requires”—do you see the crescendo coming up?—“he may go down in history as one of the greatest that we ever had, if not the greatest that ever lived in his division.”
Now Alex started to get touchy-feely. “Mike, how would you describe your feelings for Cus?” “That shouldn’t be hard to do, he’s like my father. I never look at it as he’s my trainer or my manager. I just go by the way that he has feeling toward me and it’s like a father-and-son relationship. And that’s mostly what I’m based on, even though he is my manager and trainer. Sometimes I forget that, because of the way we are.”
Now it was Cus’s turn to be on the hot seat. “Cus, how would you describe your feelings for him?” Oh God. “Well, you know, I tell these boys, all of them, when I come into contact with them, as a result of our relationship with one another, you either get to gain respect or lose respect for me and I will either gain or lose respect for you. I find the best way of teaching is by setting examples. Now, you set a good example and it appeals to them, they’ll try to emulate you, and this is what I try to do. My purpose in explaining is only to let them see the logic and the value of what I have to explain and teach. But they have to have the intelligence to understand it and accept it as truth, as fact. And then this helps develop them to the point that it’s necessary.”
But what about his feelings? Alex kept at him. “Are you able to think of a fighter you work with, like Mike Tyson, do you ever think of him on a personal basis, as opposed to being a boxer? What do you feel about him on a personal basis?” Whoa, Alex is getting too deep with it. “First of all I am a professional, and as a professional, my judgments as to a fighter are detached. I never allow my personal feelings to get involved, no matter how much affection I might have. But as I said before, you either gain or lose respect and having watched him come from where he was, to what he is, I can say honestly I have a very deep affection for him, I do. Not only affection and admiration, because I know what it takes to be and to do what he has done and what he’s doing. I’m aware of it, and, well, I feel I was a part of it, it’s almost like liking yourself too. Because you never know how much you contributed to it, but the result is then you like to think you had more to do with it. So that, in a sense, I think I answered the question.” That’s what I’ve always been saying, falling in love with myself and idolizing myself. I said that. But he’s saying he sees so much of himself in me, he’s liking himself too. I didn’t know that shit then.
Alex then asked Cus if it was hard for him at seventy-six to work with a seventeen-year-old black kid. “I never think of him as black or white, or colored or whatever. To me, he’s my boy, he’s with me.” I’m his boy. That made me feel good. Again, he was using Alex to send me a message.
But Alex wanted answers about our age difference. “I can relate to any age, because I’m seventy-six and I lived through all those periods. I grew up in a very tough neighborhood, so that I’m aware of how they feel, so the years have gone by, people are people. And boys are boys and I know exactly how he feels. From time to time, I know when to put a little pressure down to make him aware and perhaps influence him in a particular direction. I also know when to lay off. I also know, that having been a boy myself, that pressure at the wrong time may arise a certain amount of resentment, which will delay the development.”
When did he lay off? Is that when people like Atlas thought he was favoring me? They didn’t see him when he talked to me alone. Cus never laid off. Cus was a contradiction, I can’t believe he said that.
“I often say to him, ‘You know, I owe you a lot.’”
Never! He never said he owed me anything!
“I owe you a lot. And he doesn’t know what I mean. 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 he is here and doing what he’s doing, and doing as well as he’s doing and improving as he has, gives me the motivation and interest to stay alive. Because I believe a person dies when he no longer wants to live. Nature is a lot brighter than people think. Little by little we lose our friends that we care about and little by little we lose our interest, until finally we say, ‘Well, what the devil am I doing around here,’ because we have no reason to go on. But I have a reason with Mike here.”
In a way he was putting pressure on me with that talk. That was the first time I ever heard Cus say that I was prolonging his life. He never talked personal stuff like that with me. He’d talk about my pain, how I was thinking, feeling, going through my hardships, my family, my people dying, but other than that it was just the mission we were on. He never talked to me about how much I meant to him.
Meanwhile, we began getting more and more media attention and the stories were always the same: a nice old white guy is saving a young antisocial disadvantaged black kid from the ghetto. Just read the way CBS Sunday Morning framed the story:
NARRATOR: Cus D’Amato is more than a manager of champions. He is a savior of souls. He saved Floyd Patterson and others, and he is saving Mike Tyson.
CUS: I don’t succeed when I make a guy or help a guy become champion of the world. I succeed when I make that fellow become champion of the world and independent of me, that he doesn’t need me anymore.
NARRATOR: But they need each other now, because someday soon they will be coming out of the country, coming hard and coming fast for the lights of the city.
But first I had to win the Olympic gold medal. The odds were stacked against me, not because I didn’t have the talent, but because of Cus’s disputes with Bob Surkein, the head of the amateur boxing program. Cus had known him for years, and he was convinced that Surkein was an old ally of Norris’s. Actually Cus thought that anybody he didn’t like was down with Norris. Cus and Surkein had butted heads earlier when Cus wouldn’t let me fight in an international tournament in the Dominican Republic. Cus wasn’t thrilled with me going there to begin with, but when they told him that their trainers would train me, Cus flipped out. “It is their position that Mike would have to work under their coaches,” he told the local paper. “Well, I’m not about to let them mess up my fighter. I won’t let him go into any international tournaments or the training camp in Colorado unless one of my coaches goes along.”
Later, Cus would tell other reporters that he was worried about an international terrorist attack in the Dominican Republic. That pissed Surkein off. Then Cus wanted me to fight at my natural weight, which would have been in the superheavyweight division. But Surkein told Cus that I had to fight in the heavyweight class. “Well, how are you going to stop me?” Cus asked Surkein. According to Cus, he said, “I am the power behind the American Federation of Boxing. I make those people, the officers.” He told Cus that if I were to win I’d have to do it “the hard way.” In other words, he’d get to the judges. Cus considered letting me take my chances in knocking out every superheavyweight I faced. But then he decided he didn’t want to gamble with me, so we dropped down to heavyweight.
It was fun losing the weight. I didn’t eat much and I had to wear a vinyl suit all day long until I went to bed. I loved it, I felt like a real fighter, lose the weight to make the weight. I thought I was some great warrior. I was so delusional.
I was pumped when I got to Fort Worth. My first fight was with Avery Rawls. I knocked him down seconds into the fight and then I stuck my tongue out at him. Both the ref and Cus gave me shit afterward. I got the decision after three rounds. Then I fought Henry Milligan, a Princeton boy. I knocked him out in the second round and flossed to the press. “I was a young spoiled brat in the past but my attitude in the ring has changed. I just do my thing and if an individual allows himself to be intimidated, that’s his fault. I have so many styles that I don’t know them all. I have more confidence than anyone on this planet. My punch can stun you, hurt you or knock you down. My opponent was game and gutsy with a heart of a lion, but I was not impressed with his punches. What round did I stop the gentleman in, anyway?”
I went into the finals against Henry Tillman convinced I would win. My previous opponent, who lasted two rounds with me, had already knocked Tillman out. The fight started and I beat his ass for two good rounds and even dropped him. But when they announced the decision, they gave it to Tillman. The whole arena was booing. I was totally distraught. When they gave me the consolation trophy I smashed it in the dressing room.
Besides the ridiculous decision, Cus was furious at Howard Cosell’s lopsided call for Tillman on the television coverage. “He’s a rat, I paid for his wedding,” Cus yelled. But losing didn’t mean I was out of the Olympics. Three weeks later there was the Olympic Boxoff in Vegas, and if I beat Tillman there, then we’d have a third fight to see who went to the Olympics. We both got to the finals and again both the crowd and I thought that I had won but again they gave the decision to Tillman. While the crowd was booing, Cus went right after Surkein. He started throwing punches and Kevin had to step in and break it up. That’s why I would have killed for him. He always had my back.
We returned to New York the second week of July and days later I had a new car. I didn’t want a car. I didn’t know how to drive a car. I had no interest in learning how to drive a car, but Cus told me I was getting a car. And Cayton was paying for it. He sent Cus a check for $600 on July 19, $500 for the deposit on the car and $100 for the first payment on the insurance. But there was no question as to who owned the car. “Although the registration will be in your name, the car is owned by Reel Sports Inc.,” Cayton wrote Cus.
Cus wanted me to get a safe car like a Volvo or something but I figured if I was going to get a car I’d go for a Caddy. So I got a brand-new Caddy even though I had never thought of driving in my life. I would have been happy with a motorcycle. But they got me a car because my friend Mark Breland, who had gone to the Olympics, got a new Mercedes from his managers. Cus was so old-school. He thought that I’d leave him for the first person who threw some money or a car at me. He believed money could turn everybody. But I was in it for the family. I was into the household and my lifestyle there and my friends in the town. Cus thought that all that conflict with Norris and Carbo and those guys could recur with new people.
Not fighting in the Olympics didn’t change much for me. I kept training hard and fighting hard and visualizing myself as the champ. Everyone would come up to me and give me some great affirmations, like “You’re the best” and “You’ll knock all those guys out.” Jimmy got me passes for the whole Olympics and they flew me to Los Angeles to soak in the atmosphere. I watched all the fights and I was just waiting for my time, I knew it would come. I knew when I turned pro I would do well. Man, I was so confident, thanks to Cus.
I went back to the tournaments. I fought in the Empire State Games in August of 1984. In the finals I fought Winston Bent. We almost went at it before the bell sounded. I got carried away a little when he stared at me “in a very aggressive way,” as Cus would say later. I was dominating the fight and in the third round I put him to sleep with a right hand.
A week later, on August 25, I was fighting in Lake Placid for the Junior National Championships. I had drawn a bye all the way to the finals, where I fought Kelton Brown, who I had knocked out in the first round two years earlier to win the national championship. This time it wasn’t different except that I knocked both him and the ring out. I hit him with a left to the body at the beginning of the fight and he had to take an eight count. Then he took another one after I rocked him with a right to the head. Then I missed him and hit the rope so hard that it broke. I broke the ring. Brown didn’t last too much longer.
After the fight, Cus met with the press. “Well, I was very impressed. He reminded me of a modern-day Jack Dempsey, he’s awesome. I think Mike is ready to turn pro. He probably will enter the European Championships in Finland in October and then turn pro in December.” I used to love when he said stuff like “You remind me of a modern-day Jack Dempsey, you’re just so ferocious.” My dick would get hard.
In October I went to Europe for the first time. The International Tammer Tournament was in Helsinki, Finland. My first match was a walkover when my opponent suddenly got ill and refused to fight. My whole life was like that. I got a reputation as a bully. In my next fight I fought István Szikora, a veteran Hungarian fighter. I boxed the guy for three rounds and beat him real smart and easy. In the finals I fought a huge six-foot-five blond Swede named Hakan Brock. He had upset the favored Russian fighter to get into the finals. He towered over me during the referee’s instructions, but once the bell rang I was all over him. I got him on the ropes and went right to his body, boom, boom, boom, boom. Somehow he got off the ropes and spent the rest of the fight avoiding me. I won the decision but Kevin was disgusted by the Swede. “The guy didn’t want to fight,” he told the press. “But again Michael closed the show nice.”
When I got back from Europe, I started driving up to Albany and hanging out there—checking out the real estate, meeting people. I was young and vibrant and I had a white Caddy with a blue top, some money in my pocket, nice clothes. They wouldn’t let me in the clubs. “Mike, I’m sorry, you’re underage, you can’t come in,” the bouncer said. “You shouldn’t be telling everybody how old you are in the paper.” “Then I wouldn’t be special,” I said. So I started hanging out with some dope dealers, deplorable women, and street people. They were trashy girls but they were fun. I didn’t know anything about girls. Nobody was going to give me no pussy, though.
Some of the guys who were training in Catskill lived in Albany and worked in Albany. They saw me out there and they remembered when I first came in at twelve and thirteen, now they were seeing me at eighteen, hanging out. They may have gotten the word back to Cus or maybe Cus sent Mark D’Attilio up to Albany on a few reconnaissance missions to track me down, because Cus confronted me. “Don’t go up there fucking with those people again,” Cus told me. “Stop talking to those people immediately.” I kept going to Albany, but I stopped seeing those people, because that’s what Cus wanted.
Now reporters were coming up to the gym and sensing a good story. In November, The New York Times sent a reporter to profile the Catskill Boxing Club. Cus was being rediscovered, both as a boxing guru and as a Good Samaritan who saved wayward kids from a grim future. “‘Teaching a youngster to fight,’ Mr. D’Amato explained, ‘does not mean raising fists in the schoolyard, on the street. It means,’ he said, ‘learning discipline,’ a favorite word of his. He pointed to a young man who was sparring in the ring. ‘He was a troubled boy when he came here. He’s learning to control his emotions. He’s learning discipline, which he didn’t have.’ ‘If one could measure the contribution, one could nominate the man for sainthood,’ said William F. Hagan, Greene County Administrator. ‘He’s instilled a sense of character in these kids.’”
At the beginning of 1985, we were fucked because we didn’t win the Olympics and we had no money. Cus began to implement Plan B. He had me sign a contract with Jimmy Jacobs and Bill Cayton. I signed a standard manager’s contract with Jim, four years, one-third to him. Cayton then signed me to a four-year contract for personal appearances and endorsements. Then each of them assigned half their earnings to the other so they were splitting both ends. On paper Cus got nothing. But he did manage to keep control by signing the contracts as “Cus D’Amato, adviser to Michael Tyson, who shall have final approval of all decisions involving Michael Tyson.”
I think that Cus was covered because of his long-standing relationship with Jimmy. Alex Wallau told us that their relationship had changed by the time I came around. Jimmy was now supporting Cus. “By that time Cus was dependent upon Jimmy financially. At no time did Jimmy, in any way, do anything but project Cus as a god who he worships and that’s the way Jimmy felt, but there was this sort of dual relationship, where on the one hand Jimmy had that love of Cus and that overwhelming respect of him and on the other hand he was supporting him. It was different than it was initially.”
Jimmy didn’t have any money when he first came to New York. Cus probably taught him how to get money. I think Cus saw that Jimmy had potential and Cus groomed him to be this great impersonator. I met his family and they were broke. But Jimmy always acted like he was loaded. He was probably playing Cayton big-time. I can’t picture Jacobs and Cayton even liking each other.
Now that I was turning pro, Cus began to ramp up his psychological game. One day in the gym he said, “Now I work for you, Mike.” I said, “You don’t work for me, get out of here, if this means you work for me, I don’t want to do it, then.” Cus smiled. “Yeah, I don’t work for nobody. You’re all right, you’re my boy.” That’s Cus. Always testing me, playing head games. Another time I was beating up a sparring partner in the gym. I saw that he was in trouble and I let him catch his breath for a second. Cus was all over me. “Look, I think you’re in the wrong business. You don’t want to do this, do you? I don’t want to waste my time.”
But the biggest dig came one night at home when I was getting the garbage together to take out. One of the reasons people were skeptical about Cus’s claims that I would win the title was that they thought I was too small. So as I was tying up the garbage, I was talking about how good I was going to do as a pro. Cus just said, “I wish you had a body like Mike Weaver or Ken Norton, because people would just see you and they’d be intimidated. I wish you were big like those guys. You’d scare people.”
Man, did that hurt me. I couldn’t tell him, though, because he would say, “What are you, a little baby, you’re crying? How can you handle a big-time fight if you don’t have enough emotional toughness?” I threw out the garbage and went upstairs and cried in my room. Had Cus lost hope in me? Why was he putting it in my mind that nobody was going to fear me? Right then and there, I was determined to project the most savage, intimidating aura that boxing had ever seen. I went downstairs and I found Cus. “You wait, Cus. One day the whole world will be afraid of me,” I vowed. “The whole world is going to be afraid of me.” I got an old man who’s nuts, and he got a young kid who’s nuts.
But that was the day I turned into Iron Mike. I didn’t want to let Cus down, I didn’t want him to say, “I’m an old man, I’m going to die, and you wasted my time?” So I’d be the savage Cus wanted. I even began to fantasize that I’d actually killed someone in the ring. How’s that for intimidation? Cus wanted an antisocial champion, and he always used to call me “the actor,” so I’d act. I remembered all the bad guys from movies I’d watched, and all the villains I knew from wrestling, and I drew on that and threw myself into the role of the arrogant sociopath.
Shortly after this talk, I went roller-skating and I tripped and fractured both of my wrists. I went to the doctor in New York, he put a cast on each of my wrists, and I didn’t miss a day of training. I didn’t want Cus to question my commitment. Around that time, Cus and I were talking about Ali. Cus was saying that Ali had such character. He had the perfect fighting mentality, he truly loved himself, and he really believed everything he said. “I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought all that stuff was just a game.” “No, Mike, he believes every word he says. He believes he’s a god.” How can a mortal be a god?
Cus was always on my ass until the day he died. After I got my license, I became his designated driver. Sometimes we’d drive for two hours so he could go to a conference. And the whole way, he’d be fucking with my head. I’m doing everything good and he makes up shit to fuck with me? He presses my buttons, he wants to see me lose it every now and then. But I see how he’s trying to figure how far he can push me before I explode. By then I had realized that the way to get Cus off my back was to humor him and show him that he couldn’t get to me. He’d go into his rant, “Oooooh, you’re an actor, you’re a phony,” trying to get me mad, and it wouldn’t work. So he’s getting madder, because I’m not getting mad. Then he’d start in on “You’re still not ready. I don’t think you have received the discipline necessary to handle a real pro, Mike, a real pro, not like these tomato cans you’ve been knocking out. A real experienced pro is not going to get discouraged if you hit him with those punches.” And I’m laughing. “No way, Cus. I’m the best fighter in the world, Cus. Cus, God can’t beat me because I’m your fighter, Cus. Remember you said that, Cus?”
Then we came up to a tollbooth. I took the ticket from the lady in the tollbooth and said, “Thank you, ma’am, have a good day.” Oh man, Cus went off on me. “You’re a damned phony, Mike, a goddamned phony. I’ve been around phonies all my life.” He made it like it was the worst thing in the world that I said, “Thank you, ma’am,” like I was the biggest Uncle Tom in the history of Uncle Toms. That blew my mind but I just said, “Oh, Cus, come on, stop it.” I’m doing my shtick. “She’s a nice lady, it’s such a beautiful day.” While I’m doing my thing, he’s calling me the worst names under his breath, but I hear it. Then he goes, “You know in boxing, you can’t be doing none of that phony stuff. They’ll bang it all out of you and then what are you going to do? You live your life the way you fight your fights.”
It’s not like he wanted me to be Sonny Liston. He wanted me to be respectful but I was overdoing it: “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am, have a nice day.” You can’t do any of that shit around Cus. I’m saying to myself, “How can I win?” Then he got off me for twenty minutes and started in on Roy Cohn and Julius November. “That Benedict Arnold caused me so many problems . . .” And if I tried to put in my two cents, he’d say, “What do you know? You drive this car.” Then he’d get back into killing me again. “Don’t tell me ‘What?’ You know what you did.” “I don’t know,” I’d insist. “You know.” He tried to get me to confess, but I don’t know what I’m confessing to. I want to confess, but I don’t know what I’m confessing to.
Then he got on me for my relationship with Bill Cayton. “You’re just another phony. Yeah, you and Bill Cayton should get on real well, you should get along REAL well.” What the fuck is he talking about? He knows I hate Bill. “You like that, don’t you? You like people to look up to you, tell you how great you are, don’t you, huh?” Meanwhile, he’s coughing and wheezing the whole time he’s talking, working himself up to a point where I’m worried that he’s really getting himself ill. “You’re just a damn phony. Who taught you that, huh? I know I didn’t teach you that.” I’m happy, he’s not happy, so he is going to rip into me. “You’re a phony, you’re a faker.” “But Cus, wouldn’t you want me to say ‘Thank you’ to them if they were assisting you?” “No, that wasn’t a sincere ‘Thank you.’”
It took me a while but I began to get it. Cus thought I was going to suck up to Bill because Bill had money. He despised Cayton. He was always telling me, “Yeah, go back to them so they can tell you how great you are and how much they like you and you’re one of them.” He started putting that Uncle Tom shit on me. He knew that phrase would hurt me. He never said the words, but he implied it. He knew that concept would hurt me. Sometimes I would go into the city and hang out at Jimmy and Cayton’s office. I was represented by white people who knew how to organize shit. I was programmed to be an international, sensational entertainer. But he didn’t want me to be in debt to Bill Cayton or to accept anything from him. When I’d go to their office and call Cus, he’d go, “What are you doing there with him? Are you going up there kissing up to him and being a phony?” Being with Cus was like being with a wife who had you walking on eggshells. He was jealous. He thought Bill was going to win me over.
Cus had subtler ways of keeping me in check. Sport magazine had come up to Catskill to do an interview with me and put me on the cover. They brought up the reporter and another editorial person and a photographer and his assistant to the gym. And after the interview and the photo shoot, while the press was still there, Cus said, “Mike, take the broom and mop and clean the gym.” After looking like a star, I had to clean the gym.
But then the two of us would be in the kitchen at home and out of the blue Cus would say, “We’re the greatest fighter-trainer combination in the world. Take all the prophets and they have a son and their son is a fighter and they have the first connection to God. And they still can’t beat my fighter, because I’m the best trainer in the world and my fighter is the best fighter in the world.” That would send me to the moon. I realized that our success came from the bond we had with Cus. Me and Kevin, and even Camille and Jay, we all had a bond that none of the other fighters had. It wasn’t that we had a bond with each other, although we all loved each other, but the bond was all about Cus. We all loved each other but Cus was like our guru from the fucking heavens. We’re going to fucking accomplish this and succeed. We were his disciples. Yet I also learned from Cus that I could be a teacher’s admirer but never their follower. I learned from following Cus not to be a follower. I didn’t know back then that I had to base my life on my own standards and my own morals and not somebody else’s. I didn’t master it, but that’s what I eventually learned from my relationship with Cus. I had to be my own guy. I guess that was Cus’s idea, that he didn’t succeed until he made someone independent of him.
The more I think about Cus, I realize that Cus’s thing was to let you see how much pain he could take. You can’t hurt him and you can’t defy him and he’ll fight you until the end. Cus was the kind of guy who said, “I don’t care, you can cut me up in pieces, I’m never giving in.” Cus doesn’t want to see anybody who does what he does even appear to be more famous. He’d be talking about other trainers and say, “They’re not trainers, they’re more like glorified cheerleaders. You know what a trainer does? A trainer takes the kid that never had a pair of gloves on before in his life and makes him a world champion. That’s a trainer.” But Cus was not just a trainer, he was also a manager. He had to learn every aspect of boxing. He was an overachiever, destined to survive and win and laugh and be a big shot.
Cus told me that everybody is waiting for their moment. He also said that everybody you meet is not who they appear to be. When they meet you and shake your hand and talk to you, this is not who they are. We’ll never know who they are, until the time that they have to show their true colors. Cus would tell me that we were like crocodiles in the mud in the Sahara. They are there for months or years waiting for migration, for these gazelles and wildebeests to cross the water. “Do you hear me, son? And when they come we are going to bite them. We are going to bite them so hard that when they scream, the whole world is going to hear them scream.” I took all this dead serious.
Cus would always say, “God, I wish I had more time with you. I’ve been in the fight game for sixty years and I’ve never seen anybody with the kind of interest you have.” He was open about facing his own mortality. When I was ready to begin my pro career he’d constantly wake me up in the middle of the night. “Remember what we talked about, remember what we practiced,” he’d say. “I’m not going to be here long, but if you remember everything and continue to progress like you are, you’ll be the greatest fighter in the world.” I always thought Cus would be around, I never thought he would die. I thought he was talking shit. But there were subtle signs. He told me that he wasn’t going to work my corner. He wanted Kevin and Matt Baranski, who was my cut man, to be there. I later learned that was because he didn’t want me to come back to the corner one day and he wouldn’t be there. He told the others, “I’m going to die someday, I want everything to be the same.”
When I was about to start my pro career, Cus was still talking to me about my mission, but it had changed a little now. He started talking about immortality. I used to ask Cus, “What does it mean being the greatest fighter of all time? Most of those guys are all dead.” “Listen, they’re dead, but we’re talking about them now, this is all about immortality.” That fucked me up. It changed the whole game. I just thought it would be about riches, the big cars, the big mansions he used to point out to me. But now he was taking it to a whole other level. He got me hooked with the riches, but now he suddenly said, “You’re going to be a god.” This was the real deal, and the real deal fucked me up real good. Then he said, “Forget that money.” Once he told me that shit, it blew my mind. He was talking immortality and I’m figuring out what that is.
I was all set to begin my pro career when I hurt my hand in the gym at the end of November 1984. I had previously injured the same hand at the European championships. I wasn’t hurt too bad, but Cus didn’t want to take any chances, so he sent me to the city to see a specialist. It turned out that I had torn some ligaments, so we had to postpone my pro debut.
My first pro fight was scheduled for March 6, 1985. But a few days before the fight, I split. It was like the feelings I had when I was about to do my first smoker. Tom Patti tracked me down. I was downtown sitting in my Caddy, listening to music, when he knocked on the window. “What are you doing?” he said. “I don’t think I’m going to fight anymore,” I said. “What are you going to do?” “I’m going to manage a J.J. Newberry’s. Angie’s father is the manager and I’m going to get a six-figure salary and be an assistant manager.” Tom started lecturing me on how I’d have to start at the bottom being a floor sweeper and how I’d have to give my Caddy back to Cus. But I wasn’t serious about any of that. I was whining. I just reverted to being a scared kid. Every now and then I lose my heart, boom, I lose my guts and I run. I don’t know why I’m that way. If I’m in the dressing room, I’m crying and Patti is like, “What the fuck is going—” And the next thing, boom, I’m a fucking savage, I’m killing the fucking guy in the ring.
I went back with Tom, and Cus wasn’t going to let me explain what I did but eventually we talked and I said, “Yes, I’m going to do this.” The morning of my fight, I knocked on Tom Patti’s door and said, “Tom, I want you to give me a Jack Dempsey haircut.” I don’t know why I thought this white kid who never cut hair before could accomplish cutting my black hair. So he got out a little Norelco flip-top razor and he replicated Dempsey’s intimidating-looking bowl cut. It was a disaster of a haircut. I didn’t care what people thought about me, though. I was going to be dark and a little bit antihero. I’m not a bad guy, but I’m not a hero either. I’m nobody’s friend.
Cus would usually give me prefight instructions. Cus would watch the tapes of the guy’s fights and then we would get together and he’d demonstrate the way I should attack the guy. “Hold your hands up, the guy fights like this, so when he comes, you slip, you jab, jab, right here.” He’d tell me how the guy was vulnerable. It wasn’t that he was looking to break guys’ ribs, he was looking at their mistakes. Like he would watch a guy and watch a guy, and when he makes the move, he’d say, “Listen, this guy is wide-open for you to break his ribs, like that.” He didn’t have to tell me that, because I was looking to break their ribs anyway.
My first fight was against Hector Mercedes. His record was 0–3 but Cus didn’t know anything about him, so he got on the phone to Puerto Rico the morning of the fight to see who he was, who he fought, what gym he came out of. That was Cautious Cus’s way.
The fight was in Albany. Before we left the dressing room, Cus came over to me. He was totally formal and he looked stone serious. He put out his hand to shake and I shook it and his grip was vise tight. “Good luck,” he said with detachment. There was no feeling at all from him. I laughed. “What do you mean, ‘Good luck’? I don’t need luck,” I said, and he shot me a look that could kill. Cus was serious and he was totally impersonal. Okay, I thought. And then before each fight, we’d both get serious and do that Roman shit. When we shook hands it was like a fucking lock. Boom. Ice-cold. Once we shook like that, I knew what it meant. No feeling, no love, no kidding, just that coldness that meant it was time to go into the ring and do something bad.
My first fight didn’t last long. I stunned him with a left and he went reeling into the ropes. He tried to cover up but I unloaded lefts and rights to the body and he crumbled into the canvas. He got an eight count but the ref stopped the fight at 1:47 of the first round. When I was interviewed afterward I said, “I feel bad fighting somebody smaller than me. It makes me feel like a bully.” Cus was pretty reserved too. “I thought on the whole he did very well. The other fellow tonight fought back. He threw good punches. If Mike wasn’t more elusive he would have got hit,” he told one reporter. But he told another one that he thought I would break Patterson’s record of being the youngest heavyweight champion. On the way back to the dressing room, Cus was quizzed by his friend William Plummer, who was following Cus around for a major article about him for People magazine. How did it feel to be back after all those years? Cus told him he hadn’t been away at all. So he reframed his question. What difference had I made on his life? “He’s meant everything. If it weren’t for him, I probably wouldn’t be living today. See, I believe nature’s a lot smarter than anybody thinks. During the course of a man’s life he develops a lot of pleasures and people he cares about. Then nature takes them away one by one. It’s her way of preparing you for death. See, I didn’t have the pleasures any longer. My friends were gone, I didn’t hear things, I didn’t see things clearly, except in memory. The last time I had an erection was fifteen years ago. So I said I must be getting ready to die. Then Mike came along. The fact that he is here and is doing what he is doing gives me the motivation to stay alive. Because I believe a person dies when he no longer wants to live. He finds a convenient disease, just like a fighter, when he no longer wants to fight, finds a convenient corner to lie down in. It’s like boxing. It’s all psychological.”
I wasn’t there to hear him say that, but on the way home, he told me he was pleased after this fight. He had no criticisms at all. He thought I moved well and finished great. And I got a reward for the win—Cus paid for some nice clothes.
We had a little celebration at the house. The next morning, Cus changed his tune a bit. “Feeling pretty cocky, huh? Think you’re tough, don’t you? Unbeatable. Well, let me tell you, you’re not. Oh, you did good all right, and you deserved a quick knockout, but you made a lot of mistakes too. You were too excitable, too wild. You fought out of control. A good fighter would have laid back and picked you apart. You’ve got to stay calm so you can think out there. You did a good job on your first fight, but now we’ve got to go back to the gym and work on your ring discipline.”
He was always looking to rain on my parade. A little while after the fight, Cus gave me some real talk. “Mike, this is the real world. You see those people in the arena? When you lose fights and don’t perform well, they don’t like you no more. That’s just the way it is, Mike. These people are only with you when you’re doing well. Everybody used to like me. Believe me, even at an old age, I was an old man in my fifties and women would chase me all over the place, young beautiful women, and I’m an old man. But now no one comes around anymore.
“But if you listen to me, you’ll reign with the gods. See the way you talk about all these old fighters? If you listen to me, the only reason people would know about these guys is because you’ll keep them alive. You will make more money and have more fights than all these guys, don’t worry about that. I’m older than some of these guys you are talking about, Louis and those guys. I watched them develop. I watched Jack Dempsey as a boy. They are not what you are. You are a giant. You are a colossus among men.”
I was eating that shit up. But I also felt sorry for him. He’d talk about getting old a lot. “Remember I’m an old man now, Mike. I look in the mirror, I don’t even know who that guy is, I get scared with what I’m seeing.”
Now that I was being interviewed after my pro fights, Cus started grooming my speech. He would take me to all his interviews and I would absorb his diction. Cus spoke very properly when he did an interview, but when we were home together he would talk tough and that turned me on. Mort Sharnik, an old friend of Cus’s and a boxing consultant for CBS, said, “Cus had been calling me, telling me about this kid and then when I saw him, I couldn’t believe it. He really did look and sound like Cus, from the high sidewalls haircut, to the way he smiled and how he expressed himself, carefully spacing out his words, it was uncanny.” I morphed into Cus. I’m just one of those people. “Philosophically he was Cus and he had Cus’s passion for boxing.”
Now that I was fighting pro fights, Cus began to redouble his efforts to get me to control my emotions. He was schooling me on discipline. He had me practice getting used to people saying provocative things and not getting mad.
My next two fights were also in Albany. On April 10, I fought Trent Singleton. I entered the ring and bowed to all four corners and raised my arms like I was some Roman gladiator nigga. I was really getting into character. I knocked him down three times in the first round and the referee stopped the fight at fifty-seven seconds. Then I sauntered over to his corner, kissed him, and rubbed his head. “Little boy, you okay? Oh, I’m sorry.” Cus couldn’t complain, he’d seen Jack Dempsey do that. After the fight I told the press, “I was so confident in this fight. I don’t think anybody can beat me because I’m the best fighter in the world. The fans may not know it yet, but my peers know it.” Whew. I was asked whether I was scared when Singleton tried to stare me down during the referee’s instructions. “I was scared . . . scared that I might kill him.”
Cus seemed pleased when he talked to the press after the fight. “Anything can happen at any time in prizefighting. Mike proved that tonight. Even though Mike’s fighting stiffs, somebody like Larry Holmes would react the same way. It’s so hard to get somebody in the ring with him, though. Professionals with decent records are afraid to get hurt, and up-and-comers are just looking to win big. I’m even having trouble finding people to spar with Mike. The ones that agreed to do it charge me a fortune.”
I was back in the ring on May 23 fighting Don Halpin. It took me four rounds but I knocked him into the ropes and then chopped him down and left him a bloody mess. He couldn’t meet with the press afterward because he was being treated for a broken nose and a huge gash over his right eye. But I could talk. “I can’t feel bad the way it ended. If I do, then I shouldn’t be a fighter. This is how I make my living, this is how I put clothes on my back. Outside the ring, I’m a nice guy, but not once I go in.” Cus put a good spin on the fight. “The first three rounds we wanted to get Mike to open him up a little so he could get a clean shot. I thought Mike showed more poise and was more relaxed than he had ever been before.”
Now I was starting to get a local fan following. People were bringing signs that had a big “KO” written on them, a takeoff on the Mets fans holding up “K” signs for Doc Gooden. Cus was thrilled with all that. “You’re the greatest fighter the world has ever seen. I just need you to believe it,” he’d keep telling me. He thought so highly of me as a fighter, it was like he was worshipping me. And I understood that, and I started worshipping myself. I started getting groupies coming to my fights but I didn’t take them up then. I was too in love with myself at the time to think about caring about anybody else like that. That’s what it was all about, what Cus created for me, circling the world around myself. Love yourself, look in the mirror, shadowbox, and look at your work. It’s magnificent, what you’re doing, it’s never been done in the annals of fight history. He always dropped those charged words.
I wasn’t making too much money for these first fights. The promoter lost money on my first fight and Jimmy Jacobs paid me $500 out of his pocket. He took $50 of that to pay Kevin and then put the $350 in a bank account for me, so I walked away with $100. After a few fights I was supposed to go up to ten-round fights and get paid $20,000. Then Jimmy called me and told me that I was too young to go ten rounds. I was pissed because I thought I wouldn’t get the twenty grand. Cus found out and he thought I was mad because I wasn’t fighting a ten-round fight. When I called Jimmy again, I asked him if I’d still get the twenty grand. “Oh yeah, of course! Don’t worry about it.” When I got the money, I put it into a knot right in my pocket, because Cus was going to put that shit into a trust fund or the bank.
Cus was concerned that Jim would lose a lot of money on these first fights so he had Joe Colangelo counting all the people who came in with a clicker. Cus told him, “Look, Joe, I don’t want Jim Jacobs to lose one penny more than he has to, so you’ve got to make sure of that because he’s my friend.”
On June 20, I traveled down to Atlantic City to fight Ricky Spain. I knocked him out in one round. When we went through Cus’s files, there was a strange letter that Cus got on July 8, a few days before my next fight. It was from the NYSAC, where José Torres had recently been named the chairman. It included an application for a manager’s license that Cus had requested. Cus had told people in Catskill that he was probably going to be my manager. There’s no evidence that Cus applied for that license, though.
I was back in Atlantic City on July 11 for a fight with John Alderson. He was a big country guy, six-foot-four, a miner from West Virginia. We had identical records going in, 4–0 with four knockouts. But this was another quick one, a TKO at the end of the second, when the doctor stopped the fight after I knocked Alderson down three times that round. The Jersey crowd loved the fight. When I was hot, I was really hot. I’m a ham and I played the role. I watched movies and read books about how the gladiators went into the arenas, how they acted before the crowd. They expected to sit on the fucking throne without even fighting, that’s how arrogant they were.
On July 15 the People article came out. The reporter covered my first fight but he also went into a long retrospective look at Cus’s career, including his fight with the IBC. And again, Cus said that he wouldn’t have been able to fight the IBC until he found a “kid” who was not only “good but loyal.” Another whitewash of Patterson. Cus’s whole thing was to make Patterson look good. Patterson had some form of diabolicalness. He played the role, but if he could he’d beat you.
Cus was pissed after my next fight. I fought Larry Simms in Poughkeepsie and it was the only one of my fights that Jimmy and Cayton didn’t film. It was a hard fight for me, Simms was slick. The guy was hitting me hard. The guy was moving, giving me problems, moving, jabbing, awkward, and the next thing you know, I switched to southpaw and I hit him with a right jab and then with a right hook. The punch came out of nowhere. Everybody thought it was beautiful. He was dead, cold, sleeping, out. They had to give him ammonia to wake him up. But Cus was furious because I didn’t do it the way he wanted me to do it. “Who taught you that southpaw crap? It might be hard to get you fights now. People don’t want to fight southpaws. You’re going to ruin everything we created,” he yelled at me afterward. “I’m sorry, Cus,” was all I could say. I never practiced going southpaw in the gym. I was watching people doing it on television and I said, “That looks cool.” I was just a dick trying to emulate stuff and Cus was so pissed. A lot of boxing people thought that I was naturally left-handed because I had so many powerful knockouts with a left hook or a left jab.
Cus kept that criticism between us. After the fight he told the press, “I’m a sculptor. I can picture the ultimate fighter and I keep chipping away until I have created that fighter. I don’t know how long it will take Mike Tyson to become the champion, but if he maintains his discipline and dedication, he can become champion before he’s 22. Mike believes in himself so much, his actions in the ring become intuitive. And once they’re intuitive, nobody can beat him. He can take anybody out. If he hits Holmes, then Holmes will go down too.”
A month later I was back in the ring in Atlantic City against Lorenzo Canady. A one-round TKO and my record went to 7–0, all KOs. Jimmy and Cayton were sending videotapes of all my spectacular knockouts to the boxing press. They were talking to columnists they knew, like Dick Young, and they were even getting me into the gossip sections of papers. I would go into the city and they’d set up interviews for me. I had been finishing Cus’s sentences for years so I knew how to handle the press, the way Jimmy and them wanted me to. Cus thought the whole thing was so phony. It’s crazy that this guy had such affection and love for me and he’d fight to the death for me, then he’d come up to me and say, “You know, you’re a phony.”
Cus was always keeping me in check. When I’d talk to the reporters in my dressing room after a fight, Cus would stand in the back, with his arms folded, observing. One day a female reporter asked me a question and I answered, “Nah, baby.” Oh shit! On the way home, he was fuming. “Who taught you to talk like that? I never talk like that around you. Who are you around? ‘Nah, baby’—what does that mean?”
As my confidence built I started talking trash around the house. “I’m the top fighter. How can anybody beat me?” Cus would say, “Listen, there were fighters like Jim Jeffries, Sonny Liston, when they walk in the room, they don’t say a word, they just walk in the room and people die of a heart attack. If you start doing that, then you’re something.”
Cus was way ahead of his time when it came to protecting fighters. I’m not being egotistical, but Cus used to tell me, “All your fights have been easy, no-risk fights because there’s no one who can compare to you, because of what I’ve taught you. What I taught you is innovative to any thinking in the boxing world today. You’ve been fighting only a couple of months and you’ve got more press than all the Olympians. People are talking about you fighting the champ already. Listen, we’re doing the right thing. These people, they’re out of their league trying to compete with me. I’ve been in this business for sixty years, I’ve seen no one who even comes to my standards when it comes to the peerlessness of this particular genre that we are performing here.”
Three weeks later I was back in Atlantic City again to fight Michael Johnson. Check out the ring announcers’ account of the first round:
RING ANNOUNCER: And his opponent in the red corner wearing the white trunks with the green trim, undefeated with seven wins, all of them by knockout. Hails from the Catskills in New York. Please welcome, weighing two hundred nineteen and a half pounds, Mike Tyson!
FIRST TV COMMENTATOR: I was about to say when Stefan Herreria made the announcement, Mike Tyson really, vocally sounds just like Larry Holmes. I mean, I thought I was back in eastern Pennsylvania talking to the champ.
SECOND TV COMMENTATOR: He does sound like him. He’s meaner, though. Look at the size of him—he looks like the Incredible Hulk.
FIRST COMMENTATOR: In that case, I’m glad I’m not Michael Jack Johnson.
SECOND COMMENTATOR: We want to point out it’s the first fight for Michael Jack Johnson in two years.
FIRST COMMENTATOR: I’m glad you pointed it out, because down he goes. Michael Jack Johnson went good-bye. That left hook just caught him and sent him right to the—
SECOND COMMENTATOR: A right to the head and it’s all over. Good-bye.
FIRST COMMENTATOR: I hope he’s not hurt.
When I knocked Johnson out, his two front teeth were lodged in his mouthpiece. I stood in my corner laughing at the guy, like an arrogant kid, high-fiving Kevin. “Look at this dead nigga, Kevin.” Everybody hated both of us—we both talked nasty. Cus didn’t comment on our celebration but he did defend his matchmaking to the press. “People have been saying that he’s been knocking out ordinary guys. He isn’t. This guy [Johnson] was chosen because the promoters felt he could do something with Mike. But the same thing always happens. When he hits them, they go down. You’ve seen the destructive effects his blows have. It doesn’t matter who he hits; it could be [IBF champion] Holmes in there, and the same thing would happen to Holmes.” Cus hated Holmes. I had said something complimentary about Holmes after he beat Cooney, and Cus was all over me for that. “You have to reign solely supreme. Anything you like, you have to despise.”
By now I was 8–0 and everyone was ecstatic about my progress. I fought three times in less than a month starting on October 9 when I KO’d Donnie Long in the first round. Sixteen days later I knocked out Robert Colay in thirty-seven seconds of the first round. On November 1, I took out Sterling Benjamin in one round. But all these achievements were under a big black cloud. Cus was in the hospital fighting for his life.
I knew something was up with Cus, going back to that Alex Wallau interview we did before the Olympics in 1984. While they were setting up the lights, Cus was coughing and he told Alex that he had pneumonia. Alex asked him how he got it and Cus said he knew he had it in 1983 when he was in St. Louis. But then when we fought in Lake Placid in September of 1983 he told Wallau, “I developed a condition that I went to the doctor for that had nothing to do with pneumonia, I learned about the pneumonia inadvertently. I had a condition known as hiatus hernia, which is extremely painful. I woke up in the middle of the night, about two o’clock in the morning—it felt like a red-hot iron. I thought it was a heart attack, but I didn’t want to say anything, but by twelve o’clock I decided that this might get worse. So I decided to go to the doctor. And at that point he told me he thought I had a hiatus hernia. Then he sent me for X-rays and the X-rays revealed I was recovering from pneumonia.” “So you had walking pneumonia before?” Alex asked. “Probably, but it had a very bad effect on my stamina. It took me a while to recuperate.”
He never did recuperate. Cus was taking some pills and he would go to a doctor every now and then. They put him on a diet and he couldn’t eat certain things he liked and he was mad. He’d still eat that stuff. He always thought he knew more than the doctors. He had no respect for them. But in early October of 1985 he fell ill after I drove him to a seminar on boxing head injuries that was conducted by the NYSAC and the American Medical Association at a Catskill hotel. They took him to the Albany Medical Center and he stayed there for about a week. I saw him there and he seemed okay to me. He was in a small room and it was clean but it had that medicinal smell of castor oil combined with mildew. We were talking about my last fights. Jimmy had sent Cus tapes of them and Cus then told me the things that I was doing right and pointed out the things I did wrong. One of the things that was worrying Cus was that he was afraid of losing the gym. He said that followers of Teddy Atlas were trying to get Cus kicked out of the gym so that Teddy could come back to Catskill and take over. Cus was working on getting a long-term lease for one dollar a year.
Tom Patti visited Cus up in Albany and Cus asked him if I had been training. “Yeah, Mike is looking good, he’s fighting actively,” Tom told him. Then Cus asked about Kevin Rooney. “Well, what about that Rooney guy?” Tom didn’t know where Cus was going with this. “What the hell has that Rooney been doing, has he been coming around?” “Yeah, Cus. Kevin has been there,” Tom said. So he was quiet for a moment and then he said, “I’m very disappointed in Kevin. Tommy, the worst combination in boxing is a gambler who is a drinker. They make decisions that can jeopardize not only their own future, but their fighters’.” Tommy was being trained by Kevin and he told Cus that Kevin was fine. But Cus said, “When I get out of here, I’m going to have to replace Kevin.”
Look, Kevin did gamble and drink, but as far as training goes, Kevin was an animal. We had a great understanding. He’s an awesome person. Atlas was a great psychologist because he got everything he knows from Cus. Kevin didn’t get the psychology. But he loved hurting the opponent. After our fights, we’d laugh at the guys who wound up picking their teeth off the canvas. We were dedicated and focused on hurting people.
When Bonnie, Kevin’s wife, visited Cus in the hospital, he asked her about Kevin. “He’s gambling and drinking again.” That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Kevin knew he was in trouble. He went over to the hospital with his daughter on his shoulders and walked into Cus’s room and Cus yelled, “Get out, I never want to see you again, get out!” He kicked him out of the hospital room. Now Kevin was in jeopardy. And I knew that without Kevin we were fucked. Without him this was all going downhill, I don’t care who Cus wanted to bring in. Nobody could have the chemistry that Kevin and I had built up. Kevin was a total street guy, even more than me. So I went to Cus and begged him, “No, Cus, don’t do that, man. It’s not happening if he leaves.” Kevin was one hell of a soldier for Cus to the end. If you were Cus’s enemy, you were his enemy. Kevin had to be with me. When we worked together, our brains were two peas in the same pod. We were the same person. Who else was I going to be with?
Cus wasn’t getting any better, and it turned out that he had been misdiagnosed and they were treating him for the wrong thing. When Jimmy went up to Albany to visit Cus he was appalled, and he moved Cus to Mount Sinai in the city, where his doctors could treat Cus.
After Cus was evaluated at Mount Sinai by Dr. Eugene Brody, a friend of Jimmy’s, the doctor told the press that “Cus is a very sick man” and they listed his condition as “serious but stable.” He said that Cus was suffering from interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease formerly known as Hamman-Rich syndrome. Dr. Brody said it was a “life-threatening” disease. But Cus seemed to be in good spirits. When José Torres went to the hospital to visit him, Cus looked up at him and smiled and said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to die—not here. I won’t give my enemies the pleasure.”
Cus was in the hospital for about a week when I got a call from Jimmy. He said that Cus was not doing well and that I should come down to see him. When I walked in the room it was like night and day compared with his room in Albany. He was in a private, much bigger room. I saw that Cus had a catheter because he couldn’t get out of bed.
But Cus was sitting up, eating ice cream. To me that was a good sign. He used to buy his ice cream, eat a little, and then mark the container, just to see if I would have some of it because he knew I loved ice cream. When I didn’t eat his, he knew I was getting disciplined. That’s my adoptive father. He was the food police too.
Then Cus asked the people in the room to leave because he wanted to talk to me alone. As soon as they left, I started crying. Then Cus told me that he was dying from the pneumonia. I started getting angry. We had so much together. I’m a little street kid with this old guy who’s in exile and we’d talk about these grandiose dreams and making money and buying mansions and how there was nobody in the world who could touch us. They couldn’t do anything but gawk at us. We were the most magnificent gift boxing had ever witnessed. And now it was over before we had reached our ultimate mission. I couldn’t go on with it without Cus.
“If you die, I’m not going to fight anymore,” I said, sobbing. Cus looked angry. “Now listen, if you quit fighting, then you’re going to find out if people can come back from the dead, because I will come back and I will haunt you for the rest of your life. You have to fight.”
Then Cus started talking about some regrets he had. “The people I have invested the most time in disappointed me the most,” he told me again. Was he talking again about Patterson? His trainers Florio and Fariello? I didn’t know. But as I got older and dealt with life on life’s terms, I realized that Cus’s morals are hard to live up to. And if you didn’t conduct your life with a certain kind of morality, the one that Cus believed in, then he wouldn’t have respect for you.
But then he lost it. He started crying like a child and sniffling. I was floored. I’d never seen any emotion out of him before. Even when his hero Joe Louis died he just went up in his room and stayed there the whole day. But this was something else. I was crying too. Then Cus told me that he was crying because of Camille. He was upset that he never was able to marry her. When he went up against Norris, Cus sacrificed his personal life. He kept Camille hidden. His own nieces, who loved him, never understood why he hardly ever came around anymore. Cus relinquished his personal happiness to achieve his professional goal. And then, after beating the IBC, he still couldn’t marry Camille because of the treachery of November and Cohn and he wound up bankrupt and didn’t want to jeopardize the house if Camille took on his tax debt. I used to hear Cus say, “I wish I had taken care of Camille when I had money.” Cus had stopped crying by then and he put me on a second mission—to take care of Camille for the rest of her life. That’s what he wanted me to do—fight and pay the rent.
Then we were interrupted by a doctor who was on his rounds. He was wearing glasses and he had a high-pitched voice. “Hi, Mr. D’Amato,” he said. “How are you feeling?” Cus smiled. “Come here, Doc. You’re in the presence of the heavyweight champion of the world. This is the heavyweight champ.” “Oh really? Is that so?” the doctor said. He must have thought Cus was going in and out. I was mad. In my head, I’m saying, “You heard what he said, motherfucker. I’m the heavyweight champ.” What a megalomaniac Cus made me into.
The doctor left and Cus started talking to me about moving my head. That was his mantra, move my fucking head. “A more experienced fighter would have hit you that last fight.” I’m thinking, “Cus, I knocked the guy out in thirty seconds.” That was my last conversation with Cus. After he boosted me all the way up, he brings me down, pointing out my flaws. Then he told me to leave. “Go now,” he said. “Go take care of Camille.” I wanted to hug him good-bye but he just didn’t give me that energy, even though he was dying. But death didn’t mean anything to Cus. I’m at his bedside and by now nobody’s crying. If I tried to hug him he would have gone, “Mike, stop that, we got business. You’ve got to be disciplined, you’ve got to be professional and disciplined. Mike, you have to control your emotions.” The last thing he said to me was that he was going to bring a good pro fighter upstate to spar with me. So I got up and left and did what he told me to do. Fight and take care of Camille.
After I left Cus’s room I met up with Jimmy because we had to deposit my last purse in my bank account. There was a female teller there I was interested in. I was a young up-and-coming guy, I’d come in the bank, and the teller was very attractive, and we used to flirt all the time. And we’d call periodically. Now I’m coming in and you’d think someone beat me with a whip, I was screaming and crying so loud. “Is everything okay?” the bank officials asked. They were frightened that something was drastically wrong, and Jimmy coldly said, “Well, a friend of ours is not doing well. He won’t live through the night and Mike is distraught.” After that teller saw me like that, I never talked to her again. I never stepped foot into that bank again. I was so fucked-up. I was in a dark, almost suicidal hole.
Cus survived the night. They tried to sedate him and he put up a fight and tried to pull the tubes out but he was too weak and then the drugs kicked in. Camille had called Tom Patti and asked him to be by Cus’s side that night. And in the morning, Cus passed peacefully. Within a half hour Jimmy showed up and he was as emotionally detached as he was in the bank the afternoon before. Then José Torres came by. Jay Bright thought he was just visiting Cus when he came an hour later and found out that Cus was gone. He went numb. I couldn’t bring myself to go to the hospital again when I got the call that Cus had died. I was still in that dark place, just ready to kill everybody.
So I went back to my old Brooklyn neighborhood to re-situate myself. I walked around and talked to some people I grew up with. When I hit Amboy Street, I saw my old friend Buck. “Hey, man, I’m sorry you got bad news today.” He had heard the report on the radio. He left and I was sitting on the stoop and everybody knew because hardly anyone was coming up to talk to me. Normally everyone who passed by would give me a greeting. I was the up-and-coming superstar. I sat there from eight o’clock at night until four in the morning. After a few hours somebody would sit down and talk to me, smoke some weed or share a drink, and then go home. A few strangers even came up to me and said, “What are you doing here, Mike? You still come back here?”
They didn’t know me like the older people—their fathers or older brothers. I’m packaged different, but I’m one of those guys. The old ones knew that I had to be down there. So I stayed there for hours, just chilling, eating take-out Chinese food that people brought me. Whenever I had a crisis, I had to go back to Amboy Street. That was how I healed.