Train your thoughts just like Cus D’Amato
Your guts is hollow
—Proof, from Car Freestyle by Eminem and Proof, 1999
For Cus, boxing was a metaphor for living. You prepare a plan whether you’re in the ring, in a war, or going to work in a factory. When you strengthen your will and build up your character, you can persevere and face up to whatever challenge you face. It’s hard to explain the impact Cus had on me. How can I explain Cus to my kids? I was a bad kid, went to institutions, and then I met an old guy who trained fighters. And this guy gave me the blueprint for the rest of my life. I always knew I had a special destiny even when I was growing up in the gutters of Brooklyn. But when I met Cus he told me what that destiny was and it all clicked in my mind.
I came from such despair. My kids can never relate to that. They don’t have that hunger to the core. And they don’t have that pressure to succeed that I did. That pressure always followed me, way after I became champ. Even today, everything is a big championship match to me. Getting the kids to school on time is a big test and if I fail it’s just a disaster. Everything has to be right, I have to win all the time. If we’re watching movies in our home theater and I do something stupid like forget the popcorn, fuck! I own the theater but I forgot the popcorn so I’m a loser in my mind. I learned to live with that pressure when I was with Cus. I learned to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Cus’s idea of striving for perfection transcended the ring and went into every aspect of my life. Because Cus said I was that person. He said, “That’s who you are. Everybody gives me what they are, this is what you are. I can bring out certain things, but this is what you are.” Sometimes when we left the gym to go home, he’d be like, “Where are the gloves?” “Shit, I forgot the gloves,” I’d say. “You forgot the gloves?” He’d get on me and that would eat at me.
Before I do my show or before I do a speaking engagement, I read over my script again and again and again. I might have a teleprompter but I still commit it to memory. I may see a word that I don’t know and it may fuck with my head, even though I read it over and over again. So I memorize everything. I’m always on, always in a state of agitation to avoid a state of failure.
Cus once said, “I sell people dreams.” That’s exactly what he did. Cus sold me a magnificent story that I bought. I never thought of myself as the heavyweight champ, I never even looked like one. The heavyweight champion was big and strong. I fell in love with myself and the idea of me executing this mission. Cus taught by example. He led the life of a monk, denying satisfaction, sacrificing for success. That’s what I did then and that’s what I am now. But it all worked on me because I had that extremist personality. And I had such abysmally low self-esteem. What a volatile combination: low self-esteem and a sky-high ego that Cus cultivated in me.
And why wouldn’t I buy Cus’s dreams? Enthusiasm is contagious. And Cus was the best confidence man I’d ever met. I always ask myself, “How did this old man know?” That’s the only thing that’s missing from my life, that knowledge. But maybe he didn’t know. Cus had spent over forty years honing his skill, so he was good. Maybe he just willed that lightning to strike twice. Bottom line, it was destiny. That’s what I believe in my soul.
Cus addressed my deep inferiority complex by building up my ego and telling me I was superior to everyone around me. I don’t think Cus lived long enough to balance that out and it got kind of out of hand. He never got the chance to tell me something like “Well, Mike, you have to conduct yourself like this. You’re better than them, but you can’t tell these people that.” I offended so many people. Cus had brainwashed me with that arrogance and viciousness. It was in the marrow in my bones.
It was the best time of my life, plotting and scheming with Cus. Our goal was all about barbarian success and superiority and then, boom, it was there and he wasn’t. But all that stuff isn’t any good in the real world. I got older and started dating more quality women than the women I’d been dating, and they had a problem when I’d say that word “superior.” That word bothers people. Cus lived for confrontation but that wasn’t helpful to me as a citizen. My wife helped me break that cycle. We went to a dance show once and I got a lot of attention from the other people in the audience and my wife said, “They love you.” And I said something elitist like “I expect them to love me.” I saw the air go right out of my wife. Like “Man, I’m married to this shit?” She didn’t say it but I felt the energy and it was the right energy. I just couldn’t understand why she wasn’t feeling it like I was. My wife is a humble lady and I can’t be with my wife if I’ve got that superior mentality. That’s why I never had a good relationship before Kiki. When I think back, it was the same with Cus. No one could live with him but a woman as strong, humble, and dedicated as Camille. I learned over the years that people never really left me. Like Cus, I chased them away. I’m just grateful that I finally broke that cycle.
Cus made me feel that hurting people was noble. Somebody should have shot me. I would have shot me if I would have said that shit to me. I’m just doing what this guy said to do and everything he said worked. And Cus was so dramatic. Remember that story where the mob guys came to see him in the Gramercy and they were threatening him and he inched his way to the door and threw it open so the kids in the gym could see what was happening? Cus wanted to die on the stage. He wanted to be worshipped like some noble revolutionary martyr like Jean-Paul Marat. I’m just like Cus too. If I go to my demise, I want the world to see me die. I don’t want a few nobodies on a corner see me die and throw a fucking nickel on me, I want the world to see me die. Cus was just a little guy, but he was like a general. I’d do anything he told me to do. It was really dark stuff but it was awesome. I don’t think like that no more. I think it was the best time in my life. Imagine being fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and no one is going to fuck with you because your dad is the general?
Cus had the art of intimidation down to a science. He may have feared someone, but he wasn’t intimidated by anybody. He’d say, “I may fear him, but I’m not afraid to kill him.” I learned a lot from that wise old man. I loved going through life with him then, but it’s not like I don’t have any resentments now. Why did I have to work so fucking hard that I have arthritis throughout my body? I worked like a total animal because my self-esteem was so low. Now I can’t walk without pain. I have broken bones in my feet and my back. I didn’t even know those bones were broken because I was so active, fighting all the time. I can still work out now but I’m a wreck.
And he was always picking and probing at me. “What are you up to? You’re up to something. I know something is going on.” He always had me on pins and needles. Cus would be badgering me and then right in front of me, like I’m not there, he’s telling guys how I’m the greatest fighter. I don’t know what to do, I’m confused. This guy read me the riot act and now he’s on the phone, laughing and smiling and talking about how great I am. “My boy is pretty reckless, isn’t he? He’s destructive, isn’t he?” So proud. Then he’d hang up the phone and look at me and say, “You’re a phony.”
I’m fifty years old now and I’m still trying to figure it out.
Cus always talked about the people who betrayed him. They were all Benedict Arnolds. Cus believed that if you didn’t take all his shit, you were a bad person. The people he antagonized were the closest people to him. But I never left him. I learned to talk like him and finish his sentences. He wanted me to think like him and I did. That’s why people left him, because they couldn’t appreciate the mind of a manic genius the way I could. At times Cus did drive me nuts, but I always remained loyal to him.
Cus could never be at peace with himself. He was the kind of guy who has to be the light, he wants to be seen, he wants to have great accomplishments. I understand Cus more as I get older. He wanted respect from society. Then, when he got the respect after Patterson won the title against all odds, Cus became one of the most powerful men in boxing. And he got addicted to that power. He alienated so many people who would have been his allies. The independent press, the smart sportswriters, they wanted to like him, but he was too proud. And he was too stubborn to see past his own way. He had so many legitimate enemies that he got paranoid that everybody was his enemy. When you don’t know who your enemy is, you treat everyone as though they are your enemy. I’m like that. When I go through my paranoid stages, I would think my wife and my kids were against me.
But I understand Cus. Like me, he had a tough life. There was never a lot of happiness. Italians faced a lot of discrimination when Cus was growing up in the Bronx. There was pressure from the Italian mob. He never had a mother, his father died in anguish in his arms, and his favorite brother was murdered by a cop. Cus had been done dirty. Then people stole his fighters, his friends betrayed him, and he finally finds a guy like me and he dies before I make it. I was the biggest fighter in the world at that time. His progeny, his guy. Cus needed to be there. I was a fucking maniacal, malevolent heathen. “Look at me, motherfucker, I’ll bite your fucking nose off.” I wanted to be that guy, I wanted to be like Cus.
When I was fifteen, I would look at my opponent like I was ready to eat that fucker. I was so on my game then—never smiling when I was introduced to him, wouldn’t shake his hand. That was my mind-set, for real. Cus used to tell me about fighters who did that and those were the kinds of guys I wanted to be like. I had to read the history books about Harry Greb and John L. Sullivan and Jim Jeffries, because before Ali came, they were the fighters who were idolized. But they didn’t talk as slick, they just talked about hurting motherfuckers. They talked the kind of shit I liked: “Hey, let’s not fight in a ring. Why don’t we lock the door from the inside and whoever comes out with the key is the fucking champion?”
When Cus died, I’d lost my spirit. I don’t think I ever did get over his death. I felt cheated by destiny when he died. I don’t even like talking about it now. Sometimes I think it was a waste of love. I can’t explain it. All this stuff is his creation—the big house and the big cars, people respecting me, me being somebody, the family, the kids. The whole big facade is his creation. I don’t know if I’m like this or not. I just wanted to be the big fucking guy, the heavyweight champion of the world—known around the world—with everybody wanting to be my friend. I had no choice, this was the way stuff was going to happen. Kill anything in the way, sacrifice everything. The fact that nothing is going to stop you, that was the dark side of the moon. I wasn’t going to let anything stop me, my family, my mother, my sister, brother, babies.
Then I achieved that goal. I’m twenty and famous all over the world. But I’m just a trained monkey. You’re famous and you disregard what people feel. And people start laughing at your ignoramus, buffoon gestures. Then you get somebody in your crew to whip their ass. What idiocy! It was all too much. You walk outside and you’ve got a thousand crazed fans within a one-block radius. Cus always said, “Don’t let your fame or your money give you a false sense of security that you can’t die.”
Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if Cus had lived longer. For one, we would have monopolized the boxing business. People always say that if Cus had lived longer he would have worked on my character. Fuck my character. You know what my character would have been? Putting people in comas and at the end of the day saying yes to Cus’s decisions. Imagine the stuff Cus would have been talking? The deals he would have made? Nobody could have turned me away from him, they couldn’t trick me into believing Cus was a bad guy. I wish Cus would’ve seen me fighting in those big fights, but it wasn’t meant to be. I know I wouldn’t have been as opinionated if Cus were with me. I wouldn’t be talking that crazy stuff about eating babies. Cus wanted me to be a silent killer. He wanted to do all the talking.
Here’s the way it would have gone: Everywhere I’d go, Cus would be behind me. I wouldn’t be talking to people, Cus would be running the show. When Jim died, Cayton would have had a problem. Cus would have come at him full blast. Cus might have even physically attacked him. And there would have been no Don King, for sure. Cus was his own promoter. Listen, I beat all Don’s fighters and he was basically out of business. Then Cayton started working with him. But with Cus around, Don would be totally broke and out of business.
When I beat Berbick, Cus would have berated some people, to show how superior his thinking is. “This is just a boy, he’s twenty years old. He just knocked out this heavyweight champion in two rounds.” And he would go on and on and on. “He would have been the Olympic champion if they didn’t rob him.”
Can you imagine what he’d have been like with the press? He’d talk to only the one or two guys he trusted. He’d be vicious to everyone else. Buster Douglas? Never would have happened. Plus I would have stopped some of the guys who went the distance like Bonecrusher. Everybody was a bum to Cus. Even the good fighters. “Fucking bum, he’s a goddamn tomato can,” he’d say.
All this didn’t happen for a reason. You know why? Because if somebody would have said something disrespectful about Cus in front of us, I would have killed him. I was too emotionally attached to him. Cus believed in dying in the ring, dying on your shield. You don’t quit. It’s first-class pedigree fighting. I still think that too, but I realize now nothing is more important than life. There is no trophy, there is no glory, more important than life and the people you love. I’d be the first to want to die with honors in the ring back then, but not now. That is a sucker’s game. And I was probably the biggest sucker who ever came into this game.
If Cus was around now, he’d take over everything. He’d have all my kids fighting. Amir would have quit school, and he’d be a pro by now with twenty-five fights. Miguel would be in fighting in the amateurs. Rocco would be training for the Silver Gloves tournaments. He’d talk to their mothers, he’d convince them to let him handle them. “I’ll get your children triple what Mike gives you.”
He just had that gift of gab. If he would have been a motivational speaker he’d be bigger than Tony Robbins, bigger than that lady who wrote The Secret. When he spoke to an old friend’s investment group in Albany a few months before he died, he wowed them with his message of positive thinking and overcoming your fears. He used his battle with the IBC to talk about how the word “impossible” shouldn’t be in your vocabulary:
“You’ve got to overcome fear, that’s how I fought the IBC. The Norris family was worth maybe fifty to five hundred million dollars in those days. They had tremendous power. Now, I was considered crazy to even dream I could oppose them, but I had one advantage: I knew I had the experience and the knowledge and the desire. Without desire, you’re nothing. People are under the impression you have to be intelligent, but the most important thing is the motivation, the drive. Getting back to my fight with the IBC, by the early fifties, Norris had it so completely organized that if you didn’t get work from him, you didn’t get any work. So trying to buck people like Norris was considered impossible. That’s why I have no respect for the word ‘impossible.’ You must know your mind well enough to know that, given a set of circumstances that are threatening, your mind will find excuses to avoid and evade, not to accept a confrontation of any kind.
“See, but I always say it’s like crossing a suspension bridge going from one side to the other. Now when you cross to the other side, knowing what you have to cope with and knowing all that could be dangerous to you, you chop the bridge down so you can’t retreat. So when you take one step forward, two steps forward, make sure you chop that back one so you constantly have a chasm there where you can’t retreat. Then whatever you have to do, you can only think of one thing: accomplishment. Don’t be afraid to put yourself in that position. You’ll be amazed at the things you can do when you’re forced to. Nobody really knows his capabilities until he tries.”
You come to Cus weak and he makes you strong. When he makes you strong, you get addicted to that power and you don’t want to leave him because he’s the source of that strength. My whole life people have said, “How come Cus didn’t make another guy like you? It was you, Cus didn’t do it.” But that’s bullshit. I wouldn’t have been that guy. Cus was the only guy who could touch me to the core. I don’t like saying this shit but if Cus looked at me the wrong way, like I disappointed him, I wished he would have shot me. I would have wanted him to beat me and stop looking at me like that. I wanted to be his star pupil. I wanted to outwork everybody and shine so he could see me and pay attention to me. I know what Patterson meant when he told a reporter, “Cus makes mistakes, but the more they try to turn me against him, the more his quality comes out. Lucky he isn’t a woman. I might have married him.”
Cus was like those stern Zen masters. He had read all those books on Zen. The master would seem to be acting harshly and irrationally yet the disciples would completely want to submit to that kind of behavior. That’s the reality of life. The human ego needs to be crushed, but the ego is so powerful it raises you to so many great heights. But then again, it’s only the ego. It’s an illusion but it’s real. Cus didn’t want to work with well-adjusted people. He wanted people who were flawed. Then he peels off the layers of trauma, which is a painful process, and then he builds up your ego. But so much of that ego came from the power he had over us. That’s why when he’d say, “I don’t feel I’ve done my job until I make a fellow independent of me,” that wasn’t happening. I was never independent of Cus. I can’t think of anyone who became independent of him. Floyd tried to and then years later he said, “The biggest mistake I ever made was to leave Cus.” And my biggest mistake was thinking that Cus would never leave me.
How far the pupil will go is not the concern of the teacher and Master. Hardly has he shown him the right way when he must let him go on alone. There is only one thing more he can do to help him endure loneliness: he turns him away from himself, from the Master, by exhorting him to go further than he himself has done, and to “climb on the shoulders of the teacher.” Wherever his way may take him, the pupil, though he may lose sight of his teacher, can never forget him. With a gratitude as great as the uncritical veneration of the beginner, as strong as the saving faith of the artist, he now takes his Master’s place, ready for any sacrifice.
When I asked the Master how we could get on without him on our return to Europe, he said: “You have now reached a stage where teacher and pupil are no longer two persons, but one. You can separate from me any time you wish. Even if broad seas lie between us, I shall always be with you when you practice what you have learned. I need not ask you to keep up your regular practicing, not to discontinue it on any pretext whatsoever, and to let no day go by without your performing the ceremony, even without bow and arrow, or at least without having breathed properly. I need not ask you because I know that you can never give up this spiritual archery. . . . I must only warn you of one thing. You have become a different person in the course of these years. For this is what the art of archery means: a profound and far-reaching contest of the archer with himself.”
In farewell, and yet not in farewell, the Master handed me his best bow. “When you shoot with this bow you will feel the spirit of the Master near you. Give it not into the hands of the curious! And when you have passed beyond it, do not lay it up in remembrance! Destroy it, so that nothing remains but a heap of ashes!”
—Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
So it’s futile to keep asking, but one last time: Why me? How did Cus know after those three rounds of sparring back in that musty old gym? What if I didn’t fuck up at Spofford and they never sent me to Tryon? What if Bobby Stewart hadn’t taken that job in Elmwood? What if Cus hadn’t been run out of Rhinebeck by that faceless Norris associate? I got to Cus because it was ordained by God. Cus told me, “I’ve been waiting for you,” and I believe he had been. Sometimes I lie in bed with my wife, and in the middle of a conversation, I stare off in deep thought and say, “When I was born, Cus was fifty-eight years old. I’m fifty now. I could be doing bad, but by the time I’m fifty-eight my savior could be born. So I have to wait a little longer, even if I have to suffer some more until that time comes.”
Cus bet his whole life on me. He put forty years of reputation on the line for me. When he told them I was going to be one of the greatest heavyweights of all time, they laughed in his face. They would say, “Cus, he’s too small. He’s not even six feet tall and he only weighs one hundred ninety pounds. This won’t work.” But it did. The whole world knows my name because of this man and he never got to enjoy any of it. Cus told me, “You’ll walk into a place and people will give you a standing ovation.” And one day I went into a restaurant in Chicago and the whole place stood up and applauded me.
I used to read articles about Jack Dempsey and he was so well-known and beloved. They even named a tough, boisterous fish after Jack Dempsey. When pilots named the approach into the airport in Vegas the “Tyson route” because it used to pass over my old house, I didn’t want to let on that I was excited. Around other people, I denied that it was for me, but when I was alone I’d say to myself, “I’m catching up with my heroes.”
A few years ago the sportswriter William McNeil published a book about me called The Rise of Mike Tyson, Heavyweight. McNeil is a major statistics guy and at the end of the book he compared my record over my first thirty-five fights to the records of Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Ali, Holmes, and Foreman. George Foreman and I have the best records. “Mike Tyson’s record for his first 35 fights compares favorably with the top heavyweight champions of all time,” McNeil wrote. “His record is on a par with that of George Foreman, who was also a devastating puncher, but in Tyson’s case, his 35 matches included seven with world champions or former world champions, while Foreman’s record did not include any world class boxers.” It’s true, nobody beat more world champions than me in the heavyweight division. Dempsey lost three of his first thirty-five fights. Joe Louis lost one. This proves that Cus knew what he was doing and I knew what I was doing. They couldn’t beat us. We had too much pedigree for them. After I KO’d Berbick I said, “I’m the youngest heavyweight champ and this is a record that will last forever.” So far I’m right.
Can I be honest with you? And this is not from an egotistical perspective; this is from a rational, analytical look at the game of boxing. It’s going to be difficult to find a guy like me who could generate the money and income like I did, even though nowadays they might gross more money. But no other boxer understood the sport the way I did. Most boxers today don’t understand psychology, they don’t know what people want, they aren’t inspired enough to go to the past, and not only to find out about the fighters but to research their associations. Which ones hung out with Dickens? Do they know that Gene Tunney and Benny Leonard were friends with George Bernard Shaw? Mickey Walker palled around with Hemingway. A lot of young boxers don’t understand the history of the sport. They’re fighting for money but if they’re fighting for glory too, they don’t understand what and who they’re representing. Regardless of what anybody says about me—I was “horrible,” I was “a bum,” I was “overrated”—I represented all the old-time fighters. I never let people forget who they were. If I hit a guy with one of the punches I learned from Benny Leonard or Harry Greb or Ray Robinson, I’d always explain that it was that fighter’s punch I’d used.
Even at sixteen years old, I believed that all the heroes and gods of war—Achilles, Ares, and all these gods, and all the old fighters—were watching me and I had to represent them, I had to be bloodthirsty and gut-wrenching. I realized through Cus that we were fighting for immortality. Nothing else mattered than being worshipped by the entire world. When Cus talked to me about immortality he wasn’t just talking about me, he was talking about himself too. I wasn’t just fighting for my glory, I was fighting for his too. Nobody loved boxers and boxing more than Cus. He devoted his whole life to service, first to the poor Italians in his neighborhood in the Bronx and later to all the wayward kids like me, and Patterson and Kevin Rooney and Joe Juliano and on and on and on. We trained hard, we fought hard, but it was worth every minute.
Cus’s friend the CBS boxing consultant Mort Sharnik wanted to do a program about Cus before he died. In one of the interviews for the show, he asked Cus if he thought about his legacy and the whole point of his life. Cus said, “All I want to do is make one small scratch on this big rock before I go. I want them to know that Cus D’Amato was here.” You got it, Cus. Now there are two scratches on that rock, side by side. And whenever anyone remembers Mike Tyson, they’ll know the name of Cus D’Amato too. Until the end of time.