LITMIR.BIZ

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would break my spirit.

      I was getting so many mixed messages that I was becoming insecure about how he really felt about me as a boxer. Tom Patti and I once were leaving the gym and Cus was delayed for a second. So I jumped into the backseat and crouched down.

      “Tell Cus I walked back home. Because when he gets in the car, I want you to ask him how he really feels about me.” Tom agreed. Cus got in the car.

      “Where the hell is Mike?” he said.

      “I think he’s staying in town,” Tom said.

      “Well, let’s go. He can find his way home later.” So we started driving and I was lying in the back whispering to Tom because Cus was half deaf and couldn’t hear anything.

      “Yo, Tom. Ask Cus if he thinks I punch hard,” I said.

      “Hey, Cus, you think Mike punches hard?” Tom asked.

      “Punches hard! Let me tell you something, that guy punches so hard he could knock down a brick wall. Not only does he punch hard, he punches effectively. He can knock a fighter out with either hand,” Cus said.

      “Ask Cus if he thinks I can really be something in the future,” I whispered.

      Tom repeated the question.

      “Tommy, if Mike keeps his head on straight and focuses on the intended purpose, he’ll become one of the greatest fighters, if not the greatest fighter in the history of boxing.”

      I was thrilled to hear that. By now we were at the house. As we got out, Cus saw me lying down in the backseat.

      “You knew he was back there, didn’t you?” he said to Tom.

      Tom pleaded innocence.

      “Don’t hand me that nonsense. You knew he was back there. You guys are a couple of wise guys right now, let me tell you something.”

      Cus didn’t think it was funny, but we did.

      The funny thing is he couldn’t control his own emotions. Cus was just a bitter, bitter, bitter man who wanted revenge. Roy Cohn, Cardinal Spellman, those guys haunted him in his sleep. J. Edgar Hoover? “Oh, I wish I could put a bullet in his head, that’s what he deserves.” He was constantly talking about killing people and some of those guys were dead already! But he hated them. I once said something complimentary about Larry Holmes and Cus went nuts.

      “What do you mean? He’s nothing. You have to dismantle that man. That’s our goal to dismantle this man and relinquish him from the championship. He’s nothing to you.”

      Sometimes Cus would just roar at people on the TV like an animal. You’d never think he was a ferocious old man but he was. If you weren’t his slave, he hated your guts. He was always in a state of confrontation. Most of the day he’d walk around, mumbling, “Oh, this son of a bitch. Oh, I can’t believe this guy from, you know his name, from such and such. What a son of a bitch.”

      Poor Camille would say, “Cus, Cus, calm down, calm down, Cus. Your blood pressure is getting too high.”

      Cus ruled that house with an iron fist, but the funny thing was that it was actually Camille’s house. Cus didn’t have any money. He never really cared about money and he gave most of his away. ­Camille wanted to sell the house because it was so expensive to maintain but Cus talked her into keeping it. He told her he’d get a stable of good fighters and things would get better. He was losing hope, but then I came along.

      I don’t think that Cus thought that in a thousand years he’d get another champion, although he hoped he would. Most of the men who came up there were already established fighters who wanted to get away from the girls and the temptations of the city. Plus, no one liked Cus’s boxing style at that time. They thought it was outdated. Then I show up there knowing nothing, a blank chalkboard. Cus was happy. I couldn’t understand why this white man was so happy about me. He would look at me and just laugh hysterically. He’d get on the phone and tell people, “Lightning has struck me twice. I have another heavyweight champion.” I had never even had an amateur fight in my life. I have no idea how, but somehow he saw it in me.

      I’ll never forget my first amateur fight. It was at a small gym in the Bronx owned by a former Cus boxer named Nelson Cuevas. The gym was a hellhole. It was on the second floor of a building that was right next to the elevated subway line. The tracks were so close that you could put your hand out the window and almost touch the train. These fight cards were called “smokers” because the air was so thick with cigarette smoke you could hardly see the guy standing in front of you.

      Smokers were unsanctioned bouts, which basically meant they were lawless. There weren’t any paramedics or ambulances waiting outside. If the crowd didn’t like your performance, they didn’t boo, they just fought one another to show you how it was done. Everybody who came was dressed to the nines whether they were gangsters or drug dealers. And everybody bet on the fights. I remember I asked one guy, “Will you buy me a piggy in a blanket if I win?” People who bet and won money on you would usually buy you some food.

      Right before my fight, I was so scared that I almost left. I was thinking about all that preparation that I had undergone with Cus. Even after all the sparring, I was still totally intimidated with fighting somebody in the ring. What if I failed and lost? I had been in a million fights on the streets of Brooklyn but this was a whole different kind of feeling. You don’t know the guy you’re fighting; you have no beef with him. I was there with Teddy Atlas, my trainer, and I told him that I was going down to the store for a second. I went downstairs and sat on the curb by the steps leading up to the subway. For a minute, I thought I should just get on the damn train and go back to Brownsville. But then all of Cus’s teachings started to flow into my mind and I started to relax, and my pride and my ego started popping up, and I got up and walked back into the gym. It was on.

      I was fighting this big Puerto Rican guy with a huge Afro. He was eighteen, four years older than me. We fought hard for two rounds, but then in the third round I knocked him into the bottom rope and followed with another shot that literally knocked his mouthpiece six rows back into the crowd. He was out cold.

      I was ecstatic. It was love at first fight. I didn’t know how to celebrate. So I stepped on him. I raised my arms up in the air and stepped on the prone motherfucker.

      “Get the hell off him! What the fuck are you doing stepping on this guy?” the ref told me. Cus was up in Catskill waiting by the phone for the report. Teddy called him and told him what happened and Cus was so excited that he made his friend Don, who had driven down with us, give him another account the next morning.

      I kept going back to the smokers every week. You’d go into the dressing room and there were a bunch of kids looking at one another. You’d tell them your weight and how many fights you had. I normally told them I was older than fourteen. There weren’t many two-­hundred-pound fourteen-year-olds around. So I was always fighting older guys.

      Those smokers meant so much to me, a lot more to me than the rest of the kids. The way I looked at it, I was born in hell and every time I won a fight, that was one step out of it. The other fighters weren’t as mean as I was. If I hadn’t had these smokers, I probably would have died in the sewers.

      Teddy even got in the action at these fights. We were at Nelson’s gym one night and a guy pushed Teddy and Teddy punched the guy in the face and Nelson jumped in. He picked up one of the trophies that were there, solid marble with the tin fighter on top of the base, and he started smashing that guy’s head in. If the cops had come they would have charged him with attempted murder. Teddy was always getting into fights. I don’t know if he was defending me or if other guys were jealous because he had the best fighter there, but he was never smart enough to back down from anybody. We’d go to Ohio

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