LITMIR.BIZ

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walking away from the dice game with him and I haven’t seen you since.”

      Barkim’s death had a big impact on me. This was the guy who had first gotten me into robbing, making me his street son. And he had just told me to get out of here and go back with my white family. And it wasn’t just him. All my friends in the neighborhood had big hopes for me and Cus. Cus was going to take me places.

      “Stick with that white man, Mike. We’re nothing, Mike, don’t come back here, Mike. I don’t want to hear no bullshit, nigga. You’re the only hope we have. We ain’t going to never go nowhere Mike, we’re going to die right here in Brownsville. We’ve got to tell people before we die that we hung out with you, you were our nigga.”

      I was hearing variations of that everywhere I went. They took it seriously. To my friends, Brownsville was pure hell. They all wished they had an opportunity to get out like I did. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to come back, but I went back because I was trying to figure out who I really was. My two lives were so divergent, yet I felt at home in both worlds for different reasons.

      One day there was a knock on my door and it was Mrs. Coleman, my social worker. She had come to take my black ass back upstate because I got caught up robbing and stealing. I was supposed to ­return to Cus’s house three days after my mother’s funeral. Mrs. Coleman was a nice lady who drove over two hours from Catskill to get me. She was very supportive of Cus and thought that boxing was a positive direction for me. I was still out of it, so I told her that I wasn’t going back to Catskill. She informed me that if I wanted to stay in Brooklyn, then she’d have to do some paperwork and the police would pick me up and she’d place me somewhere in New York. I was sixteen by then, so I knew what she was saying was bullshit. Legally, I didn’t have to answer to anybody. But I went back upstate with her. I looked at my apartment and saw how my mother had lived in poverty and chaos and then thought about the way she died. That changed my whole perspective about how I was going to live my life. It might be short, but I was going to make sure it would be glorious.

      When I got back to Catskill, Cus really helped get me over my mother’s death. He talked to me about the day his father died. Cus was in the house with him and his father was screaming. He couldn’t help him because he didn’t know what to do. Cus helped me get strong again. During this time there was a white South African boxer named Charlie Weir who was a top contender for the junior middleweight title. He and his team came to Catskill to train with Cus. This was during the apartheid era and Cus told them, “We have a black boy here. He’s part of our family. You have to treat him with respect. The same way you treat me and Camille, this is how you treat him.”

      That was awesome. Nobody ever fought for me like that. Charlie and his team were paying to train with Cus and usually when you pay to train at a fight camp, you run the show. But Cus set them straight. And Cus talked like that at home too.

      “Listen, we’re your family now, okay?” he told me. “And you’re our boy now. And you’re going to bring a lot of pride to this family. Pride and glory.”

      The three of us would be sitting at the dining room table and Cus would say, “Look at your black son, Camille. What do you think about that?”

      Camille would get up and come over to me and kiss me.

      But our little idyllic scene got disrupted a month later. I fucked up. Cus was having trouble with my trainer Teddy Atlas. They were fighting over money. Teddy had recently married into a family that Cus was really dubious about, so when Teddy needed money, Cus wouldn’t give him much. Teddy was struggling, so he wanted me to turn pro so he could collect his share of my purses, but turning pro at that time wasn’t in Cus’s plan. So it was common knowledge that Teddy was going to leave Cus and that he would try to take me with him. There was no way in the world I would leave Cus.

      But then I did something that made Cus get rid of Teddy. I had known Teddy’s sisters-in-law before Teddy even did. We had all gone to school together and were friends. The girls would always be flirtatious with me, but I never had a sexual thing with them. I was hanging out with his twelve-year-old sister-in-law one day and I grabbed her butt. I really didn’t mean to do anything evil. I was just playing around and I grabbed her butt and I shouldn’t have. It was just a stupid thing to do. I didn’t think it through. I had no social skills with girls because Cus kept me in the gym all the time. As soon as I did it, I immediately regretted it. She didn’t say anything to me but I knew it must have made her uncomfortable.

      Later that evening my sparring partner drove me to the gym to work out with Teddy. I got out of the car and Teddy was waiting for me outside. He looked angry.

      “Mike, come here. I want to talk to you,” he said.

      I went over to him and he pulled out a gun and held it to my head.

      “Motherfucker, don’t you ever touch my sister-in-law …”

      He shot the gun into the air, right next to my ear. The sound was so deafening, I thought that he might have actually shot my ear off. And then Teddy ran. I would have too, because the gym was on top of a police station.

      Whenever Teddy talks about this incident now, he makes it sound like he scared me to shit. The truth was, it wasn’t the first time someone had held a gun to my head, but it wasn’t like I was saying stuff like “C’mon, shoot me, motherfucker.” I was nervous. By the way, it took a while for my hearing to come back. But I just felt that I had fucked something up real bad. I really cared about Teddy. I was pissed, though, and I might have told some people that I was going to get back at him, but I would never do anything to hurt Teddy. He taught me how to fight, he was right there from the beginning.

      Camille was furious with Teddy. She wanted Cus to press charges and have him arrested but Cus wouldn’t do that. He knew that Teddy was on probation for some other issue and that he would have gone right to jail. Teddy and his family eventually moved back to the city.

      All this was my fault. I’m just sorry all that went down. After Teddy left, I started working with Kevin Rooney, another boxer who Cus converted into a trainer. Rooney and Teddy were childhood friends and Teddy had introduced Kevin to Cus. You can imagine how high the emotions ran when things played out the way they did.

      I felt pretty developed by the time I got with Rooney. Normally when guys won tournaments, they’d get choosy about who they’d fight. Not me. I’d fight anybody anywhere: in their hometown, their backyard. Cus would say to me, “Fight them in their living rooms and their families could even be the judges.” I just wanted to fight and I wasn’t afraid of anything. I would fight in Chicago, Rhode Island, Boston, anywhere. And people would say, “That’s Tyson, he won the Junior Olympics twice.”

      In December of 1982, I suffered my first loss in a tournament. I was fighting for the U.S. Amateur Championships in Indianapolis and my opponent was Al Evans. I was sixteen then and he was twenty-seven, a hard puncher and a very experienced guy.

      I charged him in the first round and threw a ton of punches. I did the same in the second round. I was knocking him from pillar to post. In the third round, I was a little wild and he countered with a left hook and I went down. I got right up and rushed him again. He knocked me down with a right hand this time. I got up and started to charge again and I slipped. That was it, the ref stopped the fight. I wasn’t really hurt. I could have gone on. Cus was screaming at the ref from the corner.

      I was crushed. I wanted to win every tournament. I liked the way the champion was treated after he won. I wanted that feeling, I was addicted to that feeling.

      Cus might have thought that the loss shook my confidence and my desire, because when we got back to Catskill, he gave me a little lecture.

      “Look at the champions you’ve read about in all these books. At some time early in their careers a number of them suffered knockout losses. But they never gave up. They endured. That’s why you’re reading about them. The ones who lost and quit, well their demons will follow them to their grave because they had a chance to face them and they didn’t. You have to face your demons, Mike, or they will follow you to eternity. Remember to always be careful how you

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