LITMIR.BIZ

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say.

      “Well, I am a fighter, sir. My purpose is to fight,” I’d answer.

      The whole amateur boxing establishment hated me. They didn’t like my cocky Brownsville attitude. I was behaving myself but you could still see that New York swagger coming out. And if they didn’t like me, they despised Cus. He could be so over-the-top that sometimes he’d embarrass me. I never let him know; I always stood there and listened to him go after these guys, but I was totally embarrassed by the way he would talk to them. He was very vindictive and always out for revenge. He couldn’t live without enemies, so he created them. I sometimes thought, Damn, why couldn’t I have been with a nonconfrontational kind of white guy? I thought I was getting away from that loud life where people screamed at the top of their lungs. But with Cus, it was a constant reminder that I hadn’t.

      I had a chance to avenge my loss to Tillman a month later at the Olympic Box-Offs. Again I pressed him for three rounds and this time he did even less than in the first fight. Even Howard Cosell, who was doing the announcing for ABC and who had thought Tillman had outpointed me in our first fight, had to admit that I had a much better chance of getting the decision.

      I was sure I had won and when the ref lifted Tillman’s arm again, I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that they’d give him two bullshit decisions. Again the whole audience started booing the judges. Cus was furious. He started cursing and tried to punch out one of the U.S. Olympic officials. Kevin Rooney and some other officials had to hold him back. I was so self-absorbed at the time that I thought all of this stuff with Cus was about me. As I got older, I understood that this was really a story that went back about thirty years. These were his demons and they really had little to do with me.

      It was all about Cus being taken advantage of and robbed of his glory. I didn’t even know until recently that Cus had sent a friend of ours named Mark, who worked for the FBI, to the U.S. Attorney’s ­office in Albany to investigate the Tillman decisions.

      I threw tantrums after the two Tillman decisions. I took the ­runner-up trophies that they gave me and threw them down and broke them. Cus sent me to the Olympics anyway, to live with the Olympic team. The Olympics were in L.A. that year. He said that I should just go there and enjoy the experience. He got me two tickets to every fight, but I had a pass anyway so I scalped the tickets. And the Olympics weren’t a total loss for me. There was this really cute intern who worked for the U.S. Olympic committee. All of the boxers and the coaches were hitting on her, but I was the one who got her. She liked me. After all those years of deprivation, it was nice to ­finally have sex.

      But even getting laid didn’t take away the disappointment and pain I felt from having my Olympic dream stolen from me. When the Olympics were over, I flew back to New York, but I didn’t go right back to Catskill. I hung around the city. I was really depressed. One afternoon I went to Forty-second Street to see a karate movie. Right before it started, I smoked a joint.

      I started getting high and I remembered the time that Cus had caught me with pot. It was right after I had won my second Junior Olympics Championship. One of the other boxers was jealous of me and ratted me out. Before I had a chance to ditch the evidence, Cus had sent Ruth, the German cleaning lady, to my room and she found the weed.

      Cus was furious when I came home.

      “This must be some good stuff, Mike. I know this must be good because you just let down four hundred years of slaves and peasants to smoke it.”

      He broke my spirit that day. He made me feel like an Uncle Tom nigga. And he hated those kinds of people. He really knew how to bring me to my nadir.

      So I was sitting in the theater, remembering that, and sinking deeper and deeper into my depression. Then I started crying. When the movie was over, I went straight to the train station and went back to Catskill. The whole trip back, I knew I had to immediately throw myself into full-blown training for professional fighting. I had to be spectacular when I turned pro. As we got closer to Catskill, I started talking to myself.

      “They’re never going to see anyone like Tyson. He will transcend the game. He will be in the pantheon of great fighters alongside John L. Sullivan and Joe Louis and Benny Leonard and Joe Gans and the rest. Tyson is magnificent.”

      I talked about myself in the third person. Even to myself.

      I was completely pumped up when I got off that train and took a cab to Cus’s house. The world was about to see a fighter the likes of which it had never been seen before. I was going to transcend the game. With all due respect, and not to be arrogant, but I was conscious of my future prominence as a boxer then. I knew nothing could stop me and I would be the champion as surely as Friday would come after Thursday. I didn’t lose a fight for the next six years.

      Coming off of those two losses to Tillman, I wasn’t exactly the ­hottest property in the boxing world. Cus had planned for me to win the gold medal at the Olympics and then start my career with a lucrative TV contract. But that didn’t work out. No professional promoters were interested in me. Nobody in boxing really believed in Cus’s peek-a-boo style. And a lot of people thought that I was too short to be an effective heavyweight.

      I guess all that talk got to Cus. One night I was taking the garbage out and Cus was cleaning up the kitchen.

      “Man, I wish you had a body like Mike Weaver or Ken Norton,” he said out of the blue. “Because then you would be real intimidating. You’d have an ominous aura. They don’t have the temperament but they have the physique of an intimidating man. You could paralyze the other boxers with fear just by the way you look.”

      I got choked up. To this day, when I recount this story, I still choke up. I was offended and hurt but I wouldn’t tell Cus that because then he’d say, “Oh, you’re crying? What are you, a little baby? How can you handle a big-time fight if you don’t have the emotional toughness?”

      Any time I showed my emotions, he despised it. So I held back my tears.

      “Don’t worry, Cus.” I made myself sound arrogant. “You watch. One day the whole world is going to be afraid of me. When they mention my name, they’ll sweat blood, Cus.”

      That was the day that I turned into Iron Mike; I became that guy 100 percent. Even though I had been winning almost every one of my fights in an exciting fashion, I wasn’t completely emotionally invested in being the savage that Cus wanted me to be. After that talk about me being too small, I became that savage. I even began to fantasize that if I actually killed someone inside the ring, it would certainly intimidate everyone. Cus wanted an antisocial champion, so I drew on the bad guys from the movies, guys like Jack Palance and Richard Widmark. I immersed myself in the role of the arrogant sociopath.

      But first I got a Cadillac. Cus couldn’t afford to pay for my ­expenses while we were building up my career, so he got his friend Jimmy ­Jacobs and his partner, Bill Cayton, to lay out the money. Jimmy was an awesome guy. He was the Babe Ruth of handball and while he traveled around the world on the handball circuit, he began collecting rare fight films. Eventually he met Bill Cayton, who was a collector himself, and the two of them started Big Fights, Inc. They cornered the market on fight footage and Cayton later made a fortune selling those fights to ESPN. Cus had lived with Jimmy for ten years when Cus was still in New York, so they were close friends. In fact, Cus had devised a secret plan to train Jimmy as a fighter and for his first fight ever, amateur or professional, to fight Archie Moore for his light-heavyweight title. Jacobs trained intensely for six months with Cus, but the fight never happened because Archie pulled out.

      But Cus never liked Jimmy’s partner Cayton. He thought he was too in love with his money. I didn’t like him either. Where Jimmy had a great outgoing personality, Cayton was a pompous cold fish. Jimmy and Cayton had been managing boxers for many years and had ­Wilfred Benitez and Edwin Rosario in their stable, so despite

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