LITMIR.BIZ

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much of my talent. That really pissed Cus off. Cus hated Arum’s matchmakers and after my next fight, they never worked with Arum again.

      But all this political stuff didn’t interest me. I couldn’t wait for my next fight. It was in Atlantic City again on July eleventh. I was fighting John Alderson, a big country guy from West Virginia who also had a 4-0 record. This fight was on ESPN and I dropped him a few times in the second round and the doctor stopped the fight after he went back to his corner.

      I ran my record to 6-0 in my next fight against Larry Sims, but I really pissed Cus off in doing so. Sims was really slick and awkward, one of those cute fighters. So in the third round, I turned lefty and I knocked him out with a resounding punch. In the dressing room later, Cus confronted me.

      “Who taught you that southpaw crap? It might be hard to get you fights now,” he said. “People don’t want to fight southpaws. You’re going to ruin everything I created.” Cus hated southpaws.

      “I’m sorry, Cus.” Ain’t that a bitch. There I was apologizing for a spectacular knockout.

      I was back in the ring a month later and dispatched Lorenzo Can­ady in one round, and three weeks later I faced Mike Johnson in ­Atlantic City. When we lined up for the instructions, Johnson looked so arrogant, like he hated my guts. Within seconds he was down from a left hook to the kidneys and then when he got up, I threw a spectacular right hand that hit him so hard his front two teeth were lodged in his mouthpiece. I knew it would be a long time until he came to. Kevin jumped into the ring and we were laughing and high-fiving like two arrogant little kids. I was, like, “Ha, ha. Look at this dead nigga, Kevin.”

      Now I was 8-0 with eight knockouts and Jimmy and Cus were using all their contacts in the press to get me recognition. I’d go down to New York to go to lunch with Jimmy and his newspaper friends. We really courted the press. I also started getting mentioned in the gossip columns because I started hanging out at the New York City hot spots like the restaurant Columbus on the Upper West Side. I became friendly with the great photographer Brian Hamill, and him and his brother Pete, who was a world-famous writer, started introducing me to all these celebrities. Pete would bring me to the bar and we’d sit with Paulie Herman, one of the owners. Paulie was the man in New York at that time. It seemed to me that he was a bigger celebrity than the celebrities themselves. Everybody wanted to be around Paulie, sit at his table, ask him for favors. I thought that he was a Mafia boss or something.

      You never knew who you’d meet at Columbus. Sometimes Pete would leave me there with Paulie. Next thing I knew, David Bowie, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Drew Barrymore, this little kid, would be sitting at the same table with us. I’d think to myself, This is deep. You better keep your composure. Then Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci walked in and sat down. We were sitting and talking and the next thing I knew, Paulie said, “Hey, Mike, we all gotta go somewhere.” And, boom, five minutes later I’m at Liza Minnelli’s house sitting on the sofa chilling with Raul Julia.

      Eventually I met all those New York social scenesters. Being around them, I realized that something special had died right before I had come onto the scene. It was so powerful, you could still feel it in the music of Elton John and Stevie Wonder and Freddie Mercury. You knew they had been to a special place that wasn’t around any longer.

      But even meeting all these superstars didn’t validate my own sense of having made it. That didn’t happen until I met the wrestler Bruno Sammartino. I was a huge wrestling fan growing up. I loved Sammartino and Gorilla Monsoon and Billy Graham. One night I went to a party where I met Tom Cruise, who was just starting out. At the same event, I saw Bruno Sammartino. I was totally starstruck. I just stared at him. Someone introduced us and he had no idea who I was, but I started recounting to him all the great matches I had seen him participate in, against people like Killer Kowalski, Nikolai Vol­koff, and George “the Animal” Steele. In my sick, megalomaniac mind I was thinking, This is a sign of my greatness. My hero is here with me. I’m going to be great like him and win the championship.

      Cus wasn’t too thrilled that I was spending more and more time in Manhattan. When I went to the city, I’d crash on the couch of Steve Lott, who was Jimmy Jacobs’s right-hand man. Steve was a model junkie and he’d take me to places like the Nautilus Club and other spots where beautiful girls would hang out. At the time I was dedicated to winning that belt so I wasn’t really fooling around with the girls yet. I tried to be a nice guy then, not going too far. My weakness was food. Steve was a great cook and when I went out at night clubbing, I’d come back and have Steve heat up some Chinese leftovers for a late-night snack. I’d go back to Catskill after a few days and Cus would be mad.

      “Look at your ass. Your ass is getting fatter,” he’d shake his head.

      My next fight was my first real test. On October ninth, I went up against Donnie Long in Atlantic City. Long had gone the distance with both James Broad, a tough heavyweight, and John Tate, the former WBA heavyweight champ. I knew it would make me look good in the boxing world if I dispatched him promptly. Long was confident going into the fight, telling Al Bernstein of ESPN that he could outpunch me. They called Long “the Master of Disaster,” but his night turned disastrous as soon as the opening bell rang. I went after him fast and ferocious and knocked him down seconds into the fight with a lunging left. A little later, a right uppercut dropped him and then I finished him off with a right-uppercut-left-hook combination. It took me under a minute and a half to win.

      After the fight, Al Bernstein interviewed me.

      “Earlier in the day I really thought that Donnie Long would be a fairly tough opponent for you. He wasn’t!” Al said.

      “Well, like I told you earlier today, if I knock him out in one or two rounds, would you still consider him that?”

      “I thought he was supposed to be, but I guess he wasn’t,” Al said.

      “Oh, now he wasn’t …” I laughed.

      “No, he was a tough man, I’m just saying for you he wasn’t tough, apparently, because you beat him.”

      “I knew from the beginning, but everybody else didn’t know that it was no con, it was no con. A lot of people came to look, Jesse Ferguson came to look, the Fraziers came to look. All of you come and get some, because Mike Tyson is out here, he is waiting for you, all come and get some.”

      I was almost too focused then; I didn’t really live in reality. I was interviewed for Sports Illustrated and I said, “What bothers me most is being around people who are having a lot of fun, with parties and stuff like that. It makes you soft. People who are only interested in having fun cannot accomplish anything.” I thought I was stronger than people who were weak and partying. I wanted to be in that Columbus celebrity world, but I was fighting that temptation to party.

      I still wasn’t having sex. The last time I had gotten laid was at the Olympics with that intern. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex, but I was too awkward with women. I didn’t know how to access them. “Hey, hi, you want to get laid?” I didn’t know how to say that. Around this time, I was supposed to fight on the undercard in Madison Square Garden. My reputation preceded me and my opponent didn’t show up. So I left the Garden and went to a whorehouse on Forty-second Street. I had known about the place since I was a kid hanging out in Times Square.

      I walked into the joint and sat down in one of the chairs in the outer room. There was a big-screen TV playing porno films. The girls would come up and they’d sit with you, and ask, “Would you like to date?” If you passed on one of them, another one would come over. I was the youngest guy there, so they thought I was kind of cute. I picked out a nice Cuban girl and we went to a room in the back.

      Freud would have had a field day with that scenario. Here I was all ready to focus my aggression and beat up my opponent in the ring, but the fight is canceled and I go and get laid. I was actually extremely excited. During our session, her back went out. She said, “Hey, we have to stop. I pulled something in my back.” I hadn’t finished yet so I asked her for my money back. She changed the subject and asked me for my Edwin Rosario T-shirt that I was wearing. She was too hurt to

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