LITMIR.BIZ

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Cus began accelerating my pace. Sixteen days after the Long fight I fought Robert Colay and I threw two left hooks. The first one missed, the second one knocked him out. It was over in thirty-seven seconds. A week later I fought Sterling Benjamin upstate in Latham, New York. I knocked him down with a short left hook and then after the eight count, I swarmed him, throwing devastating body blows and uppercuts. He crumbled to the canvas. The ref stopped the fight. The upstate crowd was going wild and I turned to face them, putting my gloves through the upper ropes, palms up, and saluted them gladiator-style.

      But I had more important things on my mind than my eleventh pro victory. Cus was very ill. He had been sick since I moved into the house with him and Camille, he was always coughing, but I knew his condition was getting worse when he didn’t travel with us to some of my fights. He stayed home for the Long and the Colay fights, but he made the trip to Latham to see me fight Benjamin. He was too much of an old stubborn Italian man to miss a fight in his backyard. He had no faith in doctors and he was one of the first proponents of vitamins and what we now call “alternative medicine,” and nutritional therapy.

      I knew Cus was sick but I was just of the mind-set that he was going to make it through to see me become champ because we always talked about it. He was going to stick around to see me become a success. But when we talked in private, sometimes he’d say, “I might not be around, so you’ve got to listen to me.” I just thought he said that to scare me, to make sure I acted right. Cus always said things to make me apprehensive.

      He was admitted to a hospital in Albany, but Jimmy Jacobs had him transferred to Mount Sinai in the city. I went with Steve Lott to visit him. Cus was sitting in his bed eating ice cream. We talked for a few minutes and then Cus asked Steve to leave the room so he could talk to me in private.

      That’s when he told me he was dying from pneumonia. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. He didn’t look morbidly ill. He was buffing. He had energy and zest. He was eating ice cream. He was chilling out, but I started freaking out.

      “I don’t want to do this shit without you,” I said, choking back tears. “I’m not going to do it.”

      “Well, if you don’t fight, you’ll realize that people can come back from the grave, because I’m going to haunt you for the rest of your life.” I told him “Okay,” and then he took my hand.

      “The world has to see you, Mike. You’re going to be champ of the world, the greatest out there,” he said.

      Then Cus started crying. That was the first time I ever saw him cry. I thought he was crying because he couldn’t see me become heavyweight champion of the world after all we had gone through together. But soon I realized he was crying over Camille. I totally forgot that he had another partner who meant more to him than me. He told me he regretted that he had never married Camille because he had tax problems and he didn’t want her to take them on.

      “Mike, just do me one favor,” he said. “Make sure you take care of Camille.”

      I left the room in shock. I was staying at Steve’s apartment, and Jimmy lived in the same building. Later that day, Jimmy came by to get me to go with him to the bank to deposit a check for $120,000 for my last fights. By now my name was in the papers and I was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and strangers were stopping me on the street and wishing me well. I was out there, cocky, looking good. I knew all the girls at the bank and normally I’d flirt with them and they’d flirt back.

      But right before we walked in the bank, Jimmy stopped.

      “Cus is not going to make it through the night, Mike. They say he has a few hours to live.”

      I just started crying like it was the end of the world. It was. My world was gone. All the girls at the bank were staring at me.

      “Is there a problem?” The manager came up to us.

      “We just heard that a dear friend of ours is dying and Mike is taking it very hard,” Jimmy said. He was cool and collected. Just like that, boom, no emotion, just the way Cus trained him to be. Meanwhile, I was still crying like a lost soldier on a mission without a general. I don’t think I ever went back to that bank, I was so embarrassed.

      They had Cus’s funeral upstate. I was one of Cus’s pallbearers. Everybody from the boxing world came. It was so sad. In my sick head all I could think about was to succeed for him. I would have done ­anything to win that title to insure Cus’s legacy. I started feeling sorry for myself, thinking that without Cus, I would have a shitty life. Camille was very composed but when we got back to the house, we cried ­together.

      Shortly after the funeral, Jim Jacobs organized a memorial service for Cus at his old gym, the Gramercy Gym, in the city. All the luminaries were there. Norman Mailer said his influence on boxing was as great as Hemingway’s influence on young American writers. Gay ­Talese said it was an honor to have known Cus.

      “He taught me so many things, not just about boxing, which was a craft and could be mastered, but about living and about life, which is not so easily mastered,” Pete Hamill said.

      Jim Jacobs pretty much nailed Cus in his speech. “Cus D’Amato was violently opposed to ignorance and corruption in boxing. While Cus was unyielding to his enemies, he was understanding, compassionate, and incredibly tolerant with his friends.”

      I shut down emotionally after Cus died. I got really mean. I was trying to prove myself, show that I was a man, not just a boy. I flew to Texas a week after Cus’s funeral to fight Eddie Richardson. Jimmy and Cayton didn’t even let me mourn. So I brought along a photo of Cus. I was still talking to Cus, every night.

      “I’m going to fight this guy Richardson tomorrow, Cus,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”

      Even though I was functioning, I’d lost my spirit, my belief in ­myself. I lost all my energy to do anything good. I don’t think I ever did get over his death. I was also mad at him when he died. I was so bitter. If he’d only gone to the doctor’s earlier, he could’ve been alive to protect me. But he wanted to be stubborn, so he didn’t get treated and he died and left me out there alone for these animals in the boxing world to take advantage of. After Cus died, I just didn’t care about anything anymore. I was basically fighting for the money. I didn’t really have a dream. It would be good to win the title, but I just wanted to get some wine, have some fun, party, and get fucked up.

      But first I fucked Richardson up. The first punch I threw, a right hand, knocked him down. He hung on for a minute more, but then I hit him with a leaping left and because he was so tall he wound up coming down on the other side of the ring.

      Conroy Nelson, who had lost to Trevor Berbick years earlier for the Canadian title, was next. He was still ranked the #2 heavyweight in Canada and was a tough, experienced guy, one of those guys with a big Adonis body. All the announcers thought this was the guy who would finally test me. I just worked over his body in the first round. Two or three times he almost went down from body blows. Then the second started and, boom, boom, boom, to the body and then an overhead right broke his nose and a left hook to the chin drove him to the canvas. When the ref stopped the fight, I paraded around the ring, soaking in the adulation of my hometown fans, arms outstretched.

      My next fight was in the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden on December sixth. All my friends from Brownsville came. But I was too much in the zone to really think about being in New York and having a good time. I couldn’t wait to get through these fights and get my shot at the title for Cus. My opponent that night was Sammy Scaff. My postfight interview lasted longer than the fight. Scaff was a lumbering 250-pound Kentucky journeyman and I caught him with two awesome left hooks to the head that left his face a mask of blood and his nose mostly rearranged. After the fight, John Condon, the head of boxing at MSG who was doing the color commentary, asked me what was a typical day in the life of Mike Tyson.

      “Mike Tyson is just a hardworking fighter that leads a boring life as an individual. Anyone who says ‘I wish I was in your shoes,’ the hundreds of people who say that don’t know the tenth of it. If they were in my shoes they would cry like babies. They couldn’t

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