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lose my ear if it went untreated. They had me stay in the hospital for ten days and undergo treatment in a ­hyperbaric chamber twice a day where they forced antibiotics into the cartilage.

      The doctors at Mount Sinai told me that it would be good for me to go out and get some fresh air. So every day after my second treatment at three p.m., Tom Patti and my close childhood friend Duran would pick me up in a limo or we’d walk down to Times Square, where we hung out and took pictures with all the prostitutes and the guys who sold pictures of tourists with pythons coiled around their necks. We were having a blast, partying all night. I’d roll back into the hospital at four a.m. and the nurses would freak. “This isn’t a hotel, it’s a hospital.” When I showed the doctors the pictures of me with the prostitute and the python, they freaked too. “No, no, we didn’t mean you should go out all night. We meant go downstairs and sit in Central Park, watch the birds and the squirrels and get some fresh air.”

      That was almost two months before my fight with James Tillis in upstate New York. When it was time for the fight, I was out of shape because of my illness and also because I had been drinking and ­partying way too hard. The fight went ten hard rounds and I was just glad to get the decision. I dropped him once, which probably tipped the scales in my favor, but he was the toughest opponent I had ever faced at that point. He gave me such a body beating that I couldn’t even walk after the fight. I had to stay in the hotel. I couldn’t even drive home. I found out what fighting was really about that night. Several times during the fight I wanted to go down so bad just to get some relief, but I kept grabbing and holding him, trying to get my breath back.

      The next day Jimmy Jacobs went into spin mode. He told the press, “The fight was just a hurdle for him. Now we see that he can go the distance.” He was a master at manipulating the press, not to mention the public. He and Cayton masterminded a publicity campaign that was unparalleled. No actor in the world ever got that kind of press before. Everybody does it now, but back then, they were true ­innovators.

      Less than three weeks later, I fought Mitch Green at the Garden. He was truly a crazy motherfucker. He tried to get in my head before the fight by telling the Daily News that I was nineteen years old but I looked like I was forty. When Marv Albert asked me if Green was getting to me, I said, “Mitch Green is a good fighter but he’s not on an eloquent level to disturb me. So not at all.”

      This was my first fight on my new HBO contract that Jimmy and Cayton had negotiated. And it was a thrill to fight for the first time in the big arena in Madison Square Garden. But you wouldn’t know it from the prefight interview on HBO. When they asked me if I was enjoying all my newfound attention and wealth, I got morose. “People won’t want to be in my position. ‘Wow, I can make money,’ they say. But if they had to go through some of the things I go through, they would cry. It’s so depressing. Everybody wants something. Just as hard as you’re working in the gym, people are working that hard trying to separate you from your money.” That was me being Cus. You’d think I’d be more upbeat since this was my first time headlining the ­Garden.

      Green was a well-respected fighter then. He was a four-time Golden Gloves champion and he had been undefeated until he lost a decision in 1985 to Trevor Berbick for the USBA title. But I knew I was going to beat him as soon as we entered the ring. I didn’t get any threatening vibes from him at all. The fight went the distance but that was okay. After the Tillis fight, I wanted to be more comfortable going ten rounds. I knew he couldn’t hurt me so I was working on my endurance. I won every round and it wasn’t a dull fight. At one point I knocked out his mouthpiece and bridge with a couple of teeth in it. He took a lot of punishment. I was so loose that between the eighth and ninth rounds when Kevin was literally in my face jabbering on and on, telling me to punch more, I gave him a little kiss.

      After the fight I was back to my usual arrogant self.

      “Not to be egotistical, but I won this fight so easy. I refuse to be beaten in there. I refuse to let anybody get in my way,” I told the press.

      Reggie Gross was my next target. He was a tough fighter they called “the Spoiler” because he had upset some good fighters including Bert Cooper and Jimmy Clark, who was a great American Olympian. The fight almost didn’t happen because I was suffering from a bad case of bronchitis that week. I had suffered from bronchitis my entire life and I had gotten used to it, but this was a severe case. They took me to the doctor the day of the fight and he examined me.

      “I’m afraid I’m going to have to postpone this fight. He’s pretty ill,” the doctor said.

      “Can I talk to you for a moment, please, sir,” Jimmy said. I could see the look in Jimmy’s eyes and the next thing I knew I was in the ring fighting. In the first round, I was hitting Gross with a flurry of punches and he was covering up. Suddenly he decided to start trading punches, which was fine with me. He threw a bunch of wild punches that I dodged and then I knocked him down with a vicious left hook and then knocked him down a second time with a succession of punches. The ref stopped the fight because Gross was glassy-eyed, but Reggie complained. “You can’t even walk but you want to fight?” the ref said.

      My next two opponents seemed to be going down in caliber. Maybe Jimmy and Cayton just wanted me to get some more one-round knockouts after those two decisions. I obliged them with William Hosea, but it took me two rounds to knock out Lorenzo Boyd. But my lightning-fast right to the rib cage followed quickly by a thundering right uppercut left the crowd wowed. Two weeks later I got everyone’s attention by demolishing Marvis Frazier, Joe’s son, in thirty seconds. I cornered him, set him up with my jab, and then finished him off with my fa­vorite punch, a right uppercut. He looked severely injured so I rushed over to try to help him up. I love Marvis; he’s a beautiful ­person.

      I had just turned twenty a few weeks earlier, and the plan was for me to become the youngest heavyweight champ by the end of 1986. While Jimmy and Cayton were negotiating for that, they had me fight Jose Ribalta in Atlantic City on August seventeenth.

      Ribalta was a game fighter who, unlike Green and Tillis, actually engaged me. And he seemed to have the will not to be knocked out. I knocked him down in the second, and again in the eighth, but he got up. In the tenth, he went down a third time and when he got up, I swarmed him on the ropes and the referee stopped the fight.

      Besides gaining a lot of respect from the crowd and the commentators on his determination, Ribalta also managed to ruin my night. After the fight, I had a date with a beautiful young coed from Penn State University who I had met at the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. This young lady accompanied me to my room and she began to touch me but I recoiled in pain.

      “Hey! Please don’t touch me. It’s nothing personal but you have to go now. I just need some peace,” I told her. She was very understanding and she drove back to her school, but we made up for it the next time I saw her.

      She had been at the fight and had seen all the punishment I had absorbed. I had never been through anything like that before. I felt nauseous from all Ribalta’s body blows, even hours after the fight. Ri­balta and Tillis were the only two guys who had ever made me feel like that. I never felt that much general pain again. But I remember all the reading I had done chronicling how other great fighters had felt like their heads were halfway off after some of their fights, so I just felt that this was part of my journey.

      The negotiations for a title fight were heating up and Jimmy decided that I should fight in Vegas so I could get used to it before I would fight there later in the year to win the title. We stayed at the house of Dr. Bruce Handelman, a friend of Jimmy’s. I started training at Johnny Tocco’s gym, a wonderfully grungy old-school gym with no amenities, not even air-conditioning. Tocco was an awesome guy who had been friends with Sonny Liston. There were pictures of Johnny and all the old-time greats on the walls.

      I was in the locker room one day about to spar when it hit me. I told Kevin that I didn’t like it in Vegas and I wanted to go home. I was really just feeling anxious about the fight. If I didn’t win the Ratliff fight, I wouldn’t qualify to fight Trevor Berbick.

      Kevin went out and told Steve Lott. So Steve thought to himself, WWCD? or, What would Cus do? Steve came into

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