by Mike Tyson
I got some extra running in thanks to my control-freak guardian Cus. I was at a school dance and it was scheduled to end at ten p.m. I told Cus I’d be home at eleven. Everybody was hanging around after the dance, so I called Cus and told him that I’d probably be home a little late because I was waiting for a cab.
“No, run home now. Run. I can’t wait up for you,” he barked. Cus didn’t believe in giving out keys because he feared we’d lose them. I had on a two-piece suit and nice dress shoes, but Cus wanted me home now.
“Man, I gotta go,” I told my friends. Everyone knew what time it was. If Cus called, I had to go. So I took the fuck off.
One day I was hanging out with some friends and we were drinking and partying, and they were about to drop me off at the house and I saw Cus through the window, sleeping in his chair, waiting for me to come home.
“Turn around. Take me to your house. I don’t even want to deal with Cus,” I said. Every time I’d come home late he would rip me a new asshole. I’d try to sneak up the stairs, but they were old and rickety, and I’d think, Shit, I’m busted. I’d come home from a movie after he gave me permission to go and there was Cus waiting to interrogate me.
“What did you do? Who did you hang out with? Who are they? Where are their families from? What are their last names? You know you’ve got to box tomorrow.”
Cus even tried to marry me off in the ninth grade. I started dating this local girl named Angie. Cus loved her. You would think that he’d discourage a relationship, that it would distract from my training, but Cus thought it would be good for me to settle down with her. I’d be calmer and it would actually help focus me on my boxing. I wasn’t serious about Angie. I wanted to live the flamboyant lifestyles of my heroes, boxers like Mickey Walker and Harry Greb. They drank, they had lots of women, and they were living the life. But Camille was on to Cus.
“Don’t you dare listen to Cus about marrying anyone,” she told me. “You date as many girls as you want and then you select the best.”
One day I got into a fight in school and Cus had to go smooth things over. When he got back, he sat me down.
“You’re going to have to leave here if you’re going to continue to act like that.” I just broke down and started crying.
“Please don’t let me go,” I sobbed. “I want to stay.”
I really loved the family environment Cus had given me. And I was madly in love with Cus. He was the first white guy who not only didn’t judge me, but who wanted to beat the shit out of someone if they said anything disrespectful about me. Nobody could reach me like that guy. He reached me down in my cortex. Any time I finished talking to him, I had to go and burn energy, shadowboxing or doing sit-ups, I was so pumped. I’d start running and I’d be crying, because I wanted to make him happy and prove that all the good things he was saying were right.
I guess Cus felt bad about threatening to send me away and making me cry that day because he started hugging me. That was the first physical display of affection I’d ever seen from Cus. Ever. But the moment that I cried was when Cus really knew that he had me. From that moment on I became his slave. If he told me to kill someone, I would have killed them. I’m serious. Everybody thought I was up there with this old, sweet Italian guy, but I was there with a warrior. And I loved every minute of it. I was happy to be Cus’s soldier; it gave me a purpose in life. I liked being the one to complete the mission.
I started training even harder, if that was possible. When I got home from the gym, I actually had to crawl up the stairs. I’d make my way up to the third-floor bathroom. Cus would run some incredibly hot water into the little porcelain tub and then pour some Epsom salts in.
“Stay in as long as you can,” Cus said.
So I’d sit down and get burned, but the next morning my body felt much better and I could go work out again. I never felt so glorious in my life. I had a tunnel-vision mission and I never deterred from it. I can’t even explain that feeling to other people.
When all the other fighters would leave the gym and go out with their girlfriends, living their life, Cus and I went back to the house and devised our scheme. We’d talk about having houses in all parts of the world. Cus would say, “‘No’ will be like a foreign language to you. You won’t understand the concept of ‘no.’”
I thought that it was unfair for the rest of the fighters trying to win the championship because I was raised by a genius who prepared me. Those other guys wanted to make money and have a good life for their family. But thanks to Cus, I wanted glory and I wanted to get it over their blood. But I was insecure. I wanted glory, I wanted to be famous, I wanted the world to look at me and tell me I’m beautiful. I was a fat fucking stinking kid.
Cus made me believe that the green and gold WBC belt was worth dying for. And not for the money. I used to ask Cus, “What does it mean being the greatest fighter of all time? Most of those guys are dead.”
“Listen. They’re dead but we’re talking about them now. This is all about immortality. This is about your name being known until the end of time,” he said.
Cus was so dramatic. He was like a character from The Three Musketeers.
“We have to wait for our moment, like crocodiles in the mud. We don’t know when the drought will come and the animals will have to migrate across the Sahara. But we’ll be waiting. Months, years. But it will come. And the gazelles and the wildebeests will cross the water. And when they come, we are going to bite them. Do you hear me, son? We are going to bite them so hard that when they scream, the whole world is going to hear them.”
He was dead serious and so was I. Cus was using me to get back at the boxing establishment. I wanted to be involved with that so badly. It was like The Count of Monte Cristo. We were out to get our revenge.
When Cus realized that I was truly with him, he was happy. But then he would just get paranoid. I’d be sitting in the living room reading a book and Cus would be walking around with his robe on and he’d come over to me.
“Yeah, you’re gonna leave me too. They’ll take you away. You’ll leave me just like everybody else,” he’d say out of the blue.
I didn’t know if he was playing a mind game with me or just feeling sorry for himself.
“Are you crazy, Cus? What are you talking about?”
I would never talk to him like that. That was probably the only time I ever called him crazy.
“You know what I mean. Somebody’ll give you some money and you’ll just go away. That happened to me all of my life. I put in the time and developed fighters and people stole them away from me.”
Go away? I would try to kill somebody who kept him away from me. Floyd Patterson had left him but I was on a different level. I just wanted to be hanging around with him and Camille, my new family. No more hard life.
“You’re crazy, Cus,” I said, and he walked away.
• • •
In November of 1981, Teddy, me, and two other fighters got in the car and drove to Rhode Island for a smoker. For the whole ride I was thinking about what I was going to do to the motherfucker when I got there. I had been reading Nietzsche and thought I was a Superman. I could barely spell my name but I was a Superman. So I was visualizing how I was going to electrify the place and how all the people would be applauding me when I kicked this guy’s ass. My delusion had me believing that the crowd would be throwing flowers at my feet. I was only fifteen but I would be fighting a guy named Ernie Bennett, the local champ, who was twenty-one. It was going to be his last amateur fight before he turned pro.
We walked into the place and there were a bunch of nasty-looking people in there, packed wall to wall. It was so crowded it felt like I was back in the Brownsville slums. But I didn’t give a fuck. I was feeding on all their energy. Teddy said, “Get on the scale.” So I took off my shirt and pants. I was only wearing underwear. I was really ripped. I got up on the scale and everyone ran up and su
rrounded us.
“That’s Tyson. That’s him,” I heard people say.
I was standing on the scale and started getting nervous. These guys were gangsters, legitimate tough guys, and I wasn’t from their neighborhood. But then I remembered all those films I watched. Jack Johnson would be on the scale with a crowd around him. I always visualized myself in that position. Then I heard all the whispers and whistling. “That’s the guy who knocked out everyone in one round at the juniors,” they said.
My Cus thinking kicked in. I was nobility. I was this great gladiator, ready to do battle.
“Hey, champ!” These guys smiled at me. But I’m just looking at them with contempt, like, “Fuck you, what are you looking at?”
I weighed in at around 190.
“Oh, you are too heavy,” Bennett’s trainer said. He was a deaf-mute but you could make out his words.
“But we’ll fight him. We’ll fight anybody,” the guy said.
“I’m not just anybody,” I sneered.
The place was packed. There were at least three thousand people there. We got into the ring and it was nine straight minutes of mayhem. To this day, people still talk about that fight. The crowd never stopped cheering, even during the one-minute rest between rounds they were still applauding. We were like two pit bulls. He was very smooth and elusive and experienced but then, bam, I knocked him through the ropes. I fought this guy hard, right to the end. It was the best performance of my life.
And then they gave him the decision. It was highway robbery. I was distraught. I started crying. I had never lost a fight before. In the dressing room, the deaf-mute trainer came up to me. I was still crying.
“You’re just a baby,” he said. “My man has had many, many fights. We were fighting you with everything we got. You’re better than my fighter. Don’t give up. You’re going to be champion one day.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. I cried during the whole ride home. I wanted to beat that guy so badly. We got back home and I had to get in the shower and go to school. But Teddy must have called Cus because he was waiting for me. I thought Cus was going to be mad at me for letting him down, but he had a big smile on his face.
“I heard you did great. Teddy said the guy was cut and experienced,” Cus said. “Hey, take the day off. You don’t have to go to school.”
There was no way I was not going to school. That guy had given me a black eye and I wanted to show off my badge of courage.
I didn’t let that controversial loss get me down. I kept fighting at smokers and knocking out each of my opponents. Cus began coming to more of my fights. He loved it when I would act arrogant and give off an imperious air. Cus was plenty arrogant himself. One time, I was fighting a twenty-four-year-old guy who had been the champion of his region since he was sixteen. No one had ever beaten him.
Before the fight, one of the local boxing officials came over to us.
“Cus, the man you’re fighting is big, strong, and scary,” he said.
Cus didn’t bat an eye.
“My boy’s business is to put big, strong, scary men in their place.”
I heard that and oh, my heart. Arrrghh. I would turn into fucking hot blue fire. I got so pumped up that I wanted to fight those guys before we got into the ring.
Once, I didn’t bathe for three days leading up to a fight. All I thought about was hurting my opponent. I didn’t know anything about my opponents in these smokers, there were no videos to watch, no TV appearances by them. So I always imagined that the people I was fighting were the people who had bullied me when I was younger. It was retribution time. No one would ever pick on me again.
Whenever I displayed the slightest bit of humanity at a fight, Cus would be all over me. A guy might try to shake my hand before our fight in a gesture of sportsmanship. If I shook it, Cus went ballistic.
The only display of compassion that he didn’t criticize was when I would pick up my opponents after I knocked them out. Dempsey would do that all the time. He would pick up his vanquished opponent, take him back to his corner, hold him, and kiss him. That was right after he tried to eviscerate him. So I’d pick them up and give them a kiss. “Are you okay? I love you, brother.” It was almost humiliating for them.
Cus didn’t like me to celebrate my knockouts. No high fives, no dance steps.
“You’ve been practicing this for two years and you’re acting like you’re surprised this happened?” he’d say.
To Cus, my opponents were food. Nourishment. Something you had to eat to live. If I did good in a fight, Cus would reward me. Nice clothes, shoes. When I won one of my junior championships, he bought me gold teeth. When I got my gold in the ’80s, most people would think, “Ugh, criminals wear gold teeth. Be careful.” But Cus loved it because all the old-time fighters got gold teeth to celebrate their success.
You’d think with all these knockouts and the junior championship Cus would have had little to criticize. Not Cus. He always treated me like a prima donna in front of people, but behind closed doors it wasn’t like that. I’d be alone with him at the house and he’d sit me down.
“You know, you had your hand low. With all due respect, if that gentleman was a bit more professional, a little bit calmer, he would have hit you with that punch.”
This was after I had knocked the guy out! Everybody had been congratulating me on my right-hand KO. Cus didn’t say I would have gotten knocked out. He said he would have hit me! He would put that idea of getting hit by that punch in my head all day. Then after a couple of days, he’d run that shit again.
“Remember after the fight I told you that guy would have hit you. . . .”
AAAGGGHH.
Cus was all about manipulation, psychological warfare. He believed that 90 percent of boxing was psychological and not physical. Will, not skill. So when I was fifteen, he began taking me to a hypnotherapist named John Halpin. He had an office on Central Park West in the city. I’d lie down on the floor of John’s office and he’d go through all the stages of relaxation: your head, your eyes, your arms, your legs, all getting heavy. Once I was under, he’d tell me whatever Cus wanted him to say. Cus would write out the suggestions on a piece of paper and John would recite them out loud.
“You’re the world’s greatest fighter. I’m not telling you this because I’m trying to make you believe you are something that you’re not, I’m telling you this because you can actually do this; this is what you were actually born to do.”
Halpin showed us a method by which we could put ourselves into a hypnotic state anytime we wanted. When we were back up in Catskill, I’d lie down on the floor or in my bedroom and Cus would be sitting next to me. I’d start to relax and go into my hypnotic state and Cus would talk. Sometimes he’d talk in generalities like I was the best fighter in the world but sometimes it would be specifics.
“Your jab is like a weapon. You throw punches that are ferocious, with bad intentions. You have a wonderful right hand. You haven’t really believed in it but now you will. You are a scourge from God. The world will know your name from now until the eons of oblivion.”
It was some really deep shit. And I believed it.
Sometimes Cus would wake me up in the middle of the night and do his suggestions. Sometimes he didn’t even have to talk, I could feel his words coming through my mind telepathically.
I became focused on the hypnosis. I thought this was a secret method that was going to help me. Some people might think this was crazy but I believed everything that Cus was telling me. I embraced it religiously. Cus was my God. And this old white guy was telling me that I was the apex. Why did I have to be the best that ever existed?
• • •
Now that I was a gladiator and a god among men, it seemed a little demeaning that I had to go to high school. Then, in the fall of 1981, I got in trouble at Catskill High. One of my teachers, a real ignorant redneck, s
tarted arguing with me and threw a book at me. I got up and smacked the shit out of him in front of all the other students. They suspended me. So Cus grabbed me and we marched into the school and confronted the principal, Mr. Stickler, and the teacher. You would have thought Cus was Clarence Darrow the way he was defending me.
“You maintain that you merely dropped the book and it hit Mike by accident,” Cus grilled the teacher. “But if, as you claim, you dropped the book, how could it have been propelled into the air and into Mike’s physical person? It would have harmlessly fallen to the floor without causing any injury to anyone.”
Cus was pacing the room, making sudden stops and pointing dramatically at my teacher as if he was the guilty party.
They finally compromised and let me stop attending school as long as I got a tutor. Cus was hurt that I was leaving school. He had planned to throw me a big graduation party. On the way home from the meeting at the high school, I looked over at Cus. “Come on. I’m ready to go to the gym.”
He just looked back at me. “Come on,” he said.
• • •
June of 1982 rolled around and it was time for me to defend my Junior Olympics championship. By now my reputation had certainly preceded me. Parents pulled their kids out of the tournament in fear of them fighting me. John Condon, who was part of the Golden Gloves tournaments, wouldn’t let me compete. “I’ve seen you fight. You’re too mean. I can’t let you fight these kids. You’d rip them apart.”
My second Junior Olympics started off well. We were back in Colorado, and in my preliminary matches I knocked out all of my opponents. Then it was time for the finals where I’d defend my title. That’s when the pressure got to me. I saw all of the cameras and my insecurities started to kick in. There were all these established boxing officials saying great things about me. I thought that that was wonderful, but that it was all going to end because I was filthy, I was dirty. Even so, I certainly didn’t want to let Brownsville down. Cus had told me many times that if I listened to him, “when your mother walks the streets of Brownsville, people will carry her groceries.”