by Mike Tyson
In September of 1984, I signed two contracts, one with Bill Cayton and one with Jimmy Jacobs. Cayton owned an advertising agency, and he signed me to a seven-year personal management contract representing me for commercials and product endorsements. Instead of the usual 10 or 15 percent, Cayton was taking 33⅓ percent. But I didn’t know the terms, I just signed it. A few weeks later, I signed a contract with Jimmy and he became my manager. Standard four-year contract, two-thirds for me, one-third for Jimmy. And then they agreed to split the income from the contracts with each other. Cus signed my management contract too. Under his signature it read, “Cus D’Amato, Advisor to Michael Tyson who shall have final approval of all decisions involving Michael Tyson.” Now I had an official management team. I knew that Cayton and Jimmy were very savvy guys with the media, and I knew that they knew how to organize shit. And with Cus making all the boxing decisions and handpicking my opponents, I was ready to begin my professional career.
Until about a week into training, when I vanished for four days. Tom Patti finally tracked me down. I was sitting in my Caddy.
“Where have you been, Mike?” Tommy asked.
“I don’t need this shit,” I vented. “My girlfriend Angie’s father is a manager at J.J. Newberry’s department store. He can get me a job making a hundred thousand dollars. I got this Caddy. I’m going to split,” I said.
The truth was, I was just nervous about fighting as a professional.
“Mike, you’re not going to make a hundred grand a year because you’re dating his daughter,” he said.
“I can do a lot of things,” I said.
“Man, you don’t have a lot of options. Get back in the gym, win your fight, and move on.”
I was back in the gym the next day. Once I got over my nerves, I was proud that I was going to be a professional fighter at just eighteen years old. I had a great team in my corner. Besides Kevin Rooney, there was Matt Baranski. Matt was a wonderful man who was a methodical tactician. Kevin was more “Aarrrgggghhh” in-your-face.
We discussed giving me a nickname. Jimmy and Bill didn’t think it was necessary, but Cus wanted to call me the Tan Terror, as an homage to Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber. I thought that was cool, but we never ran with it. But I paid homage to other heroes of mine. I had someone put a bowl over my head and go around it with an electric shaver and give me a Jack Dempsey haircut. Then I decided to go with the Spartan look that all my old heroes had, no socks, no robe. I wanted to bring that look back into the mainstream of boxing.
My first professional bout was on March 6, 1985, in Albany. My opponent was a guy named Hector Mercedes. We didn’t know anything about him, so the morning before the fight Cus got on the phone with some trainers and boxing gym owners in Puerto Rico to make sure that Mercedes wasn’t a sleeper. The night of the fight, I was nervous, but I knew I could beat the guy as soon as I saw him in the ring. I knew that Cus would match me up against a weaker opponent for my first few fights to build up my confidence.
I was right. They stopped the fight in the first round when I pummeled Hector to a kneeling position in the corner of the ring. I was excited, but back in the locker room, Cus pointed out all my flaws. “You gotta keep your hands up more. Your hands were playing around,” he said.
My next two fights were also in Albany, which was practically my hometown. A month after Mercedes, I fought Trent Singleton. I entered the ring and bowed to all four corners of the arena, then I raised my arms to the crowd like a gladiator. It didn’t take long for me to knock him down three times. The referee stopped the fight. Then I sauntered over to his corner, kissed him, and rubbed his head.
I was due to fight again in a month, so in between fights all I did was run, train, and box. That’s all Cus wanted me to do. Box, box, box, spar, spar, spar.
I fought Don Halpin on May twenty-third, and he was a much more experienced opponent. He lasted for three rounds while I was switching back and forth from a conventional stance to southpaw, experimenting and getting some ring experience. In the fourth round, I tagged him with a left and a right and he was on his way down when I hit him again with a right hook. He was on the canvas for a good amount of time before they finally got him up. Cus, of course, thought I didn’t go to the body enough and I didn’t move laterally. But Jacobs and Cayton were thrilled with the way I looked so far.
I started attracting my own following at these fights. They began showing up with little signs like they do at baseball games. One sign read GOODEN IS DOCTOR K BUT MIKE TYSON IS DOCTOR KO. I also started attracting groupies, but I wasn’t taking advantage of their advances. I was too in love with myself to think about anybody else. Actually, Cus thought I was going a little bit overboard. He thought I should go out more. So I’d go up to Albany and hang out with some of my friends there.
I hardly made any money from those early fights. My first fight lost money for the promoter, but Jimmy gave me $500. Then he took $50 from that to give to Kevin and he put $350 in the bank for me, so I walked away with $100. They were more concerned with spreading my name around than making money on these early fights. Jimmy and Cayton were the first fight managers to make highlight reels of all my knockouts and send VHS tapes to every boxing writer in the country. They were very innovative that way.
I was performing sensationally, but it seemed that Cus was getting grumpier and grumpier. Sometimes I thought that Cus thought I was an Uncle Tom. I would try to be polite to the people I’d meet and give them “Yes, ma’ams” and “No, sirs” and Cus would get on my case.
“Why are you talking to them like that? You think they’re better than you? All those people are phonies,” he’d say. Then when I acted like the god that he kept telling me I was, he’d look at me with disgust.
“You like people looking up to you, huh? Guys like Cayton and them telling you how great you are.”
I think he just needed someone to tear into. My day depended on what side of the bed Cus woke up on. By then, I had gotten my license and I would drive him to various meetings and conferences.
On June twentieth, shortly before my nineteenth birthday, I fought Ricky Spain in Atlantic City. This was my first pro fight outside of Albany, but Cus had sent me to watch big fights in cities all over the country to get me acclimated to the arenas.
“Make this your home, know this arena, know this place with your eyes closed,” he’d tell me. “You are going to be living here for a long time, so get comfortable.” He also took me along when he hung out with big-time fighters. He had me sit with them around a dinner table and get familiar with them so I’d never get intimidated by a fighter.
I was really excited to be fighting in Atlantic City and for it to be broadcast on ESPN. My opponent was unbeaten too, with a 7-0 record with five knockouts. They introduced me as “the Baby Brawler” and I don’t know about the “Baby” part, but I floored Spain twice in the first round and the ref stopped the fight.
Jimmy and Cayton were trying to get me a regular slot on ESPN, but Bob Arum, who was promoting the fights, told them that his matchmakers didn’t think 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 continue so she said, “Let’s talk.” We talked for a while and then I left with my T-shirt.
After that, 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.