Monteith Illingworth - Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

After Torres, D’Amato wallowed. In 1966, he moved upstate to the town of New Paltz to manage Buster Mathis, a journeyman heavyweight prospect who gained some cachet when he beat Joe Frazier in the 1965 U.S. Olympic trials. They met again in 1968, Frazier won (and went on to considerable fame when he defeated Muhammad Ali in 1971, a match generally regarded as one of boxing’s greatest displays of ability and courage), and Mathis’s career fizzled out.

Even before Mathis finally flagged in the ring, D’Amato’s paranoia ended his role as manager. He became convinced that Mathis’s backers—four well-heeled New York executives all in their twenties—were out to kill him. At one point, D’Amato, disoriented and fearful, locked himself in a room at the training camp for two days.

In 1971, D’Amato declared personal bankruptcy. He claimed liabilities of $30,276 and, despite purse cuts from Patterson that should have amounted to well over a million dollars, assets of only $500. It was actually much worse. D’Amato owed $200,000 in back taxes to the IRS.

What happened to his money, whether he even got it, and what he did with it were all questions that became shrouded by D’Amato’s self-generated hero’s lore. He once said that he spent thousands of dollars on a network of spies and informants used to battle the I.B.C.

Sometime during the 1960s, D’Amato also bought a large, white, Victorian house near the town of Catskill. He gave title to the house to Camille Ewald, who also lived there. They had first met in the early 1950s. Ewald’s sister had married Tony D’Amato, one of Cus’s older brothers. Cus and Camille kept up a relationship, but never lived together for any length of time, nor did they marry or have children.

In 1968, D’Amato finally moved in with Ewald. There he stayed, training young boys, being visited by disciples every now and then, proffering advice to the odd professional boxer who came through (Ali reputedly often called for guidance) and developing the careers of a few, without much result.

It was as if he had decided to sleep for a while, just as Rip Van Winkle had, according to the fable, in the nearby Catskill mountains. Winkle logged a full twenty years. D’Amato did thirteen before being awakened by Mike Tyson. In a sense, D’Amato expected Tyson, or someone like him, a third champion, to one day come calling.

“What do you think about when you think about the future,” he was asked in 1976.

“Lately, I began to think … I said I never used power,” D’Amato responded. “See, I’m involved over here and my involvements are forms of distraction because these kids involve my undivided attention. How could I give these boys my undivided attention, which constitutes a distraction, and still be able to concentrate this power on getting somebody and doing something? I’d have to quit here and then sit down and you’d call it meditate. If I did that hard enough, and deep enough, I would get a picture and it would happen.”

“This picture, it would be for you to manage an important fighter?”

“Yes.”

To make another champion?”

“Yes.”

Chapter Three

When Tyson moved into D’Amato’s house, eight other boys lived there, all aspiring boxers, every one of them white, tough, and confident. They lived two to a room. Ewald cooked the dinners and the boys cleaned up. All other meals they cooked for themselves. Food was for the taking, though Ewald expected no one to consume more than his fair share, especially of the cookies and ice cream.

For the first few weeks, Tyson stayed in awe of his new surroundings. He did as he was asked, talked little, and acted shyly. At dinner, he closely watched the other boys to learn table manners. D’Amato, of course, lectured constantly. Most of the time, Tyson could barely follow his train of thought. A week into his stay, D’Amato gave him a book, Zen and the Art of Archery . Tyson couldn’t get past the first page. He was more interested in reading the books on boxing.

Tyson’s feelings of awe gave way to suspicion. Through most of that summer of 1980, D’Amato spent far more time talking with Tyson than training him in the gym. Every night and morning he told him to repeat out loud the words “Day by day in every way, I’m getting better and better.” D’Amato came into Tyson’s room at night and woke him up to complete a thought from the day’s lecture, one of the many that got lost in his meanderings. Remembered Ewald of Tyson: “He was always saying, ‘What the white dude want to do with the black kid?”’

D’Amato drilled him on fear those first few months. “Who is your best friend?” D’Amato asked Tyson early on. Before he could answer, D’Amato cut in, “Fear is your best friend.”

He’d go on, “Fear is like fire … fear is like a snowball going down a hill—if you don’t learn to control it, it will get bigger and out of control … fear is like an ugly friend who smells bad but saves you from drowning.

“Control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is psychological, the excuse of the man who wants to quit.

“The night before a fight you won’t sleep. Don’t worry—the other guy didn’t either. You’ll go to the weigh-in and he looks so much bigger than you, and calmer, like ice, but he’s burning up with fear inside. Your imagination is going to credit him with abilities he doesn’t have. Remember, motion relieves tension. The moment the bell rings and you come into contact with each other, suddenly the opponent seems like everybody else, because now your imagination is dissipated.

“The fight itself is the only reality that matters. Learn to impose your will and take control over that reality.”

It took Tyson a long time to make sense of D’Amato’s ideas. The suspicions lingered. Tyson also began to feel claustrophobic around D’Amato, who was always watching him, checking up, and bearing down with another lecture. D’Amato seemed to want a kind of intimacy that Tyson had never experienced: people bonded by a mutual belief in ideas. The laws of the streets he knew, and the rules of prison, but not D’Amato’s ways. There was an impulse in Tyson to rebel. As the perennial survivor, he expected to be alone in the end anyway.

At first, it was just little things like not cleaning up after himself bringing stolen ice cream into his room, swearing at Ewald, or turning his back and walking away as D’Amato started to lecture. “When he first came it was rather difficult because there was a lack of communication,” said D’Amato in a 1984 interview.

According to D’Amato’s understanding with the state Youth Division, Tyson could train all he wanted as long as he continued with school. In September, Tyson enrolled at Catskill Junior High School. At fourteen, he was the appropriate age for the eighth grade. His academic skills lagged a year behind those of the other students; his body was several years ahead. That, plus the fact that it was the first time in almost three years that he’d been in school, let alone one in a small town, made adjustment difficult.

D’Amato did what he could to prepare the school staff for Tyson. “He would be forceful and effective in trying to explain Mike’s background to us,” said Lee A. Bordick, then the principal at Catskill JHS and now the superintendent of schools in Troy, New York. “Mike was special, he said. Allowances had to be made for him. Cus didn’t want us to dislike Mike because he had problems. He wanted us to understand how, with work, Mike had so much to gain. We worked with him. I personally did constant reality checks for Mike to make sure he understood what was expected of him.”

During the first few months, Tyson could barely sit through an entire forty-five-minute class. Many times he would walk out. He took as much interest in the academics as was required to placate D’Amato and the social worker from the Youth Division assigned to watch over him, Ernestine Coleman. His passion was boxing and only boxing. “Michael and I had arguments all the time about his not applying himself in school,” Coleman recalled. “He knew that I had the power to take him away from Cus and send him back to Tryon, so I won.”