Monteith Illingworth - Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

The increase in speed on both offense and defense played into other new ideas D’Amato had been working on over the years. D’Amato argued that the most damaging punch, physically and psychologically, was the one a fighter couldn’t see coming. He’d lose that split second of response time needed to try and move away from the blow or to steel himself against the impact. Furthermore, D’Amato believed that a fighter would punch where he last saw the target. To punch and miss was also intensely discouraging. Taking punches that couldn’t be seen and trying to hit a target that wasn’t there—that’s the impact D’Amato wanted his fighters to have on an opponent. Besides wreaking physical damage, it sapped the will.

Just to be sure, D’Amato added a few more advanced refinements. In Torres’s training for the Willie Pastrano fight, D’Amato wrapped two mattresses around a pole. He then numbered the main types of punches, 1 through 7, and wrote those numbers on the makeshift bag. Torres set up in front of the bag and D’Amato called out the combinations.

A “5-4” was a left hook to the body to weaken the opponent, followed by a right uppercut to the chin. The “7-2-3” was a left jab to the head that set up a straight right to the head and a left uppercut. Punch “6” was a straight right to the body and “1” a straight left to the head. Every combination included the requisite defensive movements.

Such numbering increased punching accuracy and created an economical verbal shorthand to use in training and in an actual fight. D’Amato put a series of such numbered combinations on an audiotape that Torres, and many fighters after him, would train to. “Punch and move, punch and move. Cus trained you to fight by habit and instinct,” remembered Torres. “You shouldn’t have to think for half a second.” Torres gave the mattress a name, the “Willie Bag,” after his upcoming opponent, Willie Pastrano.

Boxing people looked skeptically at D’Amato’s system when it was used by Patterson. When he took the title, they began to tolerate it. With Patterson’s defeat and slow demise, the system was all but rejected. Even though it was Patterson who abandoned the system in the second half of his career—he earned the distinction of being knocked down in title bouts more times, sixteen in all, than any other fighter in history—D’Amato’s system, rightly or wrongly, still took partial blame. Torres’s brief success did little to earn it new respect. Torres lacked the interest and the discipline to be consistently evasive in the ring. As he said: “I thought too much. It wasn’t instinctual enough for me.”

The boxing world gave up on D’Amato’s ideas about boxing technique, but he remained stalwart. He continued to tinker with his system, as an inventor would a device he expected to work someday when the right partner came along to help realize its potential. That partner, it turned out, was Mike Tyson.

D’Amato knew that speed, power, and elusiveness in a 200-pound-plus natural heavyweight would have the force of an atomic bomb in the ring. That’s what he saw, or dreamed of, on the day Stewart brought Tyson down from Tryon: the potential to create the most devastating heavyweight in history. He also knew that being thirteen and coming from a boy’s prison, Tyson was eminently pliable. “Mentally, he had no other choices in life because of his background,” said Atlas of his and D’Amato’s thinking at the time. “He was a perfect piece of clay.”

Atlas taught Tyson the basics. The boy already had the speed and power, but virtually no defense. They worked first on avoiding the left jab, the punch commonly used to keep an opponent at bay and to set up combinations. For the first few months, Atlas spent several hours a week throwing jabs at Tyson’s head, requiring him to “slip” to his right. Once Tyson could no longer be hit by a jab, Atlas tried other simple punches. The rule was that Tyson could only elude, not counterpunch.

D’Amato believed that fighters were hit easily by straight right hands because they had a tendency to remain stationary and hold their gloves low. When Tyson slipped to his right, he was taught to keep his left up, but more important, he learned to immediately move again. He’d slip right in a sideways motion, then weave left and slightly forward. In the weave, he was taught not to use the standard “bob” or up-and-down motion. Instead, he moved his head and shoulders in a U shape. The slip took him laterally away from the first punch, then the U -shaped weave moved under the second—whether or not it was delivered.

D’Amato had a bias against the “weave and bob,” a mainstay for the conventionally trained fighter. The weaving he liked; the bobbing, he believed, tended to fix the fighter’s position. To D’Amato’s mind, it created the illusion that by standing still and moving up and down along a vertical plane he could avoid the punches, whereas in fact, the opposite was the case. All the other fighter had to do was time his punch, D’Amato insisted; it was like hitting a jack-in-the-box.

The idea with Tyson was never to let him “hang” on either the outside or the inside. He had to be constantly moving sideways and forward in a seamless sequence. The goal was to get position and once there to deliver a combination of punches—all without getting hit.

That would seem self-evident, but few boxers could, or knew how to, do it. Slipping away made sense, but constantly moving in seemed counterintuitive. It increased the danger of getting hit. Punch and you were doubly exposed to counterpunches. Those were articles of faith to boxers, but only because they never knew how to do otherwise.

“When his defense started working, his offense did, too, because then he was in position to throw combinations of punches that the opponent couldn’t see coming,” said Atlas.

The offense: slip to the right, away from a jab, then throw a left hook to the body and another to the head. Or slip right and weave left under the next jab to get positioning on the opponent’s exposed side, and execute the same combination. Or weave to either side, hook to the body, and uppercut through the gloves. Tyson was in front, on both sides, high and low. He was taught to punch from every conceivable angle.

“We practiced those punches so much that we used to say he couldn’t do it wrong even if he wanted to,” said Atlas. Doing it right meant hitting specific targets. D’Amato laid them out: the liver on the right side, the jawbone just below the ear, the point of the chin, and the floating left-side rib.

In the advanced lessons, Atlas added a unique D’Amato-inspired wrinkle. All fighters were at the least taught to slip jabs by moving to their right. Tyson learned how to also slip a jab by moving left. An opponent expected the slip right; Tyson’s slip left would come as a small but important tactical surprise.

The training completely exploited Tyson’s natural speed and punching power. It also converted into an asset his only potential physical drawback: at five-foot-nine with a reach of a mere seventy-one inches, he was short all around. Since the reign of Jack Johnson in early 1900s, there had been seventeen widely recognized heavyweight champions, and a half dozen or so lesser ones, and in that entire group only two—Rocky Marciano and Joe Frazier—had measured under six feet. Some champions were taller (Jess Willard, the “Pottawatomie Giant” who defeated Jack Johnson in 1914, was six-foot-six-and-one-quarter with a reach of eighty-three inches), and some average (Jack Dempsey, who reigned in the early 1920s, was six-foot-one and seventy-seven inches). Marciano measured five-foot-eleven with a reach of only sixty-eight inches. Frazier was similar in his proportions to Tyson.