The stories tumble out from Tyson. There was the time he and Denise played doctor on a sleeping Rodney. Tyson took a razor black, sliced his arm, and poured in alcohol into the wound. Tyson stopped going to school. He joined a gang, the Jolly Stompers. He drank cheap liquor and smoked cigarettes. He stole from fruit stands. He beat up other kids without provocation. He would offer to carry a woman’s grocery bags, then run off with either the food or her purse. Tyson became an expert pickpocket. He particularly enjoyed ripping gold chains from the necks of women at bus stops. As Tyson once said, he relished a concept of himself as Brownsville’s own Artful Dodger.
Whether those stories were true or not didn’t seem to matter to him. Tyson’s life as champion would reach the point where appearance and reality—what people wanted to believe about him, and who he really was—became hopelessly blurred. He would be raw material to feed cultural curiosity about the nature and origins of sociopathic viciousness. By early 1988, Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith, taking his lead from such stories by Tyson, would succumb to literary romanticism and equate the rage in Tyson with social ethics. “He is justice!” Smith wrote about Tyson after being told about the rooftop battle. “Instincts haven’t made him fight. Outraged innocence has.”
The idea that Tyson became a fighter in order to right the wrongs done to his person, family, neighborhood, class, and race ignored what was probably the most significant point about what really happened on that rooftop. Tyson reveled in a perverse romanticism about his past, to disguise rather than reveal.
The rage was rooted in feelings of confusion about his life—about where his next meal would come from, what his future might be, who would care for him, and most important, whether his mother, or anyone else, loved him. The rage set in motion a vicious cycle in which rage only pushed farther away the people closest to him. It also alienated Tyson from himself. When rage is your only friend, all the other qualities of human nature—kindness, pity, affection—wither. No human being can live that way for long, and Tyson, if ever he was as far from human as he wanted others to believe, surely didn’t. Rage and a life of systematic violence meant death. Within Tyson there was always a whispering voice that sought life. He was a survivor.
By the age of eleven, Tyson was going in and out of juvenile detention centers in Brooklyn. Tyson escaped as often as he could. By the age of twelve, he had graduated to Spofford, a medium-security facility in the Bronx. A dozen times he went there for short stays, until the family courts, and his mother, realized that he had to be sent out of New York. Just thirteen years old, Tyson went to the Tryon School for Boys, two hundred miles upstate in the town of Johnstown. There he would either straighten out or they would keep him until the age of sixteen.
Many of the kids who end up in places like Tryon go on to become adult felons and do a stint or two in prison before making an effort to go straight. Tyson, to the amazement of everyone who knew him then, started his reform early.
In comparison to Spofford, Tryon was a country club. “Instructors” referred to it as a “campus.” The boys lived in “cottages.” There were no chaotic dormitories, fences, barbed wire, or barred windows. Boys lived one to a room. The food was plain, and starchy, but it came three times a day, 365 days of the year. There were movies, school classes, trade instruction, and sports. It was not unusual for some boys to run away a few days before discharge so that they could enjoy the punishment of staying longer. The alternative, after all, was a return to the streets of New York.
There are two different versions of what happened to Tyson soon after he arrived. In the first one, he got locked up in the “secure” cottage called Elmwood after some violent outburst. While there, he found out that one of the supervisors, Bobby Stewart, was a former professional boxer. He pleaded to see him, begged for a lesson, got it, and was discovered.
The second version makes more sense. Muhammad Ali visited Spofford once. Tyson marveled at the man, but more than that reflected on the living, breathing symbolism of his life. Ali was a cultural icon of the black man making it his way in a white world. The allure of Ali promised the acquisition of money and power without compromise. For the boy who had learned to be alone, the idea of Ali, regardless of the realities, promised that, if he so chose, he would never need anyone else again. All he had to do was learn to box. And Bobby Stewart, Tyson decided, would be his teacher.
Bobby Stewart had a reputation around Tryon as tough and unforgiving, a strict disciplinarian who considered most of the kids incapable of reform. His pessimism came from the disappointments of his own life.
He was born and raised in Amsterdam, New York, a small upstate town that had crumbling nineteenth-century mills and a dim future. Stewart played football in high school, married at seventeen, then began to box in the amateurs. In 1974, he won the National Golden Gloves light heavyweight title. Instead of holding out for the 1976 Olympics, which would produce such future boxing stars as Sugar Ray Leonard, he turned pro. Stewart won thirteen fights and lost three, then burned out. He was a small-town boy with an honest heart and few dreams.
After boxing, Stewart managed a family-owned bar. He worked part-time at Tryon, then went on staff in 1978. By the time Tyson arrived in 1980, Stewart was still fit, and he had trimmed down in weight. He was barely six feet tall and sinewy, and he had a small, boxy head, a flush of red in his cheeks, and pummeled-down pug nose. He had boyish Scotchman’s looks but a gruff blue-collar manner and slurred speech, the result of too many blows to the head.
Stewart had been hired to start a boxing program. Several boys wanted to box, but according to Stewart, few had the desire or the discipline to learn more than the basics. Usually, he just laced the gloves on them and let them flail away for a round or two. Tyson would change Stewart’s dismal view of human nature. He differed in every respect.
Once he was placed in Elmwood, Tyson asked for Stewart. For two days, Stewart ignored him. Tyson suddenly became a model inmate. Stewart didn’t fall for it. One night he waited for Tyson to fall asleep, then banged violently on his door.
“What the fuck do you want?” he yelled.
“Mr. Stewart, I want to be a fighter,” Tyson said meekly.
“So do the rest of these scumbags. They wouldn’t be here if they were tough and had balls like a fighter. They’re losers!” Stewart spit out.
Tyson said it again. “I want to be a fighter.”
For two weeks Stewart put Tyson off. With each passing day, Tyson’s behavior improved. Finally, Stewart put Tyson in the ring. There Tyson made an incongruous sight. At thirteen years of age he packed almost two hundred pounds of slablike mass into a five-foot, eight-inch frame. Every part of him looked thick. His head appeared large and out of proportion to his body. He didn’t so much walk as lumber, as if the mass, and its arrangement, was an insupportable burden. The most obvious anomaly was his voice—too high-pitched to match the menacing physique and with a slight, almost farcical lisp.
Stewart didn’t want to take any chances. He dared not let Tyson pummel one of the other boys and become some kind of bully. So into the ring went Stewart himself, and for three rounds he humiliated Tyson.
“After we finished, the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Can we do it again tomorrow?’” Stewart recalled later. “I didn’t care if he could box—I was amazed with his mind. He wanted to better himself. He knew he wanted that at age thirteen. It almost scared me. None of the other kids were like that.”
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