Monteith Illingworth - Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

First and foremost, they could not risk another defeat in the ring. For an amateur losing was excusable. For a professional it would severely diminish the aura they wanted to build around Tyson as an indestructible force in the ring and an inevitable champion of the heavyweight division. Opponents had to be selected carefully, with all factors—such as fight duration, ring size, and glove weight—stacked in Tyson’s favor.

Second, they hoped to schedule a fight at least once a month. That served several purposes. It fit in with the mortality factor. It was also a way of maintaining control over Tyson and sustaining his burning intensity. And as long as he could be kept at that upper level of performance, Tyson’s tendency to fall into a passive state in the ring might just be avoided.

Third, just as D’Amato had with Floyd Patterson, they had to find promoters willing to let them make most of the decisions. That was the best way to retain absolute control over Tyson’s career.

In this first stage of Tyson’s career, they needed a completely malleable promoter. Matt Baranski suggested a husband-and-wife team based in Troy, New York, an hour north of Catskill. The Millers ran a true mom-and-pop promoting business. They rarely made much money and certainly couldn’t afford to lose any. Jacobs and Cayton would finance the whole promotion. The Millers would be paid out of profits from ticket sales, if any. Jacobs and Cayton also promised to cover all losses.

Tyson’s professional debut came against a club fighter named Hector Mercedes on March 6, 1985, in Albany, New York. Tyson’s hair was cropped short at the sides in a homage to the Spartan macho aesthetic of Jack Dempsey. Tyson swarmed over the taller, slower Mercedes, who must have felt as if he were fighting two opponents: one who only punched and another who eluded. Tyson then settled down into a more fluid expression of his unique style. He’d revised the “peek-a-boo” by holding his gloves on either side of the chin instead of the temple. That way his punches got off more quickly. He knocked out Mercedes in the first round.

As expected, the fight did not turn a profit. Jacobs and Cayton paid Tyson a purse of five hundred dollars. D’Amato paid Rooney 10 percent of that, gave Tyson one hundred dollars, and put the remainder away.

Tyson’s second fight came on April 10 against Trent Singleton. This time he looked more studied. He charged straight in, feinted with his head, slipped and weaved, all the while not getting hit. Then, suddenly, Tyson popped up in close range and let go a series of left and right hooks to the body and head. Singleton went down twice within seconds. When he got up, Tyson reverted to a more conventional offense. He pinned Singleton against the ropes and threw a series of punches, displaying textbook “finishing” abilities. Singelton crumbled. Tyson lunged down to hit his prone opponent again—a serious infraction of the rules—but was stopped by the referee. He turned to his cornermen, Kevin Rooney and Matt Baranski, and smirked.

In his third fight, five weeks later, Tyson regressed. His first two opponents had been tall and black. This one, Don Halpin, was the same height as Tyson and white. From the moment the bell rang, Tyson looked sluggish. There was little head and upper body movement. At times, he let his gloves drop.

Halpin made things worse by standing up to Tyson’s punches. He also tended to crouch, which may have confused Tyson. From early in the amateurs, Tyson was always more effective with a taller opponent. It gave him the chance to use his smaller size to advantage. By the second round, he had started to get lazy on the inside, which enabled Halpin to connect with a few straight rights.

By the fourth round, Tyson began to look like any other conventionally trained fighter. Fortunately, because of his superior hand speed and power, he was better at being average than Halpin. Tyson won by a knockout in the fourth, and tried to hit Halpin as he fell. This time the referee openly rebuked him.

It wasn’t Tyson’s foul play—and there would be much more of it to come—that worried D’Amato and Jacobs afterwards. The passivity had struck their prospect once again, and this time with a handpicked, mediocre opponent. They had no idea what to do about it. “They didn’t know Mike,” Baranski said. “He was out of control most of the time.”

For the next fight Jacobs arranged to get Tyson on ESPN, the sports cable station that stages a weekly fightnight to showcase up-and-coming contenders. These events were organized by top Rank Boxing, owned by Bob Arum. Arum was one of the country’s two top promoters, the other being Don King. Jacobs ran a risk letting Tyson come within Arum’s grasp. Like King, he was notorious for spiriting away other people’s fighters with promises of big money. Jacobs had had one such battle with Arum over Wilfred Benitez.

But Arum had something that Jacobs desperately wanted. Due to his losses at the Olympic trials, Tyson had no chance yet of getting on one of the big three broadcast networks. He had to start with cable. Jacobs made an appeal to Arum’s appetite for power. For several years Arum had been battling with King over turf. Arum ended up doing most of the major middleweight fights, and King the heavyweights. Jacobs knew that Arum had always wanted to get his hands on a major heavyweight contender and challenge King for control of that division.

Tyson’s first fight under Arum was against Ricardo Spain on June 20 in Atlantic City at the Resorts International hotel-casino. D’Amato and Jacobs didn’t want to take any chances with Spain. His height, six-foot-two, didn’t worry them, and neither did his record of seven wins, five by knockout. It was his weight, a mere 184¼ pounds, or around thirty pounds under the average for a heavyweight. “They were really afraid that because he was so much lighter than Mike, Spain would run,” said Nick Beck, who was at the fight. “Chasing him around the ring would have made Mike look bad.”

The fight was scheduled for four rounds. They decided the night before to try increasing it to six, which would give Tyson plenty of time to score a knockout. Jacobs called Spain’s manager. He didn’t want to do it. Jacobs demanded to talk to Spain. “He offered Spain a few hundred dollars on top of his purse for two more rounds,” said Beck. Spain took the money.

Tyson knocked him out in thirty-nine seconds of the first round. Spain, whose nom de pug was “The Ram,” had unwisely decided to stand and fight, a mistake with Tyson, as many other fighters would soon discover. Ironically, Jacobs’s offer may have also made Spain overconfident. If they were that worried about their man’s chances, Spain may have reasoned, maybe he wasn’t such a threat. No doubt that was the conclusion they hoped Spain would reach.

A few weeks later, Tyson went on ESPN again, this time to fight six-foot-four, 226½ pound John Alderson, a twenty-one-year-old former West Virginia coal miner. Alderson was four victories into his return from a three-year layoff from the ring. He made the perfect victim for Tyson. He had the tall heavyweight’s habit of leaning away from a punch. That might have worked against Tyson if Alderson also had good hand speed and leg work, plus punch accuracy, but he didn’t. Tyson easily eluded the punches. He then chopped away with combinations at the body and head as if trying to fell an old red oak, bloodying Alderson’s nose and eye, and dropping him twice until the referee called the fight over in the second round.

The ESPN commentator noted that Tyson switched to being a southpaw, or a left-hander, midway through the first round. He had indeed been taught—perhaps after a suggestion by Jacobs, who was lethal with both hands on the handball court—to fight as a right- and left-hander. That confused opponents. They couldn’t figure out which side of Tyson was the bigger threat. The answer, of course, was both.