Monteith Illingworth - Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

Of course, with Cus and the Kid the medium was also the message. It was a story that could be told in pictures and words within a few minutes. Jacobs and Cayton took that symmetry between form and content the next logical step. In 1983, the VHS format cassette videotape for home and office use was a novel publicity device already being used to sell financial services, travel, and residential real estate. Jacobs and Cayton were the first to apply it to boxing. They made more than five hundred tapes showing all of Tyson’s first-round knockouts and sent them to boxing reporters and the editors of the major sports magazines. Follow-up letters and phone calls were made to set up interviews. In the sports journalism community it came to be known as “The Tape,” a must-see and a status symbol for those who had a VCR.

The knockout tape made an appropriate companion piece to presentations of Cus and the Kid. As communications theorist Marshall McLuhan argued, the means of conveying information often has more influence on people than the information itself. On the “cool medium” of television, Tyson’s knockouts were fast and efficient, like a blast of numbing arctic air that instantly paralyzed an opponent. There was little sweat, minimal struggle, and only occasional blood; nothing, in other words, to suggest that sentient, and suffering, human beings were involved. If you weren’t a boxing fan, you could certainly watch a Tyson fight.

“It wasn’t that Jimmy and Bill did anything new or revolutionary in marketing Tyson,” pointed out boxing analyst Larry Merchant. “They just knew how to use television better than anybody in boxing had ever done before.”

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Nine days after D’Amato died, Tyson went to Houston to fight “Fast” Eddie Richardson. Asked by reporters if the death of D’Amato would adversely affect his performance, he responded like the emotionally detached professional that both D’Amato and Jacobs valued so highly: “I have certain objectives, and I’m going to fulfill them,” said Tyson.

At six-foot-six, Richardson was taller than his average opponent. Tyson came out slipping and weaving and in the first punch of the bout plowed Richardson with a straight right that he couldn’t react swiftly enough to avoid. Richardson stayed on his feet, though not for long. Tyson eluded a right and countered with a left hook to the head that literally lifted Richardson off his feet and sent him to the canvas like a toppled tower.

The television announcers struggled to make historical comparisons to explain what they’d witnessed. They appreciated only half the phenomenon. One announcer said that Tyson threw a left hook from the same crouch as Joe Frazier and that he had the power of Rocky Marciano. In fact, a lot of heavyweights threw hooks from a crouch: not only Frazier, but Max Schmeling, Marciano, and Liston. What Tyson did better than all of them was make the crouch a single component in a complex defensive and offensive ballet. His body mechanics flowed in a poetic motion that delivered the maximum quantity of physical force.

Marciano punched hard from his crouch, but he had comparatively inferior body mechanics. He was more plodding and didn’t blend in as many different types of movements. At a fighting weight of only around 189 pounds, he also had a weaker punch than Tyson, plus nowhere near the same defensive skills. That’s why Archie Moore, in their September 21, 1955, bout, was able to knock Marciano down. Moore had the hand speed to exploit the many openings in his crouch. Marciano did, though, have something that Tyson the boxing historian valued very highly. Tyson felt empathy with Marciano because they both found ways to beat taller opponents. Marciano didn’t do it as well, technically, but he fought much bigger opponents with courage. “He broke their will,” Tyson said of Marciano in a November 1985 Village Voice feature profile.

Just over a week later, Tyson arrived in Latham, New York, to meet Conroy Nelson, the stereotypical opponent. Nelson had done some homework on fighting Tyson and had decided to run rather than stand and trade punches. Tyson stalked relentlessly, eventually caught Nelson, and used him as a punching bag. Nelson had no choice but to throw something back, which was like opening the cookie jar. Tyson’s left hook took him out with ease.

On December 6, Tyson made his debut in the Felt Forum, an auxiliary arena at the famed Madison Square Garden. This would be his first exposure to the New York sports media.

Kuralt and Gumbel had been useful in creating a consumable, living room persona for Tyson. Still, Jacobs and Cayton wanted something more: for the boxing reporters at the influential New York newspapers— Newsday , the Daily News , the New York Post and the New York Times —to anoint Tyson the next great, and inevitable, heavyweight champion. That would be a slow process. They would want to see Tyson undergo several key tests, particularly the all-important “gut check” of his courage against a tough, unrelenting opponent.

That wouldn’t come with “Slamming” Sam Scaff, a white six-foot-six, 250-pound, overweight, lumbering, club fighter from Kentucky. He had had thirteen fights, many of them losses. Partway through the first round, Tyson broke Scaff’s nose. It made a bloody mess of his face, sent ringlets of crimson red down Tyson’s broad brown back, and finished the fight. Scaff, who had once sparred with two world champions, later muttered: “I’ve never been hit that hard in my life.”

Wally Matthews, the boxing reporter for New York Newsday , recalled his thoughts at the time: “I got the tape of Tyson’s knockouts Jacobs and Cayton were sending around. One after the other. They did a masterful job at convincing people that Tyson had incredible punching power. I bought it. I was skeptical, but I bought it. I think back now and I realize they’d proven only that Tyson was a good one-round fighter because he came out like a maniac. And the guys he was knocking out, everyone else did too. Tyson hadn’t been tested yet.”

The test quickly approached. Sticking to the schedule of a fight every two weeks, Tyson met Mark Young and knocked him out in one round. Then, to kick off 1986, he put on a remarkable display of his full range of abilities against David Jaco. That brought Tyson to sixteen wins, all by knockout, twelve in the first round. In the process, Tyson picked up a nom de pug : “Catskill Thunder,” coined by Randy Gordon, an announcer for a sports cable station. In a January cover story, Sports Illustrated came up with “Kid Dynamite.”

Jacobs and Cayton didn’t embrace either name. In fact, they had decided early on to stick with the simplicity of “Mike Tyson.” D’Amato had once suggested “The Tanned Terror,” as a nod to Joe Louis’s “Brown Bomber,” but that wasn’t taken on. As the children of Brownsville had discovered when Tyson started marauding the streets, his mere name, when combined with the menace evoked by his smoldering manner, the almost animal-like physique, and his performance in the ring, was more than suitable.

The Sports Illustrated cover, a slew of new television news segments, more morning show appearances, and talk of his becoming champion—it was a remarkable amount of hype over a nineteen-year-old prospect who had yet to fight anyone ranked near the top ten. What was even more remarkable is that Jacobs began to suggest, in confident asides to reporters, that Tyson would become the savior of the heavyweight division. Its one-time glory, as symbolized in the achievements of Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, and Ali, had been tarnished by the splintering of the title in 1978 into three separate crowns, each awarded by a different sanctioning body. The world had no idea who was the real champion. Tyson, claimed Jacobs, would unify the title, restore its meaning, bring back the public’s faith in boxing, and in so doing join the ranks of the great ones.