Monteith Illingworth - Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

The whole, sordid mess blew open a month after the fight. Rosensohn’s joy over lucking into promotional control of the new heavyweight champion didn’t last long. He lost $40,000 on the fight. He personally owed $10,000 to a gangster. Rosensohn then found out that Salerno and Black, in an effort to hide their roles, had transferred their ownership in his company to a front man, Vincent Velella, a Republican state politician from East Harlem, then also making a bid for a municipal court judgeship. Rosensohn made an unwise power bid. He went public with the story that he’d been forced to sell two-thirds of his company, perhaps to arm-twist Salerno and Black into selling back their interest or risk exposure.

The bid backfired. The New York State Athletic Commission and the attorney general’s office both conducted investigations. Rosensohn was stripped of his promoter’s license and forced to sell his rights to the rematch. He moved to California, became a salesman, and in 1988 committed suicide. Salerno, Black, and Velella were barred from boxing. Salerno rose in the mob; then, in 1985, old and sick, he was convicted in the infamous “Pizza Connection” heroin-smuggling case and sent to prison for what remained of his life. Finally, the scandal prompted Senator Estes Kefauver to establish the Senate Antimonopoly Subcommittee to investigate boxing.

D’Amato was the only principal who refused to testify. He fled to Puerto Rico during the hearings. Always wary of his enemies, D’Amato traveled under the name Carl Dudley. The Athletic Commission criticized D’Amato for trying to wrest control of the heavyweight division by acting as both manager and promoter, and revoked his manager’s license. The state attorney general also began preparing an antitrust action against D’Amato, then dropped the case. D’Amato blamed it all on old enemies at the I.B.C. “They are trying to destroy me,” he told Gay Talese, then a reporter for the New York Times .

Other reporters were not so gentle with D’Amato. His only diehard supporter among the New York sportswriting community, columnist Jimmy Cannon, was a close friend until he inquired about D’Amato’s meddling with Brian London. D’Amato said he “wasn’t at liberty to discuss it.” Cannon became one of D’Amato’s biggest critics. He was “Cus the Mus” from then on in Cannon’s column. During the Patterson/Johansson scandal, Harold Weissman, sports columnist for the tabloid New York Mirror , dubbed him the “Neurotic Napoleon.” Dan Parker, another columnist at the Mirror , ridiculed D’Amato’s new boxing “system,” in which the writer included business practices: “guaranteed to get everyone in trouble and your fighter knocked out.”

What did D’Amato know and when did he know it? Perhaps he didn’t conspire to drive Rosensohn to Salerno and Black. Maybe Rosensohn was just a loose cannon moved by his own inexperience, bad judgment, and greed. D’Amato apparently never discussed the details of what happened with anyone. It’s hard to believe, however, that a man so obsessed with control would not have known about the Salerno-Black connection. “He was too close to Charlie Black not to know,” said José Torres, who became D’Amato’s next boxing protégé.

And so an observer’s proposition: D’Amato at the least knew about Salerno and Black, felt the promotion slip from his grasp, and rationalized the problem away. “He forgot that a shining knight on a white horse was not supposed to do those things,” opined Fariello.

Patterson made $600,000 from the purse and ancillary income. The scandal, though, set in motion Patterson’s disillusionment with his domineering father figure-mentor-manager. D’Amato won back his manager’s license back on a legal technicality. He stayed in Patterson’s corner through his next three victories, all against Johansson. Beginning with the first rematch, Patterson eschewed D’Amato’s “system” for the conventional style. It was the act of a young man seeking his own identity. Fortunately for Patterson, Johansson proved to be an inconsistent boxer.

A new group of promoters, conniving with and far more savvy than those D’Amato selected, took over Patterson’s fights. They sped up his disillusionment with stories about D’Amato’s supposed mob ties and paranoiac behavior. Matters came to a head when Patterson, egged on by his new promoters, accepted a fight against a former convict and rising contender, Sonny Liston. D’Amato warned him not to fight Liston. Without the benefit of the “system,” D’Amato felt, Patterson offered too easy and too vulnerable a target to a much bigger, harder-punching heavyweight. Patterson fired D’Amato, not to his face but through a lawyer. He was tired, he said, of being “dominated.”

Liston knocked Patterson out in the first round. Patterson never again, despite three attempts, won the title. In a final ironic twist, Liston’s management group included none other than mobster Frankie Carbo.

After the split with Patterson, the part of D’Amato that lusted for power died. So, too, did his willingness to ever again get emotionally attached to a fighter. “When my feelings are involved I become a chump,” he told an interviewer in 1976. “That’s why I never trust anything. I just trust that detachment. My feelings got involved with Patterson.”

Everything else about D’Amato remained virtually intact, from an unflagging belief in the technical and spiritual merits of his “system” to the wracking paranoia. He also still wanted to develop another champion.

* * *

José Torres was eighteen years old when he won the silver medal as a middleweight in the 1956 Olympics. The second of seven children, he was born and raised in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Torres’s father owned a small trucking business. A family friend introduced Torres to D’Amato after the Olympics and D’Amato took him on, reluctantly.

Torres had basic talent but little taste for D’Amato’s many disciplines. Though married with children, he frequently bolted camp to carouse or spend a few days with a mistress. Torres then often lied to D’Amato about why he wasn’t training. “José wasn’t such a bad guy,” said Fariello, his trainer. “He got stupid about things. His judgment was dumb.”

Besides being distracted with Patterson, D’Amato never had the confidence in Torres’s abilities to actively develop his career. That, and the lingering fears about the I.B.C., kept Torres in a perennial backwater. D’Amato’s emotional detachment also may have affected his management of Torres. By deciding not to get as intimate with Torres as he had gotten with Patterson, D’Amato didn’t mine the deepest parts of Torres’s potential. “With Torres everything was done cold, cool, and calculating,” admitted D’Amato in a 1965 Sports Illustrated article.

For six years Torres fought and won, first as a middleweight and then as a light heavyweight, against a gaggle of lackluster opponents. D’Amato refused to let him fight at Madison Square Garden for the larger purses. Instead, Torres fought at smaller local arenas and in a host of other cities and towns, such as Boston and Toronto, which lacked constituencies of Puerto Ricans to boost ticket sales. During those six years he earned a total of only $60,000. D’Amato, claiming that he had earned enough money from Patterson’s career, did not take a manager’s cut.

Finally, against D’Amato’s wishes, Torres fought chàmpion Willie Pastrano for the light heavyweight title at the Garden in March 1965. Although not favored, he won on a punch to Pastrano’s liver. That turned out to be the climax of his career. After a few defenses against unknowns, he lost the title just over a year later to Dick Tiger in a listless performance. Torres tried to win the title back in a May 1967 rematch, but lost again. Puerto Ricans in the audience were so angered with Torres (he was already disliked for favoring the New York literary salons and the company of Norman Mailer over the environs of El Barrio) that they showered the ring with bottles and chairs in a melee that lasted twenty minutes. Torres announced soon afterwards that he would retire to write an “autobiographical novel.”