Pete Hamill - Piecework

Toward the end, he thought perhaps that he had the perfect heavyweight at last in young Michael Tyson, who has now knocked out all nine of his professional opponents, six in the first round. “He’s strong, he’s brave, he’s in condition, and most of all, he’s got that other thing, the mysterious thing,” Cus said, the last time I saw him. “I have no doubt he’ll be a champion. But more than that, he might be a great fighter.”

There were a lot of good fighters at the Gramercy in the late ’50s: Joe Shaw, a fierce-punching 140-pounder; light-heavyweight Jim Boyd, who’d won the gold medal in Melbourne; two more light-heavyweights, named Sylvester Banks and Paul Wright; a wonderful southpaw featherweight named Floyd Smith; and some fine amateurs ranging from bantamweight Georgie Colon to light-heavyweight Simon Ramos. But as Cus became more involved managing Patterson and Torres, the day-to-day training was left to Joe Fariello (now educating Mark Breland). Cus was away at camp with Patterson; he was up at Stillman’s with Torres, to find experienced professionals for sparring partners. And during the same period, Cus was waging his wars with the International Boxing Club and Madison Square Garden. Some people thought he grew increasingly paranoid.

“If this goes down instead of up,” he said to me one day as we stepped into an elevator in a midtown office building, “we’re in trouble.”

He laughed, but Cus meant it, too. The Mob was all over boxing when Cus brought his first good fighters out of the Gramercy Gym. The hoodlums cut into fighters, arranged tank jobs, fixed judges. Frankie Carbo was called the underworld’s commissioner of boxing, a vicious punk who lived off other men’s sweat and controlled a number of managers. Carbo was friendly, sort of, with Jim Norris, a rich bum with a hoodlum complex who ran the IBC out of the old Garden on Eighth Avenue and 50th Street. There’s no room here to relate the details of Cus D’Amato’s sustained contest with Norris, Carbo, and the Garden. Certainly he was on the moral high ground, but the terrible thing was that his personal crusade also hurt his fighters.

We’ll never know how good Patterson and Torres might have become if they’d been fighting more often, battling those fighters who were controlled by the IBC and the Garden. Certainly Torres would have made more money. I remember one main event he had to take in Boston, when he was still a hot fighter in New York. The total purse came to $28.35. Joe Fariello said, “Joe, you take the $20, I’ll take the $8, and we’ll send the 35$ to Cus.” Patterson did get rich, and Torres did become champion years later than he should have, and in the wrong division (he was one of the greatest middleweights I ever saw, but had to settle for the light-heavyweight championship in 1965). But the competitive fire of Shaw withered from lack of action; the others drifted away.

“It breaks my heart sometimes, thinking about those kids not fighting,” he said to me once. “But I don’t see any other way.”

That was the problem. From 1959 on, Cus never worked a corner for any of his fighters; he didn’t even hold a manager’s license, as a result of the botched promotion of the 1959 Patterson-Johansson fight, when it appeared (but was never proved) that Cus helped bring Fat Tony Salerno in as a money man. The fighters did their best, and for some fights Cus would come to camp, work with them, talk strategy and tactics. But Patterson broke with him, and Torres was forced to go with another manager (Cain Young) to get his chance at a title. Around the time Torres retired, Cus moved upstate, far from the gyms of the city. “I like it up there,” he said once. “I like the clear skies, the lake, where I go fishing. It’s beautiful. Beautiful.” Did he miss the gym on 14th Street? “Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes…”

The last time I saw him was almost exactly a year ago, on the 57th floor of the World Trade Center. We were there to watch Torres be sworn in as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, the first professional fighter and the first Puerto Rican ever to hold the job. “I’m so proud of José, I can’t explain it,” Cus said. We talked about Tyson and other things. And then I asked him if he’d ever gone back to the Gramercy Gym since he sold it in the ’70s. “No,” he said, and looked up at José, who was standing with Mario Cuomo at the front of the room. “No, I don’t like to look back.”

And so I did the looking back, sitting in the packed, brightly lit conference room, remembering Cus talking to me when I was 20 about the uses of fear, the meaning of courage, the need to concentrate energy and purpose in all things, and how I’d tried and failed so often to follow his lessons. I’d modeled a character on Cus in one of my novels, and he’d liked the book but objected when he saw the TV movie; on the screen, John Cassavetes stood on a ring apron talking to a fighter and smoking a cigarette. “What manager would do that? What kind of example would he be showing to a kid?” I remembered that conversation, and after José was sworn in, I turned to Cus and said, “Listen, Cus, I want to thank you for everything.” He squinted suspiciously at me. “What do you mean?” he said, and I said, “For letting me climb the stairs.”

He nodded, turned away, and said, “You goddamned writers.”

I’m sorry I never got to explain.

VILLAGE VOICE,

November 19, 1985

An artificial Christmas tree stands in a corner of the waiting room, with a bunched-up bedsheet at its base feigning snow. Unmatched pieces of cheap furniture, some wicker, some plastic, are arranged awkwardly around the edges of the room. It could be the antiseptic lobby of a second-class motel except for the view through the picture windows behind the Christmas tree: two parallel steel-mesh fences topped with barbed wire and a slope of sour lawn rising toward blank walls and tan-brick buildings. The complex is called the Indiana Youth Center. But it’s not a place where schoolkids play checkers or basketball on frigid afternoons. The barbed wire makes it clear that this is a jail.

So does the posted rule against bringing drugs or alcohol on visits; so does the order to place wallets and handbags in a locker in the far corner, along with all cash in excess of five dollars, any pens, notebooks, tape recorders, books, all hats and overcoats; and so does the stamping of your hand with invisible ink, the emptying of pockets into a plastic tray, the body search, the passage through a metal detector.

The rules of entrance obeyed, I walk down a long, wide ramp into the prison, pause at a sign forbidding weapons beyond this point, and wait for a steel-rimmed glass door to be opened. Up ahead there are other such doors, with guards and a few prisoners moving languidly along a corridor that is lit like an aquarium. The door in front of me pops open with a click. I turn right to a guard’s booth, where I hand over my pass and am told to thrust my right hand into a hole in a wooden box. An ultraviolet light certifies the stamp. I am then instructed to go through the door to the left, into the visitors’ lounge, and give the pass to the guard behind the high desk in the corner. I do what I am told and wait. In the lounge a dozen couples sit facing each other on thick plastic-covered chairs, maintaining space and privacy, drinking soda bought from machines, trying hard to be loose, glancing tensely at the clock, conscious of time. Behind them a wall of picture windows opens upon a vista of gray grass and blank, tan walls. The Indiana sky is the color of steel.

Then, suddenly, from another door, Mike Tyson appears. He smiles, gives me a hug, and says, “How are ya, buddy?”