Mike Tyson E-Book

Reg Gutteridge

• Herausgeber: G2 Rights
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Written by the late, great boxing broadcaster, Reg Gutteridge, this is the inside story of Mike Tyson, the most explosive and controversial world heavyweight boxing champion of all time.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to the memory of the Gutteridge Twins who taught Reg left from right; and to George Giller who taught Norman right from wrong.

MIKE TYSON

The Release of Power

MIKE TYSON

The Release of Power

REG GUTTERIDGE OBE and Norman Giller

RETRO CLASSICS

RETRO CLASSICS is a collection of facsimile reproductions

of popular bestsellers from the 1980s and 1990s

Mike Tyson: The Release of Power was first published in 1995 by Queen Anne Press

Re-issued in 2012 as a Retro Classic

by G2 Rights

in association with Lennard Publishing

Windmill Cottage

Mackerye End

Harpenden

Hertfordshire

AL5 5DR

Copyright © Reg Gutteridge and Normal Giller 1995

ISBN 978-1-909040-24-3

Cover design: Paul Cooper

Cover photographs: (front) Colorsport, (back) Mike Brennan, Scope Features.

Colour photographs: Mike Brennan, Scope Features

Editor: Alison Bravington

Assistant editor: Roy Mathers

Typesetting and design: Norman Giller Enterprises

Origination: Leaside Graphics

This book is a facsimile reproduction of the first edition ofMike Tyson: The Release of Power which was a bestseller in 1995.

No attempt has been made to alter any of the wording with the benefit of hindsight, or to update the book in any way.

CONTENTS

Seconds Out by Reg Gutteridge OBE

PART ONE: TYSON THE MAN

1: A Walking Time-bomb

2: Out of the Ghetto

3: The Court of ‘King’ Cus

4: Enter the Historymakers

5: Beauty and the Beast

6: Busted in Tokyo

7: The Rape Trial

8: Prisoner 922335

PART TWO: TYSON THE FIGHTER

9: The Fight File

APPENDIX

History of the Heavyweights

Mike Tyson: A Chronology

Mike Tyson: The Amateur

Mike Tyson: The Professional

World Heavyweight Title Fights

Computer Ratings

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nobody can visit the life and times of Mike Tyson without leaning heavily on the help and advice of those closest to him. Cus D'Amato and Jim Jacobs, both sadly now departed, were a constant source of information and inspiration; our thanks to Bill Cayton, Don King, Kevin Rooney, Teddy Atlas, José Torres, Bobby Stewart and a procession of good pals on the American boxing beat who passed on facts and whispers; particular thanks to the omnipotent Nigel Collins, Bristol-born Managing Editor of The Ring, who kindly allowed us to quote from his fascinating one-on-one prison interview with Tyson. Thanks, too, to Harry Mullan, Editor of Boxing News, for producing a magazine that is invaluable for anybody wanting to know the exact facts of what goes on in the fight game. Previous books on Tyson, and in particular For Whom the Bell Tolls and Tyson by Peter Heller were excellent points of reference, as was the controversial biography by José Torres. Publisher Adrian Stephenson, of Queen Anne Press, also has the gratitude of the authors. Without his support and encouragement this book would never have reached your hands. There will never be another quite like Mike Tyson. The man is unique. Read and enjoy.

Seconds Out

Reg Gutteridge OBE

MY co-author Norman Giller and I were introduced to a new sport some 15 years ago: Tyson Watching. Cus D’Amato, a legendary character in boxing who had guided Floyd Patterson to the world heavyweight title, told us in his Bronx drawl: “I’ve got a kid who’s going to take over from Floyd Patterson as the youngest world heavyweight champion of all time. Note the name. It’s Mike Tyson. Watch out for him.” Tyson was then barely 14 years old.

So we started watching, first with casual interest and then with fascination followed by excitement as he began to develop into an extraordinary fighting machine. What we did not realise is that our Tyson Watching would turn into a frightening, stomach-churning experience. Suddenly it was like watching a runaway truck, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. Many of us in boxing wanted to reach out and help him, but he was a law to himself and always had a finger on the self-destruct button.

We – we shall use the royal ‘we’ throughout the book – knew that Tyson was on a crash course with disaster early on in his career. The village world of boxing was alive with gossip, rumour and innuendo about his sexual practices. He was continually getting into trouble with girls, stories that were stifled by people protecting him and the millions of dollars he promised to earn with his brutal fists.

Hush money was paid to keep girls – and at least one mother – quiet. Too much was riding on Tyson’s broad shoulders to allow him literally to screw the well-laid plans for him to rule the world’s heavyweights. His co-manager Jim Jacobs, sadly no longer with us, confided: “Mike is a highly-sexed guy. He does everything with high energy, and one of the reasons we like to keep him busy in the ring and the gym is that it burns off that desire to go out and get laid.”

Cus D’Amato and Jim Jacobs were the men who did most to protect Tyson. When they both died he was suddenly left without cover and without control. The rape case that ended with his being sentenced to prison for six years was a disaster just waiting to happen.

Tyson has been a prisoner for years. A prisoner of his past.

As experienced Tyson Watchers, we knew that he was not going to be able to escape from his ghetto grounding. You can take the man out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the man. Never has the old saying been more sadly proved than by Michael Gerard Tyson. He had been taught from an early age that this was a cruel world in which you have to snatch what you want because nobody would give you a thing. If you walk round the mean back streets of Brooklyn where he grew up, as we have, you will realise that you need an animal instinct to survive. And it was the animal in him – the one we applaud in the ring – that got him locked away for three years.

This is Tyson Revisited for Norman and me. We were his first biographers just a month or two after he became the world’s youngest heavyweight champion at the age of 20 years, four months and 22 days. So much has happened to him since that it cried out for another book to record the life and times of one of the most extraordinary sportsmen of the century. We have great affection for Tyson, and consider him right up there with the immortals of the ring. That’s Tyson the Fighter. Tyson the Man is such a cocktail of a character that nobody knows which of his many personalities will surface now that he been released from prison to continue his one-man war on the world’s heavyweights.

In the following pages we will introduce you to Tyson the Man and Tyson the Fighter. Even if you don’t like boxing, you will find this a fascinating study of what happens when a ghetto boy suddenly becomes one of the most famous and fêted people in the world.

We want him to be a kingly beast in the ring and a pussycat outside. But it doesn’t work out like that. Not when you’re Mike Tyson and you have been down in the gutter. Here he comes now, warts ‘n’ all.

PART ONE

Tyson the Man

1: A Walking Time-bomb

MIKE Tyson planned a $250 million smash-and-grab raid while incarcerated in prison for a rape that he still contends he did not commit. He had an ex-convict in the mountainous shape of boxing promoter Don King as his accomplice as he plotted a comeback to the ring that could, once again, make him the richest sportsman in history.

Inmate 922335, who for three years lost his identity to a prison number, was a walking time-bomb when released from jail in the early spring of 1995 after serving half the six-year sentence handed down to him in an Indianapolis court. ‘Time-bomb Tyson’ was ready to explode in the ring in a bid to release the pent-up anger that had built up inside him since a jury found him guilty of raping an 18-year-old black beauty contestant. His smash-and-grab raid will be on the heavyweight division that he is determined to rule once again, and the $250 million is a reasonable estimate of what he will earn if he can recapture the punching power and precision that made the rest of the world’s heavyweights live in fear of him. Those of us who have been fascinated Tyson Watchers since he was just a 14-year-old schoolboy were worried as he walked out a free man that ‘Time-bomb Tyson’ could explode outside the ring.

There are many faces to the man who, at just 20, became the youngest world heavyweight champion of all time. If you asked the real Mike Tyson to stand up, there would be at least four personalities fighting to claim centre stage. You will meet all four Mike Tysons in the following pages:

The ghetto thug and controlled killer in the ring;

the wife beater and out-of-control woman molester;

the man who fancies feathered birds, loves his four-year-old daughter and looks after his 90-year-old surrogate mum, Camille Ewald,

and, our favourite, the likeable, self-educated charmer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of boxing history.

Which Tyson came out of jail in March 1995? Even Tyson could not answer that one. It could take him years to find himself. One thing for certain is that free man Tyson will be a much changed person from the one locked away in March 1992. He went in holding a Bible and came out with the Koran in his hand as a fight developed for his soul. In mileage terms, Tyson did not travel far during his three years in prison: 25 miles in fact – from the Marion County court to the high-security Indiana Youth Centre in the town of Plainfield, Indianopolis, where he served his sentence. But Tyson travelled a long, long way mentally. A major change was his consideration of a conversion from born-again Christian to the Islamic religion. At one stage during his introduction to his new faith he toyed with changing his name to Mikhail Abdul-Aziz, but no doubt Don King would have made him see that, commercially, this was not a good idea. Tyson’s Baptist church associates maintained that he would remain a Christian, while Chicago-based Muslims insisted that while in prison he had taken shahada, the Islamic statement of faith, and that, like Muhammad Ali, he had converted to Islam. The claim and counterclaim will just add to Tyson’s torment as he tries to come to terms with his new life outside the prison walls.

Uppermost in the minds of both Tyson and Don King, while the former champion was locked away, was the thought of restoring the Tyson fortunes. The $60 million he earned during his first blitz on the world heavyweight championship had been largely eaten away by legal fees, a divorce settlement, alleged mismanagement of funds and a crazy, earn-it-spend-it lifestyle. Tyson thought nothing at his out-of-control peak of buying two or three luxury motorcars at a time, spending fortunes on jewellery and house furnishings, and dazzling beautiful foxy ladies with his wealth. He admitted to being so vague about finances that he had no recollection of where the little matter of $10 million had disappeared to during a court investigation of his finances. For several months, he allowed his then wife, Robin Givens, and his mother-in-law, Ruth Roper, to take over his financial affairs. He later claimed that this had been a grievous mistake, and he has come out of prison a much wiser man. The fighter who can re-establish himself as the biggest earner in sporting history is determined not to have anybody else’s hands in his pockets other than his own.

It was not only Tyson’s fortune that shrank. The man who walked free from prison looked a shadow of the 17-stone colossus who was handcuffed and led away to the cells in March 1992. He had kept himself fit in the prison gymnasium with daily work-outs, but the awesome physique that used to promote fear in his opponents was much reduced. This led to the anti-Tyson brigade dragging up old allegations that he owed his enormous physical presence to steroids, and that the effect had now worn off. Their argument is that his dangerous mood swings that got him in trouble in the first place were the classic symptoms of somebody going down the steroid road. Tyson – “fit, but not yet fighting fit” – has always denied the claims and, even down to around 15 stone on his release from prison, he still looked a formidable force.

Perhaps the biggest change in Tyson from the man who ruled the world heavyweight division with frightening ferocity was that he was no longer a trusting person. “I have been screwed too many times in my life to trust anybody again,” he said during one of several interviews he gave while serving his time. “Now Mike Tyson hates the world. That’s a fact. I hate everybody.”

Tyson’s bitterness is understandable if you look at things through his eyes. He is convinced he did not get a fair trial when found guilty of raping Sunday school teacher Desiree Washington in an Indianapolis hotel in the summer of 1991. We give a full breakdown of the court proceedings in a later chapter but, several months before his release from prison, there was convincing evidence that Tyson was less than fairly treated.

Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a high-powered attorney acting for Tyson, told an appeals court that the trial judge who sentenced the former champion, Patricia Gifford, was selected by the prosecution, giving the state a clear advantage. “If the defence had had a choice, it would have been anyone other than Judge Gifford,” Dershowitz said.

He made the sensational revelation that, as the trial neared its conclusion, the defence learned of three women who said they saw Desiree Washington “engaging in foreplay with Tyson in a limousine just before they entered the Indianapolis hotel where she claimed she was raped”.

Dershowitz revealed that Judge Gifford did not allow the witnesses to testify because she believed the defence delayed in notifying the prosecution of this development. “The witnesses,” Dershowitz told the court, “would have corroborated Tyson’s testimony that he had reason to believe that Miss Washington would be a willing sex partner once in the hotel room”.

It is reasonable to assume that if these witnesses had been allowed to testify it could have swung the verdict of a jury that had to vote three times before finding Tyson guilty.

Dershowitz made further inroads on the prosecution case that had ended with Tyson found guilty and shamed in the eyes of the watching world: “Miss Washington was wearing a sequin-studded outfit, which she claims Tyson ‘yanked’ off her as he ‘slammed her down on the bed’. If that had happened, there would have been sequins all over the hotel room. Indeed, at the trial when the dress was gingerly introduced into evidence, sequins fell off on to the courtroom floor. But only a single sequin was found in Tyson’s hotel room after the alleged rape.”

We present more of the Dershowitz counter-arguments in the rape trial chapter. Everything points to Tyson having had a raw deal, and this is why he was a walking time-bomb when he was granted his freedom.

Even in prison Tyson could not avoid assaults on his character. He had been inside only a matter of weeks when a story broke that added yet another dark shade to the portrait we shall be painting of Tyson the Woman Molester. Erinn Cosby, 25-year-old daughter of entertainer Bill Cosby, revealed on a television show that Tyson had agreed to undergo psychotherapy three years earlier. This was at the urging of Bill Cosby, after his daughter had told her parents that he had tried to sexually assault her.

She claimed that Tyson later reneged on the therapy agreement. She told interviewer Jane Whitney on Night Talk that she went with Tyson from a New York nightclub to his home. There, she claimed, he knocked her to the ground and began groping her, but she was able to break away. “I told my parents,” she said. “They said they would handle it – and they did. I put myself through therapy. The agreement was that my parents wanted him to go to therapy for a year.” She told viewers that she ran into Tyson several weeks later at a nightclub. “He came in there looking for me – deliberately looking for me – because he was so upset that he had to go to therapy for a year. Not upset over what he had done to me. He was screaming, ‘How dare you do this, I am not going to go to therapy.’ I couldn’t believe that this man was not even concerned about anything that he had done.”

We cannot claim to have been too surprised at the way Tyson’s gargantuan sexual appetite continually got him into trouble. The late Jim Jacobs, his co-manager and an intoxicating influence on him both as a man and as a fighter, confided to us early on in his career: “We’ve got to keep him busy in the gym and in the ring to try to burn off his energy. He has a high-powered sex drive and while he’s training and fighting he can’t get laid.”

Jacobs was talking soon after shelling out several thousand dollars to buy the silence of a mother in Catskill who had complained to him that Tyson had sexually assaulted her teenage daughter. A couple of years later, Jacobs had to pay out $105,000 to settle out of court with a car park attendant who claimed Tyson had clobbered him when he went to the aid of a girl who Tyson had lewdly propositioned.

Another little-publicised incident led to Tyson breaking with his then trainer Teddy Atlas, who had looked after him from his earliest amateur days. It was reported to Atlas that Tyson, then a 16-year-old unknown, had abused a 12-year-old girl. Atlas, like Tyson, was from the ghetto and he decided to use ghetto tactics to try to frighten him into behaving properly. Legend has it that he got hold of him in a deserted gymnasium and put a gun to his head. “You step out of line once more and I’ll blow your brains out,” he told a quivering Tyson. The outcome was that Atlas was sacked as trainer, and Tyson continued on down the slippery slope that finally led to prison.

Little did Tyson know just how prophetic he was being when he said in the summer of 1990 after being sensationally dethroned by Buster Douglas as ruler of the world heavyweights: “I believe a lot of people want to see me self-destruct. They want to see me one day with handcuffs and walking into the police car, going to jail. They’ll say, ‘Look, I told you he was headed for that.’ ”

It was Tyson’s ex-wife, Robin Givens, who predicted that Tyson would turn out to be the “all American tragedy”. Perhaps that was the path he was on from his first breath of life in the ghettos of New York.

2: Out of the Ghetto

TO know Mike Tyson, you must know the environment in which he spent his formative years. New York legend has it that, in the mid-1960s, a slab of concrete was pneumatically drilled out of a Brooklyn sidewalk, was sprayed with black paint and then left to dry . . . and it became Mike Tyson. Looking at the cliff-wall-face of a body that had been honed to awesome muscular shape long before the downhill run to prison, it would be easy to take the legend as fact. But when you get inside Tyson’s 71-inch reach – as we intend to in the following pages – you discover that this is no slab of concrete. He is flesh, blood and brains; a living body with feelings and emotions that have filled out his character and personality to produce a human being far more sensitive and thoughtful than you would imagine possible when watching him brutalise opponents in the ring. But the disturbing experiences of his early life have left a deep mental scar, and even when he became, at the age of 20 years, four months and 22 days, the youngest world heavyweight champion in history, those close to him knew that he was an earthquake waiting to happen. When, as was alleged, he brutally raped a girl in an Indianapolis hotel room in the early hours of the morning in July 1991, many considered that the seeds of the deed had been sown during his days as a juvenile ghetto thug.

Academics would consider Tyson poorly educated, but he has street intelligence of Mastermind magnitude and he has developed a vocabulary that makes him sound mature beyond his years. He has added to his knowledge while in prison by reading ‘heavies’ like Friedrich Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Alexandre Dumas. “I must have read over a hundred books while I was inside,” he told The Ring Managing Editor, Nigel Collins. “Some of them nearly drove me out of my mind. They made me look at things in a new perspective. Nietzsche told me there is no God, there’s just superman. Man, I don’t want to hear that crap. Tolstoy told me women ain’t s***. Machiavelli told me don’t trust nobody. That I know already!”

The way Tyson talks is an echo from beyond the grave, because he sounds and thinks exactly like the man who moulded him, the late Cus D’Amato, of whom we will have much to reveal in the following chapter. But first, let us go back to the beginning and the legend of how Mike Tyson was quarried rather than born.

In truth, Michael Gerard Tyson was born on 30 June 1966, in the tough Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, the youngest of three children. His father was James Kirkpatrick, a massively built construction-site labourer who walked out on his family after a heart condition stopped him working. Kirkpatrick never married Mike’s mother, Lorna, and she registered his birth in her maiden name of Tyson.

One of Tyson’s regrets is that he did not get to know his father better. He died of a heart attack at the age of 68 while his son was serving his prison sentence. They had a reunion in 1989, but never became close. Kirkpatrick said that he walked out on two-year-old Tyson, his mother, his brother and sister because he “wasn’t the marrying kind”. He explained that he and Mike’s mother were not getting on after being together for seven years, and so he thought it better that he got out of her life. “I didn’t just abandon them like has been made out,” he said. “I used to pay them visits and give Mike’s mother money when I had it.”

Tyson was said by prison officials to be “distraught and upset” when told of his father’s death, but he did not request time out to attend the funeral. He only got to know his father after he had become champion, and the biggest influence on him in his formative years was Lorna, who had always been totally opposed to violence. Sadly, Lorna died of cancer in 1982 without seeing her son prove that, in the ring at least, he could control violence and turn it into a legitimate and accepted way of making himself one of the richest and most famous sportsmen of the twentieth century; on the other hand, she was saved the anguish of seeing him shamed by his prison sentence and suffering the despair of his divorce to Hollywood actress Robin Givens as he rode a nonstop rollercoaster of controversies.

In his earliest years, Mike was being fed messages of pacifism and was taught right from wrong, rather than left hook from right cross. His mother preached a love-thy-neighbour code as young Mike struggled to grow up in an area where rob-thy-neighbour was too often the rule. “My mother detested violence,” Mike recalled in an after-fight interview, while not a dozen yards away his battered opponent was being repaired after suffering grievous bodily harm. “She was a very timid and gentle person. I had only my sister, Denise, to play with because my brother, Rodney, was five years older. So I guess I picked up a lot of gentle, sort of effeminate habits. In fact when I was a kid they used to call me a ‘little fairy boy.’ ” Only a volunteer candidate for the funny farm would dare call him that to his face today, despite his occasional lisp and quiet, almost apologetic tone of voice.

Tyson confessed that violence came naturally to him from as early as he could remember. “I was in a Brooklyn hospital when I was about four, and an aunt brought me a toy gun and a doll,” he recalled. “I broke the gun by accident and I was so angry that I smashed the doll against the wall and ripped its head off. That gave me more pleasure than playing with the toys.”

The real toughening-up process started unintentionally for Tyson when his penniless mother, scraping by on welfare, moved her family from the tenement apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant to a rundown apartment block in another district of Brooklyn, Brownsville, where the streets are so mean that they say even the birds are armed. Mike was ten when he arrived in Brownsville and was pitched unsuspectingly into a world where the strongest survived and the weakest were walked on. “I was always getting set on,” he recalled. “You’d be walking along a street when a couple of big guys would stop you and steal anything you had – your sneakers, your clothes, your money. They’d take anything and then give you a whipping just for laughs.”

Mike remembers his first fight like most of us would remember our first kiss. “I was into raising pigeons,” he said. “I love those birds. I’m really at peace when I’m with them. Anyways, this particular day an older boy tried to steal one of my birds. No, to tell you the truth he ripped its head off. I was 11 at the time and had never given any thought to using violence. But I just blew. I threw everything at the guy – fists, feet, head. I became an animal and beat the living crap out of him. And d’you know something? I found I loved every second of it. I had found a way of letting all my frustration out.”

This first fight launched Tyson the Wild Boy and, instead of crossing the street when the muggers came his way, he joined them. He became a member of The Jolly Stompers. No, not a traditional jazz band. They were a notorious street gang committed to stomping on anybody who got in their way. Mike was the youngest in the gang, but had the respect of the older boys because of the way he could hold his own in fights. Included among his catalogue of crime was pickpocketing, house breaking, mugging and even armed robbery. “The older kids had the guns, while I was given the job of bag-man,” he said. “We’d go into stores and while they did the sticking up I would fill the bags from the shelves. It was really exciting and I have to admit I got a real buzz out of it. It wasn’t so much the violent stuff as outsmarting the store people. That’s what I enjoyed best, showing I could beat ‘em by cunning.”

The police records suggest that Tyson was not that clever at outsmarting the people he was trying to rob. He was caught and questioned more than 30 times during a period when he admits that he got a liking for liquor, drinking stolen booze in a bravado act to show that he could keep pace with the older boys in the gang. By picking pockets and robbing stores, Tyson got some self respect within the laws of the concrete jungle in which he was operating. He was able to buy himself decent shoes and clothes, rather than suffer the humiliation of being given second-hand clothes by charity workers at Public School 396, where he was noted more for his long absences than any academic input.

Within a year of moving to Brownsville, Mike became completely beyond the control of his distraught mother. “I used to break my mother’s heart,” he admitted shortly after winning the world championship. “I was always getting into trouble, and she’d cry and say ‘How can you do such things. I never stole a thing in my whole life.’ She had so much pride, and I just kept hurting and embarrassing her. My mother always wanted me to turn the other cheek, but a neighbour who I called Aunt Liz used to encourage me to stand up for myself and fight back when bigger kids picked on me. She would tell me to go back outside and fight back, and when I used to hesitate she would say, ‘Come on, Mike, I’ll go out there with you. You’ve got to learn to fight back or get eaten alive in this world.’ My mother, though, preferred me to forgive and forget. It really hurts me deep down that she never lived to see what I achieved. She was never able to say with real pride, ‘Look, that’s my little boy Michael. Look what he’s done. He’s champion of the whole wide world.’ All she knew me as was a wild kid causing nothing but trouble.”

After sentences at a succession of detention centres, and more than 30 arrests before he was 12, Tyson was finally ordered to the Tryon School, a viciously hard correction centre for juvenile delinquents in upstate Johnstown, New York. It was a prison in everything but name. Ernestine Coleman, a New York social worker, recalled: “I was appointed Mike’s caseworker after he had been adjudged a juvenile delinquent. He acted up when first sent to Sopporth Juvenile Center, and it was necessary to send him to Tryon where it was hoped he would respond to the much harder discipline of that school. It was clear there was a nice person somewhere below Mike’s surface, but it would need somebody to win his trust to bring the best out of him. He could be very surly and suspicious with anybody he didn’t know.”

Tyson was just 13 when he arrived at the Tryon School, but he was a boy in a man’s body and the staff struggled to control him. He was wild and undisciplined, and wanted to fight the system that had been designed to try to put him on the right road and point him away from what looked a certain path to major crimes. Bobby Stewart, a former professional fighter and a counsellor at the School, has vivid memories of the first time he saw Tyson. “He was in handcuffs,” he recalled. “Two members of the school staff were marching him across the grounds towards Elmwood Cottage, which was my base as counsellor. Elmwood was known as the ‘bad’ cottage because it was where the real troublemakers were sent to be ironed out. Suddenly this powerfully built youngster, with shoulders that went on for ever, was brought dragging and protesting into the cottage and he was brimming over with hatred for the world. He had beaten up another boy at the school and now we had charge of him. Everything about his aggressive manner and bad attitude suggested he was going to be a tough handful.”

Little did Tyson and Stewart know it at the time, but his arrival at the cottage was to be one of the most important of all milestones in Mike’s life. Social worker Stewart looked for common ground on which he could meet Tyson, who was considered by some members of the staff to be retarded because of his total lack of communication. “I had nothing to say to anyone,” is how Tyson put it when looking back on his early days at Tryon. “I nearly went crazy when they first sent me there. It was in the middle of woods in upstate New York and a million miles away from the Brooklyn streets where I’d grown up. I was so frustrated that I used to start fights every day. You do that, they isolate you. So they kept locking me up, and by locking me up they just made me more angry and frustrated. I didn’t want to communicate with nobody. There was nobody I trusted. In truth, I have to admit I had become obnoxious. Then I had the luck to meet Bobby Stewart. I owe Bobby so much because he was the first person to listen to me. He opened the door to a new life.”

The patient Stewart opened up a line of communication by talking boxing to the young rebel without a pause. He had been the National Golden Gloves light-heavyweight champion in 1974 and a good-class professional. Tyson sat up and took notice from the minute Stewart started to recall his boxing career. His interest in the fight game had been briefly awakened six years earlier when he was shown a picture of then world champion Smokin’ Joe Frazier in boxing pose. It had captured his imagination but, before he could find out how to turn his fascination into action, he got caught up in the street gang environment where there was no room for Marquess of Queensberry rules. Queensboro rules were more the style. A year before being sent to Tryon he had got a fleeting glimpse of Muhammad Ali, then heavyweight champion of the world, during a goodwill visit to one of the juvenile centres to which Tyson had been sentenced. He was captivated by Ali’s magical presence and for the first time tried to imagine what it must be like to be the heavyweight champ. Now, in Bobby Stewart, he had found somebody who could introduce him to the world of boxing where he would be able to find an identity and a purpose.

It was Tyson who made the first move. He was in solitary after threatening a teacher, and he asked his guard if he could see Stewart. “I had been told that he was an animal and so I was really aggressive when I first went to see him,” Stewart recalled. “ ‘What the fuck do you want?’ I shouted after banging on his window to frighten him. He said he wanted to be a boxer. ‘So do the rest of the assholes in here,’ I told him. ‘What makes you think you’re any different? How do I know you’re not just full of bullshit like the rest of them?’ ”

Tyson pleaded to be given a chance. “I want you to show me how to box, properly,” he said. Stewart struck a bargain with him. “I’ll give you boxing lessons in return for 100 per cent effort from you in the classroom,” he said. “I don’t care if you flunk every subject, just as long as you give it your best shot.”

Within weeks of Stewart starting his boxing lessons there was a visible change in Tyson. He lost his sullen, ‘I-hate-the-world’ attitude and other teachers commented to Stewart how much better he was behaving and cooperating in class. From being close to illiterate, he suddenly started to read and write at seventh-grade level. And, from being a novice boxer, he began to develop into an accomplished ring craftsman.

“I found I was having to get myself back into shape just to stay with him in sparring sessions,” said Stewart. “It was obvious within just a few days of working with him that he was a natural, and his power even at the age of 13 was phenomenal. I remember him hitting me right between the eyes with a left jab, and it was as if there was an explosion in my head. I went home with blackened eyes and a puffy nose. ‘Who on earth did that to you?’ my wife said, and I told her that there was a young boy called Mike Tyson who was as good a boxing prospect as I had ever seen.”

Tyson looked back on his first sparring session with Stewart with a grim smile: “I was one of the school bullies and Bobby set out to humiliate me in front of the kids. He wanted to show them that I was nothing. He hit me in the body with a real pro shot and I went down. For a moment I couldn’t catch my breath and I thought I was dead.”

Over to Stewart: “What impressed me was that instead of throwing off the gloves and deciding he didn’t want to take any more, Mike got up and asked me to show him how to throw that body punch. I knew then that here was a kid who had something special.”

It was quickly plain to Stewart that he had unearthed a jewel of a prospect, and he knew just the man who could give him the polish that could turn him into a champion.

He picked up the ’phone and rang a man called D’Amato. Cus D’Amato.

3: The Court of ‘King’ Cus

NOBODY can begin to tell the Mike Tyson story without making a lot of room in it for Cus D’Amato. To know Tyson you have to know D’Amato. We feel qualified to write in depth about him because, over a period of more than 30 years, we got about as close to him as he allowed anybody to be. Our first meeting with Cus was back in the mid-1950s when he was parading Floyd Patterson as the then youngest world heavyweight champion in history. The parallels between Patterson and Tyson are uncanny to the point of being almost eerie. Both were raised in Brooklyn. Both grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and finished up in juvenile delinquent centres. Both used boxing as a launching pad to respectability. And both had the eccentric Cus D’Amato as their guiding light.

In those mid-50s, D’Amato – then stocky and sprightly like a pugnacious Spencer Tracy – showed the sort of courage and willpower that would have earned him a championship had he revealed it inside the ring. With the all-important world heavyweight title held by Patterson as his calling card, he stood out alone against the monopolistic International Boxing Club that was proved to be under the controlling influence of notorious gangster, Frankie Carbo. The IBC virtually ran boxing in America. But they didn’t run Cus D’Amato.

It was D’Amato who bravely exposed the IBC as a corrupt organization, refusing to allow Patterson to fight for any promoter who had connections with them. He made his stubborn stand despite late-night threatening ’phone calls and menacing, side-of-the-mouth talk from men in wide-brimmed hats who were uninvited guests to his Gramercy gymnasium above what used to be a dime-a-dance ballroom at 116 East 14th Street in a rundown section of New York City. This man of deep suspicions and shifting moods took to sleeping on a single camp bed at the rear of his gymnasium with a ferocious German guard dog as his only company.

D’Amato was obsessed with the idea that gangsters were out to get him. He used always to insist on having any chair he sat in away from home facing the door so that he could see who was entering. New York fight promoter Al Braverman had known him since the late 1930s and said: “Any strange room Cus walked in he would look round it like a sniffer dog. If it was a hotel bedroom he would look under the bed and in the closet to make sure there was nobody there. He was a strange one all right. But what a manager. He could make a good fighter great and a great fighter unbeatable.”

Perhaps we got to the bottom of D’Amato’s phobia about gangsters. He told us of when one day two ‘heavies’ walked casually into his gym when he was a young manager and sat either side of him. They had been excited by the potential of one of his fighters.

“You can count us in,” said one.

“In what?” asked Cus, acting dumb.

“In as partners,” said the other. “We like the kid and we want part of the action.”

Cus told us that he rolled up his sleeve and held out his hand. “You can start here,” he told the hoodlums, miming as if hacking his fingers off. “Then you can chop my wrists off and then my arms. You can cut me up piece by piece. But you ain’t having any part of the kid. Now get your asses outta here.”

The two men, according to D’Amato, looked at him as if he was mad and left the gym. “All my life,” said Cus, “I’ve stood up to the crooks, the cheats and the villains because I detested everything they represent. Maybe I shoulda been a priest, eh?”