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D’Amato struck the self-sacrificing pose of a man more interested in souls than the dictates of his own ego: “I succeed when he becomes champion of the world and independent of me.”
Kuralt’s final remarks tried to strike an ominous note, as if we had only seen the prologue: “But they need each other now. Because someday soon they will be coming out of the country, coming hard and coming fast for the lights of the city.”
The following September, an Albany television station added its own flourishes to the fable. The voice-over described Tyson as “a very quiet and gentle man outside the ring,” a fighter who didn’t want to be the “boss,” a “boxing historian” whose “gentle side shows with his pigeons.” Tyson claimed that D’Amato never had to worry about where he was because at “nighttime I’m at my coop looking after my birds.”
A month after D’Amato’s death, Jacobs and Cayton managed to get Tyson on NBC’s “Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. “Once a thief, and a thief headed for a life in prison, mind you, Mike Tyson joins us this morning as a young man headed for a heavyweight crown,” said Gumbel in introducing Tyson. The interview ran the standard course through the fable until near the end when Gumbel asked Tyson, “Did D’Amato basically save your life?” The answer: “Yes.”
Dan Rather, anchorman for “CBS Evening News,” chimed in to take his turn with the fable later that December. He introduced a segment on Tyson that hit all the high notes and then some. “He’s just nineteen years old, tending his pigeons in the Catskills. A big, strong, country kid …” began the CBS reporter. “His teacher was Cus D’Amato, dead now but living on in his masterpiece … Mike Tyson, age nineteen, has the skills and is determined to win the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. And he has a secret weapon: he wants to do it for Cus.”
Cus and the Kid could be viewed as a human-interest story that celebrated universal values. The implicit messages, however, endorsed two abiding myths of American culture: charity is better then fundamental social change, and love, combined with the human will, conquers all. Cus and the Kid became a paradigm for social reform, but of the most passive variety. It was television fare, after all; pure entertainment. People could watch the problems of the black urban underclass being solved for them in the comfort of their living rooms.
The historical parallels with how other black boxers were packaged are striking. Tyson was made into a black stereotype of the post-civil rights era in which equal political and social rights had supposedly been obtained; economic freedom came to those who were willing to work for it. By that logic, Tyson, with the guidance and love of D’Amato, had fought his way out of poverty toward a certain future of wealth and fame. Heavyweight champion Joe Louis was also made into a stereotype of his era. In the 1930s, equal rights for blacks were a minor issue to most Americans, and yet blacks were still expected to feel empowered by the myth of individual salvation. If only they would “uplift” themselves, the thinking went, their problems would be over. And yet, blacks had to “behave,” especially when they obtained a measure of success that placed them in the public spotlight.
Newspaper and magazine profiles of Louis often described him as “nonpretentious,” “self-effacing,” “Godfearing,” and a “credit to his race.” Ironically, Louis’s manager was also named Jacobs and he, too, was a manipulator of the media. He hired someone to write Louis’s biography, Joe Louis’s Own Story, in which the fighter acknowledged his “duty” not to throw his “race down by abusing my position as a heavyweight challenger.”
In the marketing of Tyson, Jacobs and Cayton had the Joe Louis model in mind. They definitely wanted to avoid the Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston experiences. “Jimmy always believed that Louis represented the right mix of great boxer and astute management,” said Nick Beck. “Ali was uncontrollable in public, and too much his own man. Jimmy also wanted to avoid what he called the ‘Liston syndrome.’ He didn’t want people looking at Mike like he was some barely reformed thug.”
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.”
* * *
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.
“Jacobs’s pitch made for great copy, whether you agreed with him or not,” said Matthews of Newsday. “He knew that. Jacobs figured out what everyone most wanted to hear. They wanted a new myth for boxing.”
Jacobs buttressed that myth by taking every opportunity to identify Tyson with the great fighters. Starting with the Scaff fight, Jacobs asked Tyson to wear only black trunks and sockless black shoes. Up to then, he’d worn white or blue trunks with a different color trim. The idea was to evoke the classic, austere asceticism of Jack Dempsey. Assistant camp manager Steve Lott then came up with the idea of putting a small badge of the American flag on one leg of the trunks. “I felt that the flag would have a subliminal effect on the press,” said Lott. “They’d find it more difficult to write negatively about Mike.”
Without question, Tyson was far better than the men he’d fought so for. They were, after all, professional opponents, statistical cannon fodder for the real contenders. Tyson was also likely to prove himself technically superior to the next level of competition he would meet—including most if not all of the fighters in the top ten rankings. But the savior of boxing? In the same tradition as Ali, Marciano, and Louis? That was stretching it.
In technical terms, and on a strict comparison of achievement at equivalent age and level of experience, Tyson was in some respects better than past greats. Certainly he was more elusive. The power of his punch, especially when combined with the speed with which he delivered it, was also in a class by itself. In practical terms, however, Tyson had not yet shown his character. That would emerge from a test of wills: his against an opponent who didn’t go down in one or two rounds.
At that point in Tyson’s development, such issues didn’t press on Jacobs and Cayton. They were in a hurry to get him the title shot. It didn’t matter to them if the hype surpassed the reality of the performance. They felt that Tyson, if watched carefully, worked on constantly, packaged, and sanitized, would at the least keep the hype valid, even if he couldn’t yet prove it true. He hadn’t faltered in the ring for a long time. The mysterious flaw remained in check.
But not for long. That was the flip side of a string of easy opponents. It created a false sense of security for everyone, Tyson included. And that was the sober truth of the man-child within the hype, of the person behind the dual personas of the well-behaved, pigeon-loving surrogate son and the Ring Destroyer, the champion of destiny: nothing could prevent Tyson from bouncing between the opposite terms of his own paradox. It was far easier to control an image of a man than the man himself.
* * *
On January 24, 1986, Tyson stepped in the ring to box opponent number seventeen, “Irish” Mike Jameson. He looked like all the others Tyson had dispatched, though less muscular and more bulky. Jameson stood six-foot-four and weighed 236 pounds to Tyson’s 215. His record, seventeen wins and nine losses, implied something less than journeyman status. Jameson was also an aged fighter—thirty-one years old. He lived in Cupertino, California, and had never fought east of Chicago. It was expected, and hoped, that Tyson would do away with Jameson rapidly. There was a lot at stake. For the past several weeks, Jacobs and Cayton had been negotiating a multifight deal with ABC Sports. It would be Tyson’s first exposure on a national network television, and the first big purse money.
Jameson was no fool. He knew he didn’t have a chance slugging it out with Tyson, so he used his height, reach, and weight advantage to lean on Tyson and tie him up. After the two were pulled apart by the referee, Tyson would get off a few punches, but they seemed to have little effect. He’d then end up in a clinch again. It seemed that Tyson was letting himself be held. He was acquiescing to the other man’s unwillingness to fight. Tyson looked worse in the second round. He got hit easily by a few left jabs and straight rights, a clear sign that after getting position on the inside, he wasn’t moving enough on defense. In the third, Jameson kept getting his punches off first, then clinching to avoid Tyson’s blows.
By the fourth, Tyson seemed to wake up as if from a trance. He started connecting with more punches. Jameson, older and less fit, ran out of steam. One flurry of five blows in combination—remarkable for a heavyweight—sent Jameson down, but not out. Early in the fifth, Tyson scored a punishing knockdown, and the referee stopped the fight.
The announcers made an astute point about Tyson’s performance: “What happens when this young kid who can punch so hard hits someone and they’re still standing there and comes back and hits him back? Is he going to get discouraged or what?” Apparently, the answer was yes, at least to a degree. That’s what happened with Jameson in the first three rounds. Had Jameson been more fit, and skilled, he could have perhaps exploited that weakness in Tyson and lasted a few more rounds. Instead, Tyson won the fight on his natural gifts of superior punching power and hand speed. Fortunately, that was all he needed to beat Jameson. Tyson would, however, need much more in the next phase of his career. He would soon debut on ABC in the first of a four-match, million-dollar deal. The stakes were rising.
Financially, the Tyson team had come a long way in just over eleven months. In the first three fights Jacobs and Cayton had covered all the expenses—$30,417—including Tyson’s purses of a few hundred dollars. They’d made a profit of only $166.80. Expenses for the remaining fourteen fights, plus a 10 percent fee for trainer Kevin Rooney, were taken out of the gross purses paid by the promoters, $69,955. That left a total net purse of $57,095, of which Tyson earned two-thirds. In other words, $38,063 for about twenty-eight rounds, or one hour and twenty-four minutes of actual boxing. Jacobs and Cayton earned the remainder, or $19,032, from which they paid a 10 percent fee to Steve Lott.
With the $1 million ABC deal, an unheard-of sum of money for a fighter with only seventeen victories, the economics of Mike Tyson were about to change radically. For the first fight he’d earn a purse of $90,000. As Tyson continued to win, the purses increased in size until the $1 million was used up. Futhermore, with convincing victories, Jacobs and Cayton would acquire a significant amount of negotiating leverage with HBO Sports, a division of the pay-cable service owned by communications giant Time Inc.
In March 1986, HBO would launch a series of fights to unify the fractured heavyweight title. It had most, but not all, of the top-ranked contenders and champions signed up. With the hype surrounding Tyson’s rise, HBO became nervous. It faced the nightmare prospect of spending millions of dollars to determine the unified champion only for Tyson to emerge independently as the one true contender, the heir presumptive; the spoiler.
Jacobs and Cayton weren’t yet prepared to sign Tyson up. He didn’t have the experience to deal with the level of competition in the HBO series. They also had other ideas on how to earn a title shot. In one scenario, they’d match Tyson against old but well-known fighters such as former champion Larry Holmes and even Gerry Cooney, the lone white heavyweight of any reputation. That would establish Tyson’s credibility and earn him the right to then match up against the eventual winner of the HBO series.
Both sides of the issue faced a dilemma. HBO couldn’t risk letting Tyson go off on a separate track. And yet with only seventeen victories he didn’t have the credentials, or the national following, to be justifiably included in the unification series. For their part, Jacobs and Cayton were reluctant to trail off on their own in pursuit of the title. There was no way of knowing if the eventual winner of the HBO series would agree to fight Tyson. They would have done several years’ work only to be denied the ultimate prize.
The solution, for both parties, was to get Tyson on a separate but parallel track. In January, Jacobs and Cayton starting discussing with HBO the terms of a three-fight deal. Combined with the ABC fights, they would gain Tyson national television exposure and experience and, if it could be agreed upon, the basis for entry into the HBO series.
There were risks. They had to give up some say over the selection of opponents. ABC and HBO were interested in good ratings, and that meant competitive matchups. It was unlikely Tyson would be scoring many more first-round knockouts. Jacobs and Cayton wondered how well he would stand up under the emotional stress of fighting more seasoned opponents on national television.
First Tyson had to beat Jesse Ferguson in his ABC debut. Ferguson was a young, strong, quick-handed prospect ranked, like Tyson, in the second tier of heavyweights. The more convincing Tyson’s victory, the greater his value to ABC and HBO.
Aware of those stakes, Jacobs stacked the deck in Tyson’s favor. The fight took place in Troy, New York, the heart of Tyson country. Some seven thousand local supporters would be rooting for a knockout. Jacobs also insisted that the fighters wear eight-ounce gloves rather than the more standard ten-ounce versions. That clearly favored Tyson. His fast hands would be even faster with the lighter gloves. Jacobs obtained another advantage by getting Ferguson’s manager to agree to a sixteen-foot, eight-inch ring, smaller by a few feet than standard ring sizes. That way if Ferguson decided to run instead of stand and fight, he wouldn’t have as much room.
Tyson came out in black trunks and black shoes, no socks, and no robe. As he climbed into the ring and the crowd cheered, Tyson held up his arms at a low angle and turned the palms up in the manner of a Roman gladiator—strong, confident, but humbled by both the adulation and his own greatness. His face was expressionless. He paced back and forth, twitching his neck as if trying to remove a kink.
To the relief of the growing group involved in his career, Tyson rose to the occasion. As usual, he came out slipping, weaving, and slugging. He hit Ferguson on both sides with vicious hooks. He doubled up on body shots, going to the ribs first, then coming through the middle with an uppercut. But Ferguson could take a punch. With his own hand speed and sense of timing, he was also able to exploit those few occasions when Tyson stopped moving. He caught Tyson on the inside with a few right uppercuts. Tyson hardly flinched. That answered an important question about his future: he had a tough chin.
Tyson kept connecting through the second, third, and fourth rounds. Ferguson still didn’t go down, but Tyson didn’t get discouraged. He kept up his intensity and maintained nearly perfect stylistic form. It was by far the highest he had yet taken D’Amato’s “system.” Twice he hit Ferguson with low blows, and at the end of the fourth he threw a punch after the bell rang. As the referee pulled them apart, Tyson stuck his tongue out at Ferguson. He was enjoying this.
Ferguson came out in the fifth trying to keep Tyson at bay with a pesky poking of his left jab. Tyson easily slipped away. He then backed Ferguson up against the ropes. Ferguson tried to clinch, but Tyson fought through with a series of body shots and right and left uppercuts. Ferguson still didn’t fall. In the sixth, finally, he had taken enough. He had only the energy to clinch. The referee warned him several times, but Ferguson continued to hold. He was disqualified.
At first, Alex Wallau, the ABC boxing analyst doing the broadcast, thought that meant Tyson would be denied the knockout, thus breaking his streak. Then the referee, perhaps aware of what his decision meant, clarified the decision. He called it a technical knockout. Steve Lott climbed into the ring and kissed Tyson on the cheek. Afterwards, in a postfight interview, Tyson said to the gathering of reporters: “I tried to punch him and drive the bone of his nose back into his brain.”
The New York papers covering the fight quoted Tyson’s remarks with relish. It was as if they’d finally seen the real Mike Tyson behind the hype and it was not a pretty sight. Maybe he was, after all, just another thug like Liston. Jacobs was flooded with calls from reporters eager to unpack this dark, new Tyson that he had obviously kept a secret. One boxing reporter even dug up Ernestine Coleman, Tyson’s Youth Division caseworker. He cited a letter she wrote to Tyson after reading his comment. Coleman advised Tyson “to be a man, not an animal.”
Jacobs’s first reaction was to blame someone other than Tyson. He fired the publicity agent he’d retained for the fights, Mike Cohen. He also impressed on Lott, who was living with Tyson at the time, the importance of baby-sitting: “I had to watch him constantly, remind him how to behave after a fight and rehearse what he should say,” Lott recalled.
A few days later Jacobs invited a group of boxing reporters to have dinner with Tyson at Jake’s, then a New York steak restaurant: Ed Schuyler of the Associated Press, Michael Katz and Bill Gallo from the Daily News and Phil Berger of the New York Times. Two who were shunned—Wallace Matthews and Mike Marley of the New York Post—dubbed it the “Bootlicker’s Ball.” Schuyler remembered the evening: “No notes, no interviews, just talking. Jimmy was very conscious of trying to make Mike likable, to make him seem like a decent person so that if he got in trouble we’d all say, ‘Oh, well, he’s just a kid and that’s how kids are.’”
Thinking back, Schuyler recalled how strained it all was. “There was a desperation about it all. Like, ‘Let’s get this guy a title before he gets into serious trouble. Let’s keep him busy.’ I believe that Jimmy and Bill thought that Mike was really not a nice person, that he wasn’t responsible to anyone but himself. He gives you that little-boy voice, but he’s capable of doing anything. He’s a creature of impulse.”
Sure enough, on February 23, the Albany Knickerbocker News reported on an incident in the Crossgates Mall. Tyson had entered Filene’s department store and come on to a white salesgirl. She declined. Tyson got angry, threw some clothes around, knocked over racks, and insulted the girl and anyone else who came by. That same day, Jacobs denied to the New York reporters that Tyson had done anything wrong. A reporter from the Times Union in Albany went back to the mall a few days later to find out the real story. The salesgirl, her managers, and the mall security personnel all refused to comment. The salesgirl implied that if she did, she’d be fired. Rumors circulated that Jacobs and Cayton had paid off people at the mall to stay mum on the incident. They no doubt also relied on the local police to turn a blind eye. “The Albany police commissioner was valuable in taking care of Mike Tyson in many ways,” admitted Cayton. “Steps were taken with the help of the police to put lids on things.” In return, Cayton made sure that the commissioner of police got ringside tickets to Tyson’s upstate fights. Moreover, twice a year he bought advertisements in the Albany Police Department’s newspaper.
Newsday’s Matthews confronted Jacobs about the mall incident, fruitlessly. “He lied to me. You’d call him on it in stories and later he’d admit that he lied to protect Tyson. That was Jacobs for you. He held the press up to very high standards of truthfulness and accuracy—his versions of both—but he never stood up to them himself.”
Up to the Ferguson fight, Jacobs handled all questions from the press in his role as manager and front man. That would now change. Cayton had to step forward. They would both be needed to handle Tyson’s public image.
For the New York boxing reporters, dealing with Cayton wasn’t exactly a breath of fresh air. Yet, compared to Jacobs, almost anybody was preferable. “Jimmy was a propagandist. If he approached anything that made him uneasy, he just closed down on you,” said Phil Berger of the New York Times. “Sometimes it was innocent things. I once asked him what his father did. He got very uptight and said, ‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything. ’Then he called me back and lied, told me that his father was in the office supplies business.” Berger took advantage of Cayton’s sudden availability. “I only had perfunctory conversations with Jacobs after Ferguson. When I needed to find out something important, I talked to Cayton.”
Matthews had similar dealings with Jacobs—namely, pointless ones. “If he didn’t like your question, he’d ridicule you. He’d play word games with your head. I’d ask a simple question and Jacobs would say things like, ‘Wally, that’s like saying is it colder in the mountains or colder in the winter’ or ‘Wally, that’s like asking me if I’m going to paint the fence green.’ After a half hour of that, I’d forget my question!”
Although Cayton was more likely to give straight answers, he could also be trying. “Everything Jimmy said was right and you were supposed to accept it,” recalled the AP’s Ed Schuyler. “But I could argue with Jimmy if I wanted to. Cayton treated me like I was on the payroll. Cayton I wanted to hit.”
Jacobs and Cayton attempted to keep the boxing reporters, and any other inquiring journalist, devoted to what they deemed the key issues: Tyson’s indomitable ring prowess, the inevitability of his becoming champion, and whether he would go for the title via the HBO series or by some other independent route. For the most part, they were extremely successful. That was the news, after all, the stuff of sports page headlines. It was also presumably what people wanted to read about at that stage of Tyson’s career. And reporters who had to meet the pressure of deadlines two or three days a week might well not have the time or the appetite to delve into the subtler aspects of the Tyson story—especially when getting the basic news from Jacobs and Cayton was such a task.
But the fact remains that the subtleties were missed. One in particular, the issue of just who managed Tyson would later surface as a central drama of his career.
Starting in late 1985, and more frequently at the outset of 1986, Jacobs and Cayton asserted that they were comanagers. No such status existed in the boxing rules and regulations of New York State boxing and they knew it. Jacobs was sole manager, and Cayton a partner sharing in the manager’s purse cut. Still, the boxing reporters parroted and endorsed that fictitious label—even though no major boxer in memory ever had more than one manager.
“Boxing being the business it is, what do they call it, an assignee? That’s how they did it to become comanagers,” said Berger of the New York Times. Ed Schuyler also recalled having dismissed the subject of precisely who managed Tyson. “I believe the [New York State Athletic] Commission said Jacobs had a legitimate managerial contract. It never questioned the contract, so I never questioned it. It’s such a shady business. I mean, who manages who? There are so many people who have pieces of fighters, so many conflicts of interest. Doesn’t make it right, but that’s the way the game is.”
Taking a lead from the New York State Athletic Commission was not a good idea, especially when the chairman was José Torres.
Torres retired from boxing in 1969. He did do that promised book, not a novel, but a biography, Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story, published in 1971. Torres spent the 1970s writing for the New York Post. On the side he dabbled in politics. He campaigned in the New York Latino community for John Lindsay’s mayoral campaign and for Jimmy Carter. For a brief period of time in the late 1970s, he became an ombudsman for the New York City Council. Four years later, in 1983, Torres was appointed a commissioner of the New York State Athletic Commission by the office of Governor Mario Cuomo. By 1985, just as Tyson turned professional, Torres had been elevated to chairman.
That was the official version of his career outside the ring. On paper it looked impressive. Torres was the first chairman ever to have been a boxing champion. He promised to represent the needs of the fighters, not the managers or promoters. For Torres, that wouldn’t be easy. He had a penchant for letting himself be compromised.
As Athletic Commission chairman, Torres had an implicit obligation to act impartially, When it came to Tyson he did precisely the opposite. Torres frequently visited the Catskill gym to offer him boxing advice. He also went to almost all of Tyson’s early upstate fights, at the taxpayer’s expense. That in itself wasn’t improper, but his ringside behavior was. Torres always cheered wildly for Tyson and derided his opponent. At fight’s end, Torres often jumped into the ring to embrace and congratulate him. On a few occasions, he would still be sent by Jacobs to track down Tyson in Brownsville during his many disappearances. Torres provided other unofficial services as well. “He used to introduce Mike to Puerto Rican girls all the time,” said Tom Patti. “I think he wanted to quit the commission and get involved managing Mike.”
That seemed unrealistic. He was, though, at the least willing to see things from the point of view of Tyson’s management. And that was a clear conflict of interest. Starting in 1985, he went on record several times stating that Jacobs and Cayton were both the managers of Tyson.
The boxing reporters knew of Torres’s partiality, of his incestuous ties to the Tyson camp. They talked about it in cynical asides among themselves. Rarely was it revealed in their news stories. It seemed that a news judgment had been made—perhaps, put in the context of the times, a fairly understandable one.
Recording the emergence of Mike Tyson, the next great heavyweight, was like being swept along by the titles of history. Reporters had the feeling that they weren’t just observing, but also participating somehow. They saw the gaps, the rough edges, the inconsistencies, and the conflicts of interest, but they were apparently overwhelmed by the phenomenon. Both the persona of Mike Tyson, and the process by which he emerged in the national consciousness, became extremely seductive. “Tyson wasn’t just another boxing story,” Matthews admitted. “He was ‘the story.’ We all got caught up in it.”
* * *
By late February, Jacobs and Cayton had reached agreement with HBO on the three-fight deal. Tyson would earn $1.35 million, or $450,000 per fight. Once again, he broke all records of financial reward for a fighter of his age and experience.
Tyson’s next fight was set for March 10 against Steve Zouski at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. It was designed as a breather fight, an easy victory to bolster Tyson for the subsequent series of tougher matches on ABC and HBO.
Zouski was another appropriate opponent for the purposes of the business plan. He looked better than he actually was. Zouski claimed never to have been knocked down, let alone out, in a record of twenty-five wins and nine losses. The problem was that eight of those losses had occurred in his last ten bouts, putting Zouski on the downward slope of his career arc. Whatever muscle he had seemed to have softened up in large, billowing puffs around an ordinary frame. For two rounds, Tyson used Zouski to showcase his combination-punching abilities. It was over in the third—by a knockout.
Tyson was to meet James (“Quick”) Tillis three weeks later. He developed an ear infection and the bout was put off until May 3. That was the longest layoff of his professional career, just over three months. In a sense, it was fortuitous. Tillis was expected to be a watershed fight. Although twenty-eight years old and near the end of his career, Tillis was still considered a fringe contender for the title. In his prime, he’d fought hard-nosed veterans like Earnie Shavers and Gerrie Coetzee. He had also matched up against some of the better fighters of his own peer group, such as Carl Williams and Pinklon Thomas. He had a tough chin, came to a fight in good condition, could employ a full arsenal of boxing skills, and moved well in the ring. Beating Tillis would gain Tyson a measure of confidence, prepare him for the emotional pressures of the next stage in his pursuit of the heavyweight championship.
A crowd of eight thousand people jammed into the Glens Falls Civic Center in upstate New York, and every one of them seemed to be a Tyson fan. When he entered the arena, Tyson got a standing ovation. He had won all nineteen of his fights by knockout. That’s what people expected to see, but it was not what he was prepared to deliver. “After coming off the ear injury, he needed one easy fight before Tillis to get into it,” Steve Lott recalled. “The pressure of fighting someone as experienced as Tillis made him nervous, and that reduced him to a one-dimensional fighter.”
Tillis became a problem that Tyson had trouble solving. Tillis moved well in both directions, which made him a difficult target. And as he moved, he jabbed to keep Tyson at bay. When Tyson did get into punching proximity, Tillis blocked the blows or tied him up. By the second round much of Tyson’s aggression seemed to have drained away. He was racking up points, but many of his punches didn’t connect solidly. He worked the body, but rarely followed in combination with a blow to the head. And he took punches, too—jabs, uppercuts, and a few left hooks.
Tillis fought far better than expected. He came into the bout seven pounds lighter than usual, which helped his movement, and improved his hand speed. When he took a punch, he struck back, usually in combination. He looked tight, measured, confident, and determined not to get knocked out. But he made one costly error. Near the end of the fourth, Tillis threw a wide, off-balance left hook that turned him around. Before he could turn back, Tyson looped in a hook that sent Tillis down. He got up quickly, though, and fought hard in the fifth, knowing that Tyson would try and end it. To his amazement, and everyone else’s, Tyson didn’t capitalize on the knockdown. He kept throwing single punches, and in clinches didn’t ram blows into Tillis’s body. He was still winning rounds, but barely. In rounds six through nine, he gave up trying to capture the inside positioning so essential for his ballet of defense and offense to work effectively. Tyson let himself be pushed back and tied up, and at times just followed Tillis around the ring in a passive, acquiescent state. In the latter half of the tenth and final round Tillis, no doubt thinking that if he scored heavily he could win the fight, stood toe to toe with Tyson. They exchanged blows for a spirited finale. As it turned out, Tillis was close to being right. The judges scored the fight for Tyson, but without the knockdown in the fourth, it would have ended in a draw. The judges gave all the middle rounds to Tillis.
The Tillis fight made Jacobs and Cayton, for the first time, nervous about Tyson’s prospects. Did he come away from Tillis feeling that he’d passed a test or failed it? He’d won, but what had Tyson discovered about himself? Did he think that he was the future champion? Or did he see in his feeling of failure an irrepressible urge to give in?
The match with Mitch (“Blood”) Green took place seventeen days after the Tillis bout in the 20,000-seat-plus main arena of Madison Square Garden. It was Tyson’s first fight on HBO and the first under the promotional banner of Don King. Green had a respectable record of sixteen wins, one loss, and one draw. Ten of his victories had came by knockout. He was not a contender for the title. Still, he was ranked seventh in the estimation of the World Boxing Council. Green was also big (six-foot-five and 225 pounds of sculpted muscle), and he fought with a lot of macho pride in a wide-open, undisciplined style.
The first round set the pattern for the entire fight. Green had been told by his trainer to punch and move out of harm’s way, and if he did get caught inside to tie Tyson up. The plan, like Tillis’s, was to take Tyson into the later rounds, where he’d not often been and would perhaps be vulnerable. But this time, it didn’t work. Tyson had come to fight.
Green, a former leader of the Black Spades gang of the Bronx, was overcome by his own recklessness. He tried to grab, but Tyson punched his way out. Instead of continuing with that tactic, or at least to punch, move, and then grab, Green decided every now and then to stand and trade blows. He took the worst of it. Tyson kept eluding Green’s best punch—his left jab—then crowding in and delivering. As Green backed up for room to swing, he only gave Tyson more space to get his punches in first, which he did, repeatedly.
Tyson put on a boxing clinic as he scored with left and right hooks, body shots, and uppercuts, almost all in combination. One of his jabs knocked Green’s mouthpiece onto the ring apron—embedded in it were a bridge and two false teeth. By the end of the fourth round, Tyson had thrown 109 body punches alone, 70 (or 64 percent) of which connected. That was an unheard-of statistic for most heavyweights, who usually aren’t fast or well conditioned enough to do anything else but headhunt.
In the fifth, Tyson evoked one of Teddy Atlas’s training techniques. As Green swung away, Tyson feinted, slipped, weaved, dipped, and bobbed in a series of eighteen separate defensive movements. He avoided every one of Green’s punches without countering with a blow of his own. It was a display of pride in his superior abilities, and a bit of arrogance.
The fight went the full ten rounds. Tyson didn’t seem to care whether he could knock Green down, or out. He was taking pleasure in the process of chopping Green up, like a cleaver against a side of beef. He sometimes smiled through his mouthpiece at Green and at other times sneered. In the corner before the ninth, while trainer Kevin Rooney yammered away, he leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
On the judge’s scorecards, Tyson won all but one round. Afterwards, at a press conference, Tyson spoke about the win in cool, professional terms. He had been well coached by Jacobs on his postfight posturing since the Ferguson incident. There was no Ali-style histrionics, none of Liston’s glum bluntness. “Not to be egotistical, but I won this fight so easy. I refuse to be beaten in there. I refuse to let anybody get in my way.”
Tyson had clearly recovered from the Tillis fight. His technical prowess returned in fine form. More important he didn’t get frustrated with being unable to win by knockout. Tyson’s remarks afterwards also displayed a measure of confidence that Jacobs and Cayton wanted to bolster, and a maturity they had to protect. There would be no more risks like Tillis. They’d set up a string of breather fights until the final approach to the title could be determined.
Still on his breakneck schedule, Tyson fought Reggie Gross about three weeks later (June 13, 1986), also at the Garden and under the promotional banner of Don King. Gross, with an eighteen-and-four record, had long arms but a lazy, inaccurate left jab that dangled out like a heavy salami. Near the end of the first round, Gross moved into the center of the ring and opened up with a series of five punches that Tyson easily avoided as he looked patiently for an opening. He put Gross down twice before the referee called it over. Gross protested. Tyson tried to console him.
Fourteen days passed. Tyson traveled up to Troy to fight William Hosea. Hosea seemed like a fighter who could do a little bit of everything in the ring with a little bit of proficiency: except take a punch. It was over within two minutes and three seconds. Lorenzo Boyd came next—on July 11. A combination right hook to the body and a right uppercut on the chin ended the fight halfway through the second. Tyson was beginning to look bored.
On July 26, Tyson met Marvis Frazier, the son of former champion Joe Frazier. Father was both manager and trainer. That was more a liability than an asset against the technically superior Tyson. Marvis was molded in his father’s image. He too bobbed and weaved. Tyson and trainer Kevin Rooney studied tapes of Marvis’s fights and noticed that when he crouched, he didn’t so much bend at the knees as he did at the waist. In the dressing room before the fight, Tyson announced his fight strategy. “As Frazier bent over, Tyson would time a right uppercut,” said Baranski.
In the first round, Tyson launched at Frazier, backed him up into the corner, and, as per plan, sent in the right uppercut at the appropriate moment. That was enough to do the job, but Tyson added a left hook and another right. Frazier crumpled to the canvas thirty seconds into the round. It was Tyson’s quickest knockout. He tried to help the fallen fighter up, but by then Frazier’s mother and father had swarmed in. Tyson turned away, leapt up, and punched the air in a war dance. Jacobs rushed over and whispered something in his ear and Tyson calmed. “By then, we had him coached on what to say afterwards,” Steve Lott remembered. “With a name fighter like Frazier, we didn’t want Mike to be disrespectful. People liked Joe Frazier. I sat Mike down before the fight and told him what to say, word for word.”
On August 17, in Atlantic City, the betting line against José Ribalta beating Mike Tyson was 7 to 1. Ribalta had a respectable record of twenty-two wins, three losses, and one draw. Sixteen of the wins had come by knockout. The problem was that about a year earlier Ribalta had been knocked out in one round by Marvis Frazier. He was expected to go no more than a few rounds, if that, with Tyson.
What the experts didn’t expect, however, was that Tyson, coming off a series of easy fights, had lost some of his intensity and concentration. Gone were the elaborate slip-and-weave movements. He tried to win the fight the lazy heavyweight’s way—that is, on a single punch.
In the first round, Ribalta easily saw the punches coming and used a combination of leaning away, covering up, and putting Tyson in a clinch to avoid them. In the second round, realizing that he had to be technically sharper, Tyson doubled up with a right hook to the body and a right uppercut that knocked Ribalta down. The look on Ribalta’s face showed more shock than pain. He clearly hadn’t seen the uppercut coming. He got up and fought gamely for several more rounds. Tyson fell back into more of a conventional style, connecting often but without effect. He didn’t get frustrated; it seemed more like boredom. He wanted to win, but he’d lost interest in scoring a knockout. He appeared comfortable just being a good conventional fighter rather than a unique and spectacular one. The conclusion, at any rate, was foregone. Tyson wore Ribalta down with a total of 328 punches, 68 percent of which landed. A moment’s inspiration in the tenth sent in a flurry of punches that solidly connected. The referee ended the fight on a technical knockout.
Asked later if he was disappointed by his performance, a nonchalant Tyson opined: “What can I say? This happens. You don’t knock everybody out.”
Jacobs was also interviewed after the fight. He claimed not to be disappointed either. He talked about deciding within the week about whether to enter Tyson into the HBO series and to then, within a few months, fight for the title. He had the smug air of someone confident that all was proceeding by plan.
In a sense, he and Cayton had reason to be content. They had achieved the near miraculous. In twenty-six fights over nineteen months, Tyson had been steered to a top ten ranking. Although not yet ranked as a number one contender, he was being perceived by boxing and mainstream audiences alike as the next great heavyweight. He had been sold to America, via the fable of Cus and the Kid, as inoffensive outside the ring and indestructible within it. People believed that it was not a matter of whether he became heavyweight champion, but when.
Privately, however, Jacobs was still nagged by doubts about Tyson’s ability to perform at the higher levels of psychological pressure. Fighting for the championship would pit him against the most seasoned and capable fighters. And there could be no more breather bouts with which to protect his sometimes fragile emotional profits from the fights that did test Tyson’s character.
He had passed several important tests in the ring, both of his skills and his character. Still, as the Halpin, Sims, Jameson, and Tillis fights demonstrated, he remained completely unpredictable. It didn’t seem like a matter of choice for Tyson; it was not as if in those fights he had decided to win in some other way besides by knockout, to take control of the fight, box, try new things, manipulate the opponent, pick his punches, and add up the victory points in his head.
