once with the great writer Norman Mailer.
“Cus, you don’t know it but you practice Zen,” Mailer had told Cus, and then he gave him a book called Zen in the Art of Archery. Cus used to read that book to me. He told me that he had actually experienced the ultimate in emotional detachment in his first fight. He was training in a gym in the city because he wanted to be a professional fighter. He had been hitting the heavy bag for a week or two when the manager asked him if he wanted to box with someone. He got in the ring and his heart was beating like a drum, and the bell rang and the other guy charged him and he got knocked around. His nose was swollen, his eye was shut, he was bleeding. The guy asked him if he wanted to go a second round and Cus said he’d try. He went out there and suddenly his mind became detached from his body. He was watching himself from afar. The punches that hit him felt like they were coming from a distance. He was more aware of them than feeling them.
Cus told me that to be a great fighter you had to get out of your head. He would have me sit down and he’d say, “Transcend. Focus. Relax until you see yourself looking at yourself. Tell me when you get there.” That was very important for me. I’m way too emotional in general. Later on I realized that if I didn’t separate from my feelings inside the ring, I would be sunk. I might hit a guy with a hard punch and then get scared if he didn’t go down.
Cus took this out-of-body experience one step further. He would separate his mind from his body and then visualize the future. “Everything gets calm and I’m outside watching myself,” he told me. “It’s me, but it’s not me, as if my mind and my body aren’t connected, but they are connected. I get a picture in my mind, what it’s going to be. I can actually see the picture, like a screen. I can take a fighter who is just beginning and I can see exactly how he will respond. When that happens, I can watch a guy fight and I know everything there is to know about this guy, I can actually see the wheels in his head. It’s as if I’m that guy, I’m inside him.”
He even claimed that he could control events using his mind. Cus trained Rocky Graziano when he was an amateur. One time, Cus was in Rocky’s corner and Rocky was taking a beating. After being knocked down twice, Rocky came back to the corner and wanted to quit. But Cus pushed him out for the next round, and before Rocky could quit, Cus used his mind to will Rocky’s arm to throw a punch and it connected and the guy went down and the ref stopped the fight. This was the heavy dude who was training me.
Cus was a strong believer that in your mind you had to be the entity that you wanted to be. If you wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, you had to start living the life of a heavyweight champion. I was only fourteen, but I was a true believer in Cus’s philosophy. Always training, thinking like a Roman gladiator, being in a perpetual state of war in your mind, yet on the outside seeming calm and relaxed. He was practicing and teaching me the law of attraction without even knowing it.
Cus was also big on affirmations. He had a book called Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion by a French pharmacist/psychologist named Emile Coué. Coué would tell his patients to repeat to themselves, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better” over and over again. Cus had a bad cataract in one eye, and he would repeat that phrase and he claimed the phrase had made it better.
Cus had us modify the affirmations for our own situation. So he had me saying, “The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me. The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me” over and over again all day. I loved doing that, I loved hearing myself talk about myself.
The goal of all these techniques was to build confidence in the fighter. Confidence was everything. But in order to possess that confidence, you had to test yourself and put yourself on the line. It doesn’t come from osmosis, out of the air. It comes from consistently going over the visualization in your mind to help you develop the confidence that you want to possess.
Cus laid all this out for me in the first few weeks that we were together. He gave me the whole plan. He gave me a mission. I was going to be the youngest heavyweight champion of all time. I didn’t know it then, but after one of our first long talks, Cus confided in Camille. “Camille, this is the one I’ve been waiting for all my life.”
I was getting close to being paroled back to Brooklyn when Bobby Stewart came to see me one day.
“I don’t want you to go back to Brooklyn. I’m afraid you may do something stupid and get killed or get your ass locked up again. Do you want to move in with Cus?”
I didn’t want to go back either. I was looking for change in my life. Plus, I liked the way those people talked and made me feel good, made me feel like I was part of society. So I talked to my mother about staying up there with Cus.
“Ma, I want to go up there and train. I want to be a fighter. I can be the best fighter in the world.” Cus had my mind so fucked up. That’s all he talked to me about, how great I could become, how to improve myself, day by day, in every way. All that self-help shit.
My mom felt bad about me leaving, but she signed the permission papers. Maybe she thought she’d failed as a mother.
So I moved in with Cus and Camille and the other fighters in the house. I got to know more and more about Cus because we’d have these long talks after I trained. He was so happy when I told him my hard-luck stories about my life. He would light up like a Christmas tree. “Tell me more,” he’d say. I was the perfect guy for his mission – broken home, unloved, destitute. I was hard and strong and sneaky, but I was still a blank chalkboard. Cus wanted me to embrace my shortcomings. He didn’t make me feel ashamed or inferior because of my upbringing. He loved the fact that I had great enthusiasm. “Enthusiasm” – Cus taught me that word.
Cus could relate to me because he’d had a hard life too. His mother died at a very early age. He’d lost his vision in one eye in a street fight when he was a little kid. His father died in his arms when he was a young man. A cop had murdered his favorite brother.
Cus really only worked a nine-to-five job for one year in his life. And then he left because he got into fights with his coworkers. But he spent a lot of time helping out the people in his neighborhood, solving their problems almost like an unofficial social worker. He derived a lot of pleasure out of assisting other people. Cus helped weed out political corruption in his neighborhood when La Guardia was running for mayor of New York City as a reformer. He did it by standing up to one of the corrupt guys who had pulled a gun on him. He was fearless.
He was also bitter.
“I stood up for the little guy all my life,” Cus said. “Lot of my troubles came from standing up for the underdog. Some of the people that I did things for didn’t deserve it. Very few people are worth saving.”
Cus was totally color-blind. His father’s best friend was black. When he was in the army, stationed in the South, he had a boxing team. When they traveled, no hotel would take his black fighters so he slept with them in parks.
He was also a big-time socialist. He was in love with Che and Fidel and the Rosenbergs. He’d tell me about the Rosenberg case and I’d tease him.
“Come on, Cus. That ain’t right. They were guilty,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” he’d roar. “You’re talking now but when they bring slavery back you’re not going to be able to say who was guilty or not. They’re planning to bring it back too, all right?”
His biggest enemy was Ronald Reagan. Reagan would come on the TV and Cus would scream at the top of his lungs, “LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. LIAR!!!” Cus was a maniac. He would always be talking about who needed to die. “A man dies by the way he lives,” he’d
