on.’ But I have a reason with Mike here. He gives me the motivation and I will stay alive and I will watch him become a success because I will not leave until that happens because when I leave, he will not only know how to fight, he will not only understand many things, but he will also know how to take care of himself.”
Whew. That was just Cus putting this fucking pressure on me again. I know that Cus believed I could handle it, but he also believed that I didn’t believe I could.
Then they asked me about my future and my dreams.
“Dreams are just when you’re starting off. You have the dream to push the motivation. I just want to be alive ten years from now. People say I’m going to be a million-dollar fighter. Well, I know what I am, and that’s what counts more than anything else, because the people don’t know what I go through. They think I’m born this way. They don’t know what it took to get this way.”
“What do you go through?” Alex asked.
“The training. The boxing’s the easy part. When you get into the ring to fight, that’s the vacation. But when you get in the gym, you have to do things over and over till you’re sore and deep in your mind you say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I push that out of my mind. At this particular time it’s the amateurs and it’s all fun, trophies and medals, but I’m like you, I want to make money when it comes to being professional. I like the fancy hairdos and I like to wear fancy clothes, gold, jewelry, and everything. To continue this kind of lifestyle you have to earn the money the right way. You can’t take a gun and go into a bank. You might as well do it in a way that you feel good about yourself by doing something you like.”
I was bitter about working that hard. I had never endured that kind of deprivation and then I had to get up the next day and do it all over again. I worked hard for those Olympics.
The U.S. team officials wouldn’t let me compete at my natural weight, because Cus was feuding with the Olympic boxing guys. It started when they wanted me to fight on the U.S. team at a fight in the Dominican Republic, but Cus wouldn’t let me go because we couldn’t use Kevin as our trainer. I would have had to use their trainers. He also didn’t want me to go because he was afraid that revolutionaries might try to kidnap me.
To get back at Cus, they told him that I would have to fight in the Under-201-pound division. I was fighting at about 215 then so I went on a fast. I put on those vinyl suits again and wore them all day. I loved it; I felt like a real fighter, lose the weight to make the weight. I was so delusional, I thought I was making a great sacrifice.
I had an intense schedule preparing for the Olympic trials. On August 12, 1983, I entered the Ohio State Fair National Tournament. On the first day, I achieved a forty-two-second KO. On the second day, I punched out the front two teeth of my opponent and left him out cold for ten minutes. Then on the third day, the reigning tournament champ withdrew from the fight.
The next day we went to Colorado Springs for the U.S. National Championship. When I got there, four of the six other fighters dropped out of the competition. Both of my victories were first-round KOs.
On June 10, 1984, I finally got a shot at the Olympics. My qualifying fight was against Henry Tillman, an older and more experienced boxer. In the first round, I knocked him almost through the ropes. Then he was up and I stalked him for the next two rounds. But in amateur boxing, aggression isn’t rewarded and my knockout counted the same as a light tippy-tap jab. When they announced the decision, I couldn’t believe that they gave it to Tillman. Once again, the crowd agreed and they started booing.
I hated these amateur bouts. “We are boxers here,” these stuffed shirts would say.
“Well, I am a fighter, sir. My purpose is to fight,” I’d answer.
The whole amateur boxing establishment hated me. They didn’t like my cocky Brownsville attitude. I was behaving myself but you could still see that New York swagger coming out. And if they didn’t like me, they despised Cus. He could be so over-the-top that sometimes he’d embarrass me. I never let him know; I always stood there and listened to him go after these guys, but I was totally embarrassed by the way he would talk to them. He was very vindictive and always out for revenge. He couldn’t live without enemies, so he created them. I sometimes thought, Damn, why couldn’t I have been with a nonconfrontational kind of white guy? I thought I was getting away from that loud life where people screamed at the top of their lungs. But with Cus, it was a constant reminder that I hadn’t.
I had a chance to avenge my loss to Tillman a month later at the Olympic Box-Offs. Again I pressed him for three rounds and this time he did even less than in the first fight. Even Howard Cosell, who was doing the announcing for ABC and who had thought Tillman had outpointed me in our first fight, had to admit that I had a much better chance of getting the decision.
I was sure I had won and when the ref lifted Tillman’s arm again, I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that they’d give him two bullshit decisions. Again the whole audience started booing the judges. Cus was furious. He started cursing and tried to punch out one of the U.S. Olympic officials. Kevin Rooney and some other officials had to hold him back. I was so self-absorbed at the time that I thought all of this stuff with Cus was about me. As I got older, I understood that this was really a story that went back about thirty years. These were his demons and they really had little to do with me.
It was all about Cus being taken advantage of and robbed of his glory. I didn’t even know until recently that Cus had sent a friend of ours named Mark, who worked for the FBI, to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Albany to investigate the Tillman decisions.
I threw tantrums after the two Tillman decisions. I took the runner-up trophies that they gave me and threw them down and broke them. Cus sent me to the Olympics anyway, to live with the Olympic team. The Olympics were in L.A. that year. He said that I should just go there and enjoy the experience. He got me two tickets to every fight, but I had a pass anyway so I scalped the tickets. And the Olympics weren’t a total loss for me. There was this really cute intern who worked for the U.S. Olympic committee. All of the boxers and the coaches were hitting on her, but I was the one who got her. She liked me. After all those years of deprivation, it was nice to finally have sex.
But even getting laid didn’t take away the disappointment and pain I felt from having my Olympic dream stolen from me. When the Olympics were over, I flew back to New York, but I didn’t go right back to Catskill. I hung around the city. I was really depressed. One afternoon I went to Forty-second Street to see a karate movie. Right before it started, I smoked a joint.
I started getting high and I remembered the time that Cus had caught me with pot. It was right after I had won my second Junior Olympics Championship. One of the other boxers was jealous of me and ratted me out. Before I had a chance to ditch the evidence, Cus had sent Ruth, the German cleaning lady, to my room and she found the weed.
Cus was furious when I came home.
“This must be some good stuff, Mike. I know this must be good because you just let down four hundred years of slaves and peasants to smoke it.”
He broke my spirit that day. He made me feel like an Uncle Tom nigga. And he hated those kinds of people. He really knew how to bring me to my nadir.
So I was sitting in the theater, remembering that, and sinking deeper and deeper into my depression. Then I started crying. When the movie was over, I went straight to the train station and went back to Catskill. The whole trip back, I knew I had to immediately throw myself into full-blown training for professional fighting. I had to be spectacular when I turned pro. As we got closer to Catskill, I started talking to myself.
