scene. It was so powerful, you could still feel it in the music of Elton John and Stevie Wonder and Freddie Mercury. You knew they had been to a special place that wasn’t around any longer.
But even meeting all these superstars didn’t validate my own sense of having made it. That didn’t happen until I met the wrestler Bruno Sammartino. I was a huge wrestling fan growing up. I loved Sammartino and Gorilla Monsoon and Billy Graham. One night I went to a party where I met Tom Cruise, who was just starting out. At the same event, I saw Bruno Sammartino. I was totally starstruck. I just stared at him. Someone introduced us and he had no idea who I was, but I started recounting to him all the great matches I had seen him participate in, against people like Killer Kowalski, Nikolai Volkoff, and George “the Animal” Steele. In my sick, megalomaniac mind I was thinking, This is a sign of my greatness. My hero is here with me. I’m going to be great like him and win the championship.
Cus wasn’t too thrilled that I was spending more and more time in Manhattan. When I went to the city, I’d crash on the couch of Steve Lott, who was Jimmy Jacobs’s right-hand man. Steve was a model junkie and he’d take me to places like the Nautilus Club and other spots where beautiful girls would hang out. At the time I was dedicated to winning that belt so I wasn’t really fooling around with the girls yet. I tried to be a nice guy then, not going too far. My weakness was food. Steve was a great cook and when I went out at night clubbing, I’d come back and have Steve heat up some Chinese leftovers for a late-night snack. I’d go back to Catskill after a few days and Cus would be mad.
“Look at your ass. Your ass is getting fatter,” he’d shake his head.
My next fight was my first real test. On October ninth, I went up against Donnie Long in Atlantic City. Long had gone the distance with both James Broad, a tough heavyweight, and John Tate, the former WBA heavyweight champ. I knew it would make me look good in the boxing world if I dispatched him promptly. Long was confident going into the fight, telling Al Bernstein of ESPN that he could outpunch me. They called Long “the Master of Disaster,” but his night turned disastrous as soon as the opening bell rang. I went after him fast and ferocious and knocked him down seconds into the fight with a lunging left. A little later, a right uppercut dropped him and then I finished him off with a right-uppercut-left-hook combination. It took me under a minute and a half to win.
After the fight, Al Bernstein interviewed me.
“Earlier in the day I really thought that Donnie Long would be a fairly tough opponent for you. He wasn’t!” Al said.
“Well, like I told you earlier today, if I knock him out in one or two rounds, would you still consider him that?”
“I thought he was supposed to be, but I guess he wasn’t,” Al said.
“Oh, now he wasn’t …” I laughed.
“No, he was a tough man, I’m just saying for you he wasn’t tough, apparently, because you beat him.”
“I knew from the beginning, but everybody else didn’t know that it was no con, it was no con. A lot of people came to look, Jesse Ferguson came to look, the Fraziers came to look. All of you come and get some, because Mike Tyson is out here, he is waiting for you, all come and get some.”
I was almost too focused then; I didn’t really live in reality. I was interviewed for Sports Illustrated and I said, “What bothers me most is being around people who are having a lot of fun, with parties and stuff like that. It makes you soft. People who are only interested in having fun cannot accomplish anything.” I thought I was stronger than people who were weak and partying. I wanted to be in that Columbus celebrity world, but I was fighting that temptation to party.
I still wasn’t having sex. The last time I had gotten laid was at the Olympics with that intern. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex, but I was too awkward with women. I didn’t know how to access them. “Hey, hi, you want to get laid?” I didn’t know how to say that. Around this time, I was supposed to fight on the undercard in Madison Square Garden. My reputation preceded me and my opponent didn’t show up. So I left the Garden and went to a whorehouse on Forty-second Street. I had known about the place since I was a kid hanging out in Times Square.
I walked into the joint and sat down in one of the chairs in the outer room. There was a big-screen TV playing porno films. The girls would come up and they’d sit with you, and ask, “Would you like to date?” If you passed on one of them, another one would come over. I was the youngest guy there, so they thought I was kind of cute. I picked out a nice Cuban girl and we went to a room in the back.
Freud would have had a field day with that scenario. Here I was all ready to focus my aggression and beat up my opponent in the ring, but the fight is canceled and I go and get laid. I was actually extremely excited. During our session, her back went out. She said, “Hey, we have to stop. I pulled something in my back.” I hadn’t finished yet so I asked her for my money back. She changed the subject and asked me for my Edwin Rosario T-shirt that I was wearing. She was too hurt to continue so she said, “Let’s talk.” We talked for a while and then I left with my T-shirt.
After that, Cus began accelerating my pace. Sixteen days after the Long fight I fought Robert Colay and I threw two left hooks. The first one missed, the second one knocked him out. It was over in thirty-seven seconds. A week later I fought Sterling Benjamin upstate in Latham, New York. I knocked him down with a short left hook and then after the eight count, I swarmed him, throwing devastating body blows and uppercuts. He crumbled to the canvas. The ref stopped the fight. The upstate crowd was going wild and I turned to face them, putting my gloves through the upper ropes, palms up, and saluted them gladiator-style.
But I had more important things on my mind than my eleventh pro victory. Cus was very ill. He had been sick since I moved into the house with him and Camille, he was always coughing, but I knew his condition was getting worse when he didn’t travel with us to some of my fights. He stayed home for the Long and the Colay fights, but he made the trip to Latham to see me fight Benjamin. He was too much of an old stubborn Italian man to miss a fight in his backyard. He had no faith in doctors and he was one of the first proponents of vitamins and what we now call “alternative medicine,” and nutritional therapy.
I knew Cus was sick but I was just of the mind-set that he was going to make it through to see me become champ because we always talked about it. He was going to stick around to see me become a success. But when we talked in private, sometimes he’d say, “I might not be around, so you’ve got to listen to me.” I just thought he said that to scare me, to make sure I acted right. Cus always said things to make me apprehensive.
He was admitted to a hospital in Albany, but Jimmy Jacobs had him transferred to Mount Sinai in the city. I went with Steve Lott to visit him. Cus was sitting in his bed eating ice cream. We talked for a few minutes and then Cus asked Steve to leave the room so he could talk to me in private.
That’s when he told me he was dying from pneumonia. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. He didn’t look morbidly ill. He was buffing. He had energy and zest. He was eating ice cream. He was chilling out, but I started freaking out.
“I don’t want to do this shit without you,” I said, choking back tears. “I’m not going to do it.”
“Well, if you don’t fight, you’ll realize that people can come back from the grave, because I’m going to haunt you for the rest of your life.” I told him “Okay,” and then he took my hand.
“The world has to see you, Mike. You’re going to be champ of the world, the greatest out there,” he said.
Then
