miss Cus terribly. He was my backbone. All the things we worked on, they’re starting to come out so well. But when it comes down to it, who really cares? I like doing my job, but I’m not happy being victorious. I fight my heart out, give it my best, but when it’s over, there’s no Cus to tell me how I did, no mother to show my clippings to.”
I put my feelings aside and kept busy. On January 24, 1986, I fought Mike Jameson. He was a big Irishman who had won decisions over Tex Cobb and Michael Dokes. It took me five rounds to stop him because he was a wily veteran and knew when to hold me. It made for a lackluster fight. My next opponent took those tactics to a new level. On February sixteenth, I met Jesse Ferguson in Troy, New York. The fight was on ABC and it was my first national TV appearance. Ferguson had become the ESPN champion when he beat Buster Douglas five months earlier. I was watching him walk around in the arena after he won the championship and I wanted to challenge him for his belt so bad. I fought on the undercard.
I knew it was going to be a tough fight. During the instructions, he didn’t even look me in the eye. He had such a humble and submissive posture. But I didn’t detect even a drop of fear or intimidation from his energy, so I wasn’t going for any of that humble, afraid-to-look-me-in-the-eye shit. I felt that he couldn’t wait to slug me.
I had the hometown advantage – in more ways than one. Jimmy had stacked the deck for my first national exposure. He got us to wear eight-ounce gloves, lighter than usual. We were fighting in a smaller ring than normal. And all the officials were in our corner.
I began the fight with a vicious body assault. But Ferguson was shrewd enough to hold on to me. This continued for the first four rounds. But in the fifth, I got him in the corner and connected with a right uppercut and broke his nose. He barely made it through the round and in the sixth he was in trouble again. Then he just blatantly held on to me and totally ignored the referee’s command to break. It got so bad that the referee stopped the fight. Ironically enough, a disqualification would have stopped my knockout streak. But the next day the local boxing commission changed the result to a TKO.
When I met with the reporters after the fight, I started a controversy. When they asked me about finishing Ferguson off after I had scored with the uppercut, I said, “I wanted to hit him on the nose one more time, so that the bone of his nose would go up into his brain … I would always listen to the doctor’s conclusions. They said that any time that the nose goes into the brain, the consequences of him getting up right away are out of the question.”
The reporters laughed, but maybe it was just nervous laughter. What I said to the reporters was what Cus used to say to me word for word. I didn’t think I said anything wrong. Cus and I always used to talk about the science of hurting people. I wanted to be a cantankerous, malevolent champion. I used to watch these comic book characters on TV, the X-Men and one of my favorites, Apocalypse. Apocalypse would say, “I’m not malevolent, I just am.” Cayton and Jacobs wanted me to be friendly with everybody, sociable, but I knew a man who was friendly with everyone was an enemy to himself.
The next day, the shit hit the fan because of my comment. New York papers had big headlines that read, “Is This the Real Tyson, a Thug?” One reporter even called up my old social worker, Mrs. Coleman, and she advised me to be a man, not an animal. But I didn’t care. I had a job to do. I wasn’t going to be Mike Tyson the heavyweight champion by being a nice guy. I was going to do it in Cus’s name. My opponents had to know that they were going to pay with their life or their health if they contested me.
Jimmy and Cayton tried to muzzle me after that. They assigned Steve Lott to tell me what to say after a fight. Jimmy even fired their P.R. guy because he had sent that quote out on the wires. Shortly after that fight Jimmy invited some handpicked reporters to have dinner with us. Ed Schuyler of the Associated Press was there, and he felt that there was a sense of desperation behind Cayton and Jimmy to get me a title before I got into serious trouble. But that wasn’t what it was. I think they just wanted to grab the money while they could. They didn’t have the respect for the mission I was on.
Cayton and the rest of them wanted to strip me of my history of growing up in Brooklyn and give me a positive image. Cus knew that was bullshit. They were trying to suppress me and make me conform to their standards. I wanted people to see the savage that was within me.
We partied after the Ferguson fight. I was drinking heavily during that time. Not during training, but once the fight was over, it was self-destruction time. I was a full-blown alcoholic. But I drank away from the glare of all the media in the city. We partied in Albany at my friend’s bar called September’s. That was our stomping ground. Sometimes guys went there from the city or from Boston or L.A. for work-related reasons, and they’d act like big shots, like they were gonna stomp on us little upstate guys, so we’d beat the shit out of them. I didn’t want to fight anybody and get sued, but there were people there fighting in place of me. I’d be instigating it, saying shit like, “Just kick that motherfucker. Who does he think he is?” We had a field day with those out-of-towners.
My next fight was against Steve Zouski on March tenth in the Nassau Coliseum. Zouski had never been floored in any of his previous fights, but I scored with several uppercuts in the third round and knocked him out. But I was not impressed with my performance. For one, I had fallen off a ladder in my pigeon coop at Camille’s and suffered a cut on my ear. Zouski hit my ear a few times and it blew up during the fight and started to affect my balance. During the interview after the fight, I alluded to my other problem.
“I didn’t like my performance,” I told Randy Gordon, who had been calling the fight. “I have a lot of personal problems I’m getting over.”
Cayton later told the press that I meant girlfriend problems, but that was absurd. I didn’t have a girlfriend then. I was just depressed because so many of my friends from Brownsville were getting killed. It was barbaric. Friends were killing other friends over money.
After the fight, one of the officials saw that there was a big bulge on my ear. So the next day Jimmy had a specialist check me out and he realized that my cartilage had gotten severely infected and immediately made me check into Mount Sinai on the Upper East Side. He was worried that I might lose my ear if it went untreated. They had me stay in the hospital for ten days and undergo treatment in a hyperbaric chamber twice a day where they forced antibiotics into the cartilage.
The doctors at Mount Sinai told me that it would be good for me to go out and get some fresh air. So every day after my second treatment at three p.m., Tom Patti and my close childhood friend Duran would pick me up in a limo or we’d walk down to Times Square, where we hung out and took pictures with all the prostitutes and the guys who sold pictures of tourists with pythons coiled around their necks. We were having a blast, partying all night. I’d roll back into the hospital at four a.m. and the nurses would freak. “This isn’t a hotel, it’s a hospital.” When I showed the doctors the pictures of me with the prostitute and the python, they freaked too. “No, no, we didn’t mean you should go out all night. We meant go downstairs and sit in Central Park, watch the birds and the squirrels and get some fresh air.”
That was almost two months before my fight with James Tillis in upstate New York. When it was time for the fight, I was out of shape because of my illness and also because I had been drinking and partying way too hard. The fight went ten hard rounds and I was just glad to get the decision. I dropped him once, which probably tipped the scales in my favor, but he was the toughest opponent I had ever faced at that point. He gave me such a body beating that I couldn’t even walk after the fight. I had to stay in the hotel. I couldn’t even drive home. I found out what fighting was really about that night. Several times during the fight I wanted to go down so bad just to get some relief, but I kept grabbing and holding him, trying to get my breath back.
The next day Jimmy Jacobs went into spin mode. He told the
