of my fights. He loved it when I would act arrogant and give off an imperious air. Cus was plenty arrogant himself. One time, I was fighting a twenty-four-year-old guy who had been the champion of his region since he was sixteen. No one had ever beaten him.
Before the fight, one of the local boxing officials came over to us.
“Cus, the man you’re fighting is big, strong, and scary,” he said.
Cus didn’t bat an eye.
“My boy’s business is to put big, strong, scary men in their place.”
I heard that and oh, my heart. Arrrghh. I would turn into fucking hot blue fire. I got so pumped up that I wanted to fight those guys before we got into the ring.
Once, I didn’t bathe for three days leading up to a fight. All I thought about was hurting my opponent. I didn’t know anything about my opponents in these smokers, there were no videos to watch, no TV appearances by them. So I always imagined that the people I was fighting were the people who had bullied me when I was younger. It was retribution time. No one would ever pick on me again.
Whenever I displayed the slightest bit of humanity at a fight, Cus would be all over me. A guy might try to shake my hand before our fight in a gesture of sportsmanship. If I shook it, Cus went ballistic.
The only display of compassion that he didn’t criticize was when I would pick up my opponents after I knocked them out. Dempsey would do that all the time. He would pick up his vanquished opponent, take him back to his corner, hold him, and kiss him. That was right after he tried to eviscerate him. So I’d pick them up and give them a kiss. “Are you okay? I love you, brother.” It was almost humiliating for them.
Cus didn’t like me to celebrate my knockouts. No high fives, no dance steps.
“You’ve been practicing this for two years and you’re acting like you’re surprised this happened?” he’d say.
To Cus, my opponents were food. Nourishment. Something you had to eat to live. If I did good in a fight, Cus would reward me. Nice clothes, shoes. When I won one of my junior championships, he bought me gold teeth. When I got my gold in the ’80s, most people would think, “Ugh, criminals wear gold teeth. Be careful.” But Cus loved it because all the old-time fighters got gold teeth to celebrate their success.
You’d think with all these knockouts and the junior championship Cus would have had little to criticize. Not Cus. He always treated me like a prima donna in front of people, but behind closed doors it wasn’t like that. I’d be alone with him at the house and he’d sit me down.
“You know, you had your hand low. With all due respect, if that gentleman was a bit more professional, a little bit calmer, he would have hit you with that punch.”
This was after I had knocked the guy out! Everybody had been congratulating me on my right-hand KO. Cus didn’t say I would have gotten knocked out. He said he would have hit me! He would put that idea of getting hit by that punch in my head all day. Then after a couple of days, he’d run that shit again.
“Remember after the fight I told you that guy would have hit you …”
AAAGGGHH.
Cus was all about manipulation, psychological warfare. He believed that 90 percent of boxing was psychological and not physical. Will, not skill. So when I was fifteen, he began taking me to a hypnotherapist named John Halpin. He had an office on Central Park West in the city. I’d lie down on the floor of John’s office and he’d go through all the stages of relaxation: your head, your eyes, your arms, your legs, all getting heavy. Once I was under, he’d tell me whatever Cus wanted him to say. Cus would write out the suggestions on a piece of paper and John would recite them out loud.
“You’re the world’s greatest fighter. I’m not telling you this because I’m trying to make you believe you are something that you’re not, I’m telling you this because you can actually do this; this is what you were actually born to do.”
Halpin showed us a method by which we could put ourselves into a hypnotic state anytime we wanted. When we were back up in Catskill, I’d lie down on the floor or in my bedroom and Cus would be sitting next to me. I’d start to relax and go into my hypnotic state and Cus would talk. Sometimes he’d talk in generalities like I was the best fighter in the world but sometimes it would be specifics.
“Your jab is like a weapon. You throw punches that are ferocious, with bad intentions. You have a wonderful right hand. You haven’t really believed in it but now you will. You are a scourge from God. The world will know your name from now until the eons of oblivion.”
It was some really deep shit. And I believed it.
Sometimes Cus would wake me up in the middle of the night and do his suggestions. Sometimes he didn’t even have to talk, I could feel his words coming through my mind telepathically.
I became focused on the hypnosis. I thought this was a secret method that was going to help me. Some people might think this was crazy but I believed everything that Cus was telling me. I embraced it religiously. Cus was my God. And this old white guy was telling me that I was the apex. Why did I have to be the best that ever existed?
Now that I was a gladiator and a god among men, it seemed a little demeaning that I had to go to high school. Then, in the fall of 1981, I got in trouble at Catskill High. One of my teachers, a real ignorant redneck, started arguing with me and threw a book at me. I got up and smacked the shit out of him in front of all the other students. They suspended me. So Cus grabbed me and we marched into the school and confronted the principal, Mr. Stickler, and the teacher. You would have thought Cus was Clarence Darrow the way he was defending me.
“You maintain that you merely dropped the book and it hit Mike by accident,” Cus grilled the teacher. “But if, as you claim, you dropped the book, how could it have been propelled into the air and into Mike’s physical person? It would have harmlessly fallen to the floor without causing any injury to anyone.”
Cus was pacing the room, making sudden stops and pointing dramatically at my teacher as if he was the guilty party.
They finally compromised and let me stop attending school as long as I got a tutor. Cus was hurt that I was leaving school. He had planned to throw me a big graduation party. On the way home from the meeting at the high school, I looked over at Cus. “Come on. I’m ready to go to the gym.”
He just looked back at me. “Come on,” he said.
June of 1982 rolled around and it was time for me to defend my Junior Olympics championship. By now my reputation had certainly preceded me. Parents pulled their kids out of the tournament in fear of them fighting me. John Condon, who was part of the Golden Gloves tournaments, wouldn’t let me compete. “I’ve seen you fight. You’re too mean. I can’t let you fight these kids. You’d rip them apart.”
My second Junior Olympics started off well. We were back in Colorado, and in my preliminary matches I knocked out all of my opponents. Then it was time for the finals where I’d defend my title. That’s when the pressure got to me. I saw all of the cameras and my insecurities started to kick in. There were all these established boxing officials saying great things about me. I thought that that was wonderful, but that it was all going to end because I was filthy, I was dirty. Even so, I certainly didn’t want to let Brownsville down. Cus had told me many times that if I listened to him, “when your mother walks the streets of Brownsville, people will
