ear. The sound was so deafening, I thought that he might have actually shot my ear off. And then Teddy ran. I would have too, because the gym was on top of a police station.
Whenever Teddy talks about this incident now, he makes it sound like he scared me to shit. The truth was, it wasn’t the first time someone had held a gun to my head, but it wasn’t like I was saying stuff like “C’mon, shoot me, motherfucker.” I was nervous. By the way, it took a while for my hearing to come back. But I just felt that I had fucked something up real bad. I really cared about Teddy. I was pissed, though, and I might have told some people that I was going to get back at him, but I would never do anything to hurt Teddy. He taught me how to fight, he was right there from the beginning.
Camille was furious with Teddy. She wanted Cus to press charges and have him arrested but Cus wouldn’t do that. He knew that Teddy was on probation for some other issue and that he would have gone right to jail. Teddy and his family eventually moved back to the city.
All this was my fault. I’m just sorry all that went down. After Teddy left, I started working with Kevin Rooney, another boxer who Cus converted into a trainer. Rooney and Teddy were childhood friends and Teddy had introduced Kevin to Cus. You can imagine how high the emotions ran when things played out the way they did.
I felt pretty developed by the time I got with Rooney. Normally when guys won tournaments, they’d get choosy about who they’d fight. Not me. I’d fight anybody anywhere: in their hometown, their backyard. Cus would say to me, “Fight them in their living rooms and their families could even be the judges.” I just wanted to fight and I wasn’t afraid of anything. I would fight in Chicago, Rhode Island, Boston, anywhere. And people would say, “That’s Tyson, he won the Junior Olympics twice.”
In December of 1982, I suffered my first loss in a tournament. I was fighting for the U.S. Amateur Championships in Indianapolis and my opponent was Al Evans. I was sixteen then and he was twenty-seven, a hard puncher and a very experienced guy.
I charged him in the first round and threw a ton of punches. I did the same in the second round. I was knocking him from pillar to post. In the third round, I was a little wild and he countered with a left hook and I went down. I got right up and rushed him again. He knocked me down with a right hand this time. I got up and started to charge again and I slipped. That was it, the ref stopped the fight. I wasn’t really hurt. I could have gone on. Cus was screaming at the ref from the corner.
I was crushed. I wanted to win every tournament. I liked the way the champion was treated after he won. I wanted that feeling, I was addicted to that feeling.
Cus might have thought that the loss shook my confidence and my desire, because when we got back to Catskill, he gave me a little lecture.
“Look at the champions you’ve read about in all these books. At some time early in their careers a number of them suffered knockout losses. But they never gave up. They endured. That’s why you’re reading about them. The ones who lost and quit, well their demons will follow them to their grave because they had a chance to face them and they didn’t. You have to face your demons, Mike, or they will follow you to eternity. Remember to always be careful how you fight your fights because the way that you fight your fights will be the way that you live your life.”
I won my next six fights, and then I fought for the National Golden Gloves championship against a guy called Craig Payne. I knocked Payne around the ring for three rounds with very little resistance. So I was confident when the official holding the big trophy walked past me into the ring. Craig and I were on either side of the ref and he was holding our hands waiting for the decision. I started raising my other hand in celebration when I noticed the official holding the trophy giving Craig the thumbs-up sign.
“And the winner in the Super Heavyweight division is … Craig Payne.”
I was stunned. The audience erupted into boos. Go to YouTube and watch that fight. I was robbed. After the fight, Emanuel Steward, the great trainer from Detroit who had Payne in his program, told me that he definitely thought that I had won. Cus was angry about the decision, but he was happy to see that I could handle that type of competition. He knew that we had won morally, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I was crying like a baby for a long time after the fight.
I didn’t have time to sulk. I went right back in the gym to train for more tournaments. In August of 1983, I won the gold medal at the CONCACAF Under-19 tournament. I won it again in 1984. That same year I won the gold medal at the National Golden Gloves tournament by knocking out Jonathan Littles in the first round. I had fought Littles in 1982 at the Junior Olympic trials and he was the only opponent who even made it into the second round with me. Now it was time to start getting ready for the Olympic trials.
While I was training for the Olympics, the boxing commentator Alex Wallau came up to Catskill to do a feature on Cus and me. At one point they had us sit in the living room and talk about each other. Cus was dressed in a conservative gray suit and a plaid sports shirt. I was wearing slacks and a shirt and a fly white Kangol cap.
Alex asked Cus about working with me and Cus went off into an interesting stream-of-consciousness rap.
“All my life I’ve been thinking in terms of developing a fighter who’s perfect. To me a person can accomplish this. I recognized the quality of a future champion because he was always able to rise to the level and exceed his sparring partners. Taught him movements like in karate so the body would make adjustments during a fight even if your opponent doesn’t make it necessary. He can strike a blow with lightning speed to the complete surprise of his opponents. He had tremendous speed, coordination, and an intuitive sense of timing, which usually comes after ten years of fighting because in the old days they used to box every single day.
“I don’t start teaching until I find out if they’re receptive. I do a great deal of talking to find out what kind of a person he is. For example we are today a sum total of every act and every deed. So in Mike’s case we talk and I try to find out how many layers I have to peel off of him of experience, detrimental and otherwise, until I get down to the man himself and then expose that, so that not only I see but that he can see. The progress begins from that point on more rapidly.”
“When you peeled away the layers on Mike Tyson, what did you find?” Alex asked.
Cus hesitated. “I found what I thought I’d find: a person of basically good character, capable of doing the things that are necessary to be done in order to be a great fighter or champion of the world. When I recognized this, then my next job was to make him aware of these qualities because unless he knew them as well as I did, it wouldn’t help him very much. The ability to apply the discipline, the ability to do what needs to be done no matter how he feels inside, in my opinion, is the definition of a true professional. I think that Mike is rapidly approaching that status, that important point, which I consider Mike must do in order to become the greatest fighter in the world. And for all we know, barring unforeseen incidents, and if this continues without any interruptions, and if we get the sparring and everything else that goes with it, he may go down in history as one of the greatest we ever had, if not the greatest that ever lived.”
I was so happy that Cus was talking about me. Then Alex asked Cus if it was hard for a man his age to work with such a young fighter.
“I often say to him, and I know he doesn’t know what I mean but I’m going to tell him now what I mean, because if he weren’t here I probably wouldn’t be alive today. The fact that he is here and doing what he’s doing and doing it so well and improving as he has gives me the motivation and interest in staying alive because I believe that a person dies when he no longer wants to live. Nature is smarter than we think. Little by little we lose our friends that we care about and little by little
