game. He will be in the pantheon of great fighters alongside John L. Sullivan and Joe Louis and Benny Leonard and Joe Gans and the rest. Tyson is magnificent.”
I talked about myself in the third person. Even to myself.
I was completely pumped up when I got off that train and took a cab to Cus’s house. The world was about to see a fighter the likes of which it had never been seen before. I was going to transcend the game. With all due respect, and not to be arrogant, but I was conscious of my future prominence as a boxer then. I knew nothing could stop me and I would be the champion as surely as Friday would come after Thursday. I didn’t lose a fight for the next six years.
Coming off of those two losses to Tillman, I wasn’t exactly the hottest property in the boxing world. Cus had planned for me to win the gold medal at the Olympics and then start my career with a lucrative TV contract. But that didn’t work out. No professional promoters were interested in me. Nobody in boxing really believed in Cus’s peek-a-boo style. And a lot of people thought that I was too short to be an effective heavyweight.
I guess all that talk got to Cus. One night I was taking the garbage out and Cus was cleaning up the kitchen.
“Man, I wish you had a body like Mike Weaver or Ken Norton,” he said out of the blue. “Because then you would be real intimidating. You’d have an ominous aura. They don’t have the temperament but they have the physique of an intimidating man. You could paralyze the other boxers with fear just by the way you look.”
I got choked up. To this day, when I recount this story, I still choke up. I was offended and hurt but I wouldn’t tell Cus that because then he’d say, “Oh, you’re crying? What are you, a little baby? How can you handle a big-time fight if you don’t have the emotional toughness?”
Any time I showed my emotions, he despised it. So I held back my tears.
“Don’t worry, Cus.” I made myself sound arrogant. “You watch. One day the whole world is going to be afraid of me. When they mention my name, they’ll sweat blood, Cus.”
That was the day that I turned into Iron Mike; I became that guy 100 percent. Even though I had been winning almost every one of my fights in an exciting fashion, I wasn’t completely emotionally invested in being the savage that Cus wanted me to be. After that talk about me being too small, I became that savage. I even began to fantasize that if I actually killed someone inside the ring, it would certainly intimidate everyone. Cus wanted an antisocial champion, so I drew on the bad guys from the movies, guys like Jack Palance and Richard Widmark. I immersed myself in the role of the arrogant sociopath.
But first I got a Cadillac. Cus couldn’t afford to pay for my expenses while we were building up my career, so he got his friend Jimmy Jacobs and his partner, Bill Cayton, to lay out the money. Jimmy was an awesome guy. He was the Babe Ruth of handball and while he traveled around the world on the handball circuit, he began collecting rare fight films. Eventually he met Bill Cayton, who was a collector himself, and the two of them started Big Fights, Inc. They cornered the market on fight footage and Cayton later made a fortune selling those fights to ESPN. Cus had lived with Jimmy for ten years when Cus was still in New York, so they were close friends. In fact, Cus had devised a secret plan to train Jimmy as a fighter and for his first fight ever, amateur or professional, to fight Archie Moore for his light-heavyweight title. Jacobs trained intensely for six months with Cus, but the fight never happened because Archie pulled out.
But Cus never liked Jimmy’s partner Cayton. He thought he was too in love with his money. I didn’t like him either. Where Jimmy had a great outgoing personality, Cayton was a pompous cold fish. Jimmy and Cayton had been managing boxers for many years and had Wilfred Benitez and Edwin Rosario in their stable, so despite his dislike of Cayton, Cus promised them a role with me when I turned pro.
I guess Cus saw Jimmy and Bill as investors who wouldn’t interfere with my development and would allow Cus to have total control over my upbringing. By now they had invested over $200,000 in me. When I got back from the Olympics, Jimmy told Cus that he wanted to buy me a new car. I think that they might have been worried that I would leave Cus and go with someone else, cutting them out of the picture. Of course, I would never have done that.
Cus was mad because he thought that I didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t like I had come home with a gold medal. But he took me to a local dealership. Cus was trying to steer me to an Oldsmobile Cutlass because it didn’t cost much.
“Nah, I want the Cadillac, Cus,” I said.
“Mike, I’m telling you …”
“If it’s not the Cadillac, I don’t want no car.” I stood my ground.
I got the car and we drove it back to the house and stored it in the barn. I didn’t have a license and I didn’t know how to drive, but when Cus got on my case, I’d grab my car keys, run out to the barn, get in the car, lock myself in, and play music.
In September of 1984, I signed two contracts, one with Bill Cayton and one with Jimmy Jacobs. Cayton owned an advertising agency, and he signed me to a seven-year personal management contract representing me for commercials and product endorsements. Instead of the usual 10 or 15 percent, Cayton was taking 331/3 percent. But I didn’t know the terms, I just signed it. A few weeks later, I signed a contract with Jimmy and he became my manager. Standard four-year contract, two-thirds for me, one-third for Jimmy. And then they agreed to split the income from the contracts with each other. Cus signed my management contract too. Under his signature it read, “Cus D’Amato, Advisor to Michael Tyson who shall have final approval of all decisions involving Michael Tyson.” Now I had an official management team. I knew that Cayton and Jimmy were very savvy guys with the media, and I knew that they knew how to organize shit. And with Cus making all the boxing decisions and handpicking my opponents, I was ready to begin my professional career.
Until about a week into training, when I vanished for four days. Tom Patti finally tracked me down. I was sitting in my Caddy.
“Where have you been, Mike?” Tommy asked.
“I don’t need this shit,” I vented. “My girlfriend Angie’s father is a manager at J.J. Newberry’s department store. He can get me a job making a hundred thousand dollars. I got this Caddy. I’m going to split,” I said.
The truth was, I was just nervous about fighting as a professional.
“Mike, you’re not going to make a hundred grand a year because you’re dating his daughter,” he said.
“I can do a lot of things,” I said.
“Man, you don’t have a lot of options. Get back in the gym, win your fight, and move on.”
I was back in the gym the next day. Once I got over my nerves, I was proud that I was going to be a professional fighter at just eighteen years old. I had a great team in my corner. Besides Kevin Rooney, there was Matt Baranski. Matt was a wonderful man who was a methodical tactician. Kevin was more “Aarrrgggghhh” in-your-face.
We discussed giving me a nickname. Jimmy and Bill didn’t think it was necessary, but Cus wanted to call me the Tan Terror, as an homage to Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber. I thought that was cool, but we never ran with it. But I paid homage to other
