On Boxing

  Early in the second round, Tyson knocks Berbick to the canvas with a powerful combination of blows, including a left hook; when Berbick manages to get gamely to his feet he is knocked down a second time with a left hook to the head—to be precise, to the right temple, a “vital area.” (As Tyson will say afterward, he had come to “destroy” the champion: “Every punch had a murderous intention.”) Accompanied by the wild clamor of the crowd as by an exotic sort of music, Berbick struggles to his feet, his expression glazed like that of a man trapped in a dream; he lurches across the ring on wobbly legs, falls another time, onto the ropes, as if by a sheer effort of will gets up, staggers across the ring in the opposite direction, is precariously on his feet when the referee, Mills Lane, stops the fight. No more than nine seconds have passed since Tyson’s blow but the sequence, in slow motion, has seemed much longer…. The nightmare image of a man struggling to retain consciousness and physical control before nine thousand witnesses is likely to linger in the memory: it is an image as inevitable in boxing as that of the ecstatic boxer with his gloved hands raised in triumph.

  At two minutes thirty-five seconds of the second round, the fight is over and twenty-year-old Mike Tyson is the new WBC champion. “I am the heavyweight champion of the world,” he tells the television audience, “and I will fight anybody in the world.”

  The post-Ali era has finally ended.

  Boxing is our most controversial American sport, always, it seems, on the brink of being abolished. Its detractors speak of it in contempt as a “so-called ‘sport,’” and surely their logic is correct: if “sport” means harmless play, boxing is not a sport; it is certainly not a game. But “sport” can signify a paradigm of life, a reduction of its complexities in terms of a single symbolic action—in this case its competitiveness, the cruelty of its Darwinian enterprise—defined and restrained by any number of rules, regulations, and customs: in which case boxing is probably, as the ex-heavyweight champion George Foreman has said, the sport to which all other sports aspire. It is the quintessential image of human struggle, masculine or otherwise, against not only other people but one’s own divided self. Its kinship with Roman gladiatorial combat—in which defeated men usually died—is not historically accurate but poetically relevant. In his classic Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen speaks of sport in general as “an expression of the barbarian temperament,” and it is a commonplace assumption for many boxers, particularly for young boxers like Mike Tyson, that in the ring they are fighting for their lives. (As Tyson said excitedly, following the Berbick fight, “I refuse to get hurt, I refuse to get knocked down, I refuse to lose—I would have to be killed—carried out of the ring. I would not be hurt.”)

  It should be kept in mind, however, that for all its negative publicity, and the sinister glamour of certain of its excesses, boxing is not our most dangerous sport. It ranks in approximately seventh place, after football, Thoroughbred racing, sports car racing, mountain climbing, et al. (It is far less systematically violent than professional football, for instance, in which, in a single season, hundreds of players are likely to be fined for the willful infraction of rules.) And in a time of sports mania unparalleled in our history, boxing remains the only major sport accessible to what is piously called “underprivileged” youth—the others are Establishment-controlled, sealed off from penetration by men with the backgrounds of Larry Holmes, Hector Camacho, Marvin Hagler, Mike Tyson.

  It has always been, in any case, from the days of bare-knuckle prizefighting to the present, the sport that people love to hate. Its image of men pitted against each other in man-to-man warfare is too stark, too extreme, to be assimilated into “civilized” society. “You’re fighting, you’re not playing the piano, you know,” welterweight champion Fritzie Zivic once said.

  “Yes, I’m fighting for my life in the ring,” Mike Tyson tells me. And, “I love boxing.” And, a little later, “Am I a born boxer? No—if I was, I’d be perfect.”

  In person Mike Tyson exudes the air of an intensely physical being; he is guarded, cautious in his speech, wary of strangers, unfailingly courteous. His intelligence expresses itself elliptically, as if through a mask—though not the death’s-head mask of the ring that so intimidates opponents. No doubt the referee’s classic admonition, “Protect yourself at all times!” rings in his ears in situations like this—an interview, one of numberless interviews, thrust upon him in the ever-burgeoning phenomenon of Fame. (It is difficult to believe Tyson will ever be fully—narcissistically—comfortable in his celebrity as Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard are in theirs.)

  Tyson is a young man, a phenomenon, one might say, of paradoxical qualities: more complex, and more self-analytical, than he has seemed willing, in public, to acknowledge. With his boyish gap-toothed smile and his earnest voice he has disarmed speculation about his future as a precocious titleholder by telling reporters repeatedly that his life is simple: “You wouldn’t believe how simple it is. I’m too young to worry about so many things. I let them worry.” (Meaning that his professional affairs are handled—and handled, it would seem, with consummate skill—by managers Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton of Big Fights Inc. and trainer Kevin Rooney.) He acquiesces to media descriptions of himself as a “boy champion”; he speaks, not, it seems, disingenuously, of being a “kid” whose career is a masterwork guided by others—primarily, of course, by the late Cus D’Amato. (“Cus laid the groundwork for Mike’s career,” Jim Jacobs tells me. “And when I say Cus laid the groundwork, I mean he laid the groundwork—for Mike’s entire future career.”) The young boxer’s relationship to his handlers and to his “family”—an intimate though not blood-related constellation of men and women linked by way of D’Amato—allows him the freedom-within-discipline of the child prodigy in music whose teacher and parents zealously protect him from the outside world. And it is readily clear, speaking with Mike Tyson in the presence of Jim and Loraine Jacobs (my interview was conducted in the Jacobses’ apartment in the East Forties, Manhattan, surrounded by boxing memorabilia that includes an entire wall of films and tapes), that he is fully aware of his good fortune; he understands that his emotional-professional situation is close to unique in the notoriously unsentimental world of professional boxing. He is loved by his family and he loves them—it is that simple, and that enviable. If in one sense, like other star athletes of our time, Mike Tyson is a child, he is also a fully, even uncannily mature man—a twenty-year-old like no other I have ever encountered.

  “I’m happy when I’m fighting. The day of the fight-leading up to it—I’m happy,” he says. In his black wool-and-leather sweater, black brushed corduroy trousers, a jewel-studded gold bracelet on his wrist, Mike Tyson looks very different from the man who “destroyed” Trevor Berbick seven days ago in Las Vegas; very different from the iconographic photographs of him that have appeared in various publications, here and abroad. (The Japanese are much taken with Tyson: his photograph has been on the cover not only of sports magazines but of movie and general-interest magazines. How to explain his popularity there, where he has never visited? Tyson smiles and shrugs. “Who knows?”) Loraine Jacobs shows me a remarkable photograph of Tyson by Ken Regan of Camera 5 in which, in his boxing trunks, eerily shadowed and outlined by light, Tyson looks like a statue, or a robot—a high-tech fantasy of sheerly masculine threat and aggression. I ask Tyson what he thinks of his image—does it seem strange to him, to be so detached from a “Mike Tyson” who both is and is not himself—and Tyson murmurs something vaguely philosophical, like, “What can you do?” Yet it is clear that he too is fascinated by the phenomenon of Tyson; he remarks, a little later, that it would be interesting if he could in some way be in the audience at one of his own fights, where the excitement is. In the ring, in the cynosure of action, the fighter does not experience himself; what appears to the crowd as an emotionally charged performance is coolly calibrated. If Tyson feels fear—which, he acknowledges, he does—he projects his fear onto the opponent, as Cus D’Amat
o instructed: but little emotion is ever visible on Mike Tyson’s own face.

  If Tyson is happy in the ring, unlike many boxers who come to dislike and dread their own life’s work, it is perhaps because he hasn’t been hurt; hasn’t been seriously hit; has never met an opponent who was in any sense a match for him. (Do any exist? Right now? Tyson and his circle don’t think so.) At the age of twenty he believes himself invulnerable, and who, watching him in action, would deny it? One of the fascinations of this new young titleholder is the air he exudes of “immortality” in the flesh—it is the fascination of a certain kind of innocence.

  Asked after the Berbick fight why he is so concerned with establishing a record “that will never, ever be broken,” Tyson said, “I want to be immortal! I want to live forever!” He was being funny, of course—he often is, making such pronouncements to the press. But he was also, of course, deadly serious.

  Baptized Catholic, he no longer practices the faith; but believes, he says, in God. As for life after death—“When you’re dead, that’s it.” He is quick to acknowledge the extraordinary good fortune, amounting very nearly to the miraculous, that has characterized his life beyond the age of twelve, when, as a particularly unhappy inmate of the Tryon School for Boys in Johnstown, New York, a juvenile detention facility to which he was sent after committing burglaries and robberies in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, he was brought to the attention of the elderly Cus D’Amato—a man who, judging by the testimony of numerous observers, seems to have had the mystical qualities of a Zen Master. But Cus D’Amato was a boxing trainer par excellence who had already cultivated another juvenile delinquent, Floyd Patterson, into a prodigy-champion heavyweight in the 1950s and had discovered José Torres (world light-heavyweight champion 1965-66 and current head of the New York State Boxing Commission) as an amateur boxer in Puerto Rico. The story is that, having observed the untrained thirteen-year-old Tyson box a few rounds in the gym he ran above the police station in Catskill, New York, D’Amato said to a Tryon School boxing coach: “That’s the heavyweight champion of the world. If he wants it, it’s his.”

  This is the stuff of legend, of course. Yet it happens to be true. The precocious criminal-to-be—Tyson’s earliest arrests were at the age of ten—is taken up by one of boxing history’s greatest trainers; is released into D’Amato’s custody and, two years later, is officially adopted by him; lives, trains, most importantly is nourished, in Catskill, New York, in a fourteen-room house shared by D’Amato and his sister-in-law, Camille Ewald—far from the corrosive atmosphere of the black ghetto, in which, judging from his record, the young Mike Tyson would have been doomed. “Cus was my father but he was more than a father,” Tyson says. “You can have a father and what does it mean?—it doesn’t really mean anything. Cus was my backbone…. He did everything for my best interest…. We’d spend all our time together, talk about things that, later on, would come back to me. Like about character, and courage. Like the hero and the coward: that the hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It’s the same thing, fear, but it’s what you do with it that matters.” (Jim Jacobs tells me afterward that much of what Mike says is Cus D’Amato speaking; much of what he says is Cus D’Amato speaking.)

  Quite apart from his genius as a boxing trainer, D’Amato appears to have been a genius of a spiritual sort, if “genius” is not an inappropriate term in this context. Like a devoted religious elder he instilled in Tyson, and no doubt in others of his young boxer acolytes, qualities of an abstract nature: self-denial, discipline, will, integrity, independence, “character.” It was D’Amato’s belief that a fighter’s character is more important ultimately than his skill: a perception proven, in the ring, only in the most arduous of fights—one thinks of the virtually Shakespearean struggles of the first Ali/Frazier match, the 1941 Louis/Conn match, the Leonard/Hearns. Most importantly, D’Amato instilled in Tyson that most invaluable and mysterious of gifts, an unwavering faith in himself. “He said I would be the youngest heavyweight in history,” marvels Tyson. “And what he said turned out to be true. Cus knew it all along.”

  Jim Jacobs, D’Amato’s devoted friend, a boxing manager of enormous reputation and prestige and the archivist of twenty-six thousand boxing films, says that D’Amato’s word regarding Tyson’s promise was enough for him: there was no one in the world whose judgment he trusted more than Cus D’Amato’s. “When Cus told me that Mike Tyson was going to be heavyweight champion of the world, that’s all I had to hear.” So internalized is D’Amato’s voice, and his instructions regarding the nurturing of the young heavyweight, Jacobs says that when he thinks about what he is doing, he has only to “press a button in my head and I can hear Cus talking to me. What I am doing is precisely and exactly what Cus told me to do.”

  If Tyson looked upon D’Amato as a father—Tyson’s “real” father seems never to have figured in his life—it is evident that D’Amato looked upon Tyson as a son. In an interview for People shortly before his death, D’Amato told William Plummer that the boy meant “everything” to him. “If it weren’t for him, I probably wouldn’t be living today. See, I believe nature’s a lot smarter than anybody thinks. During the course of a man’s life he develops a lot of pleasures and people he cares about. Then nature takes them away one by one. It’s her way of preparing you for death. See, I didn’t have the pleasures any longer. My friends were gone, I didn’t hear things, I didn’t see things clearly, except in memory…. So I said I must be getting ready to die. Then Mike came along. The fact that he is here and is doing what he is doing gives me the motivation to stay alive.” Though D’Amato died of pneumonia in November 1985, aged seventy-seven, approximately a year before Tyson became the youngest titleholder in heavyweight history, he seems to be alive, still, in Tyson’s soul. One man’s faith in another can go no further.

  Yet it would be imprecise to say that Mike Tyson is D’Amato’s creature solely. His initial social shyness masks a quick, restless intelligence; he is not without humor regarding even the vicissitudes of his early life. Of his years as a child criminal—during which time, as the youngest member of a gang, he was frequently entrusted with holding a gun during robberies—he has said, “Please don’t think I was really bad. I used to rob and steal but other guys did worse things—they murdered people.” At times Tyson lived on the Bedford-Stuyvesant streets, slept in abandoned buildings like a feral child. When he was arrested, aged eleven, and sent to the Tryon School for Boys, no one could have guessed how his life, ironically, had been saved. He was violent, depressed, mute; one of the most intractable of the “incorrigible” boys. When he broke loose it required several adult men to overpower him. One official recalls having seen him dragged away in handcuffs, to be locked in solitary confinement.

  Mike Tyson’s story reminded me of those legendary tales of abandoned children so particularly cherished by the European imagination—Kasper Hauser of Nürnberg, the “wild boy” of the Aveyron. Such tales appeal to our sense of wonder, mystery, and dread; and to our collective guilt. These children, invariably boys, are “natural” and “wild”; not precisely mute but lacking a language; wholly innocent of the rudiments of human social relations. They are homeless, parentless, nameless, “redeemable” only by way of the devotion of a teacher father—not unlike Tyson’s Cus D’Amato. But even love is not enough to save the mysteriously doomed Kasper Hauser, whose story ends as abruptly and as tragically as it begins. And the “wild boy” of the Aveyron loses the freshness of his soul even as he acquires the skills of language and social intercourse.

  There is nothing nostalgic, however, about Tyson’s feelings for his past. Many of his boyhood friends are in jail or dead; both his parents are deceased; he has a sister and a brother, both older, with whom he appears to be on friendly but not intimate terms. If he returns to his old neighborhood it is as a visitor of conspicuous dimensions: a hero, a “boy champion,” a Sports Illustrated cover in the f
lesh. Like Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Larry Holmes, et al., Mike Tyson has become a model of success for “ghetto youth,” though his personal code of conduct, his remarkably assured sense of himself, owes nothing at all to the ghetto. He is trained, managed, and surrounded, to an unusual degree, by white men, and though he cannot be said to be a white man’s black man he is surely not a black man’s black man in the style of, for instance, Muhammad Ali (whose visit to Tyson’s grammar school in Brooklyn made a powerful impression on him at the age of ten). Indeed, it might be said that Mike Tyson will be the first heavyweight boxer in America to transcend issues of race—a feat laudable or troubling, depending upon one’s perspective. (In the light of which, a proposed match between Tyson and the zealously overpromoted “White Hope” candidate Gerry Cooney would have interesting consequences: allegiances are likely not to break down along cursory color lines.)

  He will do what he can, Tyson says, to promote blacks, but he does not intend to become involved in politics. He will visit schools, make public appearances, do anti-drug commercials for the FBI and the State of New York. If his replies to questions about black consciousness—its literature, art, history—are rather vague, it should be said that his replies to most questions that deal with culture in a larger sense are vague. Tyson dropped out of Catskill High School in his senior year—“I hated it there”—to concentrate on his amateur boxing in clubs and Golden Gloves competitions under the tutelage of D’Amato; and at this point his formal education, such as it was, seems to have ended. He has virtually no interest in music—“I could live without music.” He shrugs aside queries about art, dance, literature; his reading is limited to boxing books and magazines. With Jim Jacobs’s library of twenty-six thousand fight films at his disposal he watches old fights with an almost scholarly passion—surely this is unusual, in a practitioner? (Jim Jacobs assures me it is.) For entertainment Tyson watches videos of karate movies, horror movies, occasionally even children’s cartoons: no serious dramas, and no movies about the lives of fictionalized boxers. I am spared asking him the obligatory question about the preposterous Rocky movies.