Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

A month after D’Amato’s death, Jacobs and Cayton managed to get Tyson on NBC’s “Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. “Once a thief, and a thief headed for a life in prison, mind you, Mike Tyson joins us this morning as a young man headed for a heavyweight crown,” said Gumbel in introducing Tyson. The interview ran the standard course through the fable until near the end when Gumbel asked Tyson, “Did D’Amato basically save your life?” The answer: “Yes.”

Dan Rather, anchorman for “CBS Evening News,” chimed in to take his turn with the fable later that December. He introduced a segment on Tyson that hit all the high notes and then some. “He’s just nineteen years old, tending his pigeons in the Catskills. A big, strong, country kid …” began the CBS reporter. “His teacher was Cus D’Amato, dead now but living on in his masterpiece … Mike Tyson, age nineteen, has the skills and is determined to win the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. And he has a secret weapon: he wants to do it for Cus.”

Cus and the Kid could be viewed as a human-interest story that celebrated universal values. The implicit messages, however, endorsed two abiding myths of American culture: charity is better then fundamental social change, and love, combined with the human will, conquers all. Cus and the Kid became a paradigm for social reform, but of the most passive variety. It was television fare, after all; pure entertainment. People could watch the problems of the black urban underclass being solved for them in the comfort of their living rooms.

The historical parallels with how other black boxers were packaged are striking. Tyson was made into a black stereotype of the post-civil rights era in which equal political and social rights had supposedly been obtained; economic freedom came to those who were willing to work for it. By that logic, Tyson, with the guidance and love of D’Amato, had fought his way out of poverty toward a certain future of wealth and fame. Heavyweight champion Joe Louis was also made into a stereotype of his era. In the 1930s, equal rights for blacks were a minor issue to most Americans, and yet blacks were still expected to feel empowered by the myth of individual salvation. If only they would “uplift” themselves, the thinking went, their problems would be over. And yet, blacks had to “behave,” especially when they obtained a measure of success that placed them in the public spotlight.

Newspaper and magazine profiles of Louis often described him as “nonpretentious,” “self-effacing,” “Godfearing,” and a “credit to his race.” Ironically, Louis’s manager was also named Jacobs and he, too, was a manipulator of the media. He hired someone to write Louis’s biography, Joe Louis’s Own Story, in which the fighter acknowledged his “duty” not to throw his “race down by abusing my position as a heavyweight challenger.”

In the marketing of Tyson, Jacobs and Cayton had the Joe Louis model in mind. They definitely wanted to avoid the Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston experiences. “Jimmy always believed that Louis represented the right mix of great boxer and astute management,” said Nick Beck. “Ali was uncontrollable in public, and too much his own man. Jimmy also wanted to avoid what he called the ‘Liston syndrome.’ He didn’t want people looking at Mike like he was some barely reformed thug.”

Of course, with Cus and the Kid the medium was also the message. It was a story that could be told in pictures and words within a few minutes. Jacobs and Cayton took that symmetry between form and content the next logical step. In 1983, the VHS format cassette videotape for home and office use was a novel publicity device already being used to sell financial services, travel, and residential real estate. Jacobs and Cayton were the first to apply it to boxing. They made more than five hundred tapes showing all of Tyson’s first-round knockouts and sent them to boxing reporters and the editors of the major sports magazines. Follow-up letters and phone calls were made to set up interviews. In the sports journalism community it came to be known as “The Tape,” a must-see and a status symbol for those who had a VCR.

The knockout tape made an appropriate companion piece to presentations of Cus and the Kid. As communications theorist Marshall McLuhan argued, the means of conveying information often has more influence on people than the information itself. On the “cool medium” of television, Tyson’s knockouts were fast and efficient, like a blast of numbing arctic air that instantly paralyzed an opponent. There was little sweat, minimal struggle, and only occasional blood; nothing, in other words, to suggest that sentient, and suffering, human beings were involved. If you weren’t a boxing fan, you could certainly watch a Tyson fight.

“It wasn’t that Jimmy and Bill did anything new or revolutionary in marketing Tyson,” pointed out boxing analyst Larry Merchant. “They just knew how to use television better than anybody in boxing had ever done before.”

* * *

Nine days after D’Amato died, Tyson went to Houston to fight “Fast” Eddie Richardson. Asked by reporters if the death of D’Amato would adversely affect his performance, he responded like the emotionally detached professional that both D’Amato and Jacobs valued so highly: “I have certain objectives, and I’m going to fulfill them,” said Tyson.

At six-foot-six, Richardson was taller than his average opponent. Tyson came out slipping and weaving and in the first punch of the bout plowed Richardson with a straight right that he couldn’t react swiftly enough to avoid. Richardson stayed on his feet, though not for long. Tyson eluded a right and countered with a left hook to the head that literally lifted Richardson off his feet and sent him to the canvas like a toppled tower.

The television announcers struggled to make historical comparisons to explain what they’d witnessed. They appreciated only half the phenomenon. One announcer said that Tyson threw a left hook from the same crouch as Joe Frazier and that he had the power of Rocky Marciano. In fact, a lot of heavyweights threw hooks from a crouch: not only Frazier, but Max Schmeling, Marciano, and Liston. What Tyson did better than all of them was make the crouch a single component in a complex defensive and offensive ballet. His body mechanics flowed in a poetic motion that delivered the maximum quantity of physical force.

Marciano punched hard from his crouch, but he had comparatively inferior body mechanics. He was more plodding and didn’t blend in as many different types of movements. At a fighting weight of only around 189 pounds, he also had a weaker punch than Tyson, plus nowhere near the same defensive skills. That’s why Archie Moore, in their September 21, 1955, bout, was able to knock Marciano down. Moore had the hand speed to exploit the many openings in his crouch. Marciano did, though, have something that Tyson the boxing historian valued very highly. Tyson felt empathy with Marciano because they both found ways to beat taller opponents. Marciano didn’t do it as well, technically, but he fought much bigger opponents with courage. “He broke their will,” Tyson said of Marciano in a November 1985 Village Voice feature profile.

Just over a week later, Tyson arrived in Latham, New York, to meet Conroy Nelson, the stereotypical opponent. Nelson had done some homework on fighting Tyson and had decided to run rather than stand and trade punches. Tyson stalked relentlessly, eventually caught Nelson, and used him as a punching bag. Nelson had no choice but to throw something back, which was like opening the cookie jar. Tyson’s left hook took him out with ease.

On December 6, Tyson made his debut in the Felt Forum, an auxiliary arena at the famed Madison Square Garden. This would be his first exposure to the New York sports media.

Kuralt and Gumbel had been useful in creating a consumable, living room persona for Tyson. Still, Jacobs and Cayton wanted something more: for the boxing reporters at the influential New York newspapers—Newsday, the Daily News, the New York Post and the New York Times—to anoint Tyson the next great, and inevitable, heavyweight champion. That would be a slow process. They would want to see Tyson undergo several key tests, particularly the all-important “gut check” of his courage against a tough, unrelenting opponent.

That wouldn’t come with “Slamming” Sam Scaff, a white six-foot-six, 250-pound, overweight, lumbering, club fighter from Kentucky. He had had thirteen fights, many of them losses. Partway through the first round, Tyson broke Scaff’s nose. It made a bloody mess of his face, sent ringlets of crimson red down Tyson’s broad brown back, and finished the fight. Scaff, who had once sparred with two world champions, later muttered: “I’ve never been hit that hard in my life.”

Wally Matthews, the boxing reporter for New York Newsday, recalled his thoughts at the time: “I got the tape of Tyson’s knockouts Jacobs and Cayton were sending around. One after the other. They did a masterful job at convincing people that Tyson had incredible punching power. I bought it. I was skeptical, but I bought it. I think back now and I realize they’d proven only that Tyson was a good one-round fighter because he came out like a maniac. And the guys he was knocking out, everyone else did too. Tyson hadn’t been tested yet.”

The test quickly approached. Sticking to the schedule of a fight every two weeks, Tyson met Mark Young and knocked him out in one round. Then, to kick off 1986, he put on a remarkable display of his full range of abilities against David Jaco. That brought Tyson to sixteen wins, all by knockout, twelve in the first round. In the process, Tyson picked up a nom de pug: “Catskill Thunder,” coined by Randy Gordon, an announcer for a sports cable station. In a January cover story, Sports Illustrated came up with “Kid Dynamite.”

Jacobs and Cayton didn’t embrace either name. In fact, they had decided early on to stick with the simplicity of “Mike Tyson.” D’Amato had once suggested “The Tanned Terror,” as a nod to Joe Louis’s “Brown Bomber,” but that wasn’t taken on. As the children of Brownsville had discovered when Tyson started marauding the streets, his mere name, when combined with the menace evoked by his smoldering manner, the almost animal-like physique, and his performance in the ring, was more than suitable.

The Sports Illustrated cover, a slew of new television news segments, more morning show appearances, and talk of his becoming champion—it was a remarkable amount of hype over a nineteen-year-old prospect who had yet to fight anyone ranked near the top ten. What was even more remarkable is that Jacobs began to suggest, in confident asides to reporters, that Tyson would become the savior of the heavyweight division. Its one-time glory, as symbolized in the achievements of Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, and Ali, had been tarnished by the splintering of the title in 1978 into three separate crowns, each awarded by a different sanctioning body. The world had no idea who was the real champion. Tyson, claimed Jacobs, would unify the title, restore its meaning, bring back the public’s faith in boxing, and in so doing join the ranks of the great ones.

“Jacobs’s pitch made for great copy, whether you agreed with him or not,” said Matthews of Newsday. “He knew that. Jacobs figured out what everyone most wanted to hear. They wanted a new myth for boxing.”

Jacobs buttressed that myth by taking every opportunity to identify Tyson with the great fighters. Starting with the Scaff fight, Jacobs asked Tyson to wear only black trunks and sockless black shoes. Up to then, he’d worn white or blue trunks with a different color trim. The idea was to evoke the classic, austere asceticism of Jack Dempsey. Assistant camp manager Steve Lott then came up with the idea of putting a small badge of the American flag on one leg of the trunks. “I felt that the flag would have a subliminal effect on the press,” said Lott. “They’d find it more difficult to write negatively about Mike.”

Without question, Tyson was far better than the men he’d fought so for. They were, after all, professional opponents, statistical cannon fodder for the real contenders. Tyson was also likely to prove himself technically superior to the next level of competition he would meet—including most if not all of the fighters in the top ten rankings. But the savior of boxing? In the same tradition as Ali, Marciano, and Louis? That was stretching it.

In technical terms, and on a strict comparison of achievement at equivalent age and level of experience, Tyson was in some respects better than past greats. Certainly he was more elusive. The power of his punch, especially when combined with the speed with which he delivered it, was also in a class by itself. In practical terms, however, Tyson had not yet shown his character. That would emerge from a test of wills: his against an opponent who didn’t go down in one or two rounds.

At that point in Tyson’s development, such issues didn’t press on Jacobs and Cayton. They were in a hurry to get him the title shot. It didn’t matter to them if the hype surpassed the reality of the performance. They felt that Tyson, if watched carefully, worked on constantly, packaged, and sanitized, would at the least keep the hype valid, even if he couldn’t yet prove it true. He hadn’t faltered in the ring for a long time. The mysterious flaw remained in check.

But not for long. That was the flip side of a string of easy opponents. It created a false sense of security for everyone, Tyson included. And that was the sober truth of the man-child within the hype, of the person behind the dual personas of the well-behaved, pigeon-loving surrogate son and the Ring Destroyer, the champion of destiny: nothing could prevent Tyson from bouncing between the opposite terms of his own paradox. It was far easier to control an image of a man than the man himself.

* * *

On January 24, 1986, Tyson stepped in the ring to box opponent number seventeen, “Irish” Mike Jameson. He looked like all the others Tyson had dispatched, though less muscular and more bulky. Jameson stood six-foot-four and weighed 236 pounds to Tyson’s 215. His record, seventeen wins and nine losses, implied something less than journeyman status. Jameson was also an aged fighter—thirty-one years old. He lived in Cupertino, California, and had never fought east of Chicago. It was expected, and hoped, that Tyson would do away with Jameson rapidly. There was a lot at stake. For the past several weeks, Jacobs and Cayton had been negotiating a multifight deal with ABC Sports. It would be Tyson’s first exposure on a national network television, and the first big purse money.

Jameson was no fool. He knew he didn’t have a chance slugging it out with Tyson, so he used his height, reach, and weight advantage to lean on Tyson and tie him up. After the two were pulled apart by the referee, Tyson would get off a few punches, but they seemed to have little effect. He’d then end up in a clinch again. It seemed that Tyson was letting himself be held. He was acquiescing to the other man’s unwillingness to fight. Tyson looked worse in the second round. He got hit easily by a few left jabs and straight rights, a clear sign that after getting position on the inside, he wasn’t moving enough on defense. In the third, Jameson kept getting his punches off first, then clinching to avoid Tyson’s blows.

By the fourth, Tyson seemed to wake up as if from a trance. He started connecting with more punches. Jameson, older and less fit, ran out of steam. One flurry of five blows in combination—remarkable for a heavyweight—sent Jameson down, but not out. Early in the fifth, Tyson scored a punishing knockdown, and the referee stopped the fight.

The announcers made an astute point about Tyson’s performance: “What happens when this young kid who can punch so hard hits someone and they’re still standing there and comes back and hits him back? Is he going to get discouraged or what?” Apparently, the answer was yes, at least to a degree. That’s what happened with Jameson in the first three rounds. Had Jameson been more fit, and skilled, he could have perhaps exploited that weakness in Tyson and lasted a few more rounds. Instead, Tyson won the fight on his natural gifts of superior punching power and hand speed. Fortunately, that was all he needed to beat Jameson. Tyson would, however, need much more in the next phase of his career. He would soon debut on ABC in the first of a four-match, million-dollar deal. The stakes were rising.

Financially, the Tyson team had come a long way in just over eleven months. In the first three fights Jacobs and Cayton had covered all the expenses—$30,417—including Tyson’s purses of a few hundred dollars. They’d made a profit of only $166.80. Expenses for the remaining fourteen fights, plus a 10 percent fee for trainer Kevin Rooney, were taken out of the gross purses paid by the promoters, $69,955. That left a total net purse of $57,095, of which Tyson earned two-thirds. In other words, $38,063 for about twenty-eight rounds, or one hour and twenty-four minutes of actual boxing. Jacobs and Cayton earned the remainder, or $19,032, from which they paid a 10 percent fee to Steve Lott.

With the $1 million ABC deal, an unheard-of sum of money for a fighter with only seventeen victories, the economics of Mike Tyson were about to change radically. For the first fight he’d earn a purse of $90,000. As Tyson continued to win, the purses increased in size until the $1 million was used up. Futhermore, with convincing victories, Jacobs and Cayton would acquire a significant amount of negotiating leverage with HBO Sports, a division of the pay-cable service owned by communications giant Time Inc.

In March 1986, HBO would launch a series of fights to unify the fractured heavyweight title. It had most, but not all, of the top-ranked contenders and champions signed up. With the hype surrounding Tyson’s rise, HBO became nervous. It faced the nightmare prospect of spending millions of dollars to determine the unified champion only for Tyson to emerge independently as the one true contender, the heir presumptive; the spoiler.

Jacobs and Cayton weren’t yet prepared to sign Tyson up. He didn’t have the experience to deal with the level of competition in the HBO series. They also had other ideas on how to earn a title shot. In one scenario, they’d match Tyson against old but well-known fighters such as former champion Larry Holmes and even Gerry Cooney, the lone white heavyweight of any reputation. That would establish Tyson’s credibility and earn him the right to then match up against the eventual winner of the HBO series.

Both sides of the issue faced a dilemma. HBO couldn’t risk letting Tyson go off on a separate track. And yet with only seventeen victories he didn’t have the credentials, or the national following, to be justifiably included in the unification series. For their part, Jacobs and Cayton were reluctant to trail off on their own in pursuit of the title. There was no way of knowing if the eventual winner of the HBO series would agree to fight Tyson. They would have done several years’ work only to be denied the ultimate prize.

The solution, for both parties, was to get Tyson on a separate but parallel track. In January, Jacobs and Cayton starting discussing with HBO the terms of a three-fight deal. Combined with the ABC fights, they would gain Tyson national television exposure and experience and, if it could be agreed upon, the basis for entry into the HBO series.

There were risks. They had to give up some say over the selection of opponents. ABC and HBO were interested in good ratings, and that meant competitive matchups. It was unlikely Tyson would be scoring many more first-round knockouts. Jacobs and Cayton wondered how well he would stand up under the emotional stress of fighting more seasoned opponents on national television.

First Tyson had to beat Jesse Ferguson in his ABC debut. Ferguson was a young, strong, quick-handed prospect ranked, like Tyson, in the second tier of heavyweights. The more convincing Tyson’s victory, the greater his value to ABC and HBO.

Aware of those stakes, Jacobs stacked the deck in Tyson’s favor. The fight took place in Troy, New York, the heart of Tyson country. Some seven thousand local supporters would be rooting for a knockout. Jacobs also insisted that the fighters wear eight-ounce gloves rather than the more standard ten-ounce versions. That clearly favored Tyson. His fast hands would be even faster with the lighter gloves. Jacobs obtained another advantage by getting Ferguson’s manager to agree to a sixteen-foot, eight-inch ring, smaller by a few feet than standard ring sizes. That way if Ferguson decided to run instead of stand and fight, he wouldn’t have as much room.

Tyson came out in black trunks and black shoes, no socks, and no robe. As he climbed into the ring and the crowd cheered, Tyson held up his arms at a low angle and turned the palms up in the manner of a Roman gladiator—strong, confident, but humbled by both the adulation and his own greatness. His face was expressionless. He paced back and forth, twitching his neck as if trying to remove a kink.

To the relief of the growing group involved in his career, Tyson rose to the occasion. As usual, he came out slipping, weaving, and slugging. He hit Ferguson on both sides with vicious hooks. He doubled up on body shots, going to the ribs first, then coming through the middle with an uppercut. But Ferguson could take a punch. With his own hand speed and sense of timing, he was also able to exploit those few occasions when Tyson stopped moving. He caught Tyson on the inside with a few right uppercuts. Tyson hardly flinched. That answered an important question about his future: he had a tough chin.

Tyson kept connecting through the second, third, and fourth rounds. Ferguson still didn’t go down, but Tyson didn’t get discouraged. He kept up his intensity and maintained nearly perfect stylistic form. It was by far the highest he had yet taken D’Amato’s “system.” Twice he hit Ferguson with low blows, and at the end of the fourth he threw a punch after the bell rang. As the referee pulled them apart, Tyson stuck his tongue out at Ferguson. He was enjoying this.

Ferguson came out in the fifth trying to keep Tyson at bay with a pesky poking of his left jab. Tyson easily slipped away. He then backed Ferguson up against the ropes. Ferguson tried to clinch, but Tyson fought through with a series of body shots and right and left uppercuts. Ferguson still didn’t fall. In the sixth, finally, he had taken enough. He had only the energy to clinch. The referee warned him several times, but Ferguson continued to hold. He was disqualified.

At first, Alex Wallau, the ABC boxing analyst doing the broadcast, thought that meant Tyson would be denied the knockout, thus breaking his streak. Then the referee, perhaps aware of what his decision meant, clarified the decision. He called it a technical knockout. Steve Lott climbed into the ring and kissed Tyson on the cheek. Afterwards, in a postfight interview, Tyson said to the gathering of reporters: “I tried to punch him and drive the bone of his nose back into his brain.”

The New York papers covering the fight quoted Tyson’s remarks with relish. It was as if they’d finally seen the real Mike Tyson behind the hype and it was not a pretty sight. Maybe he was, after all, just another thug like Liston. Jacobs was flooded with calls from reporters eager to unpack this dark, new Tyson that he had obviously kept a secret. One boxing reporter even dug up Ernestine Coleman, Tyson’s Youth Division caseworker. He cited a letter she wrote to Tyson after reading his comment. Coleman advised Tyson “to be a man, not an animal.”

Jacobs’s first reaction was to blame someone other than Tyson. He fired the publicity agent he’d retained for the fights, Mike Cohen. He also impressed on Lott, who was living with Tyson at the time, the importance of baby-sitting: “I had to watch him constantly, remind him how to behave after a fight and rehearse what he should say,” Lott recalled.

A few days later Jacobs invited a group of boxing reporters to have dinner with Tyson at Jake’s, then a New York steak restaurant: Ed Schuyler of the Associated Press, Michael Katz and Bill Gallo from the Daily News and Phil Berger of the New York Times. Two who were shunned—Wallace Matthews and Mike Marley of the New York Post—dubbed it the “Bootlicker’s Ball.” Schuyler remembered the evening: “No notes, no interviews, just talking. Jimmy was very conscious of trying to make Mike likable, to make him seem like a decent person so that if he got in trouble we’d all say, ‘Oh, well, he’s just a kid and that’s how kids are.’”