Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition)

D’Amato’s most interesting wrinkle had nothing to do with technical training. He believed that training alone, no matter how diligent, wasn’t enough to master such a ying-yang synthesis of offense and defense. It had to be instinctual. He tried to teach Patterson to see the counterpunch in his mind before it happened. It was almost a spiritual thing for D’Amato. Years later, he discovered that what he tried to teach Patterson also lay at the foundation of Zen archery.

In the “Brujo” interview, D’Amato described how in the late 1950s he once saw a Texan named Lucky Daniels shoot a BB pellet out of the air with another BB, a seemingly impossible task. Daniels challenged D’Amato to a mock gunfight. D’Amato got to hold his gun pointed and cocked; Daniels’s gun stayed in its holster. As D’Amato pulled his trigger, Daniels was able to draw and shoot first. D’Amato picked Daniels’s mind and found out that he had been applying the same principles to boxing. When, in the late 1960s, he told the story to Norman Mailer, he was given a book on Zen archery. “I was doing what the guy said in the book!” D’Amato said.

First, then, the concentration. Second, detachment. “Eventually a pro becomes impersonal, detached in his thinking while he’s performing. You separate and watch yourself from like the outside the whole time,” D’Amato said.

D’Amato believed in out-of-body experiences. “Everything gets calm and I’m outside watching myself. It’s me, but not me. It’s as if my mind and body aren’t connected, but they are connected and I know exactly what to do. I get a picture in my mind what it’s gonna be. I can actually see the picture, like a screen,” D’Amato said.

He also believed that this gave him immense power over others. “I can take a fighter who’s just beginning and I can see exactly how he’s gonna end up, what I have to teach him and how he’ll respond,” he added. “When that happens, I can watch a guy fight and I know everything there is to know about the guy. I can actually see the wheels in his head. It’s as if I am the guy. I’m inside him!”

Presumably, that’s what D’Amato had in mind for Patterson. He should see the punch coming before it came, through some kind of spiritual detachment. In other words, he was taught, don’t look at the man’s hand or it will hit you. Instead, see a concept of the fight in which you know all the things your opponent might do and use that knowledge to advantage.

In precisely what terms D’Amato explained those ideas to Patterson, or if he explained them at all, is not known. Clearly, after first reordering Patterson’s psychic furniture—via the lessons on fear—he instructed him in the basics of the system. The advanced lessons on spirituality would seem heady stuff for anyone, let alone the young Patterson. He did well enough with the basics. As a middleweight with naturally quick reflexes, Patterson managed, far better than his peers, to hit without getting hit. But the heavyweight division posed new challenges and increased risk. The added bulk on his own body slowed him down. And a true heavyweight opponent, close to or above 200 pounds, would hit with bigger punches. The question was whether Patterson could make the system work as a heavyweight. Not just with his body, but also with his mind.

D’Amato’s public challenge to the heavyweight division was, at most, a thorn in the side of the I.B.C. Norris and Carbo had no reason to put their franchise fighter, Rocky Marciano, at risk, so D’Amato started to play the ends against the middle. Publicly, he bombarded the I.B.C. with accusations about its monopolistic practices. Privately, he borrowed money from Norris: $15,000 on June 7, 1956, and another $5,000 two months later. D’Amato wanted to lull Norris into thinking that he had fallen into line with all the other managers who served their fighters up to the I.B.C. The debts, in other words, would obligate D’Amato to keep Patterson under I.B.C. control should he beat Marciano.

In April 1956, Marciano unexpectedly retired from the ring as an undefeated champion. An elimination tournament was set up by the I.B.C. to fill the vacant title. D’Amato entered Patterson, who beat “Hurricane” Jackson, barely, in a split decision. On November 30, Patterson fought Marciano’s last victim, thirty-nine-year-old Archie Moore, and won. At twenty-one he became the youngest heavyweight champion ever.

With the title in his grasp, D’Amato felt no obligations to Norris and the I.B.C. He agreed to a rematch with Jackson in the first defense eight months later, then took Patterson off into a series of independently promoted bouts. That snub, he insisted later, broke the I.B.C. monopoly. Not exactly. The United States government did that.

In 1951, the Justice Department charged the I.B.C. under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The I.B.C. won a ruling that boxing, like baseball, was beyond the limits of the antitrust laws. The government appealed to the Supreme Court and won. After a trial that finally ended on March 8, 1957, Norris and his codefendants were found guilty. They appealed the conviction to the Supreme Court, which upheld it. On January 12, 1959, the I.B.C. was ordered to dissolve and sell its stock in Madison Square Garden. Three justices dissented and called the dissolution “futile.” New corporations, they argued, would be formed to attempt similar monopolies.

Soon after, Norris died of a heart attack. Frankie Carbo was convicted on November 30, 1959, on three misdemeanor charges—conspiracy, undercover managing of boxers, and undercover matchmaking—and sentenced to two years in prison. Upon his release, he stood trial in Los Angeles on racketeering charges for attempting through threats and extortion to muscle in on the management and promotion of Don Jordan, a welterweight champion. He was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years at Alcatraz. Around that same time, a U.S. Senate subcommittee held hearings on mob influence in boxing. The “Kefauver Committee,” as it was known, wrenched from middleweight champion Jake LaMotta the admission that he was forced by the I.B.C. to lose to Billy Fox in a 1947 bout as a condition for a title shot.

During the seven years of trials and appeals, not once did D’Amato give testimony for the government’s case against the I.B.C.; nor did he appear at the Kefauver hearings. And assuming that he was in fact threatened by Carbo henchmen, he could have, like Jackie Leonard, the manager of Don Jordan, gone to the police and cooperated in phone taps to build an official case. D’Amato did none of that. He fought the I.B.C. his way, which turned out to have little effect. The early Patterson fights he staged at another New York arena were small and insignificant, more a minor annoyance than major competition. At best, his public rantings brought attention to the monopoly, but even then only long after the government had begun its prosecution.

The significant point is that D’Amato wanted to be portrayed as the lone white knight championing the cause of justice. In fact, he was more dedicated to using Patterson to make a play for his own control of the heavyweight division.

He didn’t do that for the money but, as was usual with D’Amato, for the fulfillment of an idea. This one, however, got twisted around. The idea, he claimed, was to do everything for the benefit of the fighter. But D’Amato pursued that objective obsessively. He ended up using some of the same tactics as his enemies. The effort drove him into a state of paranoia, and in the end the fighter was not well served. Without his champion, and disgraced by his meddling in the promotion of Patterson’s fights, D’Amato was pushed into obscurity—until Mike Tyson came along and D’Amato was rediscovered, repackaged, and made sagelike to a new generation.

Even though the I.B.C. slowly crumbled, D’Amato continued during Patterson’s reign to see the enemy in every dark corner. Years later, he told people that someone once tried to push him in front of a subway train. In another story, Rocky Marciano supposedly knocked at his door. When D’Amato opened it, he found the boxer in the company of two mobsters. According to D’Amato, he spun the double-crosser Marciano around, put an ice pick to his throat, and said, “Get outta here or the champ dies.”

Perhaps that happened. Perhaps not. To the men who knew him well then, it seemed more likely that D’Amato couldn’t stop fighting an imaginary war. Fariello held this view. “It was all because of the I.B.C., he said. They were out to get him, hurt him. I never saw anything that justified those fears.”

D’Amato enjoyed food and drink on the town, but he feared that someone would spike his beer, so he stopped going out. He was afraid someone might drop drugs in his pocket, so he sewed the pockets of his jackets. When the phone rang, he never spoke first, choosing instead to listen until he could identify the caller. He kept a hatchet under his bed and an ice pick in his pocket. To anyone riding in an elevator with him, D’Amato, fearing that some I.B.C. hit man was at the controls and waiting with a gun, would say, “If it goes down to the basement, we’re dead.”

D’Amato went to great lengths to protect Patterson from these imaginary enemies. He assumed that any big-time New York promoter was I.B.C.-connected. D’Amato sought out inexperienced and easily controlled independents. Between July 1957 and June 1959, Patterson defended his title only three times. He fought in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis. The opponents, all nearly unknowns, barely tested Patterson’s abilities. Pete Rademacher, the 1956 Olympic champion, had his first pro fight with Patterson; not surprisingly, he lost by a knockout in the sixth. A year later, Patterson fought Roy Harris, a schoolteacher and club fighter from Cut and Shoot, Texas. A year after that, he disposed of a British journeyman named Brian London.

D’Amato’s paranoia began to destroy the proverbial Golden Goose. The long layoffs and easy matchups dulled Patterson’s unique boxing skills. In the Harris and London fights it took Patterson thirteen and eleven rounds, respectively, to do the job. “I couldn’t put anything together,” Patterson told Liebling of his performance against Harris. “I said to Cus he’s got to get me more fights.”

The London promotion showcased D’Amato’s obsession with total control. When London arrived to complete his training for the fight, he went to D’Amato’s gym, where he used a hand-picked D’Amato trainer and Patterson’s own sparring partners. D’Amato appointed a U.S. “representative” to co-manage London for a cut of his purse. He barred the press from interviewing London. Those were all tactics used by the I.B.C.

D’Amato eventually fired the first inexperienced promoter. The second, Bill Rosensohn, had only one fight to his credit, the Harris match. Rosensohn was young, eager to please, and, so D’Amato thought, easily controlled. He also worked for TelePrompter Corporation, recently formed to exploit the relatively new concept of closed-circuit theater television.

Traditionally, promoters made money on the radio broadcast and ticket sales, less fighters’ purses and expenses. With the advent of television in the 1950s—at one point fights could be seen three nights a week on the small screen—advertiser revenue expanded the pie. Managers fought bitterly with the I.B.C. and its promoters at Madison Square Garden to get a share of the television revenues. They didn’t get very far.

Closed-circuit posed a new opportunity, and D’Amato, as manager of the heavyweight champion, knew he could exploit it. Now he, and not the I.B.C., controlled the promoter. D’Amato dictated the split of the closed-circuit revenues.

Rosensohn, a thirty-eight-year-old, ambitious, heavy-eyed, slimfaced, Princeton-educated dandy, readily accepted D’Amato’s terms. In the Harris fight, D’Amato brought in a friend, Charlie Black, to profit from the promotion. D’Amato and Black were boyhood friends, and despite Black’s convictions for bookmaking, plus his underworld ties, Cus kept up the friendship. Black, after all, was the kind of man who could come in handy. D’Amato ordered Rosensohn to pay Black 50 percent of the net profits. He paid, but profits were low, and Rosensohn made only a few thousand dollars. D’Amato, in another classic I.B.C. move, also put a lock on Harris should he beat Patterson. He required Harris to sign a managerial contract with Black.

Rosensohn started to get hungry. He tried to initiate his own deal and signed Ingemar Johansson, a capable Swedish heavyweight, to a forty-day option for $10,000. During that time, Rosensohn had to get him a match with Patterson or lose the money. Rosensohn felt he had a tailor-made D’Amato opponent: non-I.B.C., not much of a threat, easily controlled.

D’Amato stonewalled. Perhaps he felt that Johansson, known for having a thunderous right hand, would be no pushover. But it’s more likely that D’Amato delayed as a pressuring tactic to keep Rosensohn in line.

Rosensohn gambled heavily and usually lost more than he won. He needed money to finance the promotion, plus some way to make D’Amato cooperate. Rosensohn went to his bookmaker, Gilbert Beckley, for help. Beckley had once introduced him to an East Harlem-based mobster named Anthony (“Fat Tony”) Salerno. Rosensohn asked Salerno to finance the promotion in exchange for a share of the profits, adding that there was one problem: he had already promised Charlie Black 50 percent of the net. Not to worry, said Salerno. He knew Black; a deal would be made. Rosensohn ended up with $25,000 for the promotion and a $10,000 loan for himself. He gave Salerno and Black each one-third ownership in his company, Rosensohn Enterprises.

Not long after that, D’Amato delivered Patterson. But he had a new demand. D’Amato wanted 100 percent of all ancillary rights (closed-circuit, radio, and movie) plus half the net from ticket sales. Rosensohn felt he’d been set up in an elaborate plan to trade off the promoter’s rights so that D’Amato, Black, Salerno, and Patterson could profit. D’Amato threw in one more zinger. When Johansson arrived, D’Amato assigned another friend, Harry Davidow, as “representative” for a 10 percent purse cut.

The only piece of the pie D’Amato left intact was the option on Johansson’s next fight if he should win. Unlike in the deal with Harris, he gave that to Rosensohn. It proved a big mistake.

It drizzled a warm, wet rain on the night of the fight, June 26, 1959. Ticket sales were dismal. Patterson, wrote Liebling, “came out to prove himself.” He shot jabs out at Johansson, who merely retreated. Johansson looked patient and held his mysterious right hand—dubbed the “Hammer of Thor” by the press—in reserve. In the third it became clear that for Patterson almost three years of easy opponents and infrequent bouts had taken their toll. Johansson hit him with a straight right that virtually ended the fight. Patterson got up, stunned. Johansson dropped him seven times before the referee called it quits.

The whole, sordid mess blew open a month after the fight. Rosensohn’s joy over lucking into promotional control of the new heavyweight champion didn’t last long. He lost $40,000 on the fight. He personally owed $10,000 to a gangster. Rosensohn then found out that Salerno and Black, in an effort to hide their roles, had transferred their ownership in his company to a front man, Vincent Velella, a Republican state politician from East Harlem, then also making a bid for a municipal court judgeship. Rosensohn made an unwise power bid. He went public with the story that he’d been forced to sell two-thirds of his company, perhaps to arm-twist Salerno and Black into selling back their interest or risk exposure.

The bid backfired. The New York State Athletic Commission and the attorney general’s office both conducted investigations. Rosensohn was stripped of his promoter’s license and forced to sell his rights to the rematch. He moved to California, became a salesman, and in 1988 committed suicide. Salerno, Black, and Velella were barred from boxing. Salerno rose in the mob; then, in 1985, old and sick, he was convicted in the infamous “Pizza Connection” heroin-smuggling case and sent to prison for what remained of his life. Finally, the scandal prompted Senator Estes Kefauver to establish the Senate Antimonopoly Subcommittee to investigate boxing.

D’Amato was the only principal who refused to testify. He fled to Puerto Rico during the hearings. Always wary of his enemies, D’Amato traveled under the name Carl Dudley. The Athletic Commission criticized D’Amato for trying to wrest control of the heavyweight division by acting as both manager and promoter, and revoked his manager’s license. The state attorney general also began preparing an antitrust action against D’Amato, then dropped the case. D’Amato blamed it all on old enemies at the I.B.C. “They are trying to destroy me,” he told Gay Talese, then a reporter for the New York Times.

Other reporters were not so gentle with D’Amato. His only diehard supporter among the New York sportswriting community, columnist Jimmy Cannon, was a close friend until he inquired about D’Amato’s meddling with Brian London. D’Amato said he “wasn’t at liberty to discuss it.” Cannon became one of D’Amato’s biggest critics. He was “Cus the Mus” from then on in Cannon’s column. During the Patterson/Johansson scandal, Harold Weissman, sports columnist for the tabloid New York Mirror, dubbed him the “Neurotic Napoleon.” Dan Parker, another columnist at the Mirror, ridiculed D’Amato’s new boxing “system,” in which the writer included business practices: “guaranteed to get everyone in trouble and your fighter knocked out.”

What did D’Amato know and when did he know it? Perhaps he didn’t conspire to drive Rosensohn to Salerno and Black. Maybe Rosensohn was just a loose cannon moved by his own inexperience, bad judgment, and greed. D’Amato apparently never discussed the details of what happened with anyone. It’s hard to believe, however, that a man so obsessed with control would not have known about the Salerno-Black connection. “He was too close to Charlie Black not to know,” said José Torres, who became D’Amato’s next boxing protégé.

And so an observer’s proposition: D’Amato at the least knew about Salerno and Black, felt the promotion slip from his grasp, and rationalized the problem away. “He forgot that a shining knight on a white horse was not supposed to do those things,” opined Fariello.

Patterson made $600,000 from the purse and ancillary income. The scandal, though, set in motion Patterson’s disillusionment with his domineering father figure-mentor-manager. D’Amato won back his manager’s license back on a legal technicality. He stayed in Patterson’s corner through his next three victories, all against Johansson. Beginning with the first rematch, Patterson eschewed D’Amato’s “system” for the conventional style. It was the act of a young man seeking his own identity. Fortunately for Patterson, Johansson proved to be an inconsistent boxer.

A new group of promoters, conniving with and far more savvy than those D’Amato selected, took over Patterson’s fights. They sped up his disillusionment with stories about D’Amato’s supposed mob ties and paranoiac behavior. Matters came to a head when Patterson, egged on by his new promoters, accepted a fight against a former convict and rising contender, Sonny Liston. D’Amato warned him not to fight Liston. Without the benefit of the “system,” D’Amato felt, Patterson offered too easy and too vulnerable a target to a much bigger, harder-punching heavyweight. Patterson fired D’Amato, not to his face but through a lawyer. He was tired, he said, of being “dominated.”

Liston knocked Patterson out in the first round. Patterson never again, despite three attempts, won the title. In a final ironic twist, Liston’s management group included none other than mobster Frankie Carbo.

After the split with Patterson, the part of D’Amato that lusted for power died. So, too, did his willingness to ever again get emotionally attached to a fighter. “When my feelings are involved I become a chump,” he told an interviewer in 1976. “That’s why I never trust anything. I just trust that detachment. My feelings got involved with Patterson.”

Everything else about D’Amato remained virtually intact, from an unflagging belief in the technical and spiritual merits of his “system” to the wracking paranoia. He also still wanted to develop another champion.

* * *

José Torres was eighteen years old when he won the silver medal as a middleweight in the 1956 Olympics. The second of seven children, he was born and raised in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Torres’s father owned a small trucking business. A family friend introduced Torres to D’Amato after the Olympics and D’Amato took him on, reluctantly.

Torres had basic talent but little taste for D’Amato’s many disciplines. Though married with children, he frequently bolted camp to carouse or spend a few days with a mistress. Torres then often lied to D’Amato about why he wasn’t training. “José wasn’t such a bad guy,” said Fariello, his trainer. “He got stupid about things. His judgment was dumb.”

Besides being distracted with Patterson, D’Amato never had the confidence in Torres’s abilities to actively develop his career. That, and the lingering fears about the I.B.C., kept Torres in a perennial backwater. D’Amato’s emotional detachment also may have affected his management of Torres. By deciding not to get as intimate with Torres as he had gotten with Patterson, D’Amato didn’t mine the deepest parts of Torres’s potential. “With Torres everything was done cold, cool, and calculating,” admitted D’Amato in a 1965 Sports Illustrated article.

For six years Torres fought and won, first as a middleweight and then as a light heavyweight, against a gaggle of lackluster opponents. D’Amato refused to let him fight at Madison Square Garden for the larger purses. Instead, Torres fought at smaller local arenas and in a host of other cities and towns, such as Boston and Toronto, which lacked constituencies of Puerto Ricans to boost ticket sales. During those six years he earned a total of only $60,000. D’Amato, claiming that he had earned enough money from Patterson’s career, did not take a manager’s cut.

Finally, against D’Amato’s wishes, Torres fought chàmpion Willie Pastrano for the light heavyweight title at the Garden in March 1965. Although not favored, he won on a punch to Pastrano’s liver. That turned out to be the climax of his career. After a few defenses against unknowns, he lost the title just over a year later to Dick Tiger in a listless performance. Torres tried to win the title back in a May 1967 rematch, but lost again. Puerto Ricans in the audience were so angered with Torres (he was already disliked for favoring the New York literary salons and the company of Norman Mailer over the environs of El Barrio) that they showered the ring with bottles and chairs in a melee that lasted twenty minutes. Torres announced soon afterwards that he would retire to write an “autobiographical novel.”

After Torres, D’Amato wallowed. In 1966, he moved upstate to the town of New Paltz to manage Buster Mathis, a journeyman heavyweight prospect who gained some cachet when he beat Joe Frazier in the 1965 U.S. Olympic trials. They met again in 1968, Frazier won (and went on to considerable fame when he defeated Muhammad Ali in 1971, a match generally regarded as one of boxing’s greatest displays of ability and courage), and Mathis’s career fizzled out.

Even before Mathis finally flagged in the ring, D’Amato’s paranoia ended his role as manager. He became convinced that Mathis’s backers—four well-heeled New York executives all in their twenties—were out to kill him. At one point, D’Amato, disoriented and fearful, locked himself in a room at the training camp for two days.

In 1971, D’Amato declared personal bankruptcy. He claimed liabilities of $30,276 and, despite purse cuts from Patterson that should have amounted to well over a million dollars, assets of only $500. It was actually much worse. D’Amato owed $200,000 in back taxes to the IRS.

What happened to his money, whether he even got it, and what he did with it were all questions that became shrouded by D’Amato’s self-generated hero’s lore. He once said that he spent thousands of dollars on a network of spies and informants used to battle the I.B.C.