would get a picture and it would happen.”
“This picture, it would be for you to manage an important fighter?”
“Yes.”
To make another champion?”
“Yes.”
When Tyson moved into D’Amato’s house, eight other boys lived there, all aspiring boxers, every one of them white, tough, and confident. They lived two to a room. Ewald cooked the dinners and the boys cleaned up. All other meals they cooked for themselves. Food was for the taking, though Ewald expected no one to consume more than his fair share, especially of the cookies and ice cream.
For the first few weeks, Tyson stayed in awe of his new surroundings. He did as he was asked, talked little, and acted shyly. At dinner, he closely watched the other boys to learn table manners. D’Amato, of course, lectured constantly. Most of the time, Tyson could barely follow his train of thought. A week into his stay, D’Amato gave him a book, Zen and the Art of Archery. Tyson couldn’t get past the first page. He was more interested in reading the books on boxing.
Tyson’s feelings of awe gave way to suspicion. Through most of that summer of 1980, D’Amato spent far more time talking with Tyson than training him in the gym. Every night and morning he told him to repeat out loud the words “Day by day in every way, I’m getting better and better.” D’Amato came into Tyson’s room at night and woke him up to complete a thought from the day’s lecture, one of the many that got lost in his meanderings. Remembered Ewald of Tyson: “He was always saying, ‘What the white dude want to do with the black kid?”’
D’Amato drilled him on fear those first few months. “Who is your best friend?” D’Amato asked Tyson early on. Before he could answer, D’Amato cut in, “Fear is your best friend.”
He’d go on, “Fear is like fire … fear is like a snowball going down a hill—if you don’t learn to control it, it will get bigger and out of control … fear is like an ugly friend who smells bad but saves you from drowning.
“Control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is psychological, the excuse of the man who wants to quit.
“The night before a fight you won’t sleep. Don’t worry—the other guy didn’t either. You’ll go to the weigh-in and he looks so much bigger than you, and calmer, like ice, but he’s burning up with fear inside. Your imagination is going to credit him with abilities he doesn’t have. Remember, motion relieves tension. The moment the bell rings and you come into contact with each other, suddenly the opponent seems like everybody else, because now your imagination is dissipated.
“The fight itself is the only reality that matters. Learn to impose your will and take control over that reality.”
It took Tyson a long time to make sense of D’Amato’s ideas. The suspicions lingered. Tyson also began to feel claustrophobic around D’Amato, who was always watching him, checking up, and bearing down with another lecture. D’Amato seemed to want a kind of intimacy that Tyson had never experienced: people bonded by a mutual belief in ideas. The laws of the streets he knew, and the rules of prison, but not D’Amato’s ways. There was an impulse in Tyson to rebel. As the perennial survivor, he expected to be alone in the end anyway.
At first, it was just little things like not cleaning up after himself bringing stolen ice cream into his room, swearing at Ewald, or turning his back and walking away as D’Amato started to lecture. “When he first came it was rather difficult because there was a lack of communication,” said D’Amato in a 1984 interview.
According to D’Amato’s understanding with the state Youth Division, Tyson could train all he wanted as long as he continued with school. In September, Tyson enrolled at Catskill Junior High School. At fourteen, he was the appropriate age for the eighth grade. His academic skills lagged a year behind those of the other students; his body was several years ahead. That, plus the fact that it was the first time in almost three years that he’d been in school, let alone one in a small town, made adjustment difficult.
D’Amato did what he could to prepare the school staff for Tyson. “He would be forceful and effective in trying to explain Mike’s background to us,” said Lee A. Bordick, then the principal at Catskill JHS and now the superintendent of schools in Troy, New York. “Mike was special, he said. Allowances had to be made for him. Cus didn’t want us to dislike Mike because he had problems. He wanted us to understand how, with work, Mike had so much to gain. We worked with him. I personally did constant reality checks for Mike to make sure he understood what was expected of him.”
During the first few months, Tyson could barely sit through an entire forty-five-minute class. Many times he would walk out. He took as much interest in the academics as was required to placate D’Amato and the social worker from the Youth Division assigned to watch over him, Ernestine Coleman. His passion was boxing and only boxing. “Michael and I had arguments all the time about his not applying himself in school,” Coleman recalled. “He knew that I had the power to take him away from Cus and send him back to Tryon, so I won.”
Almost won. Tyson attended school every day, but ignored his homework, D’Amato didn’t tell Coleman, and neither did he force Tyson to do the homework. He was far more interested in Tyson’s aptitude for training than for academics.
Instead of taking the morning bus, Tyson would run the three miles to school. The teachers finally told him to stop because of the smell from the sweat. So Tyson took the bus there, then ran home in the afternoons. At five o’clock, every weekday, he went to the gym for two hours. In the evenings, he talked to D’Amato, watched television, or read boxing books. On weekends, he’d be up at five in the morning, run a few miles, make his own breakfast, nap, then get to the gym again at twelve sharp. Tyson didn’t join any school team or make any “civilian” friends. His friends were the other boys in the house, all of whom boxed.
That year there were racial tensions between the black and white students in the adjoining high school. School officials were concerned that Tyson might become some kind of leader among the black students. But he did not get involved. “I used to take some of the kids to baseball games down in New York on weekends,” said junior high principal Bordick. “I asked Mike to come and he never did. I got the feeling that he had this block about his past, being a black kid from the slums. This was his break, boxing, and he wanted to do that and nothing else.”
The other students made him pay for being different. They ridiculed his size, his lisping voice, and his desire to be a boxer. The black students were particularly cruel. For living with D’Amato and Ewald, they accused him of hating black people, including his own mother. “Three black girls were teasing him in the hallway about his mother,” remembered Bordick. “He got angry, they ran into the bathroom, and he followed them. He punched the paper towel holder off the wall, screamed a lot, nothing else. I had them all in the office and one of the girls kicked him. He held back; I could see he was seething with anger, but he kept it in. I took him outside. I remember it was November. A cold rain drizzled down. We stood there and I told him he couldn’t lash out at people, he had to learn control.”
Bordick realized that Tyson might never be fully socialized into so-called normal society. It was as if everything, and everyone, conspired to keep him different, all of which pushed Tyson further into boxing. “There was more pressure on Michael to behave because he was Mike the boxer with this difficult background. He felt put-upon because the expectations to conform were greater on him than on other students.”
During the second half of the school year, Tyson seemed better able to cope with the taunts of the other students. He also tried to use charm rather than rebellion with his teachers. “He was streetwise,” said Bordick. “He could play with you almost like a con artist. Mike had this ability to deal with adults on their own level.”
Bordick accepted these realities about Tyson. They represented distortions of what boys his age were usually like, but for that matter everything about Tyson seemed distorted. Even the people who