the round, Tyson told Atlas that he was tired. “I told him that he couldn’t possibly be tired after one round,” remembered Atlas. “His emotions were taking over.” Tyson knocked his opponent down again in the second, to no great effect. Back in the corner he complained about a broken hand. He couldn’t look Atlas in the eye. Tyson seemed drained of energy, dazed, defeated. Atlas didn’t believe the broken-hand story. He grabbed Tyson’s head and lifted it up. “If you want to become heavyweight champion of the world, this is it, the title,” barked Atlas. “All these dreams end here if you don’t beat this guy.”
In the third and final round, Tyson stopped punching. He let himself be grabbed and easily hit. He punched back, but without the same snap, or, as D’Amato liked to say, “bad intentions.” Atlas had never seen him so passive before, and neither had D’Amato, who sat nearby watching his future champion fizzle. At one point, after taking a straight right and then clinching, Tyson got backed up into the corner and it seemed to Atlas that within seconds he would fall to the canvas and simply give up. “Don’t do it!” he yelled. Tyson stayed on his feet, the round ended, and he won on points.
“We talked afterwards down in a hallway in the arena,” remembered Atlas. “He was thanking me, he couldn’t stop saying it. I told him we made a breakthrough. He knew he wanted to lose. I told him he should never let himself get to that point again.” Atlas made one more crucial point. “What counted, I said, was not that he had those feelings; all fighters do. It’s that he didn’t give in to them.”
The Scranton fight exposed a serious flaw that neutralized every one of Tyson’s natural and acquired advantages. He fell into an intensively passive, trancelike state in which the will to fight and elude punches drained away. When the group got back to Catskill, D’Amato didn’t add much to Atlas’s comments. He went over the same ground about fear, and how will overcomes skill, but he made minimal effort to determine what lay at the heart of Tyson’s sudden passivity. Sometime later, though, he did send Tyson to a hypnotist. D’Amato had done that with other fighters. He felt that it helped them concentrate better in the ring.
D’Amato had decided to remain emotionally detached from Tyson, just as he had done with Torres. It was as if he chose to commit himself to an idea of what Tyson could become rather than grapple with the full reality of all the chaos in the youth’s heart, which would have been more demanding. That, at least, is what Atlas began to see. “Cus was in a hurry with Mike,” said Atlas. “He was so set on getting another world champion, a heavyweight, that he didn’t want to see what Mike was.”
D’Amato may have also been driven by a desire for vindication. It was the rationalization of the egoist. “He knew that no matter what he’d failed to do in the past with Patterson or Torres or whatever, he’d be remembered forever for that one last champion,” said Atlas.
Shortly after the Scranton incident, Tyson went to the National Junior Olympics Tournament in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This time only Atlas accompanied Tyson, who stood out from the other fifteen-year-olds. Their muscles had barely begun to form through the layer of adolescent baby fat; Tyson’s bulged. He also kept to himself mostly, which soon created a mystique about his background. In his first fight, Tyson scored a first-round knockout of a 265-pound Hawaiian boy with a textbook left hook to the liver. Some boys intentionally lost their fights just to avoid meeting Tyson and possibly suffering permanent physical damage. Tyson won the Junior Olympic heavyweight title, his first major victory.
Tyson’s success got big play in the Catskill newspaper. It made him a minor celebrity and, to officials at the junior high school who watched him attend dutifully but learn little, a greater distraction. They decided to matriculate Tyson into the high school without testing. When Tyson’s caseworker, Ernestine Coleman, found out, she was enraged. “They wanted Michael out of their hair and he knew it,” she said. “I think that hurt him, which caused Michael to act out more. He was feeling that if that’s the way they wanted to be, he didn’t need school anyway; he’d be a boxer.”
The principal at Catskill High, Richard Stickles, was far less patient with Tyson than his counterpart at the junior high school, Lee Bordick. The teachers there also decided from the outset to cut Tyson down to size. The racial tensions of the previous year had persisted and they were concerned that he might become a lightning rod for the black students.
Tyson began to be victimized by some of the other boys in the house. “They baited him,” said Tom Patti, who was seventeen years old when he moved into the house that fall to train with D’Amato. “Mike talked back in class, sure. Once a teacher threw a book at him, called him intolerable. He misbehaved. He was never intolerable.” Atlas, however, felt that Tyson exploited the fact that others—namely D’Amato—considered him special. “Cus told Mike he’d be world champion. Mike didn’t believe it, but he knew that whatever he had was letting him do things other people couldn’t do,” said Atlas.
The situation fed on itself. Labeled a miscreant, Tyson increasingly acted like one. He was still being taunted by the black students for living with white people, which led to a few schoolyard scuffles. One day, he asked for milk in the cafeteria just as it closed. He was refused and threw his tray against the wall. He was suspended for a few days. It was the first of several suspensions.
During those suspensions Tyson would disappear from Catskill. D’Amato figured that he had gone back to Brownsville, which was exactly right. D’Amato would ask José Torres to bring him back. “He wasn’t at home. He’d be out on the streets, stealing, mugging people, screwing around,” remembered Torres. When he returned to the house, Tyson would be meek and apologetic. Yet, without provocation, he could turn nasty. Once housemother Ewald asked Tyson to try and shower more often and to keep his gym clothes clean. Tyson angrily called her “a piece of shit.’ Another time, in an argument over one of his Brownsville trips, Tyson spit at D’Amato.
Atlas understood how someone with Tyson’s background—which after all was similar to his own—could have difficulties in a small-town school. But he believed in the principles D’Amato preached in such situations: rise above the other man and control your emotions. Tyson wasn’t doing that. As the conflicts worsened, Atlas realized that D’Amato preferred to contradict his own principles rather than undermine Tyson’s focus on boxing. “I told Cus that if we teach Mike to control himself in the ring, but not out of it, he won’t develop into a responsible person,” said Atlas. “That’s what Cus always taught me: develop a boxer in ways that make him successful in life, whether he becomes a champion or not. With Mike, Cus wanted a champion first, a good person last.”
When other boys in the gym got in trouble at school, Atlas barred them from training for a few days. He did the same to Tyson. D’Amato vetoed that by bringing Tyson in himself. Atlas relented. “I was loyal to Cus. I didn’t want to see what was happening.”
By late fall of 1981, the school administration decided to expel Tyson. D’Amato didn’t protest this time. He contacted Coleman and convinced her that Tyson had been victimized at school, that boxing was still his best form of therapy. He sent her newspaper clippings of his successes in the ring. Clearly, D’Amato knew that Coleman had the power to take Tyson back into state care. He couldn’t risk losing his future champion. D’Amato asked if she would find a tutor. Coleman agreed, and in January 1982, Tyson left the high school.
The tutoring failed. Again, Tyson sat down for the instruction but didn’t apply himself. D’Amato promised the tutor that Tyson would work harder, but he never did. The 1982 National Junior Olympics Tournament was coming up and Tyson had to defend his title.
The mystique about Tyson built. Professional fight promoters who stalked the amateur tournaments looking for prospects talked about Tyson as a sure bet to win the gold at the upcoming Olympic Games in Los Angeles. One manager, Shelly Finkel, had already approached Tyson about his future plans. D’Amato refused to even discuss the matter with Finkel.
At the 1982 Juniors, Tyson again kept mostly to himself, or with Atlas, instead of mixing with the other boys. He knocked out his first four opponents with ease. On the night of the final, as he waited to enter the ring, Tyson broke down in tears. “I’m ‘Mike Tyson,’ everyone likes me now,” he uttered. Atlas did what he could