Jacobs knew that the management of Tyson had become greatly simplified. “It would have eventually come to a head between Jimmy and Cus,” continued Baranski. “The bigger Mike got, the more say Cus would have wanted. That would have drove Jimmy nuts. Bill, too. With Cus gone they breathed a lot easier.”
Maybe so. But it’s almost a moot point, because if conflicts had arisen over management issues, D’Amato wouldn’t have had much legal recourse. Once Tyson turned eighteen, D’Amato’s guardianship approval wasn’t needed anymore on documents. Jacobs and Cayton had tied Tyson into a series of agreements that gave them control over every aspect of his career.
They stuck to the plan of Jacobs as manager and Cayton working behind the scenes on contract negotiations. That suited their temperaments and abilities. They also didn’t have any choice. According to the rules and regulations of the New York State Athletic Commission, a body that oversees boxing and wrestling, a boxer is permitted to have only one manager of record.
Still, Cayton had solidified his background role. On September 28, 1984, he obtained Tyson’s signature on a contract that made him “exclusive personal manager” for the extraordinary long term of seven years. He would represent Tyson for commercial appearances, product endorsements, and all entertainment activities under the corporate name of Reel Sports, Inc.
Cayton was sole owner of Reel Sports. He also had a private agreement with Jacobs to share evenly the personal manager’s commission. That was the other unusual aspect of the contract besides the lengthy term. Personal service agents for athletes usually claim a commission of from 10 to 15 percent. Cayton took 33⅓ percent.
D’Amato, who for so long had prided himself on working in the fighter’s interests, did not object to either the term of the Reel Sports agreement or the commission. Nor did he advise Tyson to get a lawyer to review the contract.. Perhaps D’Amato felt that his review was sufficient. He signed the agreement. Under his name it read “Cus D’Amato, Adviser to Michael Tyson, who shall have final approval of all decisions involving Michael Tyson.” D’Amato’s legal position was shaky. He didn’t have a separate contract with Tyson making him exclusive adviser.
A few weeks after the Reel Sports agreement was signed, Jacobs officially contracted with Tyson to become manager. That agreement used the standard Athletic Commission boxer-manager form. Nothing in the specified term (four years) or purse split (two-thirds for Tyson, one-third for Jacobs) was unusual. That same day, Jacobs and Cayton used another Athletic Commission form to put their division of Tyson’s purses in writing. The “assignment of manager’s contract” enabled Jacobs to legally give Cayton 50 percent of his earnings from Tyson.
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Ever since doing the Alex Wallau interview with ABC, Jacobs and Cayton had looked for new media opportunities to push the narrative of the relationship between D’Amato and Tyson. They knew that every great fighter, if he was going to cross over into the mainstream audience, needed a story. The more empathetic the tale, the better. In other words, the more Tyson could be defined through a device America understood, the more likely he’d achieve general acceptance and popularity. Given Tyson’s continued bent for the wild side—all through 1985 he continued to disappear for days at a time in Albany and New York, and on one occasion mugged a man in an elevator for his wallet—that story had to move center stage. It would popularize, sanitize, and create the ever-ready, all-purpose rationalization.
Soon after Tyson turned professional, Jacobs pitched a documentary profile of D’Amato and Tyson to the producers of CBS “Sunday Morning,” hosted by the avuncular Charles Kuralt. On June 2, 1985, the piece aired. Narrative had been refined into the fable of Cus and the Kid.
The initial image showed Kuralt and D’Amato strolling across the lawn of the house. Kuralt’s voice-over cut in: “Cus D’Amato lived a full, rich, embattled life in the big cities. He managed Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight championship of the world almost thirty years ago. But boxing passed him by. And left him in exile in the country.”
The image cut to D’Amato in the Catskill gym.
“He considered himself a teacher, a shaper of character … and then suddenly Cus D’Amato is handling fire again. Michael Tyson, a wild, angry teenager from a nearby reform school. Cus, who never married, adopted Michael, took him into his home, taught him about jabbing through fear.”
Kuralt talked about each giving the other the same gift, “a future.” The piece flashed back to D’Amato’s time with Patterson and their eventual estrangement. Kuralt then dug up Patterson and asked if he had any advice for Tyson: “Have faith, confidence in the man you trust. In Cus.”
D’Amato claimed, rather incredibly, for Tyson had had only three pro fights up to that point, that he could “go down in history as the greatest fighter of all time.”
Kuralt then all but sainted D’Amato. “Cus D’Amato is more than a manager of champions. He’s a savior of souls. He saved Floyd Patterson and he is saving Mike Tyson.”
D’Amato struck the self-sacrificing pose of a man more interested in souls than the dictates of his own ego: “I succeed when he becomes champion of the world and independent of me.”
Kuralt’s final remarks tried to strike an ominous note, as if we had only seen the prologue: “But they need each other now. Because someday soon they will be coming out of the country, coming hard and coming fast for the lights of the city.”
The following September, an Albany television station added its own flourishes to the fable. The voice-over described Tyson as “a very quiet and gentle man outside the ring,” a fighter who didn’t want to be the “boss,” a “boxing historian” whose “gentle side shows with his pigeons.” Tyson claimed that D’Amato never had to worry about where he was because at “nighttime I’m at my coop looking after my birds.”
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