Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

Halpin, Sims, Jameson, and Tillis fights demonstrated, he remained completely unpredictable. It didn’t seem like a matter of choice for Tyson; it was not as if in those fights he had decided to win in some other way besides by knockout, to take control of the fight, box, try new things, manipulate the opponent, pick his punches, and add up the victory points in his head.

      Tyson was capable of a small degree of such control, or “ring generalship,” as it is termed. He displayed it with Ferguson and Green. But that wasn’t a reliable quality in him as far as Jacobs was concerned. Nor was it the style of boxing he’d been trained in. D’Amato had honed Tyson to be a knockout artist. He’d always believed that was the best use of Tyson’s burning, rage-filled, psychic intensity. Jacobs agreed with D’Amato. He, too, feared that if Tyson didn’t knock his man out as soon as possible, the chances were high that he’d burn out and regress into a passive, acquiescent state. And so, despite the fact that Jacobs had everyone convinced Tyson would be champion, when it came down to it, he feared that he quite possibly possessed the dark, troubled heart of a loser.

      That was the hole at the center of the entire elaborate and emerging spectacle of Tyson’s life. In retrospect, it seems incredible that more people didn’t recognize the problem at the time. Everything about Tyson was paradoxical.

      The problem went beyond almost diametrically opposed performances in the ring. The Albany mall incident offered a glimpse into a counterlife vastly different from the one served up by Cus and the Kid. It just didn’t make sense that Tyson was the sum of his dual personas: surrogate son to D’Amato and robotic Ring Destroyer. How could those two beings exist in one, barely grown-up man? “It was very eerie to see Tyson break people’s faces in the ring, then sit down with him and hear that sweet little boy’s voice,” recalled Newsday’s Matthews. “I felt there was something I wasn’t seeing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

      Nor could Tyson. He remained a mystery to himself. Despite the years with D’Amato, the twenty-six victories, and all the elaborate packaging as the greatest fighter of his time, Tyson was still unable to get any purchase on a self, on the core of his identity. “When people started to recognize Mike on the streets in New York, he used to tell me that he felt they were thinking he wasn’t really a good boxer,” Lott recalled. “Mike always felt like a fake.”

      Tyson knew that D’Amato’s attentions were, in part, motivated by self-interest. But while D’Amato lived, the role of surrogate son could be played. His religion of the fists, as an all-encompassing gestalt, provided emotional order. It put Tyson in the leading role of his own unique drama of both the inner life and the practical world. With D’Amato around, even if he was a fake, it almost didn’t matter. D’Amato made him feel that some kind of self existed. At the least, Tyson felt that he wasn’t hollow.

      When D’Amato died, Tyson had to play the role without a director. Soon, the persona of surrogate son no longer seemed to hold any validity. He may have never really believed in the veracity of D’Amato’s love, or if he did, it was perhaps on a leap of faith for the lack of any other choice when, as a boy of thirteen, he was presented with the option of life with D’Amato and all his eccentricities, or going back to the Tryon reformatory. However Tyson came to terms with D’Amato’s attentions, if he did feel loved, the experience left him with no permanent emotional structure. He had, in other words, come full circle. It was like having to go back to the first act of the drama and play it all over again. As Tyson told Sports Illustrated in the January 1986, “Kid Dynamite” feature: “I miss him terribly. The many years we worked over things, and worked over things. He was my backbone. All the things we worked on, they’re starting to come out so well … God, I’m doing so well, but when it comes down to it, who really cares? I like doing my job, but I’m not happy being victorious. I fight my heart out and give it my best, but when it’s over, there’s no Cus to tell me how I did, no mother to show my clippings to.”

      Tyson was alone again and second-guessing the motivations of his supposed intimates. The same nagging paradox remained: Did they want him faults and all, or did they want only the future heavyweight champion of the world?

      At first it seemed they only wanted the champion. In the months immediately following D’Amato’s death, Jacobs and Cayton were more focused on the business of Mike Tyson than the person. Remembered Camille Ewald: “After every victory, Cus used to have some kind of celebration for Mike. A cake or something. It gave him prestige. Jimmy and Bill didn’t do that. They were losing contact with Mike.”

      Cayton didn’t want intimate contact with Tyson. In the four years of Tyson’s amateur career, he visited Catskill only once. His only gesture of intimacy with Tyson after he turned professional was to give him a book on raising pigeons. Tyson threw it in the garbage. “Mike knew he was just a business to Cayton,” said Jay Bright, another of the boys living in the house during the 1980s.

      Jacobs didn’t want that kind of intimacy with Tyson, either, but he knew that someone had to step into D’Amato’s role. It was that or run a much higher risk that Tyson would self-destruct, either in or out of the ring. Jacobs revealed those views to Nick Beck: “To Jim, Mike became a business. I think that, despite what he wanted everyone to believe, was what motivated Jim in the relationship.”