Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

the fight. Tyson won by a technical knockout.

      Tyson’s flaw, his passivity, seemed in control—barely. Atlas didn’t know it, but what had happened at Scranton was only the symptom. Before the Junior Olympic finals, the cause of Tyson’s passivity, of the flaw that drained his willingness to fight, had once again peeked out.

      In Scranton, it was not just the prospect of losing the fight that had paralyzed Tyson. It was that in defeat the emotional attachments with D’Amato, Ewald, the other boys in the house, and Atlas would be severed. Fighting, and winning fights, made those bonds possible. Losing confirmed the fear he had lived with since childhood: that he was alone, unloved, and quite possibly unlovable.

      So much of Tyson’s behavior from the day he entered Tryon and wanted to see ex-boxer Bobby Stewart sprang from that fear. Boxing was his only way of controlling the intense feelings of isolation, helplessness, and rage. What D’Amato tried to do was make boxing an all-encompassing gestalt: a way for Tyson to recognize and then order his emotions, to use his body as an instrument of his will, and ultimately to situate himself in the world.

      The problem for Tyson was that the world—from Tryon to D’Amato’s house, the gym, tournaments, and the Junior Olympics—kept getting bigger and more foreign. It was certainly far different from what he came from and where he expected to end up. It was like being cast in a dramatic narrative as the lead player; they were writing as they went along and Tyson never knew what would happen next, only that one day the climax was supposed to be his coronation as heavyweight champion of the world.

      It was a difficult role to play, especially when the leading man felt hollow. Tyson could never see himself becoming champion, because he couldn’t make purchase on his own core identity. That is the affliction of the unloved: without the basic human attachment of love, one comes to doubt that a self exists, and comes to believe that even if it does, it’s probably not worthy of being attached to anyone else. The impulse is toward self-annihilation; the “I” doesn’t exist and so it’s willfully converted to an “it.” The “it,” as Tyson demonstrated during his Brownsville childhood, robs, steals, fights, and ends up in prison. The “it” dies an early death.

      Of course, Tyson had already demonstrated the will to survive. He didn’t want to be an “it.” He knew almost instinctually that boxing offered the logical possibility of finding a self. D’Amato, Ewald, and Atlas were all part of the effort. And so, in a sense, what choice did he have but to participate in their drama of making a champion? It was box or be alone. Box or perish.

      The stakes, then, were high, and to Tyson they seemed to get higher each day. As he started to win fights, he felt the gap widen between the hope others had invested in him and his own deep, riveting fear of what failure would mean. Emotionally, that sent him bouncing back and fourth between two states. In the one, he believed that the hope of D’Amato, Ewald, and Atlas was grounded in authentic caring, even love. That belief dulled the fear, kept it under control. In the other, however, the fear leapt out like a flame. What if D’Amato’s attentions had nothing to do with Tyson the person, only with Tyson the future heavyweight champion?

      The gap widened and Tyson began to live a paradox. He cooperated and then rebelled. He progressed in his boxing abilities, to a seemingly perfect degree, and then radically regressed in the blink of an eye. He’d behave as if he belonged, felt wanted, even loved, and then would act rejected, abandoned, and alone. During the positive phases people saw Tyson as kind, gentle, ambitious, determined, and hardworking; in the negative ones, selfish, conniving, deceptive, and at times inexplicably vicious. He alternated, in other words, between being an “I” and being an “it.”

      D’Amato, for all his preaching on the psychology of fear, did not understand Tyson in those terms. After getting into Tyson’s psyche and bringing order to the most obvious confusions, D’Amato realized there were doors in Tyson he didn’t want to open and rooms he refused to enter. After Floyd Patterson, he vowed never again to open those doors in a fighter. Besides, D’Amato didn’t have the time with this one. He might die before the goal could be reached, and he knew it.

      Perhaps D’Amato sensed that whatever caused Tyson’s will to fail in Scranton formed the opposite side of that which also made him so devastating. Perhaps that was what lurked behind one of those doors. It created a tension, and an intensity, that won fights. It was as if he entered the ring so emotionally coiled that a psychic energy built up that was desperate for release, and the only place it could go, the only relief for Tyson, was to destroy the other man.

      With those forces powering Tyson, he didn’t need Zen. Tyson’s concentration was already so intense that he didn’t need to detach himself, to look down at the task from some spiritually removed place in order to control himself and the opponent. He could win a fight before control became an issue. And so perhaps D’Amato thought to himself, why should I go into one of those dark rooms, reorder and resolve? If I did, I wouldn’t have a champion anymore.

      * * *

      Tyson’s problems at school, his battle with Atlas, the lack of interest in education, his bolting back to Brownsville, his rudeness toward Ewald—D’Amato rationalized them all away as the price he, and Tyson, had to pay for winning the heavyweight championship of the world.

      “Cus took Mike’s selfishness and said fuck it, fuck principles, I see a guy that is going to be a world champion,” said Atlas. “Cus was manipulative, too, but he could use it better. Tyson did it by instinct; Cus knew exactly what he was doing, how to do it, and who it affected.”

      Soon after the Junior Olympic tournament, Atlas’s disillusionment with D’Amato increased. “Cus had the greatest tunnel vision, so great he didn’t even care about himself. He’d let Mike spit on him. When I met him, before Mike came along, he wouldn’t put up with that.”

      In the spring, Tyson boasted around the gym that he didn’t need a trainer anymore, that he could win without Atlas, or D’Amato. In June, Tyson’s tutor quit. She was frustrated both with his lack of interest and with D’Amato’s lack of support. It was no coincidence that on June 30, Tyson turned sixteen and was thus legally no longer obligated to attend school. Moreover, he left the authority of the Youth Division. D’Amato still had to answer to Coleman, however, until Tyson was formally released. He continued to give Coleman rosy reports of Tyson’s progress, despite contrary accounts from the tutor. Coleman believed D’Amato.

      Over the summer, Atlas continued to bump heads with Tyson and D’Amato. Atlas found out that in the late 1970s, D’Amato had secured a $25,000 grant from a federal agency to fund the boxing club—a portion of which was supposed to pay him a salary. Atlas never saw the money. He heard rumors that D’Amato gave certain town officials cash payments for their support and influence, especially on those occasions that Tyson had scrapes with the local law. In one instance, a woman complained to the police that Mike had been having sex with her twelve-year-old daughter. The matter stopped there. Atlas suspected that she’d been paid off. D’Amato also no longer seemed to care about the other boys in the club. Atlas watched D’Amato spend freely to cover Tyson’s expenses for tournaments, but complain when the other boys needed money for new equipment.

      That attitude seemed all the more outrageous to Atlas because he knew that D’Amato had another major source of money to fund his efforts with Tyson. D’Amato had convinced his silent benefactors, Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton, that Tyson was the prospect they’d all been waiting for: a champion fighter they could develop from scratch and control completely. Cayton was skeptical. But Jacobs shared D’Amato’s passion, and he had the same obsessive tendencies. He persuaded Cayton to help pay for the additional expenses of bringing Tyson along. The travel, lodging, and other costs of sending everyone, including Jacobs, to a single tournament reached $6,000. With Tyson’s size, speed, and ability, he needed professional sparring, and that was expensive, upwards of $500 a week. They also paid $250 for each pair of Tyson’s custom-made gloves. Extra padding was needed to protect his sparring partners. Jacobs and Cayton even paid for gold fillings in Tyson’s two front teeth.

      They had a verbal agreement on taking Tyson professional. D’Amato would decide whom he would fight and for which promoters. He would not, however, be manager