Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

at the time was considering retirement. His role remained uncertain, although he had expertise in advertising, marketing, and television, and expected to share in any profits from Tyson’s purses.

      In August, Ernestine Coleman discovered that Tyson’s mother had been diagnosed as having inoperable cancer. She told Tyson and D’Amato. Despite all the money available for Tyson’s boxing career, D’Amato spared none for Lorna’s care. Nor had he ever paid for her to visit Tyson in Catskill. Over the past two years, D’Amato had spoken to her only a few times, and then briefly. He didn’t want to reveal her son’s problems in case the information got back to Coleman. D’Amato deemed his obligations as being only to the officials at the Youth Division.

      In September, D’Amato paid for Tyson’s one train trip to visit Lorna in the hospital. He went alone. When he came back a few days later, Tyson refused to discuss what he saw, or felt. When his mother died in October, at the age of fifty-two, Tyson again went to New York alone. The trip turned out to be a watershed experience.

      When Tyson arrived at his old apartment on Amboy Street in Brownsville, no one was there. Rodney long ago had moved away and had left no new address. When Denise returned home she said that there was no money to bury Lorna. The city would put her in Potter’s Field, a cemetery for the poor on an island northeast of Manhattan in the East River. Convicts from Rikers Island prison dug the graves.

      Tyson couldn’t bring himself to go to the burial. He stayed in the apartment for three days. The phone rang several times but he didn’t answer. When he did, finally, it was D’Amato. Tyson said he wasn’t coming back to Catskill and hung up.

      The next day, Ernestine Coleman came to the door. He wouldn’t let her into the apartment. They talked in the hallway. “I told Michael that he had to come back to Catskill,” recalled Coleman. “He refused. He was going to stay in Brownsville. I was convinced of that.”

      Coleman explained that her own mother had died of cancer; she could empathize with what he felt. Tyson wasn’t moved. He was stuck in his grief and perhaps weighed down by the guilt he felt for letting his mother down all those years. There was also the shame. At Tryon, he tried to tell her how much he was changing, but maybe he hadn’t tried hard enough. If he had called more, cared more, tried harder, as hard as he boxed, maybe he could have earned back her love.

      “This was a boy who had more rage than I’d ever seen before, and now he was falling, going into a deep depression. The boxing was a positive direction for him. It was either that or the streets, where he would have ended up dead for sure,” said Coleman.

      She wasn’t prepared to let Tyson commit suicide in this manner. So she lied. “I said that if he wanted to stay I’d have to do the paperwork, the police would pick him up, and I’d place him somewhere in New York.”

      At sixteen, Tyson was no longer under the authority of the Youth Division. He could do as he pleased. D’Amato had never told him that, and now, when the information would have perhaps determined his future, neither did Coleman. Perhaps, then, it was the prospect of the police, or just the shock value of the ultimatum, that made Tyson see through his own grief to the stark realities of his situation. He returned to Catskill that very day with Coleman.

      According to Ewald, Tyson refused to discuss his mother’s death when he returned. But he started to change, radically. “Not long after he got back, Michael told me that he thought he could become the heavyweight champion of the world. Cus had always said that about him before and he knew it. That was the first time Mike said it.”

      Coleman detected a shift as well. “Until his mother died, he never saw that house as home. Catskill just amounted to a place where he was and a thing he was doing. Suddenly, Cus, Camille, the house, and boxing was all he had left.”

      Soon after Lorna’s death, D’Amato made a move to become Tyson’s legal guardian. When Tyson went to New York on the day of his mother’s funeral and refused to come back, D’Amato realized that his dream of having another champion could be easily stolen. The only control D’Amato could have was legal guardianship. Up until the age of eighteen, Tyson required the approval of a parent, or guardian, to sign a contract.

      D’Amato’s duplicity ate away at Atlas like an acid. Every time he tried to discipline Tyson, D’Amato vetoed it. It reached the point where D’Amato had to take over Tyson’s training, while Atlas worked solely with the other boys in the boxing club. In November, matters came to a head. Atlas had gotten married over the previous summer. His wife had a twelve-year-old sister who on occasion came to the gym. The girl told Atlas that Tyson had fondled her. Atlas flew into a rage, got a gun, and confronted Tyson at the gym. Tyson ran out and hid in D’Amato’s house. D’Amato sent him to stay with Bobby Stewart at Tryon until he could sort things out. That consisted of firing Atlas.

      Two weeks later, D’Amato used an old friend to expedite his bid to control Tyson. Bill Hagan was the supervisor of Greene County, in which Catskill was located. Hagan had used his Washington connections to secure the $25,000 federal grant for D’Amato years before. D’Amato told him now that some promoters were trying to weasel in on Tyson. The next day, D’Amato went to a local court with his lawyers and a set of already-completed guardianship papers. The judge approved the request without delay.

      Atlas believed that D’Amato had intentionally let his dispute with Tyson boil over. “He let the conflict between me and Mike be brought to a climax so I had to leave and he could take Mike over,” said Atlas.

      With Atlas gone the issue of who would work in Tyson’s corner arose. Baranski would be tapped to organize the sparring partners and work as cutman during fights. Kevin Rooney just months before lost a fight to Alexis Arguello, and lost so badly that it snuffed out any hope of his earning a shot at the welterweight title. When Atlas left, Rooney, his boyhood friend, took over as Tyson’s trainer.

      Atlas was determined to continue working with the other boys in the boxing club. Some of their parents confronted D’Amato about his dismissal. D’Amato lied. He told them that Atlas had quit in order to work with professionals in New York. The parents knew that Atlas hadn’t left Catskill at all. Desperate to cover himself, D’Amato launched a smear campaign against Atlas. He spread rumors among the town officials who supported the club with funding that Atlas had taken up with the Mafia. He recounted tales of Atlas’s troubled youth—the street fights, the suicide attempts, and a score of other factual, and not so factual, stories. Atlas was forced to leave Catskill, but the rumors followed. He couldn’t get work at any of the New York gyms. Eventually, one of the parents, who was also a member of the Catskill Town Recreation Board and an executive at IBM, got the word to one of D’Amato’s supporters that he would have the gym closed if the rumors didn’t stop. They did, and Atlas slowly started to get work training professionals at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, New York.

      Looking back on those days with the benefit of hindsight, Atlas didn’t sound angry or bitter. After training professionals on his own for almost ten years, he has learned that some young men can’t be changed, that they are coded somehow to turn out a certain way. When that behavior is enforced by others, there’s not much anyone could do. “We didn’t do everything we could have for Mike. But maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. We could have just been given what was always going to be there,” he said, and then added: “Maybe Cus was right. If we did it my way, Tyson might never have become champion.”

      Atlas paused a moment, as if trying to decide whether his next thought would be taken for sour grapes. He didn’t care anymore; for Atlas it was the truth. “This syndrome about Mike when he turned pro, that he was superhuman, Iron Mike, was bullshit. You know, I never thought he’d be a durable champion.”

      * * *

      After his mother’s death, Tyson became more devoted to D’Amato as a trainer and mentor, and also as a surrogate father. Tyson spoke for the first time of one day being heavyweight champion. He poured himself into boxing to a degree no one involved in his life then—D’Amato, Ewald, Matt Baranski, Kevin Rooney, or Jim Jacobs—had yet seen in him, or in any other boxer past and present.

      “Cus would be sitting in one chair, and Mike across from him in the other, both