Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

Chapter Five

      Mike Tyson’s professional career began on March 6, 1985. One year, eight months, and sixteen days later, he would capture the heavyweight championship of the world. The list of firsts which led up to that event in sports history is, by all appearances, mind-boggling.

      He would win the title at the age of twenty, younger than any other heavyweight. At that age, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano were still in the amateurs. No other heavyweight ever captured the title in so short a span of time. No other heavyweight ever achieved as high a percentage of first-round knockouts as Tyson—40.5 percent, or fifteen in twenty-seven fights—in his career leading up to the crown.

      It wasn’t victory just by brute force. Tyson acquired the subtler though far less recognized distinction of defensive excellence. Due to his training in the D’Amato “system,” he would be hit far fewer times moving forward than had any other notable heavyweight moving in any direction in the ring.

      What won’t go into the statistical record books, or the sports lore, is the degree to which those achievements were the product of design. No boxer becomes champion by serendipity. But the careers of some boxers are more intently, and successfully, manipulated than others. In the hands of D’Amato, Jacobs, and Cayton, that manipulation almost reached the level of conspiracy. Recognizing this fact doesn’t severely diminish Tyson’s achievement. But it does put it in proper perspective.

      Informing the whole effort was a single, unspoken motive. None of the men could waste any time getting Tyson a shot at the title. Each of them was on borrowed time.

      D’Amato was seventy-seven years old. He had little energy to travel long distances, let alone keep up with the punishing regimen of watching over a rising contender. Tyson was his last hurrah.

      In 1985, Jacobs entered the fifth year of his leukemia. According to Dr. Gene Brody, the New York specialist who diagnosed and treated Jacobs, in the early years he managed fairly well. Starting in 1982, Jacobs received occasional doses of two drugs—Leukeran and Prednisone—that kept the disease under control. By 1985, the distorting effect of the cancer on his blood cell count made Jacobs increasingly prone to simple infections. He also suffered enlargement of the lymph nodes in his neck. As Jacobs well knew, chronic lymphoid leukemia, or CLL, is incurable. It’s also capricious. He could die with only a few months’ warning.

      Cayton, of course, also knew that. Jacobs told him of the disease, and his prognosis, in 1981. Since then Tyson’s success as an amateur, and the prospect of making him champion, had given Cayton a new interest in his business career. He delayed plans for retirement despite recurring attacks of endocarditis, which had been treated successfully with massive doses of antibiotics. Still, Cayton was a sixty-nine-year-old man. He’d probably outlive D’Amato, but it was a toss-up with Jacobs. No doubt, somewhere in the back of his mind, Cayton wondered if he’d be left having to finish (and profit from) the job himself.

      With their collectively fragile mortalities as the background, they devised three basic guidelines for developing Tyson’s career.

      First and foremost, they could not risk another defeat in the ring. For an amateur losing was excusable. For a professional it would severely diminish the aura they wanted to build around Tyson as an indestructible force in the ring and an inevitable champion of the heavyweight division. Opponents had to be selected carefully, with all factors—such as fight duration, ring size, and glove weight—stacked in Tyson’s favor.

      Second, they hoped to schedule a fight at least once a month. That served several purposes. It fit in with the mortality factor. It was also a way of maintaining control over Tyson and sustaining his burning intensity. And as long as he could be kept at that upper level of performance, Tyson’s tendency to fall into a passive state in the ring might just be avoided.

      Third, just as D’Amato had with Floyd Patterson, they had to find promoters willing to let them make most of the decisions. That was the best way to retain absolute control over Tyson’s career.

      In this first stage of Tyson’s career, they needed a completely malleable promoter. Matt Baranski suggested a husband-and-wife team based in Troy, New York, an hour north of Catskill. The Millers ran a true mom-and-pop promoting business. They rarely made much money and certainly couldn’t afford to lose any. Jacobs and Cayton would finance the whole promotion. The Millers would be paid out of profits from ticket sales, if any. Jacobs and Cayton also promised to cover all losses.

      Tyson’s professional debut came against a club fighter named Hector Mercedes on March 6, 1985, in Albany, New York. Tyson’s hair was cropped short at the sides in a homage to the Spartan macho aesthetic of Jack Dempsey. Tyson swarmed over the taller, slower Mercedes, who must have felt as if he were fighting two opponents: one who only punched and another who eluded. Tyson then settled down into a more fluid expression of his unique style. He’d revised the “peek-a-boo” by holding his gloves on either side of the chin instead of the temple. That way his punches got off more quickly. He knocked out Mercedes in the first round.

      As expected, the fight did not turn a profit. Jacobs and Cayton paid Tyson a purse of five hundred dollars. D’Amato paid Rooney 10 percent of that, gave Tyson one hundred dollars, and put the remainder away.

      Tyson’s second fight came on April 10 against Trent Singleton. This time he looked more studied. He charged straight in, feinted with his head, slipped and weaved, all the while not getting hit. Then, suddenly, Tyson popped up in close range and let go a series of left and right hooks to the body and head. Singleton went down twice within seconds. When he got up, Tyson reverted to a more conventional offense. He pinned Singleton against the ropes and threw a series of punches, displaying textbook “finishing” abilities. Singelton crumbled. Tyson lunged down to hit his prone opponent again—a serious infraction of the rules—but was stopped by the referee. He turned to his cornermen, Kevin Rooney and Matt Baranski, and smirked.

      In his third fight, five weeks later, Tyson regressed. His first two opponents had been tall and black. This one, Don Halpin, was the same height as Tyson and white. From the moment the bell rang, Tyson looked sluggish. There was little head and upper body movement. At times, he let his gloves drop.

      Halpin made things worse by standing up to Tyson’s punches. He also tended to crouch, which may have confused Tyson. From early in the amateurs, Tyson was always more effective with a taller opponent. It gave him the chance to use his smaller size to advantage. By the second round, he had started to get lazy on the inside, which enabled Halpin to connect with a few straight rights.

      By the fourth round, Tyson began to look like any other conventionally trained fighter. Fortunately, because of his superior hand speed and power, he was better at being average than Halpin. Tyson won by a knockout in the fourth, and tried to hit Halpin as he fell. This time the referee openly rebuked him.

      It wasn’t Tyson’s foul play—and there would be much more of it to come—that worried D’Amato and Jacobs afterwards. The passivity had struck their prospect once again, and this time with a handpicked, mediocre opponent. They had no idea what to do about it. “They didn’t know Mike,” Baranski said. “He was out of control most of the time.”

      For the next fight Jacobs arranged to get Tyson on ESPN, the sports cable station that stages a weekly fightnight to showcase up-and-coming contenders. These events were organized by top Rank Boxing, owned by Bob Arum. Arum was one of the country’s two top promoters, the other being Don King. Jacobs ran a risk letting Tyson come within Arum’s grasp. Like King, he was notorious for spiriting away other people’s fighters with promises of big money. Jacobs had had one such battle with Arum over Wilfred Benitez.

      But Arum had something that Jacobs desperately wanted. Due to his losses at the Olympic trials, Tyson had no chance yet of getting on one of the big three broadcast networks. He had to start with cable. Jacobs made an appeal to Arum’s appetite for power. For several years Arum had been battling with King over turf. Arum ended up doing most of the major middleweight fights, and King the heavyweights. Jacobs knew that Arum had always wanted to get his hands on a major heavyweight contender and challenge King for control of that