Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

and Jacobs didn’t want to take any chances with Spain. His height, six-foot-two, didn’t worry them, and neither did his record of seven wins, five by knockout. It was his weight, a mere 184¼ pounds, or around thirty pounds under the average for a heavyweight. “They were really afraid that because he was so much lighter than Mike, Spain would run,” said Nick Beck, who was at the fight. “Chasing him around the ring would have made Mike look bad.”

      The fight was scheduled for four rounds. They decided the night before to try increasing it to six, which would give Tyson plenty of time to score a knockout. Jacobs called Spain’s manager. He didn’t want to do it. Jacobs demanded to talk to Spain. “He offered Spain a few hundred dollars on top of his purse for two more rounds,” said Beck. Spain took the money.

      Tyson knocked him out in thirty-nine seconds of the first round. Spain, whose nom de pug was “The Ram,” had unwisely decided to stand and fight, a mistake with Tyson, as many other fighters would soon discover. Ironically, Jacobs’s offer may have also made Spain overconfident. If they were that worried about their man’s chances, Spain may have reasoned, maybe he wasn’t such a threat. No doubt that was the conclusion they hoped Spain would reach.

      A few weeks later, Tyson went on ESPN again, this time to fight six-foot-four, 226½ pound John Alderson, a twenty-one-year-old former West Virginia coal miner. Alderson was four victories into his return from a three-year layoff from the ring. He made the perfect victim for Tyson. He had the tall heavyweight’s habit of leaning away from a punch. That might have worked against Tyson if Alderson also had good hand speed and leg work, plus punch accuracy, but he didn’t. Tyson easily eluded the punches. He then chopped away with combinations at the body and head as if trying to fell an old red oak, bloodying Alderson’s nose and eye, and dropping him twice until the referee called the fight over in the second round.

      The ESPN commentator noted that Tyson switched to being a southpaw, or a left-hander, midway through the first round. He had indeed been taught—perhaps after a suggestion by Jacobs, who was lethal with both hands on the handball court—to fight as a right- and left-hander. That confused opponents. They couldn’t figure out which side of Tyson was the bigger threat. The answer, of course, was both.

      Jacobs felt that Tyson had proven himself enough to deserve a regular schedule on ESPN. Arum, in one of the biggest blunders of his promoting career, disagreed. Incredibly, he told Jacobs that his matchmakers considered Tyson an average talent. Arum refused to give Jacobs the dates. Jacobs made contact with a promoter in Houston, Jeff Levine, who would go on to handle eight Tyson fights. Jacobs and Cayton, with their long, bitter memories, never forgave Arum his lack of insight. They did one more fight with Arum, then never again let him within a foot of Tyson’s career.

      In Tyson’s next fight, against Larry Sims in Poughkeepsie, New York, he faltered. That is, after an unsuccessful initial barrage, he seemed to get frustrated and lose the seamless union of defensive and offensive movement. It took three rounds to knock Sims out. As with all his fights, this one was taped on video. But Jacobs and Cayton would later deny that a tape had been made. The Sims tape was destroyed. They wanted a record of first-round knockouts and nothing less.

      Tyson’s next five fights were on average three weeks apart. Every opponent was tall, slow, and used little head or lateral movement—in other words, tailor-made for Tyson. Some of them didn’t deserve to be in the ring against a fighter of Tyson’s caliber. Not surprisingly, he set off on binge of first-round knockouts.

      In pro fight number seven, the slow hands of six-foot-two Lorenzo Canady proved his downfall. Tyson simply ducked underneath, dipped to his left, and let go a concussive left hook to the head. Next was Mike (“Jack”) Johnson, fighting his first bout in more than two years. He sank to the canvas after Tyson slipped, then ripped into him with a left hook to the ribs. Johnson got up and Tyson delivered a straight right through the gloves that dislodged two front teeth, which remained stuck in the hard, rubber mouth guard. Tyson turned to Rooney and pointed at Johnson with a gleeful look that said, “Look at that! Did you see what I just did!”

      Donnie Long was dubbed “The Master of Disaster.” He, too, had recently come back after a two-year layoff. Long had a tendency to hold his gloves out as if displaying a sign. That left a big space, through which Tyson drove a straight right. A few more punches and Long was out. Back in his corner, Tyson blew a kiss at the camera.

      “Big Bob” Colay, another tall opponent, came on a platter. He held his hands low and tried to dance, but he lacked the leg speed to move out of Tyson’s way. He pawed with left jabs that Tyson easily slipped—to both the right and left, to Colay’s amazement. His trademark left hook to the head put Colay out in thirty-seven seconds of the first round.

      After knocking out Sterling Benjamin with another left hook, Tyson didn’t bother to wait for the count to make sure he stayed down. He walked over to Rooney and Baranski and thrust his hands through the ropes, saying nothing, just demanding with the gesture that the gloves be removed. He’d finished. Job done. As they were about to cut the tape away and undo the strings, Tyson glanced over his shoulder to make sure Benjamin remained prone. After all, the unexpected could happen.

      It did. Three days later—November 4, 1985—D’Amato died of pneumonia. Through most of October, D’Amato had battled the illness at home. Always distrustful of doctors, he wouldn’t go to the hospital. Finally, he had no choice. By then it was too late. D’Amato spent a week in a nearby local hospital but didn’t respond to the drugs. He moved down to Mount Sinai in New York, and died a few days later.

      The only person with him during those last days was not Jacobs or Tyson or Torres, but Tom Patti, who still lived in the house even though he’d given up boxing. “I don’t know why Mike didn’t come,” said Patti. “Maybe he didn’t want to see Cus like that. Cus looked bad, all bloated up.” Patti paused a moment. “Jimmy Jacobs should have been there. I learnt something about Jimmy after that.”

      D’Amato was buried in a Catholic cemetery on the outskirts of Catskill. The gravestone is a simple pink granite slab, a few feet high, a few feet wide. Chiseled on it are D’Amato’s own words:

      “A boy comes to me with a spark of interest. I feed the spark and it becomes a flame. I feed the flame and it becomes a fire. I feed the fire and it becomes a roaring blaze.” And then beneath, “Cus.” The day after the funeral, Tyson returned by himself and poured a bottle of champagne over the grave.

      It was Jacobs’s idea to put those words on the gravestone. They focused on a small part of what D’Amato’s life represented. But they were more apt in describing Jacobs’s primary commercial ambition: promoting heavyweight contender Mike Tyson. Patterson was at most a flickering flame, Torres a mere glow. Only Tyson blazed.

      Jacobs didn’t overtly exploit the event of D’Amato’s death to advance his interest with Tyson. He did, however, subtly leverage from it as Patti noticed at the November 19 memorial service that Jacobs organized at D’Amato’s former gym, the Gramercy, on Fourteenth Street. Dozens of people came; old fighters long forgotten, boys whom D’Amato had helped, and friends from his childhood. Jacobs asked only authors Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and Budd Schulberg, among others, to give eulogies—which he then videotaped.

      “He wanted to have segments just in case they came in handy promoting Mike,” said Tom Patti. “Jimmy was using Mike’s relationship with Cus. He wrote a program for the memorial service and quoted Cus about fighting and what makes a great fighter. Beneath the quote he wrote in things like ‘and Mike Tyson is what Cus meant.’ That was true, but what Jimmy did wasn’t right. He was thinking about himself, not Cus or Mike.”

      With D’Amato gone, Jacobs could think about the opportunity of Mike Tyson in different terms. He no longer had the benefit of D’Amato’s wisdom on managing a fighter. But he’d listened to D’Amato for years on the principles of the job, and had practiced them with other lesser fighters. “Cus had gone over the plan for Mike endlessly with Jimmy: how often he should fight, who the best opponents would be, when he’d probably be ready for the title, how to handle promoters—everything you could think of,” said Baranski. “Then he told Jimmy what Mike was probably going to be like after he won the title.