Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

so it became Costantine, then Coster, Cos, and eventually Cus.

      His mother died when D’Amato was four. His father cared for the boys as best he could but lost them, as it were, to the streets. Love alternated with beatings. Many beatings. The boys respected the father, though. He didn’t put up with injustice. He was the kind of man who showed respect to those he felt deserved it and hatred for those who didn’t.

      D’Amato took the beatings with the attitude that he had to accept the consequences of his actions. “I knew I deserved it,” D’Amato said in a 1976 interview titled “The Brujo of Gramercy Gym,” published in a periodical called Observations From the Treadmill. “I knew before I got hit what I was getting hit for, and I knew before I did what I did exactly what was gonna happen, just like day follows darkness. There was nothin’ to be resentful about.”

      His father, a former wrestler, loved boxing. D’Amato’s older brother Jerry trained at a gym in the Frog Hollow section of the Bronx. It later became famous as Stillman’s. D’Amato carried Jerry’s bags and watched. One day, Jerry got in a fight with a policeman—and was shot dead.

      D’Amato had his share of scraps. At twelve, in a street fight with an older man, he suffered a blow to the head that partially blinded him in the left eye. A deviated septum caused breathing difficulties (hence the odd blowing). Still, D’Amato never backed down from a good fight—that is, when he could fight for what he believed was right.

      In old New York, neighborhoods were highly territorial. You didn’t throw your weight around on someone else’s block unless you were ready to back it up with force. One day, a man with a reputation for knife fighting came into D’Amato’s small patch of the Bronx. He started to push some of D’Amato’s friends around. When they pushed back, the man challenged each one to a knife fight. Everyone backed down. The man began to humiliate them, or as D’Amato explained the story to author and friend Norman Mailer, “He said things he shouldn’t have.” D’Amato challenged him to a fistfight. The man insisted on knives. D’Amato agreed.

      They were to meet the next morning, shortly after dawn, in an abandoned building. D’Amato, with good reason, couldn’t sleep that night: He had had no experience with knife fighting. He knew boxing, though. At dawn D’Amato taped an ice pick into his left hand and wrapped a coat around his right forearm. He’d fight like that. He arrived at the appointed site a half hour early to check the place out and shadowbox. At seven, the knife fighter wasn’t there. D’Amato waited for several more hours, but still no opponent. The knife fighter never appeared again in the neighborhood. D’Amato became a street hero.

      He learned soon after that heroism had its limitations. A rival gang invaded his neighborhood, and D’Amato joined a group of boys ready to do battle. When the two gangs met, D’Amato rushed ahead, screaming a war cry. When he looked around, he found himself alone. The other boys had retreated. The rival gang, respecting his courage, let him be and chased the others.

      It was from such incidents that D’Amato later developed a practical psychology of fear and made it the foundation for everything else he taught young boxers. D’Amato argued that no essential difference existed between the coward and the hero. The hero can control his emotions; the coward can’t. “Fear is like fire,” D’Amato said time and again, repeating it like a mantra. “If you don’t control it, it will destroy you and everything around you.”

      From boyhood, D’Amato had what could only be called a warrior’s obsessions. He always seemed to be preparing for some battle of life and death. To steel himself against an imaginary enemy who threatened starvation, he would fast for days at a time. Even though the sight in his left eye was poor, he insisted on closing the right eye when reading. That led to a habit of squinting with the bad eye.

      He believed deeply in Catholicism. The deterministic concept of heaven held special appeal. As a boy, he would watch funeral processions go by and long for death. If heaven was the ultimate good, D’Amato thought, there was no point of mortal life on Earth.

      D’Amato dropped out of Morris High School to hang around boxing gyms. His father got him work in a mill that made iceboxes. D’Amato, then seventeen, couldn’t help pointing out to the other men how to do their jobs. That led to a lot of fights. In one, he nearly beat a man to death. D’Amato quit a year later and went back to the gym. Money didn’t interest him. “To me, working was a waste of time. It was a bore,” he once said. His favorite reading material then was the National Police Gazette, a magazine popular among boxing sportsmen since the mid-nineteenth century.

      In 1939, D’Amato and two other friends opened a gym at 116 East Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. In 1942, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. The ascetic in him found heaven on Earth. He slept on the floor. At mess hall meals he traded his cake for bread. During bivouac there were always so many flies around the food that D’Amato once promised himself to eat the next mouthful regardless. A spider crawled into it. He hated spiders, but he ate it anyway—with bread.

      D’Amato made a perfect soldier. He took orders well and kept his locker neat and spotless. D’Amato’s commanding officer put him up for a commission. At the test, he refused to recite the General Orders. D’Amato knew them, he just didn’t want to be an officer. He preferred the rigors of the lowly G.I.

      D’Amato stayed Stateside during the war and afterward returned to his gym on East Fourteenth. He lived in a back room on a cot with a dog—a boxer—named Cus. He believed that extraterrestrial beings came to Earth on occasion, and he bought a telescope to watch for them. He felt that upon arrival they were likely to seek him out. D’Amato also harbored a deep mistrust of women.

      D’Amato told friends that he wanted one day to have three champions. They laughed. Managers and promoters had taken away, by hook or by crook, other men’s champions, but no one in the sport of boxing had ever developed and held on to three. D’Amato would train anybody that came up the two flights of stairs and walked through the door. He especially wanted the boys who came alone. The more afraid they were, the better. Fear was always his window into their souls.

      “He was so charismatic and persuasive with those ideas about fear,” said Joe Fariello, one of those boys. “He understood better than anybody else that all fighters are afraid. And that’s good. Otherwise, they’d be walking into punches. He taught you how to control it, make it work. He taught you what would happen in the ring, why and how you could correct it.”

      Fariello met D’Amato in 1952. They were from the same neighborhood in the Bronx. Fariello didn’t know his father. His mother worked occasionally. The family lived on welfare. He got kicked out of high school for fighting. Fariello boxed for a few years, then at age seventeen stopped because of a broken nose and hand. D’Amato asked him to train the other fighters. Fariello moved into D’Amato’s apartment on Fifty-third Street. “Cus was the only man I looked up to as a father,” said Fariello, now a highly respected New York trainer.

      Fariello worked with D’Amato and some of his fighters until 1965, when the two men had a falling-out. He remembered D’Amato as a son would remember a father with whom he battled constantly, or as a disillusioned disciple would remember his master.

      “I realized that Cus couldn’t control his own emotions. He was afraid to drive; he wouldn’t fly; he feared heights, elevators, tunnels, water, thunder and lightning,” Fariello said. “That’s okay, but he acted like he wasn’t contradicting himself. He didn’t deal with those fears; he rationalized them away, made things the way he wanted them to be.”

      But that, in the end, isn’t what caused the split. D’Amato was the kind of person someone coming into manhood had to get away from. “His whole philosophy on boxing and on life was a brainwashing. That’s why he wanted young kids from the beginning. He could start with a fresh mind,” Fariello maintained.

      Fariello moved out of D’Amato’s apartment, got married, and started to develop his own ideas about boxing. He had wanted to make more money, but D’Amato didn’t care much about the size of his fighters’ purses, only that they were developing as he wanted them to. And Fariello had made his mistakes. He had a weakness for gambling. D’Amato could rationalize away his own