I think both of us realized that we were in a race with time. Cus was in his seventies, he was no spring chicken, so he would constantly be shoving all this knowledge into me. Shove, shove, shove all this shit in. If you keep shoving it in, you learn it, unless you’re an idiot. I became very adept at boxing but my maturity, my thinking ability as a human being didn’t catch up with my boxing ability. It wasn’t like I was going to go to school and they were building my character to make me a good, productive member of society. No, I was doing this to become heavyweight champion of the world. Cus was aware of that. “God, I wish I had more time with you,” he said. But then he would say, “I’ve been in the fight game for sixty years and I’ve never seen anybody with the kind of interest you have. You’re always talking about fighting.”
I was an extremist. If we got snowed in, Cus trained me in the house. At night, I’d stay up for hours in my room shadowboxing. My life depended on succeeding. If I didn’t, I would just be a useless piece of shit. Plus, I was doing it for Cus too. He had a tough life with a lot of disappointments. So I was here to defend this old Italian man’s ego and pride. Who the fuck did I think I was?
When I wasn’t training, I was watching old fight films for at least ten hours a day. That was my treat on the weekend. I’d watch them alone upstairs, all night long. I’d crank up the volume and the sound would travel through the old house. Then Cus would come up. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Just watching the films,” I said.
“Hey, you gotta go to bed. People want to sleep,” he said. Then he’d walk down the stairs and I’d hear him muttering, “I never met a kid like this. Watching the films all night, waking up the whole damned house.”
Sometimes we’d watch the fight films together and Cus would give me tips on how I could beat Dempsey and Jeffries and Louis.
I was so focused sometimes that I’d actually go to sleep with my gloves on. I was an animal, dreaming about Mike Tyson being a big-time fighter. I sacrificed everything for that goal. No women, no food. I had an eating disorder; I was addicted to food then. And I was going through puberty. I was getting acne, my hormones were raging, all I wanted to do was eat ice cream but I couldn’t lose sight of the goal. I’d talk to Cus about girls and he’d pooh-pooh me, telling me that I was going to have all the women I ever wanted. One time, I was morose.
“Cus, I ain’t never going to have a girl, huh?”
Cus sent someone out and they came back with one of those miniature baseball bats and he presented it to me.
“You’re going to have so many girls that you’ll need this to beat them off you.”
So all I did was jerk off and train, jerk off and train. I thought that after I became champion, I could get as much money and women as I’d need.
In the gym, Cus had some very unusual and unorthodox techniques. Some people laughed at the style he taught, but it was because they didn’t really understand it. They called it the peek-a-boo style. It was very defense-oriented. You’d keep both your hands in front of your face, almost like you were turtling. Your hands and your elbows move with you, so when the guy throws the punch, you block it as you’re coming forward, and then you counter.
Cus’s offense started with a good defense. He thought it was of paramount importance for his fighter not to get hit. To learn to slip punches, he used a slipbag, a canvas bag filled with sand, wrapped around a rope. You had to slip around it by moving your head to avoid it hitting you. I got really good at that.
Then he used something called the Willie, named after the fighter Willie Pastrano. It was a mattress covered in canvas and wrapped around a frame. On the exterior was a sketch of a torso. The body was divided into different zones and each zone had a number associated with it. The odd numbers were left-hand punches, the even numbers were the right-hand ones. Then Cus would play a cassette tape of him calling out the various sequences of numbers. So you’d hear “five, four” and immediately throw a left hook to the body and a right uppercut to the chin. The idea was that the more you repeated these actions in response to numbers they’d become instinctual and robotic and you wouldn’t have to consciously think about them. After a while, you could throw punches with your eyes closed.
Cus thought that fighters got hit by right hands because they were stationary and had their gloves too low. So he taught me to weave in a U-shape, not just up and down. He had me on the move constantly, sideways and then forward, sideways and forward. When you were punching, Cus believed that you got the maximum effect from your punches when you made two punches sound like one. The closest you could get to that sound, the higher percentage that barrage would result in a knockout.
Even though he emphasized defense, Cus knew that defensive fighters could be boring.
“Boxing is entertainment, so to be successful a fighter must not only win, but he must win in an exciting manner. He must throw punches with bad intentions,” Cus would always say. He wanted me to be an aggressive counterpuncher, forcing my opponents to punch or run. Cus was always trying to manipulate the opponent in the ring. If you kept eluding their punches, they would get frustrated and lose their confidence. And then they were sunk. Slip the punch and counter. Move and hit at the same time. Force the issue. He thought short punches could be harder than long punches. He thought that punching hard had nothing to do with anything physical, it was all emotional. Controlled emotion.
Cus hired the best sparring partners to teach me. My favorite was Marvin Stinson. I believe he was a former Olympian. He had been Holmes’s top sparring partner and then Cus brought him in to work with me. He was an awesome mentor to me, teaching me about movement and throwing punches. When he was finished the first time he came up to spar, he pulled me aside and gave me his running gloves because it was so cold out in the morning when I’d run. He saw that I didn’t have any.
My sparring sessions were like all-out war. Before we fought, Cus would take me aside. “You don’t take it easy, you go out there and do your best,” he said. “You do everything you learned and you do it all full speed. I want you to break these guys’ ribs.”
Break their ribs? Sparring? He wanted to get me prepared for the guys I’d fight and he certainly wanted me to break the ribs of my opponents in an actual fight. When Cus found a good sparring partner for me, he treated them special because he knew that they gave me good workouts. He always paid the sparring partners top dollar. But that didn’t insure that they would stay. Often a guy would come up anticipating sparring for three weeks. But after his first session, we’d go back to the house and he’d be gone. They were so disgusted with getting the shit kicked out of them, they didn’t even bother to get their stuff. When that would happen, Tom and I made a beeline for their room and rummaged through their clothes and shoes and jewelry. If we were lucky, we’d find a stash of weed or at least a pair of shoes that fit.
Sometimes Cus would bring up established fighters to spar with me. When I was sixteen, he brought Frank Bruno to Catskill. Bruno was twenty-two at the time. We sparred for two rounds. Before I’d spar with an established fighter, Cus would take them aside.
“Listen, he’s just a boy but don’t take it easy on him. I’m informing you now, do your best,” he said.
“Okay, Cus,” they would say. “I’ll work with the kid.”
“Hey, do you hear me? Don’t work with him. Do your best.”
We fought to hurt people; we didn’t fight just to win. We talked for hours about hurting people. This is what Cus instilled in me. “You’ll be sending a message to the champ, Mike,” Cus would tell me. “He’ll be watching you.” But we would also be sending a resounding message to the trainers, the managers, the promoters, and the whole boxing establishment. Cus was back.
Besides watching old fight films, I devoured everything I could read on these great fighters. Soon after I moved