When all the other fighters would leave the gym and go out with their girlfriends, living their life, Cus and I went back to the house and devised our scheme. We’d talk about having houses in all parts of the world. Cus would say, “ ‘No’ will be like a foreign language to you. You won’t understand the concept of ‘no.’ ”
I thought that it was unfair for the rest of the fighters trying to win the championship because I was raised by a genius who prepared me. Those other guys wanted to make money and have a good life for their family. But thanks to Cus, I wanted glory and I wanted to get it over their blood. But I was insecure. I wanted glory, I wanted to be famous, I wanted the world to look at me and tell me I’m beautiful. I was a fat fucking stinking kid.
Cus made me believe that the green and gold WBC belt was worth dying for. And not for the money. I used to ask Cus, “What does it mean being the greatest fighter of all time? Most of those guys are dead.”
“Listen. They’re dead but we’re talking about them now. This is all about immortality. This is about your name being known until the end of time,” he said.
Cus was so dramatic. He was like a character from The Three Musketeers.
“We have to wait for our moment, like crocodiles in the mud. We don’t know when the drought will come and the animals will have to migrate across the Sahara. But we’ll be waiting. Months, years. But it will come. And the gazelles and the wildebeests will cross the water. And when they come, we are going to bite them. Do you hear me, son? We are going to bite them so hard that when they scream, the whole world is going to hear them.”
He was dead serious and so was I. Cus was using me to get back at the boxing establishment. I wanted to be involved with that so badly. It was like The Count of Monte Cristo. We were out to get our revenge.
When Cus realized that I was truly with him, he was happy. But then he would just get paranoid. I’d be sitting in the living room reading a book and Cus would be walking around with his robe on and he’d come over to me.
“Yeah, you’re gonna leave me too. They’ll take you away. You’ll leave me just like everybody else,” he’d say out of the blue.
I didn’t know if he was playing a mind game with me or just feeling sorry for himself.
“Are you crazy, Cus? What are you talking about?”
I would never talk to him like that. That was probably the only time I ever called him crazy.
“You know what I mean. Somebody’ll give you some money and you’ll just go away. That happened to me all of my life. I put in the time and developed fighters and people stole them away from me.”
Go away? I would try to kill somebody who kept him away from me. Floyd Patterson had left him but I was on a different level. I just wanted to be hanging around with him and Camille, my new family. No more hard life.
“You’re crazy, Cus,” I said, and he walked away.
In November of 1981, Teddy, me, and two other fighters got in the car and drove to Rhode Island for a smoker. For the whole ride I was thinking about what I was going to do to the motherfucker when I got there. I had been reading Nietzsche and thought I was a Superman. I could barely spell my name but I was a Superman. So I was visualizing how I was going to electrify the place and how all the people would be applauding me when I kicked this guy’s ass. My delusion had me believing that the crowd would be throwing flowers at my feet. I was only fifteen but I would be fighting a guy named Ernie Bennett, the local champ, who was twenty-one. It was going to be his last amateur fight before he turned pro.
We walked into the place and there were a bunch of nasty-looking people in there, packed wall to wall. It was so crowded it felt like I was back in the Brownsville slums. But I didn’t give a fuck. I was feeding on all their energy. Teddy said, “Get on the scale.” So I took off my shirt and pants. I was only wearing underwear. I was really ripped. I got up on the scale and everyone ran up and surrounded us.
“That’s Tyson. That’s him,” I heard people say.
I was standing on the scale and started getting nervous. These guys were gangsters, legitimate tough guys, and I wasn’t from their neighborhood. But then I remembered all those films I watched. Jack Johnson would be on the scale with a crowd around him. I always visualized myself in that position. Then I heard all the whispers and whistling. “That’s the guy who knocked out everyone in one round at the juniors,” they said.
My Cus thinking kicked in. I was nobility. I was this great gladiator, ready to do battle.
“Hey, champ!” These guys smiled at me. But I’m just looking at them with contempt, like, “Fuck you, what are you looking at?”
I weighed in at around 190.
“Oh, you are too heavy,” Bennett’s trainer said. He was a deaf-mute but you could make out his words.
“But we’ll fight him. We’ll fight anybody,” the guy said.
“I’m not just anybody,” I sneered.
The place was packed. There were at least three thousand people there. We got into the ring and it was nine straight minutes of mayhem. To this day, people still talk about that fight. The crowd never stopped cheering, even during the one-minute rest between rounds they were still applauding. We were like two pit bulls. He was very smooth and elusive and experienced but then, bam, I knocked him through the ropes. I fought this guy hard, right to the end. It was the best performance of my life.
And then they gave him the decision. It was highway robbery. I was distraught. I started crying. I had never lost a fight before. In the dressing room, the deaf-mute trainer came up to me. I was still crying.
“You’re just a baby,” he said. “My man has had many, many fights. We were fighting you with everything we got. You’re better than my fighter. Don’t give up. You’re going to be champion one day.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. I cried during the whole ride home. I wanted to beat that guy so badly. We got back home and I had to get in the shower and go to school. But Teddy must have called Cus because he was waiting for me. I thought Cus was going to be mad at me for letting him down, but he had a big smile on his face.
“I heard you did great. Teddy said the guy was cut and experienced,” Cus said. “Hey, take the day off. You don’t have to go to school.”
There was no way I was not going to school. That guy had given me a black eye and I wanted to show off my badge of courage.
I didn’t let that controversial loss get me down. I kept fighting at smokers and knocking out each of my opponents. Cus began coming to more of my fights. He loved it when I would act arrogant and give off an imperious air. Cus was plenty arrogant himself. One time, I was fighting a twenty-four-year-old guy who had been the champion of his region since he was sixteen. No one had ever beaten him.
Before the fight, one of the local boxing officials came over to us.
“Cus, the man you’re fighting is big, strong, and scary,” he said.
Cus didn’t bat an eye.
“My boy’s business is to put big, strong, scary men in their place.”
I heard that and oh, my heart. Arrrghh. I would turn into fucking hot blue fire. I got so pumped up that I wanted to fight those guys before we got into the ring.
Once, I didn’t bathe for three days leading up to a fight. All I thought about was hurting my opponent. I didn’t know anything about my opponents in these smokers, there were no videos to watch, no TV appearances by them. So I always imagined that the people I was fighting were the people who had bullied me when I was younger. It was retribution time. No one would ever pick on me again.
Whenever I displayed the slightest bit