Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (8 page)

Cus wouldn’t let me fail. When I felt like quitting and I got discouraged, he just kept on inspiring me. Cus would always say, “My job is to peel off layers and layers of damages that are inhibiting your true ability to grow and fulfill your potential.” He was peeling me and it hurt! I was screaming, “Leave me alone. Aarrgghh!” He tortured my mind. He’d see me sparring with an older guy and it was in my mind that I was tired and I wasn’t punching back at the guy, the guy was just bullying me, and Cus would talk to me about that, make me confront my fears. He was a perfectionist. I’d be hitting the heavy bag with combinations and Cus would be standing there, watching.

“It’s good. It’s good. But it’s not poifect,” he’d say in his thick Bronx accent.

Cus wanted the meanest fighter that God ever created, someone who scared the life out of people before they even entered the ring. He trained me to be totally ferocious, in the ring and out. At the time, I needed that. I was so insecure, so afraid. I was so traumatized from people picking on me when I was younger. I just hated the humiliation of being bullied. That feeling sticks with you for the rest of your life. It’s just such a bad, hopeless feeling. That’s why I always projected to the world that I was a mean, ferocious motherfucker. But Cus gave me confidence so that I didn’t have to worry about being bullied ever again. I knew nobody was ever going to fuck with me physically.

Cus was much more than a boxing trainer. He instilled so many values in me. He was like some guru, always saying things that would make me think.

“No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.”

Or, “I’m not a creator. What I do is discover and uncover. My job is to take the spark and fan it. Feed the fire until it becomes a roaring blaze.”

He could impart wisdom in the most mundane situations. Camille was very big on the boys doing their chores around the house. I hated doing chores; I was so focused on my boxing. One day Cus came to me. “You know, Camille really wants you to do your chores. I could care less if you did, but you should do them because it will make you a better boxer.”

“How’s taking out the trash going to make me a better boxer?” I scoffed.

“Because doing something you hate to do like you love it is good conditioning for someone aspiring towards greatness.”

After that, Camille never had to remind me to do my chores again.

One day Cus called me into the room where he was sitting.

“Are you scared of white people?” he said out of the blue. “Are you one of those kinds? You scared of mustaches and beards? I’ve been around black fighters who were scared to hit white people. You better not be one of them.”

It was funny. I had Cus in my face telling me not to be intimidated, but I was intimidated by the way he was telling me not to be intimidated.

Cus was always dead serious, never smiling. He didn’t treat me like a teenager. He always made me feel like we had a mission to accomplish. Training day in and day out, thinking about one fucking thing. He gave me a purpose. I had never had that feeling in my life before except when I was thinking about stealing.

Every once in a while, things would happen that made our goal seem much more tangible. One time, Wilfred Benitez came to train at Catskill. I was overwhelmed. I was a groupie. I had seen him fight on television and he was something to watch. It was like he had radar, he’d punch people with his eyes closed. Truly a master. And he brought his championship belt with him. Tom Patti, one of Cus’s other boxers, was there with me. Benitez pulled out this little case, and the belt was inside and he let me touch it. It was like looking at the Holy Grail.

“Man, Tommy, look at this, it’s the belt, man,” I said. “I gotta get one of these now. I’m going to train so hard. If I win this, I’m never going to take the belt off.”

I was so happy to be in Benitez’s presence. He inspired me, made me want to become more committed and dedicated.

Thanks to Cus, I also got to talk to Ali. In October of 1980, we all drove up to Albany to watch the closed-circuit broadcast of Ali trying to win back his title from Larry Holmes. Ali got the shit kicked out of him. Cus was mad as a motherfucker; I’d never seen him that angry before. After the fight, he was poker-faced because he had to give interviews and shake people’s hands, but once we got in the car, we could feel that negative energy. We didn’t say a word for the whole forty-five-minute drive home.

The next morning, Ali’s aide Gene Kilroy put Ali on the phone with Cus.

“How did you let that bum beat you? He’s a bum, Muhammad, he’s a bum. No, he’s a bum. Don’t tell me that, he’s a bum. Why did you let that bum hit you like that?”

I was listening to Cus talk and every time he said the word “bum” it was cutting right through me. I started crying. That was a bad day in my life.

Then Cus did a head trip on me.

“I have a young black kid with me. He’s just a boy, but he’s going to be the heavyweight champion of the world. His name is Mike Tyson. Talk to him for me, please, Muhammad. I want you to tell him to listen to me.”

Cus handed me the phone.

“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I said. I was a little dickhead.

“I was sick,” Ali told me. “I took some medicine and it made me weak and that’s how Holmes beat me. I’m going to get well and come back and beat Holmes.”

“Don’t worry, champ,” I said. “When I get big, I’m going to get him for you.”

A lot of people assume that Ali was my favorite boxer. But I have to say it was Roberto Duran. I always looked at Ali as being handsome and articulate. And I was short and ugly and I had a speech impediment. When I saw Duran fight, he was just a street guy. He’d say stuff to his opponents like, “Suck my fucking dick, you motherfucker. Next time you’re going to the fucking morgue.” After he beat Sugar Ray Leonard in that first fight, he went over to where Wilfred Benitez was sitting and he said, “Fuck you. You don’t have the heart or the balls to fight me.”

Man, this guy is me,
I thought. That was what I wanted to do. He was not ashamed of being who he was. I related to him as a human being. As my career progressed and people started praising me for being a savage, I knew that being called an animal was the highest praise I could receive from someone. When I’d go back to the city, I would go to Victor’s Café because I heard Duran hung out there. I’d go and sit at a table by myself and look at the pictures of Duran hanging on the wall. I was living out my dreams.

I was sad when Duran quit during the No Más rematch with Leonard. Cus and I watched that fight in Albany and I was so mad that I cried. But Cus had called it. “He’s not going to do it a second time,” he predicted.

By the time I had moved in with Cus, I was already into the flow of his repertoire. He began to train me hard every day. I never had the privilege of enjoying boxing as a sport or as something to do for fun. Cus was an extremist but I was just as extreme. I wanted to be Achilles right then. I’m the kind of guy they make fun of. “Don’t give the nigga a rope, he’ll want to be a cowboy.” I was the kid who had no hope. But if you give me a glimmer of hope, you’re in trouble. I take it to the moon.

Cus normally had to wake the fighters up in the morning, but when he’d get up to do it, I had already come back from running. Cus would usually set the table for breakfast, but I started doing it after my run. He’d get mad. “Who made up my table?” he’d bark. He was upset that I showed more dedication than he did. Then Cus would cook me my breakfast. He’d throw in a whole slab of bacon, twenty or so strips, into the frying pan and then he’d cook the eggs in that bacon grease. I didn’t drink coffee so I’d have tea. He did that every morning even if he was angry with me.

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.