Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (9 page)

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 in with Cus, I was reading the boxing encyclopedia and I started laughing reading about a champion who only held his title for a year. Cus looked at me with his cold piercing eyes and said, “A one-year championship is worth more than a lifetime of obscurity.”

When I started studying the lives of the great old boxers, I saw a lot of similarity to what Cus was preaching. They were all mean motherfuckers. Dempsey, Mickey Walker, even Joe Louis was mean, even though Louis was an introvert. I trained myself to be wicked. I used to walk to school, snapping at everybody. Deep down, I knew I had to be like that because if I failed, Cus would get rid of me and I would starve to death.

Cus had given me a book to read called
In This Corner
…
!
I couldn’t put it down. I saw how these fighters dealt with their emotions, how they prepared for fights. That book gave me such superior insight into the psychology of human beings. What struck me was how hard the old-time fighters worked, how hungry they were. I read that John L. Sullivan would train by running five miles and then he’d walk back the five miles and spar for twenty rounds. Ezzard Charles said he only ran three to four miles a day and boxed six rounds. I thought,
Damn, Sullivan trained harder in the 1880s than this guy did in the 1950s.
So I started walking four miles to the gym, did my sparring, and then walked back to the house. I started emulating the old-school guys because they were hard-core. And they had long careers.

I drove Cus nuts asking him questions about these old fighters all the time. I know he wanted to talk about boxing but I think I overdid it sometimes. I read all of Cus’s books about boxing, so when we’d sit around the dining room table and Cus would start expounding to the other guys about boxing history and he’d stumble on a name or a date, I’d finish his sentence for him.

“This guy knows everything,” he’d say. “He acts like he was there.”

I was serious about my history because I learned so much from the old fighters. What did I have to do to be like this guy? What discipline did this other guy possess? Cus would tell me how vicious and mean they were outside the ring but when they’re in it, they’re relaxed and calm. I got excited hearing him talk about these guys, seeing that he held them in such high esteem. I wanted so much for someone to talk like that about me. I wanted to be part of that world. I would watch the fights on TV and I’d see the boxers punching with grimaces on their faces and their ripped bodies, and I wanted that to be my face and my body.

We talked about all the greats. I fell in love with Jack Johnson. What a courageous guy. He was really the first black-pride guy. And I loved his arrogance. He got pulled over for speeding at the turn of the century and the ticket was for, like, ten dollars and he gave the cop a twenty and said, “Why don’t you take this twenty because I’m going to be coming back the same way I’m going.”

He was a master of manipulation. When he was training, he’d wrap his penis before he put on his tights to make it look larger and give the white guys an inferiority complex. He’d humiliate his opponents during fights. He was the original trash talker. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you can cut my lip,” he’d say. He’d laugh in the face of his opponents during a round, talk to his white wife and tell her how much he loved her while he was beating the shit out of the guy he was fighting. He was a guy I would have loved to hang with. He spoke several languages and partied with the royal families of Russia and England. Dempsey was the first million-dollar champion. He brought showbiz and glamour to boxing. I related to him the most because he was a real insecure guy, he was always afraid, but he always overcame those feelings to reach his goals.

Cus loved Henry Armstrong the most. He would constantly attack his opponents and wear them down. “Constant attack, no letup,” Cus told me. “Moving his head with a good defense, that’s what Armstrong would do. Break his opponent’s will, destroy his spirit, make all his causes a lie.”

Make all his causes a fucking lie? Whoa.
Then Cus would stare at me.

“If you listen to me, you’ll reign with the gods. See the way you’re interested and talk about all these old fighters? By the time you’re champ, if you listen to me, the only reason people would know about these guys was because you’d talk about them. You’ll supersede them all. You’ll make them forget about everybody. I watched Jack Dempsey as a boy. I’ve met these guys, shook their hands. They are not what you are. You are a giant; you are a colossus among men.”

I ate that shit up. But all this talk about dedication and discipline and hard work wasn’t enough to keep me from going back to Brooklyn and doing my jostling and robbing. I was playing two heads of the same coin. I’d be up in Catskill and be the choirboy and then I’d go down to Brooklyn and be the devil. Thank God that I never got arrested for anything. That would have broken Cus’s heart.

Cus knew how to make me feel like I could conquer the world. But he also knew how to make me feel like shit. Sometimes he’d tell me, “You allow your mind to get the better of you.” That was his secret, unwritten code way of saying, “You’re a weak piece of shit. You don’t have enough discipline to be one of the greats.” The greats could fight the best fight of their life even if someone had just kidnapped their child or killed their mother. Greats are totally emotionally independent. Performers are like that too, not just boxers. Some of the legendary artists I read about would be high on everything but still be able to go out there and do a record-breaking performance. They couldn’t even walk, but they had great discipline and determination. Sometimes they’d go directly from the arena to a hospital. I wanted to be one of those fighters and performers.

From the first night I moved in with Cus, he started to break me down, see how far he could fuck with me for no reason. He’d come to my room and say, “What did you do in school today, what did you do? Well, you had to do something, you were in school all day. What did you learn? Where’s your homework? Do you have homework today?” The other guys in the house would always say that Cus favored me but they didn’t know what he was saying to me when we were alone.

I was always struggling with my weight. In my mind, I was a fat pig even though nobody would know by looking at me. When I trained, I would put Albolene over my pores and wear a plastic suit for a week or two and only take it off at nighttime when I was taking a hot bath so I could sweat some more weight off. Then I’d go to bed and wake up the next morning and put it on and go run and wear it the whole day.

My weight was another thing that Cus would get on me about. “Your ass is getting fat,” he’d say. “You’re losing interest, aren’t you? You don’t want to do this no more, huh, Mike? It’s too tough for you, isn’t it? You thought that we were playing games up here, didn’t you? You thought you were back in Brownsville running around and playing games. Huh?” Imagine hearing that. Just as I was about to enjoy some ice cream that I only allowed myself to have on the weekend, I’d hear that. “Not many people could do this, that’s why it’s so special. Jeez, I really thought you could.”

Sometimes Cus would reprimand me and I’d have no idea why. He would rip into me, put down my character. “You can never reach the apex of what we’re aiming for with your infantile behavior and conduct.” At times I’d just scream, “I hate everybody here! Agggghhhhh.” Cus was tearing me apart.

I would pick up on his positive comments and say things like, “I’m going to do anything I can do to win. I’d give my life to be champion, Cus.” And instead of saying, “You’ll get it, Mike,” he had to just step in my face. “You just be careful what you ask for, you might get it.”

He’d even criticize my clothes. On the holidays, they might have some guests over, Camille’s sister or someone. I’d put on nice slacks and a shirt and a vest and I’d wear a tie that Camille helped me put on. I’d be sitting there chilling and all the ladies would be saying, “Oh, you look so nice, Mike.” And then Cus would come in the room.

“What are you dressed like that for? Your pants are so tight your balls and your ass are all over the place. What is wrong with you?”

Camille would defend me, but Cus had none of it.

“Don’t tell me nothing about what you think about this. Camil-lee, please. Okay? There is nothing nice about his clothes.”

Cus would never call me bad names like “a son of a bitch.” He’d just call me “a tomato can and a bum.” That was the boxing equivalent of calling me a dirty, filthy no-good nigga. That would make me cry like a baby. He knew that if he said that to me, it would break my spirit.

I was getting so many mixed messages that I was becoming insecure about how he really felt about me as a boxer. Tom Patti and I once were leaving the gym and Cus was delayed for a second. So I jumped into the backseat and crouched down.

“Tell Cus I walked back home. Because when he gets in the car, I want you to ask him how he really feels about me.” Tom agreed. Cus got in the car.

“Where the hell is Mike?” he said.

“I think he’s staying in town,” Tom said.

“Well, let’s go. He can find his way home later.” So we started driving and I was lying in the back whispering to Tom because Cus was half deaf and couldn’t hear anything.

“Yo, Tom. Ask Cus if he thinks I punch hard,” I said.

“Hey, Cus, you think Mike punches hard?” Tom asked.

“Punches hard! Let me tell you something, that guy punches so hard he could knock down a brick wall. Not only does he punch hard, he punches effectively. He can knock a fighter out with either hand,” Cus said.

“Ask Cus if he thinks I can really be something in the future,” I whispered.

Tom repeated the question.

“Tommy, if Mike keeps his head on straight and focuses on the intended purpose, he’ll become one of the greatest fighters, if not
the
greatest fighter in the history of boxing.”

I was thrilled to hear that. By now we were at the house. As we got out, Cus saw me lying down in the backseat.

“You knew he was back there, didn’t you?” he said to Tom.

Tom pleaded innocence.

“Don’t hand me that nonsense. You knew he was back there. You guys are a couple of wise guys right now, let me tell you something.”

Cus didn’t think it was funny, but we did.

The funny thing is he couldn’t control his own emotions. Cus was just a bitter, bitter, bitter man who wanted revenge. Roy Cohn, Cardinal Spellman, those guys haunted him in his sleep. J. Edgar Hoover? “Oh, I wish I could put a bullet in his head, that’s what he deserves.” He was constantly talking about killing people and some of those guys were dead already! But he hated them. I once said something complimentary about Larry Holmes and Cus went nuts.

“What do you mean? He’s nothing. You have to dismantle that man. That’s our goal to dismantle this man and relinquish him from the championship. He’s nothing to you.”

Sometimes Cus would just roar at people on the TV like an animal. You’d never think he was a ferocious old man but he was. If you weren’t his slave, he hated your guts. He was always in a state of confrontation. Most of the day he’d walk around, mumbling, “Oh, this son of a bitch. Oh, I can’t believe this guy from, you know his name, from such and such. What a son of a bitch.”

Poor Camille would say, “Cus, Cus, calm down, calm down, Cus. Your blood pressure is getting too high.”

Cus ruled that house with an iron fist, but the funny thing was that it was actually Camille’s house. Cus didn’t have any money. He never really cared about money and he gave most of his away. Camille wanted to sell the house because it was so expensive to maintain but Cus talked her into keeping it. He told her he’d get a stable of good fighters and things would get better. He was losing hope, but then I came along.

I don’t think that Cus thought that in a thousand years he’d get another champion, although he hoped he would. Most of the men who came up there were already established fighters who wanted to get away from the girls and the temptations of the city. Plus, no one liked Cus’s boxing style at that time. They thought it was outdated. Then I show up there knowing nothing, a blank chalkboard. Cus was happy. I couldn’t understand why this white man was so happy about me. He would look at me and just laugh hysterically. He’d get on the phone and tell people, “Lightning has struck me twice. I have another heavyweight champion.” I had never even had an amateur fight in my life. I have no idea how, but somehow he saw it in me.

I’ll never forget my first amateur fight. It was at a small gym in the Bronx owned by a former Cus boxer named Nelson Cuevas. The gym was a hellhole. It was on the second floor of a building that was right next to the elevated subway line. The tracks were so close that you could put your hand out the window and almost touch the train. These fight cards were called “smokers” because the air was so thick with cigarette smoke you could hardly see the guy standing in front of you.

Smokers were unsanctioned bouts, which basically meant they were lawless. There weren’t any paramedics or ambulances waiting outside. If the crowd didn’t like your performance, they didn’t boo, they just fought one another to show you how it was done. Everybody who came was dressed to the nines whether they were gangsters or drug dealers. And everybody bet on the fights. I remember I asked one guy, “Will you buy me a piggy in a blanket if I win?” People who bet and won money on you would usually buy you some food.

Right before my fight, I was so scared that I almost left. I was thinking about all that preparation that I had undergone with Cus. Even after all the sparring, I was still totally intimidated with fighting somebody in the ring. What if I failed and lost? I had been in a million fights on the streets of Brooklyn but this was a whole different kind of feeling. You don’t know the guy you’re fighting; you have no beef with him. I was there with Teddy Atlas, my trainer, and I told him that I was going down to the store for a second. I went downstairs and sat on the curb by the steps leading up to the subway. For a minute, I thought I should just get on the damn train and go back to Brownsville. But then all of Cus’s teachings started to flow into my mind and I started to relax, and my pride and my ego started popping up, and I got up and walked back into the gym. It was on.

I was fighting this big Puerto Rican guy with a huge Afro. He was eighteen, four years older than me. We fought hard for two rounds, but then in the third round I knocked him into the bottom rope and followed with another shot that literally knocked his mouthpiece six rows back into the crowd. He was out cold.

I was ecstatic. It was love at first fight. I didn’t know how to celebrate. So I stepped on him. I raised my arms up in the air and stepped on the prone motherfucker.

“Get the hell off him! What the fuck are you doing stepping on this guy?” the ref told me. Cus was up in Catskill waiting by the phone for the report. Teddy called him and told him what happened and Cus was so excited that he made his friend Don, who had driven down with us, give him another account the next morning.

I kept going back to the smokers every week. You’d go into the dressing room and there were a bunch of kids looking at one another. You’d tell them your weight and how many fights you had. I normally told them I was older than fourteen. There weren’t many two-hundred-pound fourteen-year-olds around. So I was always fighting older guys.

Those smokers meant so much to me, a lot more to me than the rest of the kids. The way I looked at it, I was born in hell and every time I won a fight, that was one step out of it. The other fighters weren’t as mean as I was. If I hadn’t had these smokers, I probably would have died in the sewers.

Teddy even got in the action at these fights. We were at Nelson’s gym one night and a guy pushed Teddy and Teddy punched the guy in the face and Nelson jumped in. He picked up one of the trophies that were there, solid marble with the tin fighter on top of the base, and he started smashing that guy’s head in. If the cops had come they would have charged him with attempted murder. Teddy was always getting into fights. I don’t know if he was defending me or if other guys were jealous because he had the best fighter there, but he was never smart enough to back down from anybody. We’d go to Ohio and there was Teddy, fighting with some of the other trainers.

We started driving to smokers all over the Northeast. Before we’d get in the car, Cus would come over.

“I’m going to have some friends watching the fight. I’ll be waiting by the phone. I expect that when they call me, they’ll be ranting and raving about you,” he said. I never forgot that. “Ranting and raving.” That would get me fired up, and I’d be pumped for the whole six-hour car ride. I wouldn’t rest a minute. I couldn’t wait to get into that ring and start beating the motherfuckers. One guy came to the fight with his wife and his little baby and I knocked him out cold.

Cus came to my fifth fight, a smoker in Scranton. I was fighting a guy named Billy O’Rourke at the Scranton Catholic Youth Center. Billy was seventeen and I said I was too because it was a pro-amateur card. Before the fight, Cus went over to O’Rourke.

“My man is a killer,” Cus said. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

That was my toughest fight so far. In the first round, I kept knocking this guy down and this crazy psycho white boy kept getting the fuck up. And he didn’t just get up, he came up swinging. The more I knocked him down, the more he got up and whipped my ass. I had kicked his ass in the first round, but the second was just a war. We were fighting three rounds and Teddy didn’t want to take any chances on a decision going the wrong way.

“Listen, you talk about being great, and all these crazy fighters, and you want to be this great fighter. Now is the time. Get in there and keep jabbing and moving your head.”

I got off my stool and went out and dropped O’Rourke twice in the third round. He was bleeding all over the place. At the end of the fight, he got me against the ropes. But, boom, boom, boom, I came back and down he went. The crowd went crazy. It was the fight of the night.

Cus was pleased with my performance, but he said, “Another round and he would have worn you down.”

In May and June of 1981, I went after my first championship – the Junior Olympics. I probably had about ten fights at that point. First you had to win your local tourney, then your region, and then you competed in Colorado for the national title.

I won all my regionals, so Teddy and I flew to Colorado and Cus took a train because he had a fear of flying. When I entered the dressing room, I remembered how all my heroes had behaved. The other kids would come up to me and put out their hand to shake, and I would just sneer and turn my back on them. I was playing a role. Someone would be talking and I’d just stare at him. Cus was all about manipulating your opponent by causing chaos and confusion, but staying cool under it all. I caused such chaos that a few of the other fighters took one look at me and lost their bouts so they wouldn’t have to fight me later on. I won all of my fights by knockouts in the first round. I won the gold by knocking out Joe Cortez in eight seconds, a record that I believe stands to this day. I was on my way.

I became a local hero after I won that gold medal. Cus loved the attention I was getting. He loved the spotlights. But I kept thinking how crazy all this was. I was barely fifteen years old and half of my friends back in Brownsville were dead, gone, wiped out. I didn’t have many friends in Catskill. I wasn’t interested in school. Cus and I had already established what we wanted to accomplish, so school seemed to be a distraction from that goal. I didn’t care about what they were teaching me, but I did have an urge to learn. So Cus would encourage me and I read some of the books from his library. I read books by Oscar Wilde, Charles Darwin, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Dumas, and Adam Smith. I read a book about Alexander the Great. I loved history. By reading history, I learned about human nature. I learned the hearts of men.

I didn’t get into major trouble in school with the exception of hitting a couple of students and getting suspended. I was just uncomfortable there. Some students would make fun of me, but nobody fucked with me. Cus had told my junior high school principal, Mr. Bordick, that I was special and that “allowances had to be made for him.” Mr. Bordick was a beautiful man and whenever there was a problem, Cus would go to the school, do his Italian gesturing shit with his fingers, and I’d be back in school. I’d go home and go to the gym at five p.m. every night for two hours. In the evenings, I’d read boxing books, watch films, or talk to Cus. On the weekends, I’d get up at five, run a few miles, eat, nap, and then be back in the gym at noon. During the week, I ran back and forth from school.

I got some extra running in thanks to my control-freak guardian Cus. I was at a school dance and it was scheduled to end at ten p.m. I told Cus I’d be home at eleven. Everybody was hanging around after the dance, so I called Cus and told him that I’d probably be home a little late because I was waiting for a cab.

“No, run home now. Run. I can’t wait up for you,” he barked. Cus didn’t believe in giving out keys because he feared we’d lose them. I had on a two-piece suit and nice dress shoes, but Cus wanted me home
now
.

“Man, I gotta go,” I told my friends. Everyone knew what time it was. If Cus called, I had to go. So I took the fuck off.

One day I was hanging out with some friends and we were drinking and partying, and they were about to drop me off at the house and I saw Cus through the window, sleeping in his chair, waiting for me to come home.

“Turn around. Take me to your house. I don’t even want to deal with Cus,” I said. Every time I’d come home late he would rip me a new asshole. I’d try to sneak up the stairs, but they were old and rickety, and I’d think,
Shit, I’m busted
. I’d come home from a movie after he gave me permission to go and there was Cus waiting to interrogate me.

“What did you do? Who did you hang out with? Who are they? Where are their families from? What are their last names? You know you’ve got to box tomorrow.”

Cus even tried to marry me off in the ninth grade. I started dating this local girl named Angie. Cus loved her. You would think that he’d discourage a relationship, that it would distract from my training, but Cus thought it would be good for me to settle down with her. I’d be calmer and it would actually help focus me on my boxing. I wasn’t serious about Angie. I wanted to live the flamboyant lifestyles of my heroes, boxers like Mickey Walker and Harry Greb. They drank, they had lots of women, and they were living the life. But Camille was on to Cus.

“Don’t you dare listen to Cus about marrying anyone,” she told me. “You date as many girls as you want and then you select the best.”

One day I got into a fight in school and Cus had to go smooth things over. When he got back, he sat me down.

“You’re going to have to leave here if you’re going to continue to act like that.” I just broke down and started crying.

“Please don’t let me go,” I sobbed. “I want to stay.”

I really loved the family environment Cus had given me. And I was madly in love with Cus. He was the first white guy who not only didn’t judge me, but who wanted to beat the shit out of someone if they said anything disrespectful about me. Nobody could reach me like that guy. He reached me down in my cortex. Any time I finished talking to him, I had to go and burn energy, shadowboxing or doing sit-ups, I was so pumped. I’d start running and I’d be crying, because I wanted to make him happy and prove that all the good things he was saying were right.

I guess Cus felt bad about threatening to send me away and making me cry that day because he started hugging me. That was the first physical display of affection I’d ever seen from Cus. Ever. But the moment that I cried was when Cus really knew that he had me. From that moment on I became his slave. If he told me to kill someone, I would have killed them. I’m serious. Everybody thought I was up there with this old, sweet Italian guy, but I was there with a warrior. And I loved every minute of it. I was happy to be Cus’s soldier; it gave me a purpose in life. I liked being the one to complete the mission.

I started training even harder, if that was possible. When I got home from the gym, I actually had to crawl up the stairs. I’d make my way up to the third-floor bathroom. Cus would run some incredibly hot water into the little porcelain tub and then pour some Epsom salts in.

“Stay in as long as you can,” Cus said.

So I’d sit down and get burned, but the next morning my body felt much better and I could go work out again. I never felt so glorious in my life. I had a tunnel-vision mission and I never deterred from it. I can’t even explain that feeling to other people.

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.”