Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

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СКАЧАТЬ measured five-foot-eleven with a reach of only sixty-eight inches. Frazier was similar in his proportions to Tyson.

      Height and reach didn’t determine boxing styles, but they did influence them. When tall fighters confronted shorter opponents, they tended to let their hands drop, which exposed the head. The assumption was that the shorter fighters didn’t have the reach to hit them there.

      D’Amato’s techniques to obtain positioning took advantage of that erroneous assumption. Not only would Tyson be able to get within reach, but he would also receive less, and do far more, damage than presumed. D’Amato knew that Tyson’s crouching style would make the taller opponent punch downward. That would feel awkward and so tend to throw the fighter off. In body mechanics, a downward punch also has less force than one made along a horizontal plane. More importantly, a punch angled slightly upward from a crouch carried the greatest amount of force.

      Tyson was trained to maximize that force. D’Amato eschewed the orthodox punching stance of putting the left foot slightly forward. Once he gained position, Tyson brought both feet up together, knees slightly bent. That way he could leverage his punches off a combined springing and turning motion of his massive thighs and upper body. His arms, shoulders, back, waist, buttocks, and legs were all moving in concert. At the point of contact Tyson actually ended up leaning forward on the tips of his toes.

      Most trainers ridiculed D’Amato’s theories on the positioning of the feet. They argued that it put a shorter fighter off-balance. They were right, but only if the fighter stopped moving—the opposite of what Tyson was trained to do.

      When it all came together, Tyson was a rare, and exciting, sight in the ring: he could win a fight with a single knockout punch. And that, in practical terms, was all D’Amato cared about. Just as with Patterson and, to a degree, Torres, he didn’t expect the boxing world, or the casual fan, to be interested in or capable of appreciating the flow, the elegance, of Tyson’s defensive skills. But a knockout punch they couldn’t ignore.

      * * *

      Theory and practice, as D’Amato preached, often differed. He and Atlas trained Tyson to fight as a professional. But in the practical development of his career, Tyson would first have to work his way up through the amateur tournaments toward an ultimate victory in the Olympics. Tyson’s boxing style wouldn’t go over well in the amateurs, and D’Amato knew it. The crouching, which lowered the head, was against the rules. Amateur officials felt it led to head butts. Without such defensive movement, the shorter Tyson would be far easier to hit. That disadvantage would be compounded by amateur scoring rules. Tyson could knock a foe down, but if the man got up and landed four or five soft jabs, he could win the round on points. In the professionals, a knockdown automatically won the round.

      Tyson’s skill with body-and-head combination punches also served little purpose. Amateur fights were only three rounds; there wasn’t time to waste with a lot of body blows. Headgear was also used in amateur fights, which D’Amato vociferously opposed. Headgear, he argued, created a false sense of security that in turn limited a fighter’s confrontation with his own fear.

      D’Amato never hid his disdain for amateur rules. He considered them useless in preparing for a professional career. That did not endear him to the amateur boxing establishment. As a result, D’Amato expected Tyson to take a lot of criticism in amateur matches. Fortunately, he had the ability to knock opponents out with a single punch—which made troublesome rules entirely moot.

      That left only one major obstacle: Tyson had not yet been tested psychologically. D’Amato and Atlas soon discovered that even with his natural advantages, superior training, and the shortcomings of his opponents, Tyson could be easily, and inexplicably, overwhelmed by his own emotions.

      Tyson’s earliest fights were “smokers.” These were held in small boxing clubs in the tough neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx. The beer ran free; people gambled, ate heartily, and cared only for the local favorite. No amateur body sanctioned the fights. They were unofficial and unruly, but were a good way for a young fighter to get experience without his mistakes ever showing up in a record book. It was the old method for bringing a fighter along. D’Amato put Tyson in to test his abilities, but more so, his nerves.

      At his first smoker, in the South Bronx, Tyson disappeared a few hours before the fight. He sat two blocks away on a curb in view of a subway station entrance. A few years later he would admit to Tom Patti, a young fighter who moved into the upstate house in 1981, that he struggled desperately over whether to take the half-hour subway ride back to nearby Brownsville and never see Catskill again. Atlas found him before the decision could be made.

      Tyson did well in the smokers. He’d knock out grown men in the first and second rounds. “One look at Mike and guys didn’t want to fight him,” said Atlas. “I had to make deals, give the trainers $50 on the side.” A few local tournaments followed and Tyson kept up his streak. By early 1981, D’Amato decided to venture out. Kevin Rooney was by then fighting regularly as a professional. He had a bout in Scranton, Pennsylvania. D’Amato got Tyson a three-round preliminary, or undercard, amateur bout.

      The opponent was a young, white, marginally talented fighter. Tyson dropped him twice in the first round. Each time, to Tyson’s amazement, he got up. After the round, Tyson told Atlas that he was tired. “I told him that he couldn’t possibly be tired after one round,” remembered Atlas. “His emotions were taking over.” Tyson knocked his opponent down again in the second, to no great effect. Back in the corner he complained about a broken hand. He couldn’t look Atlas in the eye. Tyson seemed drained of energy, dazed, defeated. Atlas didn’t believe the broken-hand story. He grabbed Tyson’s head and lifted it up. “If you want to become heavyweight champion of the world, this is it, the title,” barked Atlas. “All these dreams end here if you don’t beat this guy.”

      In the third and final round, Tyson stopped punching. He let himself be grabbed and easily hit. He punched back, but without the same snap, or, as D’Amato liked to say, “bad intentions.” Atlas had never seen him so passive before, and neither had D’Amato, who sat nearby watching his future champion fizzle. At one point, after taking a straight right and then clinching, Tyson got backed up into the corner and it seemed to Atlas that within seconds he would fall to the canvas and simply give up. “Don’t do it!” he yelled. Tyson stayed on his feet, the round ended, and he won on points.

      “We talked afterwards down in a hallway in the arena,” remembered Atlas. “He was thanking me, he couldn’t stop saying it. I told him we made a breakthrough. He knew he wanted to lose. I told him he should never let himself get to that point again.” Atlas made one more crucial point. “What counted, I said, was not that he had those feelings; all fighters do. It’s that he didn’t give in to them.”

      The Scranton fight exposed a serious flaw that neutralized every one of Tyson’s natural and acquired advantages. He fell into an intensively passive, trancelike state in which the will to fight and elude punches drained away. When the group got back to Catskill, D’Amato didn’t add much to Atlas’s comments. He went over the same ground about fear, and how will overcomes skill, but he made minimal effort to determine what lay at the heart of Tyson’s sudden passivity. Sometime later, though, he did send Tyson to a hypnotist. D’Amato had done that with other fighters. He felt that it helped them concentrate better in the ring.

      D’Amato had decided to remain emotionally detached from Tyson, just as he had done with Torres. It was as if he chose to commit himself to an idea of what Tyson could become rather than grapple with the full reality of all the chaos in the youth’s heart, which would have been more demanding. That, at least, is what Atlas began to see. “Cus was in a hurry with Mike,” said Atlas. “He was so set on getting another world champion, a heavyweight, that he didn’t want to see what Mike was.”

      D’Amato may have СКАЧАТЬ