Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

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СКАЧАТЬ There were no chaotic dormitories, fences, barbed wire, or barred windows. Boys lived one to a room. The food was plain, and starchy, but it came three times a day, 365 days of the year. There were movies, school classes, trade instruction, and sports. It was not unusual for some boys to run away a few days before discharge so that they could enjoy the punishment of staying longer. The alternative, after all, was a return to the streets of New York.

      There are two different versions of what happened to Tyson soon after he arrived. In the first one, he got locked up in the “secure” cottage called Elmwood after some violent outburst. While there, he found out that one of the supervisors, Bobby Stewart, was a former professional boxer. He pleaded to see him, begged for a lesson, got it, and was discovered.

      The second version makes more sense. Muhammad Ali visited Spofford once. Tyson marveled at the man, but more than that reflected on the living, breathing symbolism of his life. Ali was a cultural icon of the black man making it his way in a white world. The allure of Ali promised the acquisition of money and power without compromise. For the boy who had learned to be alone, the idea of Ali, regardless of the realities, promised that, if he so chose, he would never need anyone else again. All he had to do was learn to box. And Bobby Stewart, Tyson decided, would be his teacher.

      Bobby Stewart had a reputation around Tryon as tough and unforgiving, a strict disciplinarian who considered most of the kids incapable of reform. His pessimism came from the disappointments of his own life.

      He was born and raised in Amsterdam, New York, a small upstate town that had crumbling nineteenth-century mills and a dim future. Stewart played football in high school, married at seventeen, then began to box in the amateurs. In 1974, he won the National Golden Gloves light heavyweight title. Instead of holding out for the 1976 Olympics, which would produce such future boxing stars as Sugar Ray Leonard, he turned pro. Stewart won thirteen fights and lost three, then burned out. He was a small-town boy with an honest heart and few dreams.

      After boxing, Stewart managed a family-owned bar. He worked part-time at Tryon, then went on staff in 1978. By the time Tyson arrived in 1980, Stewart was still fit, and he had trimmed down in weight. He was barely six feet tall and sinewy, and he had a small, boxy head, a flush of red in his cheeks, and pummeled-down pug nose. He had boyish Scotchman’s looks but a gruff blue-collar manner and slurred speech, the result of too many blows to the head.

      Stewart had been hired to start a boxing program. Several boys wanted to box, but according to Stewart, few had the desire or the discipline to learn more than the basics. Usually, he just laced the gloves on them and let them flail away for a round or two. Tyson would change Stewart’s dismal view of human nature. He differed in every respect.

      Once he was placed in Elmwood, Tyson asked for Stewart. For two days, Stewart ignored him. Tyson suddenly became a model inmate. Stewart didn’t fall for it. One night he waited for Tyson to fall asleep, then banged violently on his door.

      “What the fuck do you want?” he yelled.

      “Mr. Stewart, I want to be a fighter,” Tyson said meekly.

      “So do the rest of these scumbags. They wouldn’t be here if they were tough and had balls like a fighter. They’re losers!” Stewart spit out.

      Tyson said it again. “I want to be a fighter.”

      For two weeks Stewart put Tyson off. With each passing day, Tyson’s behavior improved. Finally, Stewart put Tyson in the ring. There Tyson made an incongruous sight. At thirteen years of age he packed almost two hundred pounds of slablike mass into a five-foot, eight-inch frame. Every part of him looked thick. His head appeared large and out of proportion to his body. He didn’t so much walk as lumber, as if the mass, and its arrangement, was an insupportable burden. The most obvious anomaly was his voice—too high-pitched to match the menacing physique and with a slight, almost farcical lisp.

      Stewart didn’t want to take any chances. He dared not let Tyson pummel one of the other boys and become some kind of bully. So into the ring went Stewart himself, and for three rounds he humiliated Tyson.

      “After we finished, the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Can we do it again tomorrow?’” Stewart recalled later. “I didn’t care if he could box—I was amazed with his mind. He wanted to better himself. He knew he wanted that at age thirteen. It almost scared me. None of the other kids were like that.”

      Tyson became a puzzle to Stewart. If he was such a bad kid, why had he been put in Tryon, a less-then-minimum-security facility? Stewart checked Tyson’s file: all the crimes were petty, the worst being the theft of fruit from a grocery store. In an evaluation by the Tryon teachers, Tyson tested as borderline retarded, but as Stewart discovered, he had been in school a total of two days over the previous year. “Of course he tested badly—he could barely read or write!” Stewart remembered.

      Stewart began to see the psychological scars. Tyson didn’t just have self-esteem problems. They were more fundamental. He had no sense of self-worth at all. It was the affliction of the abandoned personality, the unloved. “He felt bad about his body, being so big, and the kids taunted him for it,” Stewart said. “I’d never seen anyone that bad. He was scared of his own shadow. He barely talked, never looked you in the eye. He was a baby.”

      They trained together every day, boxed every other. Stewart secretly asked one of the other boys to tutor Tyson. He improved both in the ring and the classroom. Tyson went from a fourth- to a seventh-grade reading level in three months. In the gym he improved too, in strength and in skill. Without any practice, he bench-pressed 245 pounds. His punches also started to become accurate. “He broke my nose with a jab. It almost knocked me down. I had never before been hit that hard with a jab. I had the next week off, so I let it heal at home and never told Tyson what he’d done,” Stewart said.

      Emotionally, Tyson did not heal. His size, his prowess, and the aura of inexplicable power made him almost freakish to the other boys. Special treatment by Stewart created suspicions. “To those kids, someone who’s doing well is on the outside,” Stewart said. Nor did Tyson have any desire, it seemed, to use boxing to become a leader. “He didn’t have the confidence to lead.”

      Stewart’s support and approval counted for something. But it was Lorna’s love that Tyson wanted most. The boys got to call home every Sunday. When Tyson first called Lorna, he mumbled a few words, then glumly handed the phone to his mentor. “He wanted me to tell her how good he was doing. ‘Tell her, tell her,’ he kept saying. His mother said she had trouble believing that he had changed. She sounded drunk. Mike told me she drank a lot,” Stewart said.

      Not once during Tyson’s nine-month stay did Lorna visit the facility, send any Christmas presents, or write a letter.

      The boxing gave Tyson purpose and provided a ray of hope about the future. It brought a semblance of order to his feelings, but not resolution—at least not yet. Despite the progress, Stewart sensed the deep-down pain. “I thought his negative self-image could hurt him as a boxer. Everyone always knew he could win, but he convinces himself he can’t.”

      Stewart didn’t want Tyson to go back to Brownsville. He could succeed if he had the right help. Stewart knew that Cus D’Amato, a seventy-two-year-old fight manager who lived just outside the town of Catskill, ran an informal boxing camp for boys. Some were from town families. Others, usually the more troubled boys from New York City, stayed in D’Amato’s house. Camille Ewald, his companion, served as den mother. D’Amato was tough, he knew boxing, and he provided a familylike environment. For a kid like Tyson, it was a halfway house back into the world.

      Stewart called his own former trainer, Matt Baranski, who had worked with D’Amato since the late 1960s. Baranski agreed СКАЧАТЬ