Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ mother and father had swarmed in. Tyson turned away, leapt up, and punched the air in a war dance. Jacobs rushed over and whispered something in his ear and Tyson calmed. “By then, we had him coached on what to say afterwards,” Steve Lott remembered. “With a name fighter like Frazier, we didn’t want Mike to be disrespectful. People liked Joe Frazier. I sat Mike down before the fight and told him what to say, word for word.”

      On August 17, in Atlantic City, the betting line against José Ribalta beating Mike Tyson was 7 to 1. Ribalta had a respectable record of twenty-two wins, three losses, and one draw. Sixteen of the wins had come by knockout. The problem was that about a year earlier Ribalta had been knocked out in one round by Marvis Frazier. He was expected to go no more than a few rounds, if that, with Tyson.

      What the experts didn’t expect, however, was that Tyson, coming off a series of easy fights, had lost some of his intensity and concentration. Gone were the elaborate slip-and-weave movements. He tried to win the fight the lazy heavyweight’s way—that is, on a single punch.

      In the first round, Ribalta easily saw the punches coming and used a combination of leaning away, covering up, and putting Tyson in a clinch to avoid them. In the second round, realizing that he had to be technically sharper, Tyson doubled up with a right hook to the body and a right uppercut that knocked Ribalta down. The look on Ribalta’s face showed more shock than pain. He clearly hadn’t seen the uppercut coming. He got up and fought gamely for several more rounds. Tyson fell back into more of a conventional style, connecting often but without effect. He didn’t get frustrated; it seemed more like boredom. He wanted to win, but he’d lost interest in scoring a knockout. He appeared comfortable just being a good conventional fighter rather than a unique and spectacular one. The conclusion, at any rate, was foregone. Tyson wore Ribalta down with a total of 328 punches, 68 percent of which landed. A moment’s inspiration in the tenth sent in a flurry of punches that solidly connected. The referee ended the fight on a technical knockout.

      Asked later if he was disappointed by his performance, a nonchalant Tyson opined: “What can I say? This happens. You don’t knock everybody out.”

      Jacobs was also interviewed after the fight. He claimed not to be disappointed either. He talked about deciding within the week about whether to enter Tyson into the HBO series and to then, within a few months, fight for the title. He had the smug air of someone confident that all was proceeding by plan.

      In a sense, he and Cayton had reason to be content. They had achieved the near miraculous. In twenty-six fights over nineteen months, Tyson had been steered to a top ten ranking. Although not yet ranked as a number one contender, he was being perceived by boxing and mainstream audiences alike as the next great heavyweight. He had been sold to America, via the fable of Cus and the Kid, as inoffensive outside the ring and indestructible within it. People believed that it was not a matter of whether he became heavyweight champion, but when.

      Privately, however, Jacobs was still nagged by doubts about Tyson’s ability to perform at the higher levels of psychological pressure. Fighting for the championship would pit him against the most seasoned and capable fighters. And there could be no more breather bouts with which to protect his sometimes fragile emotional profits from the fights that did test Tyson’s character.

      He had passed several important tests in the ring, both of his skills and his character. Still, as the Halpin, Sims, Jameson, and Tillis fights demonstrated, he remained completely unpredictable. It didn’t seem like a matter of choice for Tyson; it was not as if in those fights he had decided to win in some other way besides by knockout, to take control of the fight, box, try new things, manipulate the opponent, pick his punches, and add up the victory points in his head.

      Tyson was capable of a small degree of such control, or “ring generalship,” as it is termed. He displayed it with Ferguson and Green. But that wasn’t a reliable quality in him as far as Jacobs was concerned. Nor was it the style of boxing he’d been trained in. D’Amato had honed Tyson to be a knockout artist. He’d always believed that was the best use of Tyson’s burning, rage-filled, psychic intensity. Jacobs agreed with D’Amato. He, too, feared that if Tyson didn’t knock his man out as soon as possible, the chances were high that he’d burn out and regress into a passive, acquiescent state. And so, despite the fact that Jacobs had everyone convinced Tyson would be champion, when it came down to it, he feared that he quite possibly possessed the dark, troubled heart of a loser.

      That was the hole at the center of the entire elaborate and emerging spectacle of Tyson’s life. In retrospect, it seems incredible that more people didn’t recognize the problem at the time. Everything about Tyson was paradoxical.

      The problem went beyond almost diametrically opposed performances in the ring. The Albany mall incident offered a glimpse into a counterlife vastly different from the one served up by Cus and the Kid. It just didn’t make sense that Tyson was the sum of his dual personas: surrogate son to D’Amato and robotic Ring Destroyer. How could those two beings exist in one, barely grown-up man? “It was very eerie to see Tyson break people’s faces in the ring, then sit down with him and hear that sweet little boy’s voice,” recalled Newsday’s Matthews. “I felt there was something I wasn’t seeing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

      Nor could Tyson. He remained a mystery to himself. Despite the years with D’Amato, the twenty-six victories, and all the elaborate packaging as the greatest fighter of his time, Tyson was still unable to get any purchase on a self, on the core of his identity. “When people started to recognize Mike on the streets in New York, he used to tell me that he felt they were thinking he wasn’t really a good boxer,” Lott recalled. “Mike always felt like a fake.”

      Tyson knew that D’Amato’s attentions were, in part, motivated by self-interest. But while D’Amato lived, the role of surrogate son could be played. His religion of the fists, as an all-encompassing gestalt, provided emotional order. It put Tyson in the leading role of his own unique drama of both the inner life and the practical world. With D’Amato around, even if he was a fake, it almost didn’t matter. D’Amato made him feel that some kind of self existed. At the least, Tyson felt that he wasn’t hollow.

      When D’Amato died, Tyson had to play the role without a director. Soon, the persona of surrogate son no longer seemed to hold any validity. He may have never really believed in the veracity of D’Amato’s love, or if he did, it was perhaps on a leap of faith for the lack of any other choice when, as a boy of thirteen, he was presented with the option of life with D’Amato and all his eccentricities, or going back to the Tryon reformatory. However Tyson came to terms with D’Amato’s attentions, if he did feel loved, the experience left him with no permanent emotional structure. He had, in other words, come full circle. It was like having to go back to the first act of the drama and play it all over again. As Tyson told Sports Illustrated in the January 1986, “Kid Dynamite” feature: “I miss him terribly. The many years we worked over things, and worked over things. He was my backbone. All the things we worked on, they’re starting to come out so well … God, I’m doing so well, but when it comes down to it, who really cares? I like doing my job, but I’m not happy being victorious. I fight my heart out and give it my best, but when it’s over, there’s no Cus to tell me how I did, no mother to show my clippings to.”

      Tyson was alone again and second-guessing the motivations of his supposed intimates. The same nagging paradox remained: Did they want him faults and all, or did they want only the future heavyweight champion of the world?

      At first it seemed they only wanted the champion. In the months immediately following D’Amato’s death, Jacobs and Cayton were more focused on the business of Mike Tyson than the person. Remembered Camille Ewald: “After every victory, Cus used to have some kind of celebration for Mike. A cake or something. It gave him prestige. Jimmy and Bill didn’t do that. They were losing contact with Mike.”

      Cayton СКАЧАТЬ