Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

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СКАЧАТЬ by crook, other men’s champions, but no one in the sport of boxing had ever developed and held on to three. D’Amato would train anybody that came up the two flights of stairs and walked through the door. He especially wanted the boys who came alone. The more afraid they were, the better. Fear was always his window into their souls.

      “He was so charismatic and persuasive with those ideas about fear,” said Joe Fariello, one of those boys. “He understood better than anybody else that all fighters are afraid. And that’s good. Otherwise, they’d be walking into punches. He taught you how to control it, make it work. He taught you what would happen in the ring, why and how you could correct it.”

      Fariello met D’Amato in 1952. They were from the same neighborhood in the Bronx. Fariello didn’t know his father. His mother worked occasionally. The family lived on welfare. He got kicked out of high school for fighting. Fariello boxed for a few years, then at age seventeen stopped because of a broken nose and hand. D’Amato asked him to train the other fighters. Fariello moved into D’Amato’s apartment on Fifty-third Street. “Cus was the only man I looked up to as a father,” said Fariello, now a highly respected New York trainer.

      Fariello worked with D’Amato and some of his fighters until 1965, when the two men had a falling-out. He remembered D’Amato as a son would remember a father with whom he battled constantly, or as a disillusioned disciple would remember his master.

      “I realized that Cus couldn’t control his own emotions. He was afraid to drive; he wouldn’t fly; he feared heights, elevators, tunnels, water, thunder and lightning,” Fariello said. “That’s okay, but he acted like he wasn’t contradicting himself. He didn’t deal with those fears; he rationalized them away, made things the way he wanted them to be.”

      But that, in the end, isn’t what caused the split. D’Amato was the kind of person someone coming into manhood had to get away from. “His whole philosophy on boxing and on life was a brainwashing. That’s why he wanted young kids from the beginning. He could start with a fresh mind,” Fariello maintained.

      Fariello moved out of D’Amato’s apartment, got married, and started to develop his own ideas about boxing. He had wanted to make more money, but D’Amato didn’t care much about the size of his fighters’ purses, only that they were developing as he wanted them to. And Fariello had made his mistakes. He had a weakness for gambling. D’Amato could rationalize away his own quirks of character, but couldn’t tolerate either Fariello’s independence or his faults.

      “He always said his whole purpose was to make you independent of him. But he never knew when to cut the cord and let someone go out and make his own mistakes,” Fariello said.

      D’Amato eventually found the battle he had been preparing for since childhood.

      At the outset of 1949, Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion for twelve years, decided to retire. Harry Mendel, a leading press agent in boxing, hatched an idea for an elimination tournament among the top contenders to determine the new champion. The idea, though, needed financial backing and a promoter. Mike Jacobs, who had promoted Louis for the past twelve years, also wanted to retire. Mendel pitched his idea to a Chicago business man named James D. Norris, the son of a wealthy Midwest commodities merchant known as the “Grain King.” Norris had used his share of the family fortune to buy several major baseball stadiums, indoor arenas, and the Detroit Red Wings hockey team. He accepted the invitation into boxing.

      Norris and his partner, Arthur M. Wirtz, created the International Boxing Club. For $100,000 it bought Jacobs’s lease and promotional rights to stage fights at the mecca of boxing, New York’s Madison Square Garden. The I.B.C. also cornered boxing rights at the outdoor Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium, and a few smaller arenas. Joe Louis secured the signatures of the four top contenders for the tournament and sold the contracts to the I.B.C. for $150,000 and a $15,000-per-year salary as vice president. Just to keep a lock on the Garden, Norris and Wirtz bought thirty-nine percent of its public stock.

      Every fighter who entered the tournament, including the eventual winner, signed multifight contracts binding them to the I.B.C. Norris used the same tactics in all the major weight classes. Soon, no contender could hope for a shot at any title without also signing up. The I.B.C. dictated purse amounts, rematch terms, the date of the title shot, and in some cases the outcome of the fight. Some managers had to relinquish control of their fighters entirely. The I.B.C. loaned money out to fighters and managers as a means of obligating them in future deals.

      Between June 1949 and May 1953, the I.B.C. and its affiliates around the country promoted thirty-six of the forty-four championship bouts that took place in the United States. Champions Ezzard Charles (who won the tournament), Jersey Joe Walcott, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMotta, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Joey Maxim all did their deals with the devil, as it were, for the money and the fame.

      The I.B.C. took on the imprimatur of a big business, but its ethics arose from the underworld. Though raised to be a blueblood, Norris indulged in a prurient taste for the unsavory. As a Chicago college student in the 1920s he befriended Sammy Hunt, one of Al Capone’s bodyguards. They remained close up through to the 1940s, when Hunt introduced Norris to a New Yorker named John Paul Carbo, alias “The Uncle,” “The Southern Gentleman,” “Jerry the Wop,” or just plain “Frankie.” The moniker “Mr. Gray” stuck because of his understated style of dressing.

      Carbo, mild-mannered, polite, soft-spoken, had a long history of murder charges. He once served twenty months for manslaughter. Notoriety came in 1939 when he was indicted and tried for killing Harry (“Big Greenie”) Greenberg under contract to the Jewish mob organization, “Murder Inc.” The chief witness against Carbo mysteriously fell to his death from a Coney Island hotel. Two of the twelve jurors refused to believe the remaining evidence. A hung jury set Carbo free. Norris relied on Carbo for inspiration, ideas and enforcement. Carbo was always seen sitting just a few feet away from Norris in his office. Several Carbo associates became promoters and managers in I.B.C. fights.

      In the 1976 “Brujo” interview, D’Amato said that as soon as the I.B.C. was formed he became passionately determined to break its monopoly, on the grounds of principle. However, he needed the means to achieve that end. “I knew that when I made my move, I had to do it with a certain kind of fighter,” D’Amato said. “So I was waiting for the right type of guy, that had the right type of character and personality and loyalty to make a champion. I hadda have a guy who would listen, because the things I’d hafta do would require the complete cooperation of the person I was managing. Patterson was the first guy to have the qualities I’m speaking of.”

      Floyd Patterson, like Fariello, was a lost boy. D’Amato met Patterson in 1949 when Floyd was only fourteen and going to a “600 School” in New York, a new type of classroom for inner-city children considered emotionally disturbed. Patterson was deeply withdrawn, sensitive, highly impressionable, a scrawny 147 pounds, and, most important for D’Amato, full of fear. D’Amato helped train him for the 1952 Olympics. Patterson won the middleweight gold medal. D’Amato told the boxing press that he would make Patterson the future heavyweight champion.

      For the next four years, Patterson won a series of middleweight fights with non-I.B.C. opponents in small arenas in New York and around the country. On January 4, 1956, Patterson’s twenty-first birthday, D’Amato published an open letter challenging all top heavyweights, including undefeated champion Rocky Marciano.

      The boxing community did not take the challenge seriously. Marciano had forty-one knockouts to his credit; Patterson had yet to fight beyond eight rounds. At 182 pounds he was similar in weight to Marciano but was not known to have as powerful a punch. Most of all, Patterson’s boxing style was odd.

      American boxing style had its roots in early-eighteenth-century England. Traditional style, stripped down, put the left foot forward and the left hand СКАЧАТЬ