Artie Diamond boxed with the star of David on his shorts, growling and foaming at the mouth as he walked to the ring. Cus D’Amato trained plenty better fighters, just none with as much grit. No quit in this kid. His bark worse than his bite, even when shipping punishment, he never took a backward step. Easy to hit, impossible to put down. His unremarkable professional ledger of 24-9 didn’t do justice to the outsized heart of a performer Inside Sports magazine once profiled as “The toughest SOB who ever lived”.
Thirty years after Diamond fought his last, D’Amato unfurled tall tales about him to an impressionable young buck called Mike Tyson. About the punches he took without flinching. His thirst for combat and ability to withstand concussive barrages. And the bank job gone wrong that earned him a 15-year stretch and spawned the birth of his legend.
The first day behind bars, an enormous inmate told the welterweight he wanted to make him his prison wife. It was a suggestion that prompted the baby-faced pugilist to lean in and whisper a response, then chomp down on one of his suitor’s ears, ripping it off with his teeth. He remained unmolested for the duration of his stay.
When Tyson unleashed his own gnashers on Evander Holyfield, he was merely aping the behaviour of Diamond, somebody who the great D’Amato, his mentor, had brought him up to idolise. Eavesdropping yarns about old fighters and watching grainy footage of bouts from long ago was as much part of his unorthodox education as learning his trainer’s trademark peekaboo style.
The complex, troubling relationship between the youngest heavyweight champion in history and the man who moulded him is at the heart of Mark Kriegel’s newly-released Baddest Man – The Making of Mike Tyson, a forensic deep dive into his formative years that explains so much of the terrible stuff he did after.
With the literary flair of a novelist and the reporting chops of a columnist who once traipsed the New York city streets, Kriegel offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Brooklyn where Tyson grew up. It’s all here. In lurid detail. Thuggery, shakedowns, pigeon lofts, pimps, whores, hoodlums. Gangs like the Tomahawks, the Jolly Stompers and the Outlaws form the backdrop to the unrelentingly horrific childhood of the latchkey kid known on the corners as “Dirty Mike”.
He saw his mother Lorna Mae fist-fighting lovers one minute, having sex with them the next, often with him in the room. His inevitable path to juvie led him eventually to the care of D’Amato, the wise old boxing sage with an eye for fistic talent and the presumed wherewithal to save the unfortunate man-child from his own predatory instincts. The traditional feelgood narrative. The reality was rather different.
Determined to bequeath one more gift to the sweet science, the ageing trainer who previously gave the sport Floyd Patterson turned arch enabler
“In 1988 when I started with the Daily News, there was the prevalent notion of D’Amato as a secular saint of New York,” writes Kriegel. “Jack Newfield would put him right up there with Jackie Robinson and Bobby Kennedy. I get it. New York is cynical. Newspapers were supposed to be cynical. And during a moment in the city’s life when a Times literary critic could write earnestly of Donald Trump’s ‘elegant simplicity’ while reviewing The Art of the Deal, one understands the need to believe in, as you might hear it, at say The Lion’s Head, some-f**king-body. D’Amato more than fit the bill. I didn’t set out here to diminish D’Amato’s legacy…”
But he does. With some style. Evincing the reporter’s eye for damning detail, he takes a sledgehammer to the “D’Amato as white saviour” mythology foisted upon the world in the 1980s, when the moribund heavyweight division desperately needed Tyson’s demented energy, youthful menace and epic violence.
Determined to bequeath one more gift to the sweet science, the ageing trainer who previously gave the sport Floyd Patterson turned arch enabler. Transplanted to rural Catskill from a ghetto that was equal parts Dickens and The Warriors, the kid was allowed to indulge his every proclivity. Damn the consequences as long as he kept winning. For Cus.
Sifting through this stunning work, you fluctuate between feeling desperately sorry for the child Tyson navigating the carnage of his boyhood, then furiously angry at D’Amato and others for turning a blind eye to his growing litany of teenage offences, adults conveniently forgetting the word “no” remained in their vocabularies and might have benefited their charge.
[ Mike Tyson couldn’t turn back time, but he knew that all alongOpens in new window ]
Teddy Atlas was a rare truth-teller in that permissive environment. The trainer’s training protégé informed the pungent adolescent prospect – his body odour so rank it often preceded him into a room – that he smelled horrendous and needed to wash more. A brave and compassionate move. He later put a gun to Tyson’s head on account of him trying to molest his 11-year-old sister-in-law. Offered 5 per cent of the fighter’s future earnings by D’Amato to leave and keep schtum, he turned down the money and departed anyway.
Atlas exited a tawdry scene that grew even uglier following D’Amato’s death and Tyson’s inexorable rise. By the time he embarrassed Michael Spinks for all the belts in 1988, the final chapter in this book, he was a tabloid spectacle, married to the actress Robin Givens, manipulated by her controlling mother and already in the treacherous maw of Don King. Not quite imminent, his downfall was certainly inevitable, even as the New York Post heralded him as “The Baddest Man on Earth”.
Baddest? Worse.
