There’s never been an athlete as intimidating and unhinged as Mike Tyson.
Responsible for some of the wildest moments in boxing history, Tyson is one of the most colorful and influential boxing figures of the 20th century.
And for the first time, the man who still holds the record as the youngest boxer to win a heavyweight title has revealed perhaps the most crucial moment in setting him on a path of destruction.
There’s no doubt Tyson had developed serious anti-social tendencies before he ever met legendary boxing trainer Cus D’Amato — the man who shaped him into a champion.
Growing up on the rough streets of Brownsville in Brooklyn, he was an expert pickpocket, a violent street fighter and spent his days in and out of youth detention centers.
But in his new book, “Iron Ambition: Lessons I’ve Learned From The Man Who Made Me A Champion,” Tyson reveals it was D’Amato who helped shape him into the “arrogant sociopath” who would bite off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear and declare he wanted to eat Lennox Lewis’ children.
D’Amato was a master manipulator, and an insecure teen like Tyson was putty in his hands. He filled the social outcast’s head with dreams of immortality, but also encouraged him to adopt a ruthless attitude in all he did.
“We’re like crocodiles in the mud in the Sahara,” D’Amato would say. “They are there for months or years waiting for migration, for these gazelles and wildebeests to cross the water: Do you hear me, son? And when they come, we are going to bite them. We are going to bite them so hard that when they scream, the whole world is going to hear them scream.”
But along with inflating Tyson’s ego to dangerous proportions, D’Amato would tear him to shreds. Now 50, Tyson will never forget the piece of criticism that hurt him the most.
He was tying up the garbage in the upstate New York home he lived in with his adopted guardian when D’Amato targeted his biggest insecurity.
One of the biggest knocks on a young Tyson was that at 5-foot-8, he’d never be big enough to rule boxing’s premier division — and D’Amato decided to use the misconception to attack his pupil.
“I wish you had a body like Mike Weaver or Ken Norton, because people would just see you and they’d be intimidated,” he told Tyson. “I wish you were big like those guys. You’d scare people.”
It doesn’t seem that severe, but to Tyson it was devastating. He didn’t blink, but went to his bedroom and began crying. As tears rolled down his face, he decided he’d never be vulnerable again.
“Right then and there, I was determined to project the most savage, intimidating aura that boxing had ever seen,” Tyson wrote.
“That was the day I turned into Iron Mike. … I’d be the savage Cus wanted. I even began to fantasize that I’d actually kill someone in the ring. I remembered all the bad guys from movies I’d watched, and all the villains I knew from wrestling, and I drew on that and threw myself into the role of the arrogant sociopath.”
To gain a complete understanding of one of the most celebrated boxer-trainer relationships in fight history, you need to read the complete book.
Suffice it to say, it was complicated.