Will This Be His Crowning Glory? : The Shoe Fits, So Mike Tyson Is Boxing’s Sole Heavyweight Champion

The child gladiator.

Jose Torres remembers him that way. Short, very wide and so painfully shy that when confronted with strangers, he would look only at his shoes.

Sometime in 1978, a juvenile detention home counselor from Upstate New York named Bobby Stewart brought Tyson to Cus D’Amato’s enclave in Catskill, N.Y.

Torres, one of D’Amato’s proteges and one-time light-heavyweight champion, remembers that first visit.

“He was 12 1/2 and already looked like a man,” he said. “He’d already been in and out of juvenile facilities about 25 times, but Stewart thought maybe Cus could make a boxer out of him.

“Well, I had a house in Catskill then, and Cus came to get me. He said to me: ‘I want you to meet this kid. Just by talking to him, I think he can be a great fighter.’

“See, Cus believed you could teach anyone to box. It’s the head that made the difference. He liked Mike’s head immediately.”

D’Amato introduced Tyson to Torres. Tyson stared at his shoes. After a few weeks, as the boxing lessons proceeded, the child gladiator finally spoke to Jose Torres.

“He walked over to me one day and he said so quietly I could barely hear him: ‘One day I want to be like you, a champion.’ ” Torres said.

“But he still didn’t look at me. He still looked at his shoes.”

A decade later, the child gladiator is still looking at shoes--the soles of opponents’ shoes.

D’Amato, his guardian who died in 1985, taught his charge well. He became the heavyweight champion, as Cus had predicted. But it’s becoming clear that D’Amato also did something else with Tyson.

He stole his childhood.

By grooming him to be the heavyweight champion to the exclusion of almost everything else--including school--he created a champion who is still, in a real sense, the child gladiator.

Tyson himself seems not even yet to understand this. He seemed to almost be boasting in a curious comment he made this week at a press conference. When asked if he finds it difficult to deal with the media, he responded:

“No, I’ve been groomed to be the heavyweight champion since I was 12 1/2. I didn’t go to school. Tutors were brought to me. I was trained to deal with the media, too.”

At the same news conference--which was televised--Tyson, bored, put his head on his arm, on the table, and appeared to have fallen asleep. It was somewhat amusing, and there was some laughter. But in another sense, it was like watching a 21-year-old third-grader, too.

Tyson, on Monday against Spinks, in the most significant engagement of his 35-fight career, will be on the threshold of a championship reign that could last for years.

But we are also beginning to see that Tyson, who turns 22 next week, for all his terrifying talent as a fighter, was poorly schooled in almost everything else by D’Amato and everyone else who participated in his early development.

Consider:

--Marriage. Tyson married actress Robin Givens last February. D’Amato, a lifelong bachelor, was obviously of no help here. Already, there are signs of trouble. One published report had it that Tyson has physically abused Givens.

--Finance. Again, D’Amato was of no help. His boxing operation in Catskill was subsidized by Jim Jacobs, a millionaire. Tyson, the little thug who only 10 years ago was mugging folks and engaging in petty street theft in the Brownsville section of the Bronx, will earn something close to $50 million in 1988. He’ll pull down almost half of that Monday night.

Only when he married Givens did Tyson show any interest in how his money was being handled by his manager, Bill Cayton, and, before that, by his late co-manager, Jacobs.

And once Tyson--and his wife, and mother-in-law, Ruth Roper--began raising questions publicly about his finances, the tug of war between promoter Don King and Cayton for control of Tyson began. Tyson wants to be free of Cayton, whose contract runs for another 3 1/2 years.

The bitterness and back-stabbing in Team Tyson has become so bad that some even expect a Tyson retirement announcement late Monday night, if he beats Spinks.

If retirement forces the issue of the manager’s contract, the sum that it would take to buy out Cayton--$10 million?--is a measure of the stature of this young champion. In this time, he seems to stand up favorably as a dominant champion in the tradition of Larry Holmes, Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, Jack Johnson, and, 100 years ago, John L. Sullivan.

But most remarkable of all is his age, and what he has achieved at 21. In a normal course of development for a young boxer, Mike Tyson should still be an amateur, perhaps trying out for the 1988 Olympic team. The last four Olympic heavyweight champions were all older than Tyson is now.

But of course, Tyson isn’t normal. He is exceptional. This is a fighter whose like we have not seen before.

At 21, he has successfully defended his championship 7 times in 19 months. Joe Louis, who defended it 25 times over 12 years, was 23 when he won it. Marciano defended it only 6 times in 3 years. Dempsey, the most inactive of all, defended it 6 times in 7 years.

If he is still the heavyweight champion in the year 2000, he will be only 33.

He is in style most comparable to Marciano and Dempsey. Like Marciano, Tyson is tireless, always in superb condition, applying non-stop, in-your-face pressure on opponents. And like Dempsey, he’s a bobber, coming up out of a crouch with hooks to the head and body.

He has quick hands but even quicker feet. On Monday night, watch him miss with a right hand, then pivot off his right foot and dig a left hook into Spinks’ ribs.

Defensively, he’s all but invulnerable to lead punches. Only a counter-puncher, it seems, can tag him. In the same D’Amato style that Floyd Patterson employed 30 years ago--a peekaboo style it was called then--Tyson carries both thumbs on his chin, until he’s close enough to throw combinations.

He is stronger, quicker and much bigger than either Marciano or Dempsey, neither of whom ever weighed 200 pounds in the ring. Tyson is in the 215-218 range.

In the early 1980s, D’Amato began entering Tyson in novice amateur boxing events. On more than one occasion, he was asked to present Tyson’s birth certificate, so fearsome was his appearance as a young teen.

In his mid-teens, there were a couple of losses, one to Al Evans in the 1982 national amateur tournament, when Tyson was 16.

By 1984, he still had only a regional reputation in amateur boxing circles, in the New York area. But when he qualified for the 1984 Olympic team trials at Ft. Worth, word was out to watch out for “a very young, very hard puncher named Tyson from New York.”

He was 17, still painfully shy, spoke in whispers and still looked at his shoes.

In the finals of the Ft. Worth tournament, he lost a decision to Henry Tillman of Los Angeles. The verdict infuriated D’Amato, who angrily stalked out of the arena, shouting insults at the “boobs” in amateur boxing.

Tyson had one last chance to make that Olympic team. As the trials’ heavyweight runner-up, he faced Tillman in Las Vegas two weeks later at the Olympic team’s box-off, where he would have to beat him twice to make the team. But again, he lost a close decision to an older, taller, retreating Tillman.

And after that defeat--his last loss in the ring--he demonstrated how fiercely his fires burned.

Tyson, after graciously congratulating Tillman, walked outside the Caesars Palace sports pavilion and stalked past some television trailers until he came to a salt cedar tree growing against a wire fence, next to a freeway on-ramp.

He had said nothing to this point, but there, on a hot desert night, all his rage came down. With his gloves off but his hands still taped, he pounded the tree with his fists, howling in fury. It went on for a minute or two, tears streaming down his face, until D’Amato wrapped him in a fatherly embrace and led him away.

He turned pro in March, 1985, and knocked out his first 19 opponents, 13 in the first round. For about the first year, Tyson and D’Amato were subsidized to the tune of about $250,000 by Jacobs and Cayton, or until they signed an ABC deal that paid Tyson $800,000.

Tyson, who earned $500 for his first fight, made $135,000 for his 33-second knockout of Marvis Frazier in July, 1986. It was the last time an opponent made more than Tyson. Frazier got $250,000.

The Frazier fight was the breakthrough knockout. Four months later, on Nov. 22, 1986, he knocked down Trevor Berbick three times and won the World Boxing Council’s heavyweight championship.

Next came the World Boxing Assn. championship, taken from James (Bonecrusher) Smith with a decision.

Tyson retained both versions of the title with a knockout of Pinklon Thomas.

Finally, he became the undisputed heavyweight champion when he beat Tony Tucker on a decision last August at the Las Vegas Hilton.

Since then, he has knocked out Tyrell Biggs, Larry Holmes and Tony Tubbs.

And he’s earning money like no athlete in history. With the first several million that he earned, Cayton and Jacobs bought him a single premium life insurance policy that will pay him $250,000 a year for life, beginning at 25. Under present law, that income will be tax free.

A seven-fight deal with HBO paid him $26.5 million. In other words, Tyson’s income from the HBO deal alone means he makes more than America’s highest paid corporate executive made last year.

According to Business Week magazine’s annual poll last April, Jim P. Manzi, chairman of software giant Lotus Development Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., was America’s highest compensated corporate executive, at $26.3.

Tyson will make more money Monday night than Lee Iacocca made--$17.9 million--in all of 1987. Tyson will make an estimated $20 to $22 million.

Of course, Manzi and Iacocca share their income only with the Internal Revenue Service. One-third of Tyson’s income goes to Cayton and Lorraine Jacobs, Jim Jacobs’ widow. Another chunk, about 10%, goes to trainer Kevin Rooney.

Where does this gravy train end?

Maybe Monday night.

Speculation grows here that Tyson may make a retirement announcement after an anticipated victory Monday night. Some reasons:

--Relations between Cayton and Tyson, from all indications, could not be worse. Retirement could put the Tyson-Cayton contract in the courts.

--Tyson has fought 35 times in 39 months, and could use a break.

--His marriage seems to be rocky.

--Beyond Spinks, there are no opponents on the horizon worthy of anyone’s excitement.

--A retirement of a year or two would result in an elimination tournament that would produce a new champion. Then Tyson could launch a comeback, and regain the championship for possibly as much money as he’ll earn Monday night, and he’ll be only 24.

A flaw in the scenario: Could the child gladiator remove himself from combat for that long?

Make no mistake, Mike Tyson loves to fight. No one can say if it’s the drama, the rage, the tension, the fear, the pure competition. Whatever it is, he does love to fight.

He even loves the weeks of training, he says--a side to boxing ex-fighters almost to a man say was the worst part of their trade.

Here’s what kind of young champion we’re dealing with. Of training, Tyson said this week: “When you’re training, you’re free.”