Who is Mike Tyson? A boxer of exception who made the crowds stand up in the middle of the night on his name alone at his peak? A powerhouse of nature who has been through the highest and lowest levels? A guy who is no better than his unflattering reputation?
Not saying anyone can answer that. Nor does the man himself know how to answer it. With his name once again coming up as he punched a fellow passenger on an airplane, in this article, we take a look into his life with the false air of a play in 21 chapters. Stay tuned!
Then, after several weeks, he introduces Mike to the man who will change his life for good: Constantine ‘Cus’ D’Amato. A former manager of Stewart and several Hall of Famers such as Floyd Patterson or Jose Torres, Constantine D’Amato immediately detected the immense potential of this tumultuous teenager.
Or, to quote Tyson: “He may have just met me, I may have still been a kid, but he predicted I would be world champion.”
The 70-year-old man who Muhammad Ali gave him the nickname of “the Bible of boxing” set about implementing his plan without further ado, but not without reformatting his new foal from scratch.
Reputed to be as austere as intractable with his boxers, D’Amato set about making him “an arrogant sociopath”, according to Tyson. Or, as he wrote in his 2017 book Iron Ambition, “Cus persuaded me that hurting others was noble (…) I had no feelings for my fellow man, no compassion. I was programmed to be like that, to be empty.”
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