Ready To Soar To The Very Top

All that changed when Lorna Tyson moved her family to the even rougher Brownsville section of Brooklyn when Mike was 10. The boy discovered a different world there, one in which he routinely found himself the victim of neighborhood toughs. "They used to take my sneakers, my clothes, my money," he says. "Beat me up and smack me around."

Tyson finally struck back when an older boy tried to steal one of the pigeons he was raising. "I don't know what possessed me to fight, but it was my first fight and I kicked the living crap out of him," Tyson says. "When I started hitting him, I was loving it. I let so much frustration out."

Tyson began to fight all the time. He was already big for his age, with enormous natural power, and his prowess as a ruffian eventually led him into a circle of older friends who led him into crime. He picked pockets and snatched jewelry, mugged people on the street and stuck up stores. "Like the check-cashing place and the supermarket," he says. "They held the guns. I would just put everything in a bag. I was 11."

And already trapped. "I can't say that I was sucked in," he says. "I wanted to be sucked in. I knew what was at the end of the rainbow—trouble and jail—but I wanted to be accepted. So we did those things." Lorna Tyson used to cry to him, "How can you steal? I never stole anything in my life." Her pleading did no good. "I know she was embarrassed, because she had a lot of pride," Tyson says. "I was haunted and just didn't care. I became so obnoxious." In and out of detention facilities, he was ultimately sent to the Tryon School.

Tyson knew that Stewart had been a boxer, and not a bad one at that. As an amateur, Stewart had won the National Golden Gloves light heavyweight championship in 1974 by beating the eventual WBA heavyweight champion, Michael Dokes. Tyson got the idea that he wanted to become a boxer, too, and he asked Stewart to work with him. Stewart resisted. Tyson persisted. "Teach me how to box. I really want to learn how to fight," he said. Stewart gave in, but only on condition that Tyson work harder in school. He told Tyson, "I don't care if you flunk every subject, as long as your behavior is good and you're putting in some effort."

Not long after the man started teaching the boy how to fight, teachers were calling Stewart to ask, "What the hell has happened to this kid? He's paying attention, not acting up in class." Within a few months Tyson had raised his reading level from third to seventh grade. And he was learning so quickly in the ring that Stewart decided he had better go into training himself. "I'd have gotten killed," Stewart says. "I had to train if I was to survive."

Tyson became so adept, in fact, that Stewart finally decided to call for help. He phoned a friend, the legendary old fight trainer Cus D'Amato, who ran a boxing school out of a small gym above the police station in the town of Catskill, some 80 miles southeast of Tryon. This was no ordinary boxing school, and D'Amato no ordinary professor of the sweet science. He had taken Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight championship of the world and Jose Torres to the light heavyweight title, and he imbued all his fighters with the D'Amato creed, which holds, in part: In the last analysis, mind triumphs over matter, and the will to win is more crucial than the skill to win.

D'Amato's fighters came from all over the country to Catskill, like acolytes in search of a guru, and they lived with D'Amato and his friend Camille Ewald—the sister of the wife of Cus's brother Rocco—in Ewald's 14-room house on 9½ acres of land overlooking the Hudson River. Camille figures that some 200 fighters came and went through that house and trained in that gym in the 15 years D'Amato ran the school.

"I got a kid up here and I want you to take a look at him," Stewart said.

"Bring him down," said D'Amato.