When He Was 19, Mike Tyson's Room Was Really Nice

Lots of sun, views of the trees.

One afternoon in April of 1986, when Mike Tyson was 19 and his professional record was 19-0, I watched him work out in a ring in the otherwise empty top floor of the old wooden police station in the ragged village of Catskill, NY, (i) on the west bank of the Hudson about 20 miles south of Albany.  

At that point, Tyson had begun to attract attention, but not a lot; his opponents had been pretty nameless — borderline journeymen, and he was winning by TKO’s, not knockouts. I was the only witness as his affable Irish trainer Kevin Rooney (who’d once fought middleweight legend Alexis Arguello (ii) ) put him through his rounds for 90 minutes. 

Tyson’s gloves made loud leather-thud sounds in the empty attic space as they hit the pads that Rooney held out for him to punch. In a real gym, there’d have been lots of grunts and thuds, and boxing sounds, but up in an old attic, they were amplified, and you could feel them just by the sound. They spent the last half of the session working on Tyson’s bobbing and weaving from close in, and then the uppercut that would suddenly follow the bob and the weave. (iii) 

It had been my experience that asking complicated or deep questions of kids wasn’t really fair to them, so as he towelled off, I asked him some pretty routine things about his rise: toughest opponents, what he had to work on, what he’d overcome. After a few minutes he said, eagerly, “Want to see the room where I live?”

Well, um, yeah.

He was living in a rambling old late-19th century white clapboard house in need of some repair surrounded by woodsy trees. It was owned by the widow of his first manager, Cus D’Amato. D’Amato had heard about the boy’s skills from a counselor at the Tryon School for Boys up in Johnstown, Tyson’s residence since the age of 13 after 38 arrests in Brooklyn (iv).

His father, a reputed pimp, had never been in his life, and his mother, a reputed prostitute, had died three years earlier, so D’Amato had taken the boy out of Tryon and taken custody. D’Amato had died the year before I visited the house. Tyson, with no significant adults in his world, was not a good candidate for handling eventual fame.

When we got to the top of two flights of stairs, I instantly understood why he wanted me to see it. It was unlike any room he’d ever occupied. He was proud of it. It was a sun-flooded, wooden-floored aerie, comfortable and personal. He had posters and books. One was a well-thumbed paperback biography of Jesse James. Tyson told me that he was intrigued by James’ habit of anonymously showing up in the crowds of boxing matches coming down from hiding in the Midwest hills, and so Tyson himself had recently developed a habit of sitting at a table at the window inside restaurants in Manhattan to anonymously observe the people walking by on the sidewalk. 

Many years later, when I had occasion to teach a hundred or so 18- and 19-year olds in a college where most of the kids were the first in their families to earn a degree, I recognized in many of them the Tyson I spent the afternoon with, talking about life and ambition. He was curious about everything, including my world, and what becoming an adult entailed. On that day, he was a good kid.

The next time I saw him, two years later, I was interviewing him with another writer a week before he beat Michael Spinks in 90 seconds in Atlantic City. He was angry and nuts. I had the impression that he was on a medication that was unleashing his inside anger in anticipation of the fight.

Some years after that, at a dinner for Muhammad Ali in Las Vegas, he was the kid again, polite, dressed in a nice suit, smiling and peaceful, and we talked about that afternoon with fondness.

(i) Today an increasingly hip Hudson Valley destination with unrealistic rents. 

(ii) Arguello later fought with the U.S.-backed forces controlled out of Honduras trying unsuccessfully to put down Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista revolution.

(iii) The uppercut had broken journeyman Jesse Ferguson’s nose three months earlier.

(iv) Representative arrests would be the times when he was strong enough at 12 to walk behind the counter at a bodega and put the proprietor in a bear hug threateningly strong enough to break the guy’s ribs while a pal emptied the register.