MMA
The day the whole world became afraid of me! The legendary Mike Tyson recalls his transformation into a fierce boxer
Former world heavyweight boxing champion and the scariest man on the planet Mike Tyson has revealed his relationship with trainer Cus D’Amato. In particular, he outlined the moment that changed his professional boxing life forever.
Former world heavyweight boxing champion and the scariest man on the planet Mike Tyson has revealed his relationship with trainer Cus D’Amato. In particular, he outlined the moment that changed his professional boxing life forever.
Cus D’Amato both loved and criticized his protégé
Mike Tyson was a petty thief in a detention centre at the age of 13 when he was discovered by former boxer Bobby Stewart. He recognised his raw potential and introduced him to Italian-American trainer Cus D’Amato. He even became Tyson’s legal guardian after his father died.
But while the charismatic trainer taught his young charge boxing skills, he was also very critical of him. One of the moments he criticized the young boxer changed his life forever.
His methods created a boxing monster
Cus D’Amato, in fact, created a monster with that very moment, who later won the world heavyweight boxing title at just twenty years old. Tyson then woke his opponents from their dreams for a long time afterwards. He describes the fateful day in his autobiography, “Undisputed Truth”.
Tyson was one of the shorter boxers among the other heavyweights due to his height and suffered from overweight in his youth. “Man, I wish you had a body like Mike Weaver or Ken Norton, you’d be really intimidating,” coach D’Amato told him one day , according to Talksport.
“You would have a sinister aura, because they don’t have the character of an intimidating boxer, but especially the physique,” he continued his wish. “You could paralyse others with fear just by the way you look, ” he said of his charge, provoking him in just the right way.
Tyson later admitted in his autobiography that this was the moment that changed his perception of professional boxing. He decided to build his own intimidation method, but in the opposite style of the boxers mentioned by his trainer.
One day the whole world will be afraid of me, replied a young Mike Tyson
Tyson decided that if he couldn’t have the physical proportions of the others, he would be a boxer with a sinister nature. And Tyson has certainly done that. In his glory days, he was nicknamed “The Scariest Man on the Planet”.
“Don’t worry, Cus, just watch, one day the whole world will be afraid of me, ” Tyson would tell his trainer. “If they mention my name, they’ll sweat blood, Cus,” the young boxer said at the time.
“That was the day I turned into Iron Mike and became 100 percent that guy,” the former world champion recalled. “Even though I won almost every one of my fights in exciting fashion, I wasn’t completely emotionally invested in being the wild man Cus wanted me to be,” he says.
“But after all the talk about being too small, I became the savage,” he says of the change he had to go through. The trainer, who liked to say that boxing is mostly about the mentality of the boxer, has constantly worked on his client’s confidence, in addition to improving his technical skills.
But Iron Mike lost direction after reaching his peak
Unfortunately, time worked against him and Tyson only won his championship belt when Cus D’Amato was dead. A series of successful defences followed, but his career took a ste ep decline after three years.
Don King’s spats and the absence of his trainer cost Tyson his ranking among the very best boxers in the sport’s history. “ By the time I won the belt, I was truly a broken soul because I had no guidance, I didn’t have my Cus,” he added.
