Mike Tyson, Distractions, Your Career and Life
December 13, 2010
I saw the most interesting documentary on Mike Tyson recently, James Toback’s Tyson. A review of the film in Time magazine relates:
At first he was a variation on the proverbial 97-pound weakling: an overweight street kid from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He got beaten up regularly by the local toughs—”Very few of them,” he says, “are functioning adults right now”—who lured him into street crime. As a 12-year-old in a detention home he was discovered by Cus d’Amato, who had trained and managed Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight boxing title in the ’50s. Cus saw potential in this soft-spoken junior thug, and Mike went along with the program because “I was afraid of being physically humiliated in the streets again.” In d’Amato, Tyson found the father he never had. “He broke me down and rebuilt me,” Tyson says of his coach, who adopted him, raised him with the d’Amato family in the Catskills and gave the boy focus and purpose as a boxer. Tyson was an apt pupil: he obsessively studied old films of boxing legends, learned the spiritual side of the warrior mentality and, he says, “restrained myself from having sex for about five years.” He tore through the amateur ranks, knocking out one opponent in a record eight seconds, and was heavyweight champ before he was 21. (His mentor died just before the big fight.) Those victories helped him realize that “I don’t have to worry about anyone bullying me again.” http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1893622-1,00.html
The most interesting thing to me about the documentary was listening to Tyson talk about how d’Amato trained him to become a boxer. Instead of defining boxing to Tyson as a mere physical conquest, the coach taught him that boxing was a spiritual conquest. As Tyson trained with d’Amato, the coach would constantly drop suggestions to him on how to increase his self-confidence and his self-image as he boxed. These suggestions would be short little blurbs about how Tyson was the best, the strongest, and so [Read more]
