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All over Tyson's walls at the Ocean Club hotel are the old sepia photographs out of which he has stepped, going back to Mike Donovan, Jack Blackburn and Joe Jeannette, who in 1909 fought a 49-rounder that featured 38 knockdowns. Louis, Rocky Marciano and Ali are there, but Jack Johnson, Jim Jeffries and Stanley Ketchel are more prominent. (John Lardner told Ketchel's 1910 fate in a pretty good sentence: "Stanley Ketchel was 24 years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.") The repeaters in Tyson's gallery are Joe Gans and Battling Nelson. In a 79-year-old picture, Nelson is posing after a knockout with his gloves balanced defiantly on his hips. Tyson struck that same attitude five months ago over the horizontal remains of Larry Holmes.
"I like them all," says the curator from Brownsville and Bedford- Stuyvesant , completing his tour, "but Nelson and Gans are special. Both of them great fighters ((lightweights)) and fellow opponents near their peak at the same time. That's always special."
In this at least, Michael Spinks can concur. Though ten years older than Tyson, he has managed to register three fewer professional bouts -- 31 to 34 -- and only four of those against heavyweights. All told, the two men share 65 victories and uneven parts of the mystical championship. While Tyson owns the various belts, Floyd Patterson says, "Spinks has the real title, my old title, the one handed down from person to person." Spinks was first to get to Holmes (whom he out-pointed twice), the acknowledged champion for seven years. Patterson forgets, though, that Holmes' branch of the title originated when Michael's older brother Leon skipped a mandatory defense in order to preserve a lucrative rematch with Ali. Holmes won his championship from Ken Norton, who won it from no one. He was assigned the vacated title on the strength of a slender decision over Jimmy Young that may have represented a backlash against the creaking mobster Blinky Palermo. Boxing is a dazzling business.
Cus D'Amato, the manager who stood up to the fight mob in the '50s, who defied the murderous Frankie Carbo and helped break the monopolist Jim Norris, died in 1985 at 77 and left Tyson in his will. "More than me or Patterson," says D'Amato's other old champion, the light-heavyweight Jose Torres, "Tyson is a clone of Cus's dream. Cus changed both of us, but he made Mike from scratch." In Brooklyn, Tyson had drawn the absent father and saintly mother, the standard neighborhood issue. "You fought to keep what you took," he says, "not what you bought." His literary pedigree is by Charles Dickens out of Budd Schulberg. When Tyson wasn't mugging and robbing, he actually raised pigeons, like Terry Malloy. A tough amateur boxer named Bobby Stewart discovered Tyson in the "bad cottage" of a mountain reformatory and steered him to D'Amato's informal halfway house at Catskill, N.Y.