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Torres recalls the very sight of Tyson at 13: "Very short, very shy and very wide." D'Amato pegged him for a champion straight off, though the resident welterweight Kevin Rooney was dubious. "He looked like a big liar to me; he looked old." Hearing that he was destined to be champ, Tyson shrugged laconically. But before long, everyone in the stable began to see him out of Cus's one good eye. "If he keeps listening," Rooney thought, "he's got a chance." The fighters' gym has a fascination of its own: the timeless loft, the faded posters, the dark and smelly world of the primeval man.
To D'Amato, the punching and ducking were rudimentary. Hands up, chin down. Accepting discipline was harder, and controlling emotion was hardest of all. "Fear is like fire," he never tired of saying. "It can cook for you. It can heat your house. Or it can burn it down." D'Amato's neck-bridging exercises enlarged Tyson's naturally thick stem to nearly 20 in., and the rest of him filled out in concrete blocks. Like every old trainer, D'Amato tried to instill a courtliness at the same time as he was installing the heavy machinery. "My opponent was game and gutsy," the 17-year-old Tyson remarked after dusting a Princeton man during the Olympic trials of 1984. "What round did I stop the gentleman in, anyway?"
But in two tries Tyson could not quite best the eventual gold-medal winner, Henry Tillman, who fought him backing up (Spinks' style, incidentally). When the second decision was handed down, Tyson stepped outside the arena and began to weep, actually to bawl, a cold kind of crying that carried for a distance. He was a primitive again. As the U.S. boxing team trooped through the airport after the trials, a woman mistakenly directed her good wishes to the alternate, Tyson. "She must mean good luck on the flight," said the superheavyweight Tyrell Biggs, a future Tyson opponent who would rue his joke.
Turning pro in 1985, Tyson knocked out 18 men for a start, twelve of them within three minutes, six of those within 60 seconds. He did not jab them; he mauled them with both hands. They fell in sections. His first couple of fights were in Albany, on the undercard of the welterweight Rooney, at an incubator suitably titled "the Egg." Rooney worked Tyson's corner and then fought the main events. Knowing time was short, D'Amato thought to leave a trainer too. "We were fighters together first," says Rooney, 32, who has not warred in three years (his delicate face is practically healed) but never officially ! retired. "That's my advantage as Mike's trainer, knowing how a fighter thinks. We're a legacy: he's the fighter; I'm the trainer. We're not in Cus's league, but we're close enough." At any mention of D'Amato, Tyson is capable of tears.