Word: tyson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...Tyson, surely. "He's a very powerful young man," whistles Spinks through an air-conditioned smile. "The majority of the guys he's fought have worried about getting hit -- I worry about it too. He's got such an advantage; he's so strong. But he does things that are mistakes that he might have to pay for." Is Spinks afraid? "Sure, I've got to have my fear," he says. "I refuse to go into the ring without it." But he also says, "I have a nice grip on my pride: I boss it around. I wear it when...
...This is the first time Tyson is going to meet some talent; Spinks is a thinking fighter," says the venerable trainer Ray Arcel, 89, who carted 13 opponents to Louis before beating him with Ezzard Charles. ("And you know something? As happy as I was for my guy, that's how sad I was for Joe.") Nothing can touch boxing for beautiful old men. "Tyson is learning how to think too," Arcel says. "He's picked up a lot from those old films he studies, including a little Jack Dempsey." He first saw Dempsey in 1916 in New York City...