overnights

Mike Recap: Coach Frankenstein

Mike

Monster
Season 1 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating 4 stars

Mike

Monster
Season 1 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating 4 stars
Photo: Patti Perret/Hulu

Mike Tyson loved Cus D’Amato. Whenever Tyson gets interviewed about his relationship to Cus, he tends to get emotional about it. Cus was the man who told him he could be a champion. He was the man who took him out of Brownsville and gave him a home in Catskill, where he could learn discipline and train away from the toxic influences that would have surely landed him in prison, if not the grave. He was the father-figure who brought Tyson into his home and officially adopted him when Tyson’s mother died. He had a plan to bring Tyson up through the amateur and Olympic ranks in the early ‘80s and prepare him to dominate the professional heavyweight field as a young adult. But he died before his vision could be fully realized, and he died before Tyson’s personal and professional mistakes tarnished his legacy.

The strong second episode of Mike implies that Cus also died before he could disappoint his sensitive young protégé. In the most telling scene, Cus sits down with Tyson’s mother to persuade her to allow him to train with him in Catskill after his stint in a reform facility is over. She’s skeptical. She doesn’t appreciate the “cheap-ass chocolates” he offers to her as a gift, for one. And she simply doesn’t believe in her son, who she has stopped even trying to encourage or support, because she thinks he will continue to let her down. One of the tragedies of Tyson’s life was that he could never fight his way out of that inferiority complex, but in this scene, his mother does seem to have a read on Cus. “If he can’t box no more, do you still keep him?” she asks. When he doesn’t have an answer to that question, she continues, “That’s what I thought. What’s in it for you, motherfucker?”

The answer to that question is, “Quite a bit.” At this point in his career, Cus’ triumphs with Floyd Patterson and José Torres were long behind him, and there was skepticism that his “peek-a-boo” strategy, which trained boxers to protect their face and keep their arms close to the body, might be dated and limit the punching power of his fighters. Tyson was Cus’ ticket back from the exile of the modest gym  where he’d been put out to pasture. And, of course, Cus was Tyson’s ticket to a purposeful and prosperous life, as well as a replacement for the father he never knew and the mother who he could never please. Their interests were aligned, which is not the same thing as an unshakeable father-son bond that transcends the sport. In this episode, Cus lives with the disappointment of Tyson failing to make the 1984 Olympic team, but that’s only a slight modification of the overall plan. Pneumonia took him out of Tyson’s life before their relationship could truly be tested.

Mike allows the note of skepticism about Cus’s true character to linger more as a question rather than an assertion, because Tyson does remember Cus fondly and has reason to credit him with saving his life and making his career. In a superb performance, Harvey Keitel plays Cus as a master manipulator who does have a consuming passion about Tyson’s career, even if it’s ambiguous whether he cares about reforming a troubled soul or shaping him into the most devastating force to come along in boxing in decades. He speaks in colorful metaphors, kicking off the episode with a speech likening he and Tyson to “crocodiles in the mud,” laying low until a drought in the Sahara forces the “gazelles and wildebeests” to cross the water. (“We will bite them so hard that when they screeeeam, the whole world is going to hear them.”)

The words Cus offers to Tyson are affirming and motivating: “You will supersede everyone. You are a giant. You are a colossus amongst men.” And in one of the show’s cheeky fourth-wall breaks, Tyson tells us, “I never heard anyone say anything good about me. I wanted to hear more.” But there’s a hidden threat in what building “a colossus amongst men” actually means for someone as impressionable as a young Tyson. He can feel confident that his body and mind are being honed into a powerful force in the ring, and that in turn will help him feel like he’s not a worthless person any more. But this episode is called “Monster,” which suggests this Frankenstein-ian project may wind up rampaging the countryside. Making Tyson a terror in the ring has dark implications for how he might act outside it.

Cus’s death robs Tyson of a mentor and a father, and adds to the equally unexpected deaths of his mother and his best friend from Brownsville. And so, Tyson doesn’t even get the illusion that his handlers see him as anyone other than a golden paycheck. It isn’t even a week before he’s back in the ring, and he’s put on a schedule that gives his body the bare minimum of recovery time before he faces a new opponent. No matter. He doesn’t lose. And not only does he not lose, he destroys his adversaries, pummeling most of them through first-round knockouts. (“His post-fight interviews last longer than the fights.”) Cus may be gone, but his vision for Tyson remains unchanged, right through a heavyweight title fight against Trevor Berbick that’s understood more as a “coronation” than a true championship battle. (You can watch it here. It won’t take much of your time.)

Towards the end of the episode, Mike underlines a key point about the false perception of Tyson as a boxer. In the narration, Tyson says, “I have intelligence, discipline, extremely honed skills. People see an animal. They call me a ‘savage.’” Cus wanted him to cultivate that image to intimidate his opponents — and perhaps give him a “brand” as an entertainer — but it underestimates Tyson’s brilliance as a tactician and his fundamental vulnerability as a human being. For better and worse, he would turn out to have many more dimensions than the public assumed.

Jabs

• The flashback where his friend talks about him needing to get out of the city is the biggest bum note of the episode. It’s full of clichés, for one, and set in a bombed-out location that looks like a production designer’s overworked idea of an “inner-city” background. And beyond that, who the hell is this guy? We haven’t gotten to know him at all.

• “Your mind is not your friend. I hope you know that, Mike. You have to fight your mind. Control it. Block your feelings.” Tyson would win up losing the fight against his mind frequently.

• Great detail about Cus’s quirks, from his paranoia about being robbed or set up to his staunch progressive views, which certainly put him at odds with the vultures in the boxing world. A line like “Money’s useless, unless you’re helping people with it” is not something Tyson’s future handler, Don King, would ever come close to saying.

• Tyson continuing to rob houses after swearing to his mother that he was “not that piece of shit you said I saw anymore” is a good tip that even 2017 Tyson may be an unreliable narrator.

• The show doesn’t fill in the details, but Tyson lost twice by decision to the same guy, Henry Tillman, who would go on to win heavyweight gold in the Los Angeles games of 1984. Cus and Tyson bitterly disputed the results, but it was more a case of Tyson’s game being better suited to professional rather than amateur bouts, which reward points more than power. When Tyson would face Tillman again on June 16, 1990, he obliterated him in one round.

Mike Recap: Coach Frankenstein