Shadowboxing in Plato’s Cave: Or, when the Myth is realer than the Reality

“Myths,” someone once observed, “are not things that were never true, but are things that are always true.” Certain tales as old as time contain basic elements that get rediscovered and used to retell certain stories, again and again, for successive generations. But myths are not only true; they sometimes end up literally enacted, somewhere besides onscreen or on the page, or told by some griot at the village fireside.
Take the real life story of Cus D’Amato and Mike Tyson.
You don’t need me to tell you who Mike Tyson is. Every sentient creature on Earth knows him, or at least recognizes his scarred mug, his scowl, the signature lisp. Tyson was, for a time, viewed as the ultimate instantiation of the gladiator. He was someone whose viciousness to his opponents in the ring revealed fascinating and unpleasant things about our own bloodlust. He was the apex predator in a sport that prided itself on being called “the hurt business,” a hardman who made other hardmen quit.
For a time there, almost everyone (except for hardcore boxing fans and experts) thought he was invincible. Even the most egotistical and bravado-exuding among us never pretended that we could beat him in a standup fight.
There are exceptions to the rules that govern old-school concepts like manhood: i.e. “Men can cry after winning championship games,” or “Men can embrace after a sporting victory.” Tyson’s very existence required new carveouts, the main one being, “It was inappropriate, weak to admit fear, except of Mike Tyson.”
Halfway through his ascent through the ranks, his original nickname, “Kid Dynamite,” was swapped out for the more formidable but simpler sobriquet of “Iron Mike.” He gave postfight interviews in which, after dispatching a man in seconds rather than minutes, he bemoaned failing to drive his opponent’s nosebone through his brainstem. When most youths his age were obsessing over the opposite sex, Mike was poring over tomes about the bloody conquests of Genghis Khan. Or sitting in an attic eyrie watching Jack “the Manassa Mauler” tear through opponents in grainy footage projected onto a white canvas.
Tyson was the product of a broken home, a son of the ghetto, a feral child who lived in the abandoned tenements and blasted-out buildings in Crack Boom era Brownsville, Brooklyn. His ascent was meteoric and his fall even more precipitous. He went from the youngest heavyweight champion of the world (a record still not matched) to being imprisoned, to finally becoming a laughingstock after biting another man’s ear off.
For a time it seemed he was the plaything of the Gods, the very cynosure of their eyes. They gave him everything and then took it away, or rather they gave him the means to acquire everything, and the hubris to lose it.
The Tyson Myth is cemented in popular consciousness, and hardly needed the recapitulation I just gave it.
Cus D’Amato might need a little more introduction, especially to those not familiar with the Sweet Science. Constantine “Cus” D’Amato is the old and squat Falstaffian white man you see in many photos of Tyson from the mid-eighties. He has the strangely childlike face that a lot of very tough old men have, the innocent boy within imprisoned by time and pain somewhere beneath the accreted scars. Mostly it’s in the eyes, but a bit is in the mouth, pulled into a tight smile more guarded than ironic. Cus is having a ball, but he doesn’t want you to know it, and so hides it beneath a gruff, crotchety exterior.
Cus had already had a storied career as a trainer before he met Mike Tyson. His prize pupil was Floyd Patterson, a smallish heavyweight with lightning speed and a host of insecurities and psychic weak spots too numerous to list here. Later Cus trained light-heavyweight champion Jose Torres and took him to the Promised Land as well. In between these two champs, Cus had many other fighters under his tutelage. Many of them went on to greater things, but only after forsaking him to join deeper-pocketed syndicates or less demanding, more malleable trainers.
So much betrayal made Cus bitter. Extensive corruption in boxing—including fights fixed by the Mafia and violent reprisals against those who didn’t play along—then turned him paranoid. By the time Mike Tyson met him, he was no longer just bitter or paranoid. Batshit crazy was added to his character makeup, and truthfully probably predominated over all preexisting traits.
Tyson was mystified by some of the old man’s habits.
Cus cut the pockets out of his pants to prevent his enemies—real and imagined (but mostly imagined)—from planting drugs on him. He positively refused to interact with any attractive woman who showed an interest in him, believing it was a honeypot, or some kind of ruse to get him to otherwise lower his guard.
Many nights Tyson recalls stumbling home to the house in Catskill, New York where he lived with Cus, to see the old man lying on the floor, with the lights off. What was Cus doing? Usually commando crawling with a rifle in his arms, avoiding windows and even well-lighted patches of linoleum in the kitchen, lest snipers see him.
Mike loved Cus despite his madness—or maybe because of it—and in his own words made himself Cus’s devoted slave. Their meeting, it seemed was foreordained.
Cus terrified Tyson the first time he saw him. At the time, Tyson was serving a stretch at the Tryon School for Boys, a reformatory where Tyson was imprisoned for various offenses in his old stomping grounds. His hobbies included knocking men out and soaking their hands in the snow to loosen the rings from their fingers. He also enjoyed offering to help old ladies with their groceries, accompanying them to parking lots and then snatching their purses and any lose jewelry.
He most likely would have graduated from such petty crimes to more serious felonies and finally murder. Ultimately he would have ended up a blotter statistic rather than a legend, except for divine (or perhaps unholy) intercession.
Cus, you see, had been on a quest to find his third champion, after Patterson and Torres. He was convinced, as well, that this third champion would be a heavyweight. He was further convinced that said-heavyweight would be the youngest champion in the history of the division. Tyson recalls their meeting thusly:
Cus took one look at Mike, stared and grinned, silently.
Tyson initially suspected the weird old man was some kind of chickenhawk, an older, usually wealthy gay man who preyed on young and vulnerable boys.
Finally, though, Cus ceased smiling and finally spoke.
“It has taken me a lifetime to conjure you with my mind.”
Imagine being told such a thing, while young and impressionable, by a bizarre, craggy-faced little sloop-shouldered man, who, despite his humble appearance, seems entirely without fear.
Cus got Tyson out of Tryon, rescuing him from the pit, so to speak, but asked for Tyson’s loyalty and trust in return. Tyson initially balked at the man’s bargain, and bridled even more at the rough training regimen he was subjected to. Like the hero in the monomyth of Joseph Campbell, Tyson resisted the call to action, the path to adventure. But the wise old tutor eventually found the weak spots in Tyson’s psyche—just as he had with Floyd Patterson—probing them but also shoring them up.
He made Tyson stronger—both physically and mentally—and also gave him the tools to see himself through in his quest alone after he had passed his initiation test. Tyson went from distrusting Obi-Wan and refusing he had the ability to wield the force to eventually loving the man and in turn discovering his own greatness.
Then the old man died, and the curse of bitterness was passed on from the old to the young. Tyson grieved for a short time, but mostly just raged, outside of as well as in the ring, at the world, at opponents, at his own shadow. These rages in the hadal depths are also part of the hero’s quest, though.
And the young hero became a conqueror, but then lost himself in the wilderness. He went to prison (confined to the dungeon) where he was forced to regain humility and focus, and rediscover the wisdom of his master’s tutelage. One wonders if Cus’s holographic shroud appeared to Mike in his cell, much as the flickering images of Obi-Wan and Yoda appeared to intermittently to offer additional guidance to Luke Skywalker.
Yes, young George Lucas had the Campbellian monomyth very much in mind when he decided to make his space opera. There’s a reason that taproot he discovered still bears sweet water, all these decades later.
Tyson had more triumphs and heartaches in the ring and outside of it. He regained his crown but found that all that glittered was not gold, and so forsook the things of the world, including the accolades and his image of himself as a conqueror.
For a time he disappeared, letting his body and mind wither, gaining hundreds of pounds, and losing his daughter in a tragic accident.
At last Tyson came back, disproving Fitzgerald’s old saw about American lives and second acts, reinventing himself as a professional monologue artist, motivational speaker, and podcaster.
Now Tyson is older, wiser, and in the position of guru for any who might care to listen. He spends an inordinate amount of time in his rookery filled with pigeons, a pastime he picked up as a youth in Brooklyn. Birds were easy pets to keep even in the claustrophobic experiment in racial and cultural anomie that is the American ghetto. The birds also gave Mike a pretext to ascend to the roof of his brownstone, where he could be alone with his thoughts, the birds, the sky with its clouds.
And despite Tyson’s massive footprint in popular culture, even to this day, he has about him the aura of a holy ascetic, or a hermit shadowboxing in his platonic cave, the ultimate loner.
I won’t bother going step by step through the “story beats” or stops on the cycle as delineated by Joseph Campbell in his works on comparative mythology. Nor will I recapitulate the details of Tyson’s life in any greater detail than I already have. Suffice it to say that if you place the monomyth of Joseph Campbell alongside the real life of the mythic figure of Mike Tyson, the overlap is uncanny.
The only thing that could make it all even more eerily serendipitous would be if Tyson were to be approached by some young, angry lost man, the way he approached Cus all those years ago.
I know I said Cus approached Mike, not the other way around, but in such fatalist exchanges who “finds” who is academic. Both were walking toward each other on the fate’s tightrope, the only difference being that Cus knew it (or conjured it) while Mike was busy raging at his shadow, conjuring nothing but trouble, and—if he kept going—his own premature self-destruction.
Still, I can see Mike seeking the boy out, rescuing him from some pit where he is currently languishing.
It really wouldn’t surprise me if things came full circle, that the myth was immanentized again, the story instantiated as flesh once more, just for symmetry, to say nothing of shits and giggles.
The myth is much realer than what we recognize as reality. It’s just that the gods rarely find one of us a worthy vessel to prove it. They’re sparing with their most rarified brands of anima and pneuma, and only ensoul those vessels which occupy that liminal space between man and god— demigods, Mischling offspring of gods and mortals who somehow manage to hot potato that Promethean fire until they develop strong calluses on their able hands.
I suppose we should be thankful, though, that most of us have not earned the scrutiny of such Olympian deities. Sure, the highs are high, but the lows look abysmal, and burn as many men as they forge with their fire.