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10 Rounds with the director of Tyson about the former champ, Don King and cheeseburgers

While sitting at the W hotel in downtown Dallas with a handful of other journalists, we await screenwriter/director James Toback. A covered tray of food is brought in and set beside me. A minute later in walks Toback who takes a seat to my right. as I mic him for another journalist he uncovers his tray, a mouthwatering cheeseburger and a large order of fries sits before him. The man smothers his meal in ketchup to the point that the red tomato condiment is dripping in large drops and plops onto his plate. A smile crosses his face as he takes a bite and begins the interview about his new documentary on former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, simply entitled Tyson. He’s in Dallas, Texas for the AFI Film Festival and been on the go.

Tyson was an Official Selection at The 2008 Cannes Film Festival and was awarded the LE K.O. prize by the Un Certain Regard jury. It was also an Official Selection at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

The hour-and-a-half long documentary is a look at the world that created Tyson then the world he created for himself. Toback, despite having a good name and reputation in Hollywood, had to fight all the way tot he end to get the documentary made. Getting financial backing at the last moment from Denver Nuggets basketball star Carmelo Anthony was a big help to finishing this in-depth look at Tyson as he tells his own story to an old friend.

James Toback (JT): Wow this looks good. This is not fair. Excuse for doing this [eating] in front of you. I’m ready anytime you are.

Other Media (OM): You’ve done mostly fictional films in the past so why do a documentary on Mike Tyson?

JT: He’s a fascinating figure, period. He has a great stature and a wide existence in the worldwide public imagination. The subject forces one to deal with all of the subjects that interest me in life and in film, anyway: race, madness, crime, money, death and art and boxing. So in doing a movie about him one is necessarily addressing all of those other issues. In addition he has fascinated me individually. I like watching him and listening to him. I have known his since 1985. He is one of the few people I have known over the years I have found intriguing whenever we have spoken on the phone or in person. There’s never been a boring minute. There’s never been a time that we’ve been together when I was thinking “Okay, ready to move on.” For all those reasons I thought it’d make a fascinating film.

The question was when? I’ve done two other films with him. One, rather substantial, I don’t know if you saw Black and White, [Robert] Downey [jr.], Ben Stiller, Wu-Tang Clan, Brooke Shields and Tyson among others. Mike has some great scenes in that movie. Some rather notorious ones. One notorious one in which Downey plays the gay husband of Brooke Shields, hits on Mike relentlessly until Mike responds by slapping him, choking and slamming him on the ground. Then Brooke Shields comes over and hits on Mike and discombobulates him.

It’s the next scene he’s in in which he’s in the gym and Power of Wu-Tang Clan approaches him, Mike’s playing himself, and asks for advice on whether he, Power, should kill this guy that he grew up with who is about to betray him, rat on him and get him incarcerated. Mike gives a contradictory answer when he says “Yes, you should kill him” and then a minute later says, “No, that’s not what [I] said.” He has to worry about being in a penitentiary and he launches into a description of being strip-searched and humiliated in the penitentiary. It’s that meditative, self-analytical Tyson that made me think, even as I was watching and listening to him while the scene was being done, I should do a whole movie of Mike. It should be a portrait like this. I just had to find the right visual style.

I brought it up afterwards and he said “Anytime you’re ready, I am.” Nine years later after he crashed and been arrested for cocaine possession and put into rehab I thought, “This is the time to do it, when he’s in this meditative state. When he’s not rationed in terms of time commitment and when I can just get him alone for ten hours a day for five days nonstop.

OM: That’s how long it took, five days?

JT: Five days of shooting and one year of editing.

Ethan Nahté (EN): You chose to utilize two different kinds of HD cameras. Was that to obtain a different visual look or was it an experiment to test new technologies for a future project?

JT: That was Lyle McConkey’s decision. He’s the greatest steadicam operator in the world and has been my cinematographer on my last three films. He suggested that the best way to do the movie visually was a variety of looks. There was no way we were going to get any uniformity because we were going to use fight footage that would have all sorts of different kinds of quality and other interviews that have been done. So instead of trying to flatten everything out and make it look harmonious let’s admit that we are going to be looks and why not have two different cameras (the Panasonic Genesis and the Vericam) that work extremely well.

The notion of shooting High Def was inevitable because in order to get what I wanted to get from him, to be interrupting after four or ten minutes with a mag head (the camera film) running out would’ve been lethal. What shooting in High Def allowed us to do was just go minutes, and I mean seven-eight-nine minutes at a time in silence, continue without any pressure to say anything and allow him, Tyson, pick up and start again. Most of the breakthrough moments of the film happened took place after he had been sitting there saying nothing for several minutes. In an ordinary circumstance the next question would come or there would’ve been a break in the mood. There was almost a psychoanalytic atmosphere on the set which enabled him to allow some of these varied voices to come out.

OM: Why did you decide to go with Mike narrating his own life instead of outside sources talking about Mike?

JT: Because I was thinking of this as an investigation whose goal was to get at the factual truth of specific situations, which is an unknowable, unachievable task anyway, because you will never know what happened between two people in a room or any event where you weren’t present. As a matter of fact all you do when you get people who were present is different versions of the same event. Ultimately it’s a question of believability. And to the extent that that was at work at all, what really happened here or there, I think it isn’t that one is asked to take everything Mike says at face value. It’s that you make your own judgment about whether it feels like the truth or not. That’s as far as I felt like I needed to go in what did or did not happen.

What interested me much more was an unadulterated, unadorned portrait of Mike’s self-portrait or Mike Tyson presented by me. So if you wanted to take a painter’s analogy, for instance, it would be a self-portrait of Gauguin which would not be the same as a photograph of Gauguin but it would be Gauguin’s version of Gauguin.

OM: Had he lost all of his money and couldn’t get any legal help? I thought it was a railroad at the time.

JT: It was a railroad. I would say there are a lot of suspicions one might have. Certainly, it was inexplicable. A lawyer from Washington, D.C. , a very successful one, had defended Don King successfully in his tax evasion case, was shipped off to Indiana to defend Tyson in a rape case against a seasoned Indiana prosecutor who had a personal friendship with the judge. Let’s just put it this way, if one were creating a fictional story and one wanted to suggest a certain sabotage of the accused, these would all be fruitful ways of making that a scenario. Mike, who doesn’t know about any of this stuff, went along with Don King’s suggestion that he hire this lawyer who, of course, was completely out of his league. Among other egregious questionable decisions, did not want Mike to testify himself.

OM: You said you love boxing. It seems like after Cus died it seems that [Tyson] quickly devolved into a brawler.

JT: That’s exactly true. Cus had that six-punch out of the peek-a-boo style that he taught which [Floyd] Patterson used, José Torres used. It was his unique system where you held your gloves up at the side of your face, you were constantly bobbing and weaving and you threw six punches out of that crouch in which you sort of faced your opponent instead of the standard sideways stance.

In fact, Cus would call out numbers. Each punch had a number: one-three-five-six-two… and the punches were so ingrained and semantically digested that the fighter would spring, literally on point, into each punch as it was called out. Once Cus was gone Mike’s training habits deteriorated and he did become a brawler in the style of his most admired fighter, who was Jack Dempsey. They called Dempsey the Manassa Mauler. He would come in clubbing and Mike really started to resemble Dempsey in his style.

OM: But to come out with that uppercut in the first round, Cus would’ve never allowed him to do that.

JT: No, he had a style that suited him better than any style ever could. It also enabled him to function with that lightning speed and take advantage of his speed. In fact there’s that part of the film where he says, “Cus D’Amato always said that speed was the most important thing. Speed kills.” The fascinating comment that Tyson makes about his idols, whom he modeled himself after stylistically, not Dempsey, later on, but Henry Armstrong, Tony Canzoneri and Kid Chocolate, all lightweights. All people who relied on speed. So you had this combination of this devastating punching power, certainly the greatest one-punch power in boxing history, along with the speed of a lightweight. Which is why early in his career, you see that three minute clip at the beginning of the movie, you couldn’t put that together from any other fighters. He was unstoppable.

He lets it slip once when he says, “Mike Tyson, the greatest fighter who ever lived.” For the record he doesn’t like to say that. He always says [Muhammad] Ali is the greatest. He knows that in that period by anybody.

OM: What do you think of early Mike Tyson versus Ali?

JT: I don’t think Ali could’ve beaten him. He was just as fast as Ali and Ali’s advantage was his speed and elusiveness. Tyson was just as fast. He was a much better puncher. They were similar in their ability to take punches. I think that it would’ve been a great fight to watch but I think Tyson would’ve won. In fact they’re coming out with a fantasy game now where you virtual box.

But they’re friends. In fact, Howard Bingham, who is Ali’s oldest and best friend and photographer has a son named Damon Bingham who is the manager of both Ali and Tyson. So Muhammad and Mike are friends. There’s that great moment in the movie where (Tyson is preparing to fight Trevor Berbick, who had humiliated Ali in his last fight in the Bahamas) Ali whispers in Tyson’s before the Berbick fight. Mike says Ali said, “Get him for me,” and then he goes and demolishes Berbick.

OM: Considering what happened to Ali with the Parkinson’s, brain degeneration and all that, Fate may have done Tyson a favor by taking him out of the ring.

JT: No question. He was getting to a point, and it’s painful to watch, where he’s being hit all the time in those last few fights. In fact, when he first saw the movie he said, “Do you have to have me being knocked out so many times?” I said, “Listen, I cut out the Danny Williams fight.” He said, “Gee, thanks.”

OM: Mike says near the end of the movie, “I have to have everything or I’ve got to have nothing.” Do you think that’s honestly the way that Mike feels or is that sort of just an alleviation for how he fell?

JT: He still knows, as he puts it, an extremist by nature. He’s not capable of understanding moderation. He says that a normal person can’t understand the mind of an extremist. The reverse is true. Someone who lives in extremes can’t understand how someone can live moderately. It’s kind of a fundamental division between people. I know it. I’m what he calls an extremist by nature.

I think it’s almost a chemical genetic thing. It’s not just sociological. In fact, any generalization one would want to make about Mike you would have to question in terms of the genetic background or sociological background because his brother is a brain surgeon in Atlanta and couldn’t be more dissimilar to Mike. I think it comes down to some mysterious arrival at a place where that’s just who you are. You feel at home in extremes and you don’t know how to plant yourself in the middle. And people who feel at home in the middle feel nervous and out of sync when they are pushed to the extreme. The good thing about extremists is that they are capable of all kinds of wonderful achievements and the bad thing is they’re eventually going to be their own worst enemy in many areas. I think one of the understandings that Mike and I have had about other over the years has stemmed from the fact that we both have these extreme temperaments which have brought us a lot of success and a lot of misery, as well.
(pause)
I have to say this is one of the best cheeseburgers I’ve ever had (everyone laughs as Toback cracks a huge smile of appreciation).

OM: What was the purpose of the split-screens that you used?

JT: I felt that the first task for as a director was to find a style for the movie. Just to shoot a regular interview would’ve been lethal. There’s no way I could carry the movie off that way. So, I thought that this technique I had been using for awhile, it’s in the long opening credit sequence of Harvard Man and in the long end credit sequence of Black and White and the multiple voices are in Harvard Man, to take those two things, the split screen and the multiple voices and to use them throughout a movie seemed to be most suited to this subject because Mike, of all people, is so fragmented a personality. Let’s say, ”contains so many people within him,” that this fragmentation of imagery and layering of voices seems to allow a lot of these personalities and voices to come through simultaneously.

OM: One of the things that struck me was when you hear Mike Tyson quoting Oscar Wilde. Where did that come from?

JT: That came from me, actually. I just felt that poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” would fit ideally to that beach scene. I sprang it on Mike at the end of the day. I said, “How would you like to recite a few stanzas from ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’?”  He said, “I don’t know the poem.” I said, “Well, it’s written by Oscar Wilde.” He said right away in his sort of fetishistically information obsessed mind, “Do you know who Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend was?” I said,”Who?” He said, “Lord Alfred Douglas. Do you know who Lord Alfred Douglas’ father was?” I said, “The Marquess of Queensbury.” He said, “You know, those are the Queensbury rules. Those are boxing rules.” I said, “I know that.” He said, “Very few people know that.”

I read it to him and he said, “Okay, let me read it.” I just had a feeling that he would nail it on the first reading and I recorded it and that was it. He did one reading and that was it. It’s very dramatic the way he does it. Very appropriate to his own circumstances.

OM: What would you say is the cause of his downfall?

JT: The key thing is the way he talks about the death of Cus D’Amato when he was nineteen. He speaks of himself at nineteen as though he were thirteen - “I was just a kid, I was alone, etc.” He really talks about somebody who was still completely reliant on a father figure. I mean there are nineteen-year-olds who speak of themselves as experienced independent adults. Not a lot of them but certainly they exist. You would think that given Mike Tyson’s early years he would be one of them. But because he had lived in this cocoon-like protected environment for six years with Cus D’Amato in charge of everything, it‘s almost as if he were still thirteen in his level of independence. The fact that the rug was pulled out from under him, suddenly you would say, ”Well the rug was pulled out from under a nineteen-year-old,” but really it was pulled out from under a thirteen-year-old and everything went askew from that point on.

In particular he did get hooked up with people who were not anything successful substitutes for Cus D’Amato. I mean and Robin Givens and her mother and Don King are not in the same league of sobering figures of authority to guide him. Given his prior nature and direction before he got involved with Cus and the fact that he had a huge amount of money available to him, which meant he could do basically whatever he wanted and get away with it, it was like being let loose with no restraint and no discipline. The discipline had been coterminous with Cus. So once Cus wasn’t there there was no discipline.

That’s why the Buster Douglas fight he talks about not preparing at all and not being ready. Going in he was drinking and partying. None of that would’ve been conceivable if Cus had been around.

OM: That seemed to be a persistent theme. Every time he said anything about a loss it’s always because he wasn’t prepared, never giving credit to his opponent.

JT: I think he believes that, though he doesn’t say it that way, but I think he probably believes, at least when he was physically in his prime, that there was no one who could’ve beaten him had he been in shape. I certainly believe that’s true. Of course you can’t prove it. Often fighters insist on rematches, they’re convinced they could win. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes fighters lose four times to the same guy and each time they still think there’s something other than the fact that the guy is just better than they are. I think in this case there wasn’t anyone that he lost to he shouldn’t have beaten. Certainly up to the point where he had his skills.

Once he got out of prison he didn’t have the same skills. In fact, the first time I talked to him after he came out of prison he referred to his decaying and eroded skills. He knew he would never be the same fighter again. After the second [Evander] Holyfield fight he lost interest in boxing, period, and he was just fighting for money. Which he admits to. Very rarely fighters do that, but he really didn’t care. He just wanted the paycheck. So there’s the fact that he was no longer in his prime and he didn’t have a motivation to get in shape or even try to do his best because he just wanted the money and to move on.

OM: It’s an ironic parallel to Ali’s career.

JT: Ali, of course, didn’t go to prison, but he was exiled for a certain amount of time. When he came back and fought Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonvena he was not the same fighter ever again. Even though he had some great wins as Mike did and regained the title as Mike did, they did it as shadows of themselves.

OM: Given that you knew Mike before shooting Tyson how much was a surprise in what he revealed?

JT: Quite a bit. Not only was I surprised, he was surprised. When he first saw the movie I know that he was quite shocked at some of the things he said because there was sort of a quasi-psychoanalytic atmosphere… very quiet where a voice just came out. I think in particular what I was struck by was the level of fear that he confesses to. Mike’s constantly saying he was “… afraid, so afraid…” as if his entire, not just boxing life, but his entire life was a response to fear.

And to admitting to his fear and, in the case of boxing, transmitting his fear to the opponent. He talks about staring into the eyes of his opponent and making his opponent feel the fear that he had felt. So by the time he was actually the ring and ready to fight they both knew that Tyson was going to win because Tyson had infected with his own fear. He doesn’t , in anyway, try to hide that fear was the motivating force and pervasive psychic reality.

OM: Do you think this film is sort of a vindication for him? He does come off as very articulate and goes against his reputation.

JT: I think the way he looks at is that he’s been this way all along, so it doesn’t come as a surprise. I think whether to inure himself of the humiliation and pain of being ridiculed or whatever he’s kind of shut himself off from concern of what people say or think about him. He doesn’t read much about himself and doesn’t want to know in many cases. He’s prepared for almost anything negative.

In fact, when we had our first screening, which at the Cannes Film Festival last May, we had a ten minute standing ovation. I wasn’t expecting that but I certainly would’ve been surprised if hadn’t had a good response just from prior showings to other people. He, on the other hand, had no confidence whatsoever that people were going to like the movie at all or like him at all.

I later found out that his two managers had been standing outside in the lobby where they could hear what was going on in the theater. They had just come back from dinner. The movie was close to over and Mike said, “Do you think Jim would mind if I went back to my hotel and just stayed there?” They said, “No, you gotta go in.” He said, “What if they hate me?” They said, “Well that’s not going to happen.” He said, “How do you know that?”  It wasn’t until he started to hear all of the applause and then welling up of applause then he came into the theater and up onto the stage. But he was perfectly prepared and half expected to hear the opposite. In which case he would’ve just left and wiped it from his imagination and memory.

A Dutch journalist in a recent interview asked Mike what he thought was going to happen with this movie and Mike said, “I thought we were going to be standing on the corner 125th Street and 8th Avenue signing DVDs and taking cash.

The guy asked me what I thought and I said, “I thought we were going to go to the Cannes Film Festival and win a prize.” Afterwards I asked Mike, “Was that what you thought,” and he said, “Yeah.”

OM: Do you see him as a very complex person?

JT:He’s got voices going on all the time. It’s almost as if what he says is an involuntary choice to let that one speak as opposed to the others going on. It’s why he’s constantly contradicting himself because there’s not a rational, coherent one-note program going on with the others deeply buried underneath as most people have. It’s an unconscience that’s constantly pushing things up to fight whatever is at the top and often overcoming it.

OM: How is his financial situation now? Is he set for life or does he have to worry?

JT:I don’t think even he knows what is. His managers probably have a better idea than he does. He has money to do within reason what he wants to do but he certainly doesn’t have anything like what he had. In the movie it says that he had over $300 million at one point. Then there’s hilarious thing where he says he won the lawsuit against Don King and said they gave him some small amount of money. It was $20 or $30 million. I can’t remember.

Everyone always cracks up at that and the reason is at that point, even though he’ll never have the kind of money he once had, the unit in his head is still $100 million. There’s $100 million, $200 million, $300 million and then there’s in-between. So if you’re under $50 million, whether it’s $20, $30, $40, who cares if your unit is $100 million. Most people their unit is whatever it is, $10 thousand or $100 thousand. He was in the low bracket there at $30 million and it was almost embarrassing to say. He does not find that funny.

EN: King always said, “I’ll go into the ring with a winner. I’ll come out of the ring with a winner.” Did Tyson just kind of ignore that before he hooked up with Don King or did he not realize until afterwards that Don wasn’t the most scrupulous of people?

JT: I never understood how he got hooked up with King. He was always saying that he would never sign with King. Ali had had a very bad experience with King.

EN: Everyone has had a bad experience with King.

JT:That’s right. But he and Ali were very friendly. I was kind of shocked as most people who knew Mike back then. He stayed with King for a long time. It wasn’t just before prison. The first thing out of prison he went back with King. Once in the movie he talks about it having been called to his attention that large sums of money were missing. Then he started rethinking his alliances.

Then there’s that scene in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel, which I think comes as a shock to people cause that’s never been reported anywhere else when he confronts King. That was the final severance.

King is a unique figure in not just boxing history but American history. He has been able to kind of survive and stay on top of his game despite relentless, endless disastrous experiences for the people involved with him over and over again over the years. He’s still there with that big smile and as in the movie, “Only in America.”

EN: He’s sort of like the hot stove that you tell people not to touch and you have to go touch it anyway.

JT:Yeah, right. (he laughs)

OM: How many boxing promoters are there at that level?

JT: Well that’s the thing, you think someone else could’ve emerged to challenge him but Bob Arum is the only one who has ever, in King’s era, come close. And Arum hasn’t really matched him. Now Oscar de la Hoya is trying to get something going. He has a promotional force to a degree. King has managed to stay afloat, regardless, and to get close to the big fights.

There he was the other night at a fight in Biloxi, Mississippi sitting there at ringside with [Governor] Haley Barber as if they were best friends. He has had a very cozy relationship with powerful Republicans. He and George Bush met and there is with Barber. No one seems to be embarrassed by the association, either. With Barber that was a serious photo op because the camera was placed so that all through the fight, seventy-five percent of the time you’re seeing the two of them sitting there at ringside.

OM: What is Tyson’s emotional environment right now?

JT: He’s in a very relatively tranquil, contained and almost serene state. He became a father again a few months ago. He’s living with the girl who’s the mother of his daughter. He actually said to me the other day, “You’re not going to believe this but not only am I being completely monogamous with this girl but I haven’t been interested in anybody else.”

I know that he wouldn’t lie to me about that. There’d be no reason to. I did find that to be astonishing given his nature and his history. He seems to be much more calm and relaxed and under control than he’s been at any other time other than right at the time when we were shooting the movie and he was in rehab.

OM: The manic-depressive thing mentioned on Barbara Walters, was that anything?

JT: It’s certainly a predictable diagnosis given his erratic behavior. I think the most odd thing about that encounter was that he was completely unprepared for what his wife (Robin Givens) was about to say in front of him with him sitting there on national television. In addition, in effect to have his divorce announced on national television without his knowing that was happening. Where do you go from there except into divorce? He clearly didn’t have a clue what was about to come out of Robin’s mouth. It was as Robin thought, “What is the greatest number of people I can reach announcing my divorce?”

His voice over is quite interesting because he talks about thinking, in retrospect, that they probably expected him to go crazy and that would’ve made very successful television for ABC if he had. If you think about it it would’ve been one of the most memorable events in televisions if he had jumped up, started smashing things, swearing and going crazy. Would’ve been the most famous Barbara Walters interview of all time.

EN: Did you ever actually meet Robin during that time?

JT: I met her for two seconds, once, and she looked right through me. Brian Hamill, my friend, has a phrase, “Ambition was stamped on her forehead.”

EN: Which makes me wonder if she had a plan the whole time to play Mike.

JT:No one knows except her but it certainly would look as if… I mean, let’s put it this way. She’s come out of the woodwork recently in terms of domestic violence in terms of the Chris Brown case to revive herself talking about her supposedly abused relationship with Mike. Going on Larry King and talking about it.

It’s hard, of course, to say she’s just doing it for whatever reason. She says she’s doing it to warn other women and that it’s Domestic Abuse Syndrome. They’re all valid points. When you’re doing it in relation to a famous person and you’ve been a famous person out of the public’s eye, it certainly raises that question.

OM: I wanted to ask about the boxing footage that you used. Were there any problems picking which fights to use and were there any problems acquiring the rights?

JT: I went through three or four months of going over everything and narrowing it down to what I wanted. Then going over and over again through different versions of the movie and would fit and what did I not need. I finally arrived at what I wanted then we investigated what was available. Everything was available it was just that it was extremely expensive. What we ended up needing to pay to get the footage was not much less than what a major studio would’ve needed to pay. We got a slight discount but I was hoping we would get it for practically nothing. It was mainly from HBO and ESPN and a little from Showtime. I think we got a fifteen percent discount and given that this was a minuscule budget movie made by an individual, I financed most of the movie myself. I was hoping it would be like a gift. That was a certain fantasy that was quickly proved untrue.

Ross Greenburg, who is actually a friend of mine and head of HBO Sports, I said, “How can you not just give this to me?”. He said, “What are you talking about, give it to you? It’s what we sell. This is how we stay… what are you talking about, give it to you?” I said, “Because we’ve been friends for twenty years.” He said, “So?”

EN: See, now when you turn around and HBO wants to buy the rights to it once it gets out of the theater you can say, “Well the price is gonna be up there. I think Showtime may want it instead.” (more laughs)

JT: We finally got down to ESPN and they said, “Well if they give you fifteen percent we’ll give you a fifteen percent discount.” We got both of them to give a discount. But it still came to a substantial part of the post-production budget. If you took those two things it was probably half of the post-production budget.

Mike actually owned with Don King the Holyfield fights. Each of them is allowed one use of it without the other’s approval. So this is the one use that MIke made of it.

OM: How is it that you met Mike in the first place?

JT: He came by the set of The Pickup Artist which I was shooting at the time with Downey at the Museum of Natural History in 1985. Brian Hamill brought Mike over to the set. He knew Mike from Cus’ place in the Catskills. I started talking to Mike and we became friends fast. We had an immediate rapport. We were walking through Central Park at five in the morning and we were talking about all of the stuff that the movie talks about: sex, love, race, madness, crime death, money, boxing… all these things. He was very curious and wide-eyed. Nothing like now where he’s a seasoned, experienced world-weary guy and at the time he was almost a wide-eyed innocent. All the things that have happened to him now and changed him hadn’t yet happened. As I said before, at nineteen, in many ways he was like thirteen because he had had this completely sheltered existence from six years in the Catskills. You see that house in the movies and it was just literally way off in the woods. He was there all the time boxing, training, boxing, training under the supervision of Cus all the time. It’s as if your almost living in a timewarp.

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