Picture a gym in the Catskills. A trainer stands at the side of a heavy bag and calls out a number. A young fighter answers with a punch. A second number, a second punch, and then a third, until the sequence has run itself.

Watch Mike Tyson in his prime and you notice the speed first, then the power. What you cannot see is the instruction sitting behind it. This is how that system worked, who helped build it, and why it mattered as much as the knockouts.

Cus D'Amato handled the careers of Floyd Patterson, José Torres and Mike Tyson, all of whom went into the Hall of Fame (Wikipedia). Patterson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history in 1956, at 21 years and almost 11 months, a record Tyson would later take.

The style he taught is known as peekaboo, but D'Amato did not use that name. He called it a tight defence (Wikipedia). The fighter keeps the gloves close to the cheeks and the forearms in front of the face, with the fists at nose and eye level, while the head moves from side to side, bobbing and weaving. Critics at the time believed you could not mount an efficient attack from that position.

The Ring describes the system simply. D'Amato founded a method where every punch was represented by a number, and he would shout the numbers in different orders while the fighter responded with the matching punches. The numbers themselves never changed, but stringing them together in different patterns made the system flexible (The Ring).

The most common version of the list is below.

Source: Wikipedia, Peekaboo (boxing style). Lists in other sources vary slightly, and some stop at seven punches.

Combinations were the numbers in order. According to an excerpt of Monteith Illingworth's biography of Tyson, a 5 then 4 was a left hook to the body followed by a right uppercut, and a 7, 2, 3 was a jab, a right hand and a left uppercut. The same excerpt says D'Amato first worked this out with José Torres, writing the numbers on a makeshift bag and calling combinations while Torres threw them (Illingworth excerpt).

The most famous combination of all was Tyson's 6 then 4 (Wikipedia): a right hand to the body, then a right uppercut.

Fighters trained in the style were drilled on the stationary dummy and the bag until they could throw rapid combinations with what D'Amato called "bad intentions" (Wikipedia).

Teddy Atlas worked as a trainer and cornerman with the young Tyson between 1979 and 1982, while D'Amato moved into a mentoring role (Wikipedia). Atlas left the camp in 1982 (Wikipedia). The Illingworth excerpt says Atlas began with defence, because Tyson already had speed and power but little protection, and that once his defence improved, his offence improved with it.

Kevin Rooney took over. He had been with Tyson since late 1982, when Tyson was 16 and had just won the National Junior Olympics (Wikipedia). D'Amato's biography page credits Rooney with emphasising elusive movement (Wikipedia).

D'Amato died on 4 November 1985. Tyson already had 11 knockouts in 11 fights, and Rooney carried on developing him (The Ring). On 22 November 1986 Tyson dropped Trevor Berbick twice in round 2 and became the youngest heavyweight champion in history. Under Rooney, he won all 35 of his professional fights, 31 of them by knockout.

In 1988, after the Michael Spinks fight, Tyson fired Rooney and the rest of his original team, on the insistence of Don King. Wikipedia's account says his head movement and defensive work noticeably declined afterwards, and his first loss, to Buster Douglas, came 18 months later. Boxing analyst Larry Merchant credited the Douglas result to Rooney's absence from the corner (Wikipedia). That is an opinion, not a proven cause, but it is a widely shared one.

Rooney later sued Tyson for breach of contract and won over 4 million dollars. An AP report in October 1996 put the figure at 4.4 million.

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The next time you watch an old Tyson fight, listen past the commentary and watch his hands. Somewhere in there is a language that took years to teach. The punches belonged to Tyson. The numbers belonged to D'Amato, and he made sure Tyson could speak them without thinking.

Then the bell rings.

Good corners make the difficult part simple.

Behind every fast pair of hands is a voice that taught them what to do.

Which fighter would you have loved to hear called by numbers? Reply and tell me.

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