"It was all I would ever think about," Tyson said. It was his first fight as a pay-per-view headliner and arguably his greatest moment. In many ways, Tyson's career peaked at the tender age of 22, when he knocked out Michael Spinks in just 91 seconds in June 1988. He intersected with inner-city music and became a symbol of that movement. He was the kind of athlete who got on the front page of the paper as well as the back page." And he was a compelling figure, even when he was a bad boy. They were able to follow his career from an early age. "There was a genuine excitement about Tyson because people saw him when he was young. I suggested to HBO we might try following this young guy and seeing if he makes it," Merchant, who served as HBO's expert analyst, told Bleacher Report. "I originally brought a tape of Mike Tyson's first 10 or 11 fights to HBO at the request of Jimmy Jacobs. By the time boxing insider Larry Merchant brought the tape to HBO executives, Tyson was a star just waiting for his opportunity to shine. The result was an incredible grassroots demand for the young heavyweight. Millions of sports fans across the country who had never seen him in a live fight saw the reel and became convinced that this 19-year-old from upstate New York was a kaleidoscopic knockout machine and was going to be an indomitable force at heavyweight." So in 1986 and into 1987, if a sports director in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, or Spokane, Washington, had a given night without any local sports news, an easy way to entertain your audience was running the Tyson highlight reel. A lot of the knockouts were visually spectacular guys were flying through the air. "Cayton and Jacobs edited together a compact, minute-and-a-half collection of Tyson knockouts and sent it to every local sports director in the country.
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Particularly in small markets, where you didn't have professional sports franchises, that wasn't always so easy.
"And every local news broadcast, generally speaking, would have to fill two-to-three minutes of a half-hour show with sports. Local news programs were still the dominant vehicle through which Americans received their information," announcer Jim Lampley, who called the fight for HBO, told Bleacher Report. "At that time, in the middle-1980s, there was no World Wide Web. Lampley in the 1990s Al Bello/Getty Images That old trope, "the wrath of God," comes to mind. The single-mindedness of his ring style works to suggest that his grievance has the force of a natural catastrophe. There is the unsettling air about Tyson, with his impassive death's-head face, his unwavering stare, and his refusal to glamorize himself in the ring - no robe, no socks, only the signature black trunks and shoes - that the violence he unleashes against his opponents is somehow just that some hurt, some wound, some insult in his past, personal or ancestral, will be redressed in the ring some mysterious imbalance righted. Tyson attracted people who might not normally be attracted to boxing at all, like novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who introduced the young fighter to New York's intelligentsia in her book On Boxing: Lunging hooks and uppercuts speak loudly and carry a clear message: This is a man not to be trifled with. Who he beat was less important than the manner in which he beat them. Truth, in many ways, is less important to his legacy than the hazy and murky fantasy world, the one where he deposited a cast of disposable afterthoughts on their keisters. Something about Tyson was larger than life. Even today, after it's clearly been established he was, objectively, the fourth-best heavyweight of his own generation, fans with their heads firmly in the sand continue to compare him to Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis and the great Jack Dempsey, warriors nonpareil.
There is a mythology built around Tyson that endures. Barely able to stand, his career as an undefeated fighter was over.ĭouglas, a 42-to-1 underdog, had done the seemingly impossible: He had beaten the unbeatable Mike Tyson. Tyson found his mouthpiece, inserted it halfway into his mouth and wobbled to his feet at the count of nine. And that's how the baddest man on the planet ended up on his hands and knees, a dazed expression replacing his normally fearsome scowl, searching for his equipment as referee Octavio Meyran counted an end to his reign on top of the sport.
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