Arguably the greatest upset in world sport over the last 50 years. I can’t think of anything that even comes close. Douglas was a 42-1 underdog and that was being exceedingly generous, I think. Tyson was considered unstoppable, thought to be on the way to becoming the greatest heavyweight of all time. He was knocking out champions in the first round. Before the fight, most sportswriters were debating on how many seconds Douglas would last.
Of course, 20 years on we know that Tyson was not the unstoppable force he appeared to be. In all truth he came along at a weak point in the heavyweight division, and Holyfield and Lewis in their prime were a class above him. In retrospect Tyson was a kind of freak of nature who was just surfing above the bad decisions which eventually contributed to his downfall.
I remember how this fight was on at about 4 in the morning our time on the East Coast. A bunch of my friends at Penn State were thinking about staying up to watch, but most of us decided to bail because…well, it’s Tyson. Who wanted to stay up four hours to watch a 90-second beatdown? Our loss.
If you haven’t seen it, check out the fight on YouTube. Get shivers as you watch Douglas take the belt, as the look in his eyes tells you, “Even I can’t believe this.”
I never really followed boxing closely, but I remember how freaky this was. Tyson’s last few fights before this one lasted, like you say, less than a few minutes each. His punch was considered an unstoppable force.
To see the relatively unknown Douglas take him down, and so quickly, was really shocking. Nobody saw it coming. And then Douglas himself didn’t exactly have a stellar career.
I watched it and Buster was beating Mike to the punch over and over. It was right from the start. I was surprised and told my wife come in here and watch Tyson lose. She said no way, and didn’t watch until the end.
It amazes me that boxers take an opponent as easy. They are big strong trained trained professionals. Take them as a joke and the joke may be on you.Tyson was screwing around during training. He believed his own hype of invincibility. But he allowed the myth to be destroyed and he could never recapture it.
It’s frequently said Tyson didn’t take Douglas seriously, that he lost more than Douglas won. Maybe, but funny how apparently, he’d taken everyone seriously up to that point. And to his credit, Tyson never gave up; he was getting his ass handed to him but he knocked Douglas down late in the fight and he had to be hit about a thousand times to finally be beaten.
Douglas fought about as perfectly tailored a fight as I have ever witnessed, in terms of executing a fight strategy that was specifically planned to defeat a particular opponent, and that played on his one advantage; his much longer reach and crushing jab. You could not have designed a better strategy to defeat Mike Tyson. It was a brilliant performance.
I was in the Air Force and living in the barracks. For several previous fights, we’d gathered at the home of one of the married guys, each kicking in a few bucks to cover the cost of the PPV/beer/food, and watch the fight. We decided not to bother with that this time, as it was on HBO, and nobody was expecting much of a fight. It was shown at night where we were…dunno if it was live or taped, but the internet was not around then, and none of us knew the outcome. I didn’t even bother cracking a beer, figuring it would be over before I finished the beer. After the first round, I saw something in Douglas. Looked like he, unlike many opponents, was not afraid. Guy came to fight, so I settled in with beer and watched the rest of it. When Tyson went down, the barracks damn near exploded. Guys were going nuts, and Douglas had done the unthinkable.
Pshh… I had already seen Tyson go down to little Mac, so nothing surprised me (This is the game room right?)
Seriously though, I guess I was 8 when this went down. I obviously had no grasp of the sport of boxing at the time, but it was pretty much an accepted fact that Mike Tyson was set to reign for the next 10 years or so. I never actually did see the fight, just heard the shocked disbelief in the following days.
I’d put it on par w/ the tanking of Bo Jackson in my future book: “Unstoppable Athletes: Stopped Cold”.
