Honestly, it seems longer than that. I was a kid and I didn’t watch it live, but I remember it being all the talk the next day. Biggest upset in sports history? Maybe.
The linked story quotes Don King saying Tyson should have won the fight if not for a long count when Douglas went down in the 8th. I don’t recall that being a big discussion point back then.
So, who watched this live and what was the reaction at the time?
I remember it well. I watched it live with my friends. I was 23. None of us were Tyson fans, but we fully expected another quick knock out victory. We were completely shocked and jumping up and down in disbelief.
Were there many Tyson fans at the time? Were people rooting against him, even though they fully expected him to cruise to victory? Was he kind of a heel, so to speak?
I remember being disappointed that he lost because I wanted to see him go undefeated. Plus Mike Tyson Punch Out was an awesome game.
The counts were a little skewed, long for Douglas, short for Tyson. But Tyson would have been knocked out shortly afterward, unlike Douglas he was exhausted and a sitting duck at that point for anyone who could throw a punch.
Tyson made a critical mistake in that fight, never get in the ring with a guy whose mom just died.
Had the count been faster, Douglas would have stood up sooner. He was not badly hurt and was waiting for the ref to say “eight.”
Tyson would not have been able to continue had the ref counted to twenty. He might have stood up, maybe, but the ref wouldn’t have allowed him to continue. He had nothing left. I thought it an astonishing feat of endurance that he lasted as long as he did; except for the one mistake in the eighth, Douglas had spent the entire fight beating Tyson with enough punishment to knock down three lesser boxers.
As shocking as it was, it certainly makes sense when you watch the fight. Douglas fought a technically perfect fight, save a moment of error in the eighth. That sums up the extent of the upset; Douglas fought almost as perfect a fight as a boxer could fight and he absolutely needed to in order to defeat Tyson. Had he made TWO mistakes, he’d have lost.
I was middle school/early HS during Tyson’s peak and my friends and I all fucking loved him. We all wanted to be Mike Tyson. The NES game didn’t hurt either.
I was in the navy at the time and the ship I was assigned to was actually docked in Japan at the time. Tyson had been so dominant and intimidating up to that point that the result came as a TOTAL shock. Personally I feel like he was never quite the same after he lost his aura of invincibility (although his personal issues didn’t help his cause either).
Tons of Tyson fans back then. So quick, so powerful, so many KO’s. Add in the Nintendo game and he was really popular with kids. I was shocked when he lost.
Twenty five years later, it’s still the most memorable sporting event of my life. Even as it was happening you couldn’t believe it. I was 13 or so watching with my Dad and a neighbor. It was a given that Tyson would win, it was just a matter of how long this nobody would last before getting knocked out.
I remember saying to my Dad early in the fight that it looked like Douglas might actually last, and they just about laughed me out of the room. “No, it’s just a matter of time, Tyson will catch him sooner or later”. When he finally went down for the count, it was just total shock.
I wasn’t old enough to remember the Miracle On Ice to compare that, but I can say no sporting event I’ve seen since has been close to as big an upset as this. As much as I’d like to put my hometown’s VCU Rams upset of top seeded Kansas a few years ago up there, there’s really just no comparison, it was like Superman dying.
Was the fight on pay-per-view in the US? I think my memory of it is “watching” it on a scrambled (but somewhat watchable) channel where the audio would pop in and out if you switched back and forth between channels. My family paid for HBO, so if it was on HBO live my memory is wrong.
Mike Tyson at that time was the most aggressive, strongest and dominating boxer that anyone had ever even conceived of. Mike Tyson was a punching machine turned up to 11. He was the most exciting thing to ever happen in what was already a fairly exciting sport and the world still loved him, at that time.
I was also in my 20s when this fight happened, and like everyone else here, watching it was a complete shock. You know that feeling you have when you order a Coke and get a Dr. Pepper by mistake? Multiply that by, oh, EVERYTHING and you might have a reference point for how it was to watch that fight.
Last Sunday the LVRJ ran a great story on the 25th anniversary of the fight.
I watched it - I was in 6th or 7th grade. Tyson had tons of fans, including me, and it was a huge shock. I don’t remember any discussion of the count, but it was a long time ago and I was just a kid.
Echoing others…Tyson was a living legend, a force above and beyond nature. The only resentment or dislike that I or any of my friends/roomies at the time had was the multiple times we wasted our college-pauper pay-per-view money on 1st-round knockouts 
We were all shocked as hell when Douglas won, but knew that we were watching a historic moment as soon as Douglas made it past the first 3 or 4 rounds. At the time, I remember thinking that Tyson was off his game and unagressive, but in hindsight it was Douglas (and his coaches) playing the right opposing game.
I am old enough to remember the “Miracle on Ice” but only just. At the time I didn’t know anything about the Soviets’ run of gold medals or how they’d beaten the tar out of even a bunch of different NHL squads (both “regular” and All-Star) in the months leading up to the 1980 Winter Olympics. At the time I just thought it was neat that the U.S. was winning gold in hockey (although that didn’t officially come until a couple of days later after the match against the Finns).
I’m pretty sure I watched it live on regular HBO. I don’t think I would have paid for PPV for that fight. In fact, I’m almost positive of that, any time I bought a PPV fight I had a few friends over, and I watched this one by myself. I almost skipped it.
I still think to this day that Mike Tyson in his prime is the baddest man I’ve ever seen in a boxing ring. There wasn’t any real competition for him for a long time. I remember that the day of the fight (or within a couple of days prior to it) there was a Tank McNamara strip about this fight with Tyson talking to one of his handlers asking something like “what’s this guy’s name again?”, and after the fight I went and pulled that paper out of the trash and cut out that strip. I might still have it around somewhere. I went to look for it on gocomics but it doesn’t archive that far back.
It was surreal to watch it unfold, and I kept waiting for Douglas to unravel. When he went down in the 8th round, I remember thinking “OK, here it comes” but it was apparent pretty quickly that he wasn’t hurt. When Tyson went down later in the fight, it was surreal. Everybody remembers Tyson in his prime as packing a monster punch, but people tend to forget that he was a really hard guy to hit, very elusive.
It’s a toss-up between that fight and the 1980 Miracle on Ice team as far as the most stunning sports upset I’ve ever seen. Both were absolutely unbelievable events.
Remember the fight well. Huge upset. Called everybody I knew right afterwards - “Buster Douglas just knocked out Mike Tyson!!! GAH!!!” I remember Douglas was in the top shape, excellent shape, of his life and he flat out beat Tyson no joke. Mike had kind of gotten accustomed to chewing people up and spitting them out and wasn’t quite ready for Buster to bring it like he did. Big props as they say to Buster’s team. They had him primed and ready. Then of course he took the rest of his career off so to speak and never was the same.
Tyson was very good, but he also faced only mediocre competition up to and including Buster Douglas.
Michael Spinks was undefeated when Tyson knocked him out in 91 seconds.
I saw it live. My parents didn’t usually buy PPV fights, but they did buy this one for some reason. (I’m almost positive it was PPV, because I remember my dad waffling on whether or not to buy it). I was 12. We got popcorn ready and everything and bought the fight as much for the undercard as the main event, as we all expected it to be a VERY short fight. We were taking bets on which round, or more importantly, how far into the first round Tyson would knock out Douglas. We watched all the undercard fights, and then were amazed by not only the stunning result, but frankly just the fact that it went more than 2-3 rounds.
He was a light heavyweight who had been largely inactive. As a heavyweight Spinks was mediocre competition. Larry Holmes had only lost to Michael Spinks when he was knocked out by Tyson. But Holmes had aged quickly, neither Spinks nor Tyson would have survived against him in his better days.
Any way you look at it Tyson had the advantage of fighting in the worst period of boxing history for heavyweights. He was undoubtedly a great fighter, he could knock out a rhinoceros, but he was never in the kind of condition needed to win long tough fights. Most heavyweight champions have been skilled boxers, not just brutes, but brutish power was all Tyson actually demonstrated in the ring.