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I.
By the winter of 1990, Mike Tyson, at the age of 23, was already well on his way to falling apart. The people closest to him had either died or left him or been fired; he had brought the promoter Don King into his inner circle, and King had essentially let a young man surrounded by the temptations of youth and fame do whatever he wanted.
Maybe now, we would have seen it coming. Maybe Mike Tyson’s personal decline would have been chronicled by a society of smartphones and social media. Maybe TMZ would have burrowed in deep on his increasingly erratic personal life. And maybe, when he stepped into the ring against a largely anonymous opponent named Buster Douglas in Tokyo, the narrative would have been about an undisciplined young man on the verge of collapse.
But in that moment, in that era, Mike Tyson still possessed an air of invincibility. He did not just fight his opponents; he destroyed them. He had won all 37 of his fights, 33 of them by knockout. Tyson was the most unstoppable force of his era. “Mike Tyson was considered totally invincible at that time,” said broadcaster Bob Sheridan in Eric Raskin’s outstanding 2015 oral history of the Tyson-Douglas fight for Playboy. “He would come out with just a towel over his shoulders with the hole cut out, no socks and those black trunks. He’d snarl around the ring before the fights and push his gloves back to try to get as much knuckle into his gloves as possible. I can’t think of anybody else who was that intimidating.”
Those of us who followed this fight from the other side of the world—those of us who were young and naive enough to believe in such things—still bought into the Tyson mystique at that moment. We didn’t know what was happening on the inside. We never really saw it coming. When Tyson went down, it felt like a fever dream; it felt as if the entire world had turned sideways. Only in retrospect did it become clear that Tyson wasn’t prepared, that he had spent the weeks before the fight partying and sleeping with women and failing to train much at all. Tyson didn’t think he needed to bother with training; he viewed Buster Douglas as an inferior fighter in every way, which was true, until it wasn’t true.
Everything after that descended into tabloid hell: Tyson was one of the first modern sports celebrities to truly break down before our very eyes. He went to prison; he tore a chunk out of a man’s ear. He became a trainwreck; he became a punchline. His boxing career, Tyson later said, basically ended in 1990. After that, he was nothing more than a hollow celebrity.
II.
From Raskin’s oral history of the Tyson-Douglas fight, according to one high-profile attendee:
TRUMP: What Buster Douglas did was take the mystique away from Mike Tyson. Just totally took the mystique.
III.
It is an odd thing to watch a seemingly implacable bully collapse before our very eyes. But when it happens—whether you know it’s coming or not—it is stunning to watch. What made Mike Tyson so fascinating in the first place is that he understood the power of spectacle; he didn’t waste time when pummeling his opponents.
Tyson was highly intelligent and incredibly self-aware, but in the months leading up to the Douglas fight, he’d fully transformed himself into a supervillain. “Everybody was biased against me back then,” Tyson told Raskin. “I was…pretty arrogant and stuff and saying what was on my mind without having a filter.”
IV.
From Raskin’s oral history, a quote from commentator and journalist Larry Merchant:
MERCHANT: One of the things that stood out before the fight was how Douglas trotted to the ring. Most guys are not running to fight Mike Tyson, or anybody else for that matter. And this guy is trotting toward the ring. It turned out to be revealing in its way, as part of the whole narrative.
V.
This was the moment when you knew something was fundamentally different:
She did not shy away from a bully. She trotted directly toward him, forced him to look her in the eye, and did not let up for the next two hours.
What happens now remains an open question—Buster Douglas, after all, faded from public view after his stunning defeat of Tyson—but it is possible we will remember this moment the same way we remember that Tyson-Douglas fight, at least in terms of how it completely dismantled the aura of one of the most intimidating figures of the era, and how it rendered him into a punchline. The mystique was gone. Mike Tyson came to mean something else after 1990; he was no longer invincible. He was pitiable.
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Very, very well done.
Not condoning physical violence of course but another parallel I thought of is the bully (and the toady) from “A Christmas Story.” What goes around comes around - Ralphie will only take so much…