Tyson vs Spinks 25 year anniversary today

Retire Michael Spinks after Cooney, remove him entirely from Mike Tyson's record, and I don't think the historical standings of either change much, especially in Tyson's case.

I didn't know anybody who was surprised by the blowout result. I was rooting for Spinks, but much was still being made of the fact he came in at 170 for Sears in his penultimate LHW bout. Tyson had been busy, fighting Tucker, Biggs, Holmes and Tubbs since Spinks had upset Cooney. Even with all the rust Gerry had, he was also widely expected to crush Michael quickly, so Spinks had already vastly surpassed anything originally expected of him as a HW. Tyson simply did what was earlier expected of Cooney.

Tyson was one of the fastest starting HW champions in history, and had also previously demonstrated much better stamina against Bonecrusher and TNT than Foreman ever did to that time.

Michael Spinks ranks with Carlos Palomino among the absolute slowest starting one punch knockout artists of all time, with ZERO prime one round stoppage wins between them. [Maybe Danny Lopez can be tossed into that mix of slowest starting ATG punchers.]

At the time, Tyson's stature was already secured as the apex heavyweight. Spinks appeared in it for the money, and got a handsome retirement payoff for 90 seconds of ring time following the opening bell.

So far as Tyson's historical standing goes, I do not believe it would have changed if Spinks had retired undefeated after Cooney and stayed retired.

Good publicity, but otherwise not a history changing event as it actually happened. Tyson-Spinks is more of a footnote than anything else. For Tyson personally, Berbick was more meaningful, because that's when he considered himself to have become a champion.

While there have been fringe historians and record keepers who don't consider Charles to have been champion until defeating Louis, nor Holmes until stopping Ali, most of us consider that rather silly and trivial. [Yes, I'm specifically referring to "The Ring's" HW recognition of Louis until September 1950, Ali until March 1971, and later until October 1980, then Michael Spinks until 25 years ago today. Michael had not competed in over a full calendar year. By 1988 standards, Ring Magazine could have withdrawn their recognition on that basis alone, but their championship designation was absolutely meaningless by then, regardless. They would cease publication within a year, and be clinically dead for seven months. Ring today is a zombie publication.]

For me, Marvis Frazier was his most dominant performance. Tillis and Blood Green were starting to raise questions about Mike's starch lethality against opponents who were not tomato cans. True, Marvis had been blown out by prime Holmes, but he was coming off wins over Tillis, Ribalta and Bonecrusher. His resume against big heavyweights with power seemed solid enough. In my mind, Marvis Frazier was Tyson's Dempsey-Fulton moment, Mike's true coming out party.

 

Man, I still peed the bed when this happened.

 

Man, I learn something every time you post. Always interesting. Thanks. BTW, I though Spinks laid down and called it a day. Could have not put up anything better than the worst of Tyson's early opponents.

The second good Tyson thread this week.

 

Undefeated undisputed champion vs. Undefeated Lineal champion.

I was 11 years old at the time, and this was the biggest boxing event since I've been alive. BAR NONE. People are forgetting about the significance because of the blowout. Many respected people in the game picked Spinks to win, including Ali among others. HUGE event. Pretty much invented the way PPV is handled today. Every magazine had Tyson-Spinks on the cover: People, Time, Newsweek, The Ring, KO, every other boxing magazine in existence...their pics were on the covers for months.

Even if people believed Tyson would demolish Spinks, it was still the biggest and most hyped event since Ali-Frazier I. Nothing else since has come close.

 

love this fight

 

Really didn't need to know that


Tyson/spinks was that long ago :yikes all this thread has done is make me feel old , thanks

 

What fight ? Are you sure about your post

 

Good performance from Tyson. What an anti climax,though !

 

Can we assume that Tyson-Spinks was a mega-event?

 

It was considered as one coming up to the date of the fight. It was very much a 'Who IS the real world champ' kind of event. And even though Tyson was the betting favourite,a lot of people thought that Spinks would give him a good go.

 

Good point


It has to be said,though,that a lot of knowledgeable boxing people thought that Spinks would give Tyson a better fight than the likes of old Holmes,Tubbs and Biggs.

 

In advance of the opening bell, I think a case can be made for Kinshasa, Manila, Ali-Leon Spinks II, Ali-Holmes and Holmes-Cooney among heavyweights alone, between the FOTC and Tyson-Spinks. Ali-Norton II & III also deserve favorable mention in this respect.

Muhammad never made the case of a neglected wisdom tooth causing his jaw to be fractured by Norton as the freak occurrence it was. Instead, he quietly and respectfully made Ken into a super-humanly monstrous puncher in the public mind for having done so. He weighed in with Ken on a scale for Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, not just highlighting how hard he trained by how much weight he lost, but also showcasing the superiority of Norton's physique to his own. His diffidence for Norton II captured tremendous attention through the change in his usual presentation of an upcoming match, one he would successfully duplicate for Leon Spinks II.

Frazier III wasn't expected to be an especially competitive performance by Joe. It was thought he'd come out on the short end of the most one sided fight in their trilogy. Many expected Ali to force a mid round halt of the proceedings. Frazier-Ellis II was basically a sparring beat down of a badly diminished and aging Jimmy, who still managed to somehow last over twice as long on his feet as he did when Joe was at his peak. Jerry Quarry was utterly shot for his rematch with Frazier, Smoke had almost been dropped by Bugner [moments after producing a knockdown], and Muhammad himself nearly decked Joe with a single right hand in round two of their January 1974 rematch. Frazier's demolition at Foreman's hands in Jamaica triggered the decline of his reputation as an irresistible force of nature. His old FOTC veneer had been sandblasted in the nearly five years since.

Manila could have been widely dismissed ahead of time as a foregone conclusion, but Muhammad started taking care of business even before Bugner II was over, walking over to Frazier's broadcast position to exchange words of hype between rounds 14 and 15. Then, three words with a rubber prop for a rubber match; "Thrilla," "Gorilla," "Manila," cranked up nuclear interest in what many expected would be an anticlimactic end to the rivalry. Instead, Joe was able to talk about Ali-Frazier IV during the Manila post fight conference, and it would have come off if Foreman had not finally dusted himself off the shelf by then.


Among non-heavyweights between 1971 and 1988, Montreal, SRL-Hearns I, Hagler-Hearns and SRL-Hagler can also be cited.

Nor can anything come close again.

This part of your commentary is a statement I think an extremely strong case can be made for, due in large part to boxing's decline from the mainstream following the protracted demise of the championship distance, and the end of Tyson's first title reign. Michael Spinks was widely regarded to have laid down, Buster Douglas did likewise for Holyfield, then Bowe threw the WBC belt into the trash can, purposely further disintegrating what had once been the biggest prize in sports.

Lennox, even if retiring with a perfect record, and knocking Bowe out in the process, never had any hope of fully restoring that championship to its full former prominence. With the elimination of the championship distance, and the events from Tyson-Spinks to Bowe and the trash can, that window has been sealed over, bricked up, and the building demolished. ["Call it" already. The patient's not only been dead for decades, but reduced to skeletal remains. Classic might as well be renamed Forensics. Boxing is now the Latin of the sporting world, once ubiquitous and now niched, a cloistered interest, like hockey with helmets.]

Being a former fan of boxing and confining my interest to the history of it, I sometimes feel more like a pathologist dissecting the remains in an autopsy than I ever would as an amateur historian. It's archeology to me, of a long bygone culture, like the late 1960s pinnacle of Roller Derby. I post here only in an effort to purge myself of what I already knew and would like to discard in order to move on. [I seem to be succeeding now, with my post counts dropping dramatically from my previous several incarnations here. Anubis is therefore an apropos handle for me at this stage.]

Foreman-Moorer, like Dempsey-Willard and Louis-Schmeling I, was huge after the fact. Whitaker's bouts with JCC and DLH were well publicized, but the sport's decline in mainstream prominence was well underway by then.