Prime Mike Tyson vs Usyk

If the fight is still ongoing by round 6, I would favour Usyk to win it.

I see two possible outcomes here.


1.
Tyson swarms and connects early and often and takes Usyk out in the first 2 or three rounds.

2.
Usyk's speed and movement allows him to avoid Mike's bombs in the early stages. As the fight progresses, Usyk starts to frustrate and outbox Tyson. Usyk turns up the heat in the late rounds and a somewhat gassed and frustrated Tyson suffers a UD loss, or even a stoppage.

1 is more likely than 2.

 

I'm not a Tyson fan although i do enjoy watching his fights, but for me it's always the same case for Tyson. Casuals overrate him and hardcore boxing fans underrate him, and whilst some of the excuses for Tyson are grasping at straws by his fans. By that same token i also think he sometimes gets judged harshly.

Pretty much overall i think we can all agree Tyson was a fantastic talent, but he was still very young when he got all this attention and fame. And when the only real family he had Cus D'Amato died. And he didn't have a mentor or anyone guiding him, his life spiraled out of control and it hurt his skills.

Lastly i'm still not totally convinced by Usyk at Heavyweight.

 

It's always risky to say too much about a fighter when he's still in the middle of his career, yeah. I don't usually predict fantasy h2h and even less so when one of the fighters are still active, but suckered in this time kind of.

 

Good post.

Again, people do overrate Mike and make excuses for him.

Personally, I’d like to believe that I’m objective.

Seeing as though it’s a good debate, I thought that it was only fair for me to go and rewatch the Douglas fight.

So I watched it again earlier.


These were my observations:


Douglas was supremely confident and focused, and he wasn’t afraid to let his hands go. But he missed an awful lot of shots in the first 4 rounds.

In the 5th round, he caught Mike with some great shots.

In the 6th and 7th rounds, he became more confident as Mike slowed down.

In the 8th, it was a great uppercut by a tired Mike.

In the 9th round Mike was absolutely exhausted.

The rest is history.


So my take is this:

Although Douglas caught him with some very good shots, they weren’t bad enough to deplete Mike to the point of emptying his tank.

Mike wasn’t as aggressive as he normally was.

The head movement wasn’t there.

He was really hanging on in the 9th round.


The conclusion:

It was an unmotivated version of Mike with clear stamina issues.


Now I made a mistake earlier in the thread where I said that Mike was gassed from the 5th round. He wasn’t. But he was lethargic and he was slowing down round by round.

However, he was completely gassed by the 9th round, and I really don’t think that that’s up for debate.


Now if you watch the Ruddock fights from 1991, and especially their 12th round rematch, Mike took a lot more punishment than what he had taken in Tokyo.

The fight was fought at a faster pace, where they both threw power shots.

Yet although Mike was tired in the latter stages of the fight, he wasn’t completely spent like he’d been in the 9th round in Tokyo.


So taking nothing away from James Douglas, Mike wasn’t 100% fit or focused for him.


So my questions to you, are:


1. Why do you dispute that Mike was out of shape in Tokyo?

2. Why couldn’t an out of shape version of Mike have lasted 10 rounds with Douglas?

3. Why couldn’t an out of shape version of Mike have landed that upper cut?


To me, it’s crystal clear that he was out of shape.

Douglas didn’t punish him for 10 full rounds to slow him down.

The uppercut was just a great shot, but he wasn’t having success throwing combinations at that point.


Like I said yesterday, despite James Douglas being a more gifted fighter than Donovan Ruddock, the Tokyo version of Mike couldn’t have survived against Ruddock.

Ruddock would have knocked Mike out.

Mike had much more stamina against Ruddock.

He was still throwing power punches in the last few rounds, whereas in Tokyo, he was hanging on 3 rounds earlier.


Whilst I have no issue with anybody who believes that any version of Douglas could/would have beaten any version of Mike, I really don’t think that there’s an argument to say that Mike wasn’t out of shape with stamina issues.

I just wish that we could have seen a rematch.

 

It’s a crying shame that there was never a rematch.


It’s not that Mike didn’t train, it’s that he just went through the motions.


It was me who mentioned Roy Jones, James Toney and Dave Tiberi.

The point was: They all looked good aesthetically going into the fight.


Mike looked in great shape in Tokyo.

He looked just as great as he always did.

Yet his gas tank was empty in the 9th, whereas it wasn’t in other fights, such as the rematch against Ruddock.


A shiny car looks great on the eye, but it’s not going to perform without any fuel in it.


Mike didn’t take a beating in Tokyo.

I watched the fight earlier.

He took some good shots, but it wasn’t a Calzaghe-Lacy type fight.


Ruddock gave him a tougher fight.


Nobody has said that Mike starved himself.


I’m enjoying the debate. But if you believe that Mike WASN’T out of shape and that Douglas was just better than him, then the onus is on you to explain how Mike’s gas tank was empty in the 9th round in Tokyo, yet it wasn’t in a fast paced war against Ruddock over 12, which happened around 18 months later.

 

I've been appreciating your contributions to this thread greatly, but I do find myself wondering whether they're aimed at the relevant question, which I took to be Tyson v. Usyk best-vs-best, not one against the other at our estimate of their average over the course of their careers, or one versus the other taking one from inarguably the worst performance of his prime years.

Specifically, your pointing out the "excuses" that get made for Tyson strikes me as far more relevant to, say, a debate over his "greatness" than over his formidability when firing on all eight cylinders.

I saw that elsewhere you pointed out that worst moments can teach us about stylistic or habitual weaknesses. I would there emphasize CAN, i.e., I don't think Tokyo taught us much about Tyson's stylistic flaws (although plenty about the flaws of his character).

(The "all you need is a good jab" against pre-1989 Tyson is nonsense. Men with far better jabs fared poorly against Tyson in that period. The entirety of his style was built around defeating that approach, and no one has ever done it better at heavyweight. Ali defeats Tyson not because of his jab but because of his elusiveness, chin, and, more than anything, his ability to control the gloves of his opponents -- for which we have no evidence that Tyson had an answer, see, e.g., Tyson v. Tillis).

Where we DID see a bad night revealing a stylistic weakness was against Holyfield, even though nothing about Tyson's performance resembled his ridiculously brief "prime." Simply put, Tyson could not fight at close range. We knew that already from his fights against Bonecrusher and Mitch Green, but there it didn't matter because neither Smith nor Green could fight at close range, either. Holyfield most certainly could.

So, what does this all have to do with Usyk? Nothing at all. Usyk is an excellent mid-range counter-puncher, and at heavyweight he has been able to add to that an ability to bait and trap a man who telegraphs embarrassingly and is orders of magnitude slower than Mike Tyson. Fighting at mid-range is in my estimation the most disastrous approach to fight Mike Tyson at his best. There he's relieved of the necessity of closing the distance and been given a bye on inside fighting.

Now, pick any Tyson from a random night in career when he wasn't in jail and pit him against any Usyk from any random night in his career when he isn't defending his country, then I agree that the wisdom of picking Usyk escalates -- maybe by a lot.

*edited for embarrassing typos

 

Got to go Mike Tyson. In his prime Tyson felt sorry for no one, he just went for the kill with savage body blows and right hands to the head behind that peek a boo defense designed by Cus D Amato. Usyk for all of his talents will have to remember a quote by the great Joe Louis prior to his first meeting with Billy Conn in 1941, He Can Run, But He Can't Hide. Tyson is much more aggressive and quicker than Anthony Joshua was in both fights.

 

Even little tyson who beat overmatched handpicked opponents could BeaThis chump .

 

Hey louis54 nice to see you back buddy.

 

I agree about Tyson being lax, & even if he had drained weight after getting fat that would have been his fault.
Also about the comparison to Louis vs. Schmelling & Douglas vs. Holyfield.

But you say a discussion like this could go on forever: any one could, but if we are both reasonable then we with good evidence we would accept Tyson either gained & drained weight in addition to his poor training.
Pure reasoning does not tell us whether he did; since neither of us has presented sources yet, it seems to me reasonable to reserve judgement instead of assuming facts not in evidence.

For example you say Tyson was never very active in the mid rounds.
I know he was less active; but until looking at some numbers, I do not know whether this is the case of not.
For example Ruddock when he fell in live with "The Smash" was a pretty low volume HW...
Something like looking at Tyson when he went into the middle rounds against Razor, or other fighters, would tell me if sometimes he was.

I would not count a fight where he was prevented from doing so by being clinched, like Bonehugger or to some extent Mitch Green.
I know he did not warm up like a Frazier, I just do not know just how active he was without looking at the (properly recorded) numbers.
Or any actual evidence about what happened in training.

 

I remember seeing that body shot from Norton that doubled Ali over in fight III - as referenced by @Bokaj .

Of course we know Ken said hitting Ali in the body was like hitting a slab of concrete - such was Ali’s conditioning of that area - and, for the most part, Ali took body shots extremely well - up there with his chin resilience.

However, the random punch in just the right spot can sneak through - and I guess the body can only take so much anyway - just the ones from Frazier would’ve been enough to be getting on with as a whole career’s worth..but then there was Chuvalo, Foreman etc. and the p*ssing of blood - scary!

 

Yeah and he took some monster shots to the body from Liston, that I’m honestly doubtful Usyk could’ve taken and come out unbothered as Ali did.

 

Nothing wrong with a good waffle old mate!!!!

 

Did he what.

Commentator Steve Ellis: “A heavy shot dug under the heart!”

Liston landed quite a few very heavy body shots and they were notably audible - after the match, Dundee noted the welts on Ali’s flanks. Just one of those body shots would’ve folded me like a cheap suit.

 

…..and some ice cream!