Why does Tyson get a pass?

*character

 

I just skimmed through the Biggs chapter in the Kluck book. Biggs manages to overestimate his weight for the Tyson fight by about 30 pounds (saying it was due to weight training) and also blames weight training for the life and death Bey fight. It reads as if the Duva's were doing the logical thing by trying to make Biggs get stronger and settle into a pro style and Biggs blames it, in hindsight, because the Tyson fight turned out to be a disaster. If there's any truth to video evidence, it looks like he did try to bulk and fight more flat footed for Bey (which almost blew his seven figure payday) and then went back to the lighter style for Tyson. I think the Duvas rushed him into thr Tyson fight because it was clear that he wasn't going to develop into a great fighter after the Bey fight.

The book also says that he was celebrating 20 years of sobriety which would date his sobriety back to around the rehab stint early in his career.

I think a lot of these guys tend to say whatever is convenient in various interviews and then sucker the sorts of people who scour boxing forums into believing it as the truth.

 

This is it, in a very short and concise manner.

 

yes but did you notice that it worsened his condition? I don't know what excuses Tyson has, I was never particularly interested in it. If half of what I've heard or read about him is true, it's impossible that he became a champion at all and defended his title 10 times. But Teddy Atlas was already talking about him when Tyson was still undefeated that Ike could lose to himself, to no one else - only to himself.
I don't know why people find it so hard to accept that. Are we going to measure who drank how much alcohol or took drugs? Tyson's regression in form is a fact. There is so much evidence that Tyson was fascinated by training and boxing up to a certain point, training like crazy, and even more evidence that at some point he got completely bored with boxing but not bored with money.

Even before the fight in Tokyo there was an article in the New York Times : "Is Tyson Sabotaging Himself?"

there are training tapes when Greg Page knocks Tyson down and then says - I don't know what's going on with him. There are interviews with people from his camp. There are Booby Brown's testimonies. There is finally the fight itself when we see that Tyson is slowly !
why don't we believe our own eyes and just come up with some theories?

do we really not believe Tyson when he says - "I never took the fight seriously."??

 

All of these are excuses.

You can document every single way Tyson looked worse in the Douglas fight from the way his head movement looked worse, to how much he reacted to feints, to how ashy his elbow was, to how many leg hairs he had. You can pull up as many quotes as you want of Tyson saying he didn't take the fight seriously.

It won't change the fact he was a prime, 23 year old, undisputed, undefeated champion and he lost to a journeyman Douglas. It won't change the fact Douglas was going through a significantly worse personal turmoil losing his mother and still rose to the occasion to win. Tyson didn't.

 

Yes, Douglas used his personal turmoil of losing his mother as motivation. Tyson didn't. Tyson was mentally weaker and squandered his talent and responsibilities as champion.

 

Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen anyone say that this was Tyson on his best night. Overconfident and not very motivated quite likely, and maybe he did party as much as the stories say, even though I generally take stories such as those with a grain of salt.

But he isn't the first champion who was overcofident and unmotivated for a defence. And, as has been stated, his challengers were rarely at their very best either.

So if there's an asterisk on this loss, there is one on a bunch of his wins as well.

 

Douglas is actually the one who did that.

And Mike lost his mom in 1982.

 

Some sort of terminal post Rooney decline I'm not convinced of at all, though. Apart from Douglas his post Rooney/pre prison run goes KO5, KO1, KO1, KO1, KO7 and UD12. The perhaps worst of these opponents was an Olympic gold medalist.

If not for the Douglas loss, I don't think anyone would see much to comment on. Maybe that he underestimated Ruddock in the rematch. Perhaps also that he was a bit rusty/unfoccussed for Bruno, but my bet is that people, just like with Thomas, mainly would remember the finish.

 

Thanks for the link, it seems interesting.

 

If you create an account, they let you read the entire book for free and don’t ask for payment info.

 

No problem but if these are excuses it means that in the 80s there was the wrong champion then Douglas should be the champion!! you have to come up with excuses 100 times bigger why he wasn't. Why he lost to Ferguson, Tucker, why he was lower rated than almost every opponent of Tyson since 1986. You also have to explain how Douglas was the underdog 1-42. you have to find excuses or we have to admit that everyone knows **** about boxing. Literally. Almost every expert bet on an easy fight for Tyson so if his defeat is just excuses then what are Smith, Tucker, Biggs, Spinks, Williams, Berbick, Thomas, Tubbs? every one of them was higher rated than Douglas! we can throw every The Ring classification in the trash - it's worthless! we can throw every quote from a recognized expert in the trash, because most experts gave Buster absolutely no chance!! we can also safely assume that Dereck Chisora, for example, could beat Ali. He looks like Frazier, fights like Frazier, is bigger than Frazier and his CV has no significance. I'm just waiting for excuses for Douglas - what was he doing when a usurper - a boxer worse than him was destroying the entire HW 80's? how did it happen that he wasn't even top 5 HW before Tokyo???

 

Not sure what all this rambling has to do with the topic. Of course Douglas was an underdog for a reason, he was about of an underachiever with mixed results. And that's exactly why Tyson losing to him is inexcusable.

 

Mike losing his mom 8 years before Douglas whooped his ass is irrelevant. Douglas lost his mom a few weeks before the fight.

Are you seriously suggesting Douglas squandered his talent more than Tyson? Did Douglas lose to a 42-1 underdog? Did writers call Douglas the next big thing and potentially the #1 HW in history?

 

I’ve got Tyson at 5 all time. Douglas had top 20 or 30 talent, but is top nothing.