Almost 20 years since Douglas upset Tyson

they had an ESPN "outside the lines" piece on this fight. damn buster was going through some ****. wife left him, mom dies...after watching that piece i tried to get some vids on buster's old fights. he was actually pretty good when he wanted to be, which was only a handful of rounds per fight most of the times w/ his fight against tucker being a good example.

intially, being as young as i was, i was just shocked that tyson lost. looking back on it, douglas is a little better than he was given credit for. he may have had committment issues when it came to training, etc and maybe a little bit of a ticker problem but he sure put it together that night.

 

Yep. He even beat Oliver McCall. He had the tools but only used them every now and then. They all were present in the Tyson fight though.

 

Cartridge.

They made Evander Holyfield's Real Deal Boxing the year after, using the exact same game engine. It was equally ****. I have it as a ROM on my PC.

 

agreed. and this is why i wanted to see some of his other fights. he looked awesome against tyson. the movement, the bounce in his step, the quick jab, all that was there in other fights too just never w/ enough consistancy to push him over the top. he was right in the tucker fight and then in the tenth round...nothing.

but ****, two weeks after your mom dies...to still round out camp, fight mike tyson for the hw crown, get knocked down and then get up when no one else had and stop him in the next round is really something.

 

I think you mean Octavio Meyran. Stanley was probably putting his feet up with a cup of coffee somewhere.

 

:good

 

I'd like to see a rematch between these two old farts. (Sadistic, I know.) Leading up to their match, Greg Page dropped Mike in sparring. Pundits brushed it off, saying, "Well, that's Greg Page!" To me though, it was a warning sign.

Douglas was dealing with personal issues, but Howard Davis, Jr. won Olympic Gold and the Val Barker Cup on the heels of his mother's death. Mike Spinks lost his wife in a car crash right before producing the greatest performance of his career to that time in unifying the LHW championships.

Max Baer clowned away his title to Braddock, while Liston pulled a French exit in quitting the championship. Douglas-Tyson was an excellent match with a satisfying conclusion.

 

In Douglas's 2 year span between 1988 -1990 he was unbeaten 7 times in a row, beat a former world champion, beat a future world champion, beat the current world champion and only lost to a top 10 ATG.
This for me gives him a resume and ATG status above the likes of Riddick Bowe.
I can gaurantee that if Douglas Vs Tyson was an eliminator for a a fight with Bowe, Bowe would have threw the belt in the garbage before you could say 'Chickenly wife forking non Marine'

 

In 1991 Bowe beat former champ Tubbs who was better than Berbick in 89 that Douglas beat, and future champ Seldon, beat Holyfield in 92 and former champ Dokes in 93. Douglas beat Page, although I dont recall the condition of Page, gave up against Tucker, stayed down against Holyfield. Bowe at least defended his title a couple times before losing a close one against Holy again and defended against a guy who had beaten Douglas, although quite a bit later. I dont think it puts Douglas ahead of Bowe, just because Bowe beat Holy twice and fought him three times. Douglas doesnt have any type of consistency like that, but his total body of work certainly is underated at times. I think overall Bowe was a more talented fighter with a bigger heart.

 

i stand corrected. Where did i get Stan from?

 

I was 6 years old when this happened, but this was also the time I discovered watching Sportscenter on ESPN so I knew who the good baseball players to trade for were. I didn't know much about the fight actually happening as much as I was aware of Mike Tyson through "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!!". I asked my dad who Tyson was and he said, "He only needs a few punches to win the fight". Compared to the amount of punches I put out with Little Mac in Punch-Out!!!, Tyson's KO power made me think of him like some sort of super-boxer. However, I stuck with baseball. I just remember one day I turned on ESPN and they had a load of follow up news. Eventually I figured out Buster Douglas was the "man who beat the man". The thing remember most is Don King arguing for a rematch and the "long" count.

Years later I've seen the fight countless times and I always marvel at this match. Douglas looked like a man on a mission. Those 1-2's were so sharp!

 

The first time I saw Buster was some cable-tv fight against an unknown and he looked awful. I guess I sort of knew about him because I was a bit of a Billy Douglas fan. So going into the Tucker fight I thought Tucker would blow him away. During that fight Douglas really impressed me. Even though he lost and probably quit, he was miles ahead of the Buster I'd seen earlier.

As for Tyson, things started going publicly wrong around the time Jim Jacobs passed away and some folks were saying, myself included, that a good boxer who stood up to Tyson would have a good chance of beating him. I predicted as much with the Spinks and Carl Williams fights. Oops. So going into the Douglas fight I thought the Douglas who looked so good against Tucker had a chance. I didn't think he'd beat Tyson, but i figured he'd give him a fight. Had I seen the Douglas who later caved against Holyfield, Savarese, and Monaco, I would have predicted a very short night. But we hadn't seen that version of Buster Douglas yet.

Come fight night I was at my parents house - they had cable but not HBO - waiting for a friend to come pick me up for a midnight movie ("John Lennon - Imagine"). In those days you could get the sound of scrambled pay-tv channels but not the picture, so I figured I'd tune in and listen to the fight.

I tuned to the HBO channel and it was unscrambled! Awesome! It was round two - okay, Buster made it out of the first - and, hey, he's looking pretty good. From there on I was sitting there rooting Buster on. In round 8 it was like, "****! Get Up! Get Up!!!" and in round 10, wow, what a beautiful combination and sequence. Amazing! Even though I sort of thought Tyson would get beat sometime, it was still a major major shock. That night people were going, "Hey, did you hear that Tyson got knocked out?" "No way!"

In the back half of the eighties Mike Tyson was huge. His management did a spectacular job of building him up in full view of the public and Tyson himself delivered spectacularly. Around '89 Will Smith did a song / video called "I Can Beat Mike Tyson" where he was rapping about how he'd beat Tyson. If I remember right, one of the last lines in the song was, "Man, NOBODY can beat Mike Tyson!"

Hard to believe that was all 20+ years ago.

 

I was 8 years old at the time, and had never seen a round of boxing in my life, nor did I see the fight. However, Mike Tyson had transcended the sport, and was a household name. He was pop culture, and a synonym for being indestructible. The defeat was something you heard about and was shocked by even if you had no knowledge of boxing at all. I specifically remember thinking to myself "Wow, this Buster Douglas guy must be amazing!"

 

The night of the McCall fight was huge, not for the Douglas/McCall bout, as that was a gimme WU Douglas, as McCall was very much in journeyman mode at the time.

No that night Buster owed a huge debt of gratitude to Jeff Sims; who decked Jose Ribalta twice and made him look so bad, that DKP changed the pencilled in Tyson/RibaltaII fight, to Tyson/Douglas.