Did people think Mike Tyson would beat Rocky Marciano's record?

From what I remember no one was really betting against it. Holy was seen as the only viable threat, but still a big underdog. Apart from him there was only Ruddock really. Bowe and Lewis were still developing (and I didn't know of either at the time) and Foreman was seen as a novelty act. I thought Tyson would absolutely slaughter him if they ever met.

 

I remember Boxing Monthly printed a letter arguing that he was not just the greatest heavyweight of all time but the greatest pound for pound fighter. For a while there some people really thought he was pretty much invincible.

 

He wasn't disciplined enough and was facing much bigger dudes in comparison to Marciano. That n the peek a boo style just ain't good for your back in the long run especially when a fighter like Tyson doesn't fight off the back foot.

 

There were literaly book makers offering odds on it.

 

He looked sloppy against Bruno. The Carl Williams fight was the short it didn’t really show he’d gotten better or not. There was a stink after that fight I remember. Not a huge outcry but some were getting tired of the 2 minute fights & nothing was really on the horizon to make you think fights would be more competitive. I figured he had a really good shot to get the record. I assumed he’d reunite with Rooney at some point. I thought his prime would at least last until age 28.

I’d seen Douglas before & knew he was good & reasonably durable. I was confident he would make it into the 2nd or even 3rd round. He didn’t seem to possess the speed to keep away from Tyson though. That was the strategy I assumed you needed to beat Tyson. That Douglas won by actually “fighting” and not trying to just score points was surprising. Mike wasn’t anything like he’d been just a few years earlier. He didn’t apply the same pressure, he didn’t show a willingness to work, & he stood straight up. I figured he’d beat Douglas & then run through some international opposition. Damiani, Rodriguez, Ruddock. Ruddock looked like a real threat. If he beat those guys then I thought he’d fight Foreman, Witherspoon, & maybe Oliver McCall or someone. I thought Foreman had a shot. Then we’d get Holyfield. I couldn’t see Holyfield winning even though he’d shown himself to be a warrior. After that, maybe a few of the new guys like Morrison, Mercer & Bowe.

I figured the Marciano record would be beat. I didn’t think Tyson would lose until his early 30’s.

 

I confess I thought he would at the time. And I think a lot of other people did too.

 

That’s a great observation in hindsight. But there were many at the time who didn’t think he’d ever lose

 

I remember there being talk of him getting to 50-0 but he was so young there was no talk of him retiring let alone retiring undefeated.

 

Thing is once you reach that level you can't drop down in competition. The public won't buy it

 

For me, it never seriously crossed my mind. He wasn’t close enough to Marciano’s 49 wins to seriously contemplate it for me. Maybe if he got to 44 or 45 or something and we had speculation about who he’d fight in what order, sure, but we weren’t there yet.

And someone noted him being undisciplined. Good lord, the guy seemed like he was unraveling.

His mentor had died. The manager with whom he had a relationship, Jimmy Jacobs, had died and basically signed him over to Bill Cayton like he was property when Mike didn’t really know, like or trust Cayton, and JJ didn’t tell him he was dying.

He was in a tumultuous marriage. He went on national TV with Barbara Walter’s and admitted he was beating his wife and seemed drugged out of his mind (granted he probably needed medication … or something).

He got in a street fight with Mitch “Blood” Green while out in one of his frequent after-midnight shopping sprees in not the safest parts of town — you think that couldn’t have gone down in a way where Tyson was shot or stabbed?

He was in a car “accident” where he ran head-on into a telephone pole or a wall or something that was openly speculated to be a suicide attempt.

That’s what he was making headlines for, not his fights. He was a train wreck happening before our eyes. Within a couple of years or so he’d be in prison for ****.

All of that over the course of a couple of years. Lord knows what might have gone down that we didn’t know about.

It wasn’t whether he’d go 49-0 to me … it was would he even be alive or, maybe at best, incarcerated.

There’s a Russian word, I forget what it is, but it translates to ‘disorganized personal life’ — a person in turmoil who can’t seem to get their stuff together. That was Mike Tyson. To think he could keep it together in the ring that long when he couldn’t seem to go a few months without another personal crisis seems … to be optimistic beyond what was warranted by the glimpses we saw of his life as it played out right before our eyes.

(And yes, his boxing was unraveling too. Starting with the Bruno fight. He wasn’t on a trajectory to keep winning for a long stretch IMO. It was a matter of when, not if.)

 

Like many here, i lived through it and can honestly say that not once did it ever cross my mind nor did i ever hear any of the 'older hands' talk about it. What i DO remember is that i simply could not think of who was going to beat him and that if he was going to be beaten, the guy to do it was not yet a pro. I was not alone in thinking this

 

True but his personal life possibly getting to him was still a question in publications then. I don't think it's far fetched to believe there were those who felt him buying into his hype would backfire prior to '90. Especially given that did happen to other elite champions prior to him.

 

I was an avid fan back then and after the Spinks fight people were calling him the best ever. We know now in hindsight that wasn’t true but that was the perception at the time. Going into the Douglas fight practically no one thought Buster had a chance. In fact the majority had major doubts about even Evander Holyfield beating him given what Tyson had previously done to a great fighter formerly from a lower division ( Spinks. ) all these perceptions were despite the breakup with Robyn Givens, the car accident, the fight with Mitch Green, the firing of Kevin Rooney, etc

 

A lot did. I did, likely out of hero worship as a kid. My father told me he looked like he'd been slipping some, so he wasn't so sure. But he didn't think anyone out there was the one who would do it at the time, especially not Douglas.

With what we know now, unless Tyson had become a different person in terms of personality, it wasn't going to happen.

Was he physically capable? Sure, with a different personality. A combo of Tyson's physical attributes with Holyfield's mental attributes would probably have been able to pull it off.

 

That someone could have been Johnny Shkor if he was still around