Excuses, excuses - Mike Tyson and his victims

In defeat, a fighter is forced to confront his limits, an objective exercise that clashes with a quality of soaring faith in the mortal borne along by ego. A boxer needs his illusion of supremacy to do what he does. As a consequence, rarely is a match fought for which the loser does not have an explanation for the “baffling” turn of events. In defeat there are the usual suspects: personal problems, managerial problems, injuries, I-got-thumbed, I-got-screwed. Excuses are the means to make the fighter whole again.

Boxing’s big lie it is, and ever since I came on the fight beat in the mid-’80s for The New York Times, I’ve encountered it regularly. But it did not quite register as a phenomenon until I began working on a story about Mike Tyson in January 1988. The idea for this particular story was to convey to the reader a sense of what it felt like to be in there against Tyson—from the point of view of the opponents he had beaten since winning the heavyweight title in November 1986. I expected that by the cumulative details of their accounts, an impressionistic narrative would emerge that would give not only technical insights into what Tyson does so well, but also a subjective sense of his ring presence.

Wrong. The interviews with fighters like Trevor Berbick, Tyrell Biggs, Tony Tucker, and Pinkion Thomas were an object lesson in boxing’s big lie. Mostly Tyson’s foes were disinclined to give him credit. As they saw it, his victories were accidents.

At that time, Tyson was fresh off a convincing win over Biggs. Against an opponent some boxing experts thought had the mobility and long-armed jab to confound Tyson, the champion fought his best fight since winning the title from Berbick. He dominated Biggs completely, cutting off the ring and then pounding him with a relentless attack.

Yet, to Biggs, who suffered a seventh-round knockout, it was not quite as conclusive a victory as it appeared to the estimated 13,000 spectators at the Convention Center in Atlantic City, and the millions who watched the fight on TV.

Biggs had had a decent opening round against Tyson, but steadily deteriorated after that. As he recalled it, though, his first-round stick-and-move tactics had “exposed” the real Tyson. He regarded the lack of liveliness that struck his legs for round two on as a quirk of nature separate and apart from the thudding punches Tyson landed on him. By Biggs’ account, the strange business with those legs became a kind of Bermuda Triangle mystery; his underpinnings just vanished into the night.

Tyson’s other victims had elaborate tales of could-have and should-have and injuries, white lies, and bald-face lies necessary for their staying in business. Poverty makes fighters; illusion keeps them going.

Berbick claimed he had had a breathing problem aggravated by drugs ordinarily forbidden by the Nevada Athletic Commission. He charged that Tyson’s managers, Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton, had signed a document that permitted him to take the verboten drugs. But Chuck Minker, the executive director of the commission, said there were no agreements recorded with the commission regarding medicines Berbick was allowed to take, and there were no questionable drugs in his postfight urine sample.

Tucker claimed to have gone into his fight against Tyson with a fractured right hand. But Dr. Flip Homansky, chairman of the commission’s medical advisory board, disputed that. He said that Tucker had injured his hand approximately two weeks before the August ’87 bout, but it was not fractured. And Dr. Anthony Daly of Los Angeles, who days after the fight diagnosed “a fresh fracture” to the third metacarpal bone of Tucker’s right hand, said, “I think he told me that it happened in the second round against Tyson.”

Curiously enough, when Tyson finally suffered defeat, he himself was susceptible to the same impulse for self-protective excuses. After he lost the title to Buster Douglas in February, he told newsmen that he felt he was still champion, and that he had been the victim of a long count. That conveniently ignored the fact that Douglas had beaten and battered him handily.

“I can handle losing if I lose fairly,” Tyson said.

But in the days after the fight, the champion who had declared himself invincible appeared to be having a hard time coping with that long night in Tokyo.

From the article written by Phil Berger called “Boxing’s Big Lie” published in June 1990 issue of The Ring Magazine.