Favourite Tyson fight ?

I like the Mike Tyson-Pinklon Thomas fight.

Very good fight. Tyson comes out bombing and really unloads some leather on Thomas, but Pinklon had a granite chin, takes a lot of punishment. He's also not running or holding like some of Tyson's opponents did. Thomas came to fight.

First 2 rounds Tyson takes with some very good punching and aggression, takes the wind out of Thomas a bit and Thomas takes a time to adjust against such a fast starter, but he's throwing punches back and not merely trying to survive.

Then the 3rd and 4th rounds Thomas actually gets into it, he lands some good jabs and one-twos, times the punches well on Tyson's attack. But Tyson looks like he can take these shots well, although his rhythm is broken a bit and he fails to do much against Thomas here in these rounds. Thomas won at least one of these rounds, and at least a share of the other.

I think Tyson gets through with a few better punches in the 5th (I'm not sure, I'm going by memory here), but the 6th is where he shows his awesome finishing ability. The left hook that he shakes Thomas with is a beauty (he'd caught Thomas with similar ones on two occasions earlier in the fight), but Thomas, although clearly hurt, would probably have had enough strength to fend off any attack from most other good heavyweights.

Tyson smelled blood, and he had to overwhelm Thomas with such a volume of hard accurate punches to put Thomas down.
I've rarely seen a heavyweight take shots as well as Thomas. I've rarely seen anyone pour on such an impressive finishing salvo against a granite-chinned opponent as Tyson did.

Really was a good fight.
Mike Tyson was the best heavyweight in the world at that time, and Pinklon Thomas was arguably second-best.

 

Why is it your favourite though ?

I felt cheated and really pissed off at the time. Tyson went out like a *****. The post-fight interviews with John Horne and Mike Tyson are painfully pathetic to this day. Really obnoxious people.

Not a favourite "fight" of mine at all. A dark day for boxing.

 

Yeah, I guess it did symbolize the grotesque circus that heavyweight championship boxing had become.
And in the aftermath I think we all knew deep down that Mike Tyson would be resurrected again to make a massive profit somewhere for someone, as he was leading up to the farce of him being Lewis's "only logical contender", a big-money bonanza of such bad taste that even Las Vegas turned them away !

 

Good points.
The heavyweight championship has rarely deserved the reverence we traditionally attach to it.

I think the massive obscene amounts of money and the glitz and gloss of big-time boxing in the PPV era magnifies the scandals that occur.

Tyson's bites were fairly extreme "inside-the-ring" events, by any fair reckoning though.