Had they fought tyson in tokyo feb 90

I'll ask you again, does Busters' illness have no relevance then or is Tyson only allowed to have problems?

 

As for Holmes, he thrust forth excuses whenever he put in a sub par performance and this was after wins not losses. Certainly wasn't private then.

 

Indeed. He had more crap lackluster showings against lesser opposition than any two champions combined. Win or not..

 

I don't know why you think I'm "bending" the argument, when for me the argument has always been the same.
Perhaps you've misunderstood my argument, although I think I made it clear enough times. I think others have been emphasising the same point too.
It's not just that Mike Tyson has a loss to Buster Douglas on what might have been him fighting under-par, it's the fact it was a resounding beatdown in his prime for the world's championship. It was a one-sided beating.
Of course that matters. If he had lost a close fair decision over the distance that would be different.
In such a case, we could surmise that being less than 100% might have tipped the balance.
Same goes if he had been 36 and/or without lots of tough miles on the clock and a few years of clear decline, rather than being 23 years old and in his prime.

These are the things we look at when we assess the value of wins and losses. This isn't something I'm making up to victimize Mike Tyson. This is something we do all over these forums to all fighters all the time. It is deemed fair and accurate.

Louis was beaten down and he went on and improved. What he did after the Schmeling loss puts him in a higher category, as you would probably agree.
Having said that, of course it is ENTIRELY FAIR to factor in Joe Louis's loss to Schmeling when we assess his value as a fighter.

Holmes being decked by Shavers is in no way comparable to the 10 round beating Tyson received at the hands of Buster Douglas. Even if you seriously think he should have been stopped.
The Witherspoon and Williams fights were CLOSE FIGHTS, even if you think they Holmes lost. Tyson's loss to Douglas was not close. Besides, I will give Holmes a further a degree leeway in the Williams fight at least, since he was 35 and getting tired by then.

Yes, the Joe Louis you cited against Walcott was very inactive, and 33 years old. He's been out 4 years during the war. He'd fought less than 9 rounds on 1946 on his comeback against a shot Conn and a quick fight with Mauriello, then was out a further 15 months leading in to the Walcott fight.

Yes, Joe Louis management team collapsed around this time when John Roxborough was sent to jail for running numbers racket. Julian Black, his other manager, jumped ship soon after. During the war his trainer Jack Blackburn had died suddenly.

Yes, Joe Louis had an ugly divorce at this exact time. He was philandering incessantly all through the war years, and his wife divorced him on grounds of desertion. Less than a year later she was pressured into re-marrying him to present a good image of a black couple to the nation, and they 'enjoyed' an unhappy marriage for a short time after. He carried on his affairs so it must have been bad arrangement for him, and worse for her.

Joe Louis also had well-known debt problems and gambling habit, which you could class as a distraction if you wanted to make excuses.

I don't think Joe Louis ever broke his hand in a street fight. Maybe had some fractures few times in the ring.

 

The only reason I mention Douglas's losing family member is to illustrate that LIFE EFFECTS EVERYONE, not just Mike Tyson.
We all have family members die. We all have problems outside of our work life.

You're the one making a big deal out of it happening to Mike Tyson, so please don't misinterpret why I mentioned Douglas. I'm certainly not inclined to want to argue the toss over which fighter had a worse set of life problems outside the ring, because that's silly.
I'm just trying to point out the obvious : we all have **** to deal with, and we can't ever possibly know the extent of someone else's problems so it would be silly to argue that Tyson had it worse than everyone else.

 

Namely ? What BS ?
Everything I've stated is either a fact or a response to the excuses that come up with from those who can't deal with the facts.

Tyson was favoured to beat everyone except Lennox Lewis. That doesn't mean much. He was a massive fave over Holyfield too, but I'm not buying that he was always going to beat Holyfield either, though many will say that too.

History is best done without having to be a slave to the general perceptions of the time, when we have the full picture we can assess things objectively with a better view.

So, from our objective standpoint we are supposed to accept that Buster's mother dying is some sort of blessing for him but that anything and everything that happened around Mike Tyson was a curse ?
Where's the logic ? Where's the reason ?

 

It seems magoo at least has openly declared Tyson to be a special case.

Perhaps this is in part due to ignorance of what problems other great heavyweights might have had. Funny though because many of them are just as well documented as Tyson's life problems.

I guess the difference being they never needed to pull them out as a big "excuse card" to explain away and embarrasing loss in prime.

 

Again, I don't see many other great fighters having the complete conglomeration of problems Tyson had going into that fight. There were " some" fighters who had "some" of those problems but nearly as wide of an array of them going on simultaneously and even great champions who had LESS problems either lost or probably should have lost to lesser men. I acknowledged many times both in the past and present that Douglas fought a great fight and deserved the win. But I can't believe you would dismiss all the well documented factors concerning Tyson's life and career surrounding that match, and write it off as him just losing to a far less proven guy who would have done that to him any and every time.

 

I don't even care what would happen on "ANY night". That's the thing, you see. To me, that's not even a concern, I have no motivation to indulge in such exercises. When two guys fight in or near their prime and the result is conclusive, that's that. That's what we look at.
The idea that on another night something else might have happened is excessive speculation, since they were both in their primes it seems a waste of energy to go into that.

It's like an exercise in chaos theory, maybe if Buster Douglas had had his breakfast two minutes earlier or Tyson had caught a taxi three minutes later. ....
I mean, obviously anything can happen in an alternative reality.

When two fighters meet in or near their primes, and the result is conclusive, the fight one-sded, that stands as.
Hence why we don't really need to consider whether Tyson would always beats Berbick, Tucker, Biggs, Smith, Ruddock on "ANY" night, or whether Douglas would beat Tyson.

 

So which excuse is it? The death of Cus? The loss of Kevin Rooney? Don King? Robin Givens? Japanese Ladyboys? 500lb overweight a day before the fight? Greg Page not going easy on him?

 

I don't know how or what gives you the insight to be able to accurately assess exactly who had the worse problems, and to come to the conclusion that it must have been Mike Tyson.
Frankly, i doubt you were even aware of Joe Louis's "problems" judging from the way you asked the questions.

I don't "dismiss" Tyson's problems any more than I dismiss Buster Douglas's problems, Tony Tubbs's problems, Joe Louis's problems, Muhammad Ali's problems, your problems or my problems.
We all have life problems. We are all effected by them.

I don't say Tyson was 100%, but I do say he was in his prime. As I said many times already, the greatest fighters all had some under-par bad nights when they were less than 100%, in or close to their primes. Sometimes they won, the greatest one invariably always found a way to win in their primes, sometimes they lost and those that did lose an element of their greatness for it.
The ones who lost as badly as Tyson did against Douglas always do get marked down accordingly and their primes are assessed with that in mind.

For some reason, my pointing this out time and time again has me castigated on this forum and sometimes labelled a hater. For some reason, people insist Tyson should get special protection from the exact same standards we use against all the time discussing other fights and other fighters.

 

That's just the tip of the iceberg.
We're snowed under with excuses here.

 

Maybe I missed it, but I don't ever seem to recall you admitting that Tyson wasn't 100%. Everytime this debate comes up it always reads to me that you believe that James "buster" Douglas beat a perfectly well motivated and trained Tyson as if it were absolutely the same guy we saw from Berbick through Spinks. So was it ? I don't know. maybe and maybe not. But I do know one thing. He sure as hell had a lot on his plate going into that fight and we even saw some of it unfold during the match ie, his corner's incompetence, his apparent lack of interest, etc.. That and he was never the same fighter again. We also know that Douglas never looked that good either before or after. I think Tyson vs Douglas was a mere case of one fighter giving the absolute best performance of his career while the other gave his absolute worst. But I know way ever believed that it was a true indication of what types of fighters they were in a general sense or that the same thing would have happened every time.

 

I prefer to call them " reasons" as I also believe in cause and effect scenarios, but if "excuse" is the term we're going with then I'll will continue to produce as many as I can think of. He sure had a lot of crap going on that wasn't conducive to remaining the best in the world in a contact sport.

 

I think I'm generally in agreement with what Bokaj has said about this fight on occassions. Tyson was not much different to what he had been before, not perceivably significantly worse. I would say I think he was a not 100% though, based on everything I know and due to a reduced scheduled, and when comparing him to his absolute best performances against Berbick and Holmes where to me he looked his most intense. But then I'd also suggest maybe he wasn't 100% when he beat Thomas, Tucker, Ribalta, Biggs even. I don't have an awful lot of evidence to say he was 100% against Spinks either.

I don't really dwell on Douglas being "better than ever", since I think he was bound to look better beating a fighter of Tyson's style.
The way people divide Douglas into "Tokyo Douglas" and "normal Douglas" seems very odd to me, since there's a bigger gulf between getting KO'd by Mike White on one hand, and schooling Page, M.Williams, Berbick and McCall on the other.
It's more remarkable that Douglas went from failed prospect/journeyman to solid contender than going from solid contender to world champion, imo.