"Iron" Mike Tyson - At His Sharpest

Took some time to put this together. It's not meant to rate Tyson among any other boxer but himself. If you're a Tyson fan, I hope you enjoy it.

Click on the link for the whole article:

http://a-neutral-corner.blogspot.ca/2014/08/iron-mike-tyson-at-his-sharpest.html

Here's the first part of the article before the technique:

"Iron" Mike Tyson - At His Sharpest

He was "The Baddest Man On The Planet", "Kid Dynamite", and "Iron Mike", and all of these nicknames are precise in their description of the former champion.

Guided by the enigmatic and hermet-like sage Cus D'Amato, Mike Tyson was a self-proclaimed "throwback fighter". With the contemptuous air of Jack Johnson and the stylized hair and punching prowess of Jack Demspey, he was eager to disassociate himself from his contemporaries, and connect himself with a more charismatic past.

Truth be told, forging the bad boy from Brooklyn into "Iron" was no small feat and it required much more than outward appearances. While the ingredients were there, the refining process involved long hours, sacrifice, and little recognition from others for the hidden toil. Sequestered away in an old house to avoid unnecessary distractions, with a surrogate family to raise him, Tyson spent long hours watching archaic boxing footage and banging away on a mattress wrapped around a post. Chores became a part of his daily routine, as was responding to a battery of trivia questions about the fighters of days gone by. Harry Greb, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, and Willie Pep were his heroes - an inspiration that served as a whetstone to sharpen his edge.

This humble method was simplistic in intent, but layered with a pedagogy lost on current generations. Cus' fastidious commitment to teaching mental and physical lessons made the juvenile delinquent into something much more than he could ever hope to be.

It turns out that Catskill, New York was the perfect blast furnace to make Mike Tyson into the undisputed and lineal heavyweight champion of the world. Boxing in the 1980's wouldn't have been the same without him, but when they ended, so did his reign of terror.

Many observers say that Mike Tyson was never the same fighter when he returned from his incarceration from 1992-1995 to resume his quest to reunify the titles. Many historical observers also attributed the fall of ancient Rome to the barbarian hordes sweeping across its frontiers in the 4th and 5th Centuries A.D. Rome however, was not built in a day, nor did she fall in one. Similarly, Tyson's fall began much earlier, and much more surreptitiously than the effects of his three years in prison.

The reality is that this blast furnace that was Catskill, New York could never hope to remove all the impurities that were fused to his very core. The constant toil to separate the essential from the unessential was as hopeless as the rolling of Sisyphus' boulder. But it was as close to perfect as it could get, and much of those flaws: his fears, aggression and insecurities actually translated into his strengths in the ring. Harnessing those weaknesses became imperative to his style, but letting them overwhelm him could be disastrous. It was a fine balancing act walked on the edge of an iron blade.

"The Baddest Man on The Planet" was at his baddest from 1985 to 1988. All the positive forces in his life still were influential, and few of his weaknesses outside of the ring were strong enough to disrupt his in-ring performances. At the peak of his talent he was a brief, yet incredible force - much like an explosion - that left a crater-sized impact on the heavyweight division.

His other nickname "Kid Dynamite" proved to be impressively prophetic.

But dynamite needs to be carefully placed in order to deliver maximum results, and it is the nuances of Tyson's game, rather than his sheer power, that we will appreciate today.