Friend, I asked 3 serious questions because you cited The Ring's rankings. 1. Which HW boxer since Ali fought 8 of the top 10 HWs ranked by The Ring in the next 3 years in any given year? Pick any boxer and any year, you might get it because I haven't checked that thoroughly but I suspect his name will be Mike Tyson. So questioning his opponent choices is just nonsense because no one else has fought such good opponents after reaching the top. No Ron Stander, Chuck Wepner, Joe Roman, Scott Frank etc etc. 2. I still don't know which other HW was the leader of P4P 3. Tyson defended the unified HW title 6 times. Holyfield 3 times, Bowe 2 times, Lewis never once, Wlad was never a champion of the 3 most important organizations, he never had the basic WBC. So Tyson is the leader. Criticizing a boxer for his choice of opponents in this situation is crazy.
If anything, I think Tyson's resume is underrated. He laid waste to the division like few other have.
While I don't see enything strange with a champion not keeping up a pace of five title fights a year after pretty much cleaning out the division, it does look like the the change of pace came with a change of management. So maybe he'd continued the pace if he stuck to Cayton. If not for those conract disputes, he faces Bruno in 1988. Which five would follow in 1989? Williams probably and maybe 'Spoon gets his shot. Does the Holy fight happen already in 1989?
Apparently, Cayton had an idea of a world tour : fighting Bruno in England, Adilson Rodriguez in Brazil, Damiani in Italy, Foreman in Pekin and finally Holyfield in the USA.
Mike Tyson was originally scheduled to fight Donovan “Razor” Ruddock on November 18, 1989, in Edmonton, Alberta. That bout was postponed and ultimately canceled due to Tyson being diagnosed with costochondritis (inflammation of the chest wall) (en.wikipedia.org). Instead, his next fight became a heavyweight title defense against James “Buster” Douglas, which ended up taking place on February 11, 1990, at the Tokyo Dome — a match that famously resulted in Tyson's first professional defeat (en.wikipedia.org).
OK, you’re really confusing me. First off, this is from your post, exact quote, cut and pasted: 3. Which HW boxer has been ranked #1 since The Ring's P4P classification in 1989? The 3 is inclusive. So now you’ve moved that to No. 2? OK, we can play three-card monty — but your question is which heavyweight boxer has been ranked P4P No. 1 since 1989 by the Ring. Now you’re saying which ‘other’ boxer. So are you saying there are two, and Tyson was one of them? Or are you asking me to research 30+ years of Ring P4P ratings to answer a trivia question for you? I said I have no idea. If what you got from my posts is that I’ve memorized the entirety of the Ring’s annual rankings, please allow me to now absolve and disavow you of that notion. I have not. Nor do I care to go scurrying through their archives to answer a trivia question. I said Tyson probably deserved to have that distinction for a short time (from Spinks to Buster). As for the belts, again, I think we value things differently. Tyson didn’t become heavyweight champion until he beat Michael Spinks — he just put his hands on some belts (because HBO put up the money to make it possible, which isn’t situation that existed for every other champ in history so giving Tyson that distinction should come with that context). And, btw, HBO could do that because those belts were almost without value. Look what Witherspoon and Tubbs and guys like that were making for title fights. They were getting paid like contenders, not champions, because that’s what they were — contenders who happened to have belts even though no one who followed boxing considered them to be heavyweight champ. So Tyson collected the trinkets. Hooray. Then you want to afford him some kind of ‘omg nobody in history ever’ distinction because he defended three particular belts of your choosing a certain number of times. I pointed out how many more lineal title defenses Joe Louis and Larry Holmes had than Tyson but I guess Joe doesn’t cut it because he didn’t hold the WBC since it didn’t exist at that time, lol, and Holmes was THE champion while Don King conspired with the WBA and WBC to create belts Don could control. Tyson defending three belts that HBO helped him lasso when Michael Spinks was still champ does not impress me. If it impresses you, again, we see things differently. My point there is that it is a singular occurrence that an entity with deep enough pockets (HBO) with enough influence in the sport (HBO) ever put up the money to corral all the belts when they were split. Tyson happened to be the beneficiary. If they did it every single time the belts got split, there would be other beneficiaries. And of course no champion before the IBF came along could do it because there were two belts. And before there were two, poor guys like Joe Louis had no chance to defend multiple belts because the was THE ONE AND ONLY CHAMPION. Which Tyson was not during some of the ‘defenses’ you cite as if it’s a meaningful record. I know what Tyson did up to the point of the Spinks fight. I have not denied it nor tried to hide it. I am talking about a different period in time, where a shift took place. He went from fighting all the top guys to not fighting all the top guys — the fact that he did it before does not mean he was continuing to do it. I don’ t know how I can better spell it out. There’s Timeline A up to Spinks and Timeline B after Spinks, and I’m saying there’s a difference.
The idea of the world tour was before the prospective of a Ruddock fight (which I mentionned earlier btw).
Thinking about it you might be right, but in my recollection it was Foreman. Basically it was Bruno in the second part of 1988, Rodriguez in February of 1989, Damiani in the spring, then Foreman/Ruddock. Finally, a defence against Holyfield.
All good. To be fair and objective on all fronts, I was being duly reactive to and posting in accord with the positives of Mike’s career.
just answer simple and clear questions. For you three titles at the same time may not make an impression, for most of the boxing world it is a measure of sports value. if someone has all the most important belts, they must fight literally every contender. If this is not a measure, what is? I hope you will never have a grudge that Tyson gave one of the alphabetical belts to Lewis in 1996 and Lewis gave it to Byrd and Ruiz, in your opinion it does not matter - ok. Of course you have the right to think that until 1988 HW was ruled only by Michael Spinks, and Tyson's story begins with Spinks and ends with Spinks, no problem for me. As I have written many times and I keep repeating - I have no problem if someone thinks that in Tokyo Tyson simply lost to someone who was better than him. I have a problem if someone draws conclusions from this - Buster was too good for every Tyson. If so, shouldn't Buster, who started his career earlier than Tyson, have achieved this success? Or half of this success? Or 10% of this success? If we are not explaining Tyson from Tokyo, how can we explain this paradox? What was Buster doing for almost 10 years before Tokyo? Tyson was one of 2 HWs classified as no. 1 P4P in the 1st place. The second one received this recognition in quite special circumstances. If someone follows the side on a regular basis, they know what I mean, if not, it still takes about 2 minutes to check. Interestingly, The Ring has been making classifications since 1989, i.e. when Tyson was already in this weaker period of his career. And it was still ranked higher than any other HW for the next 30 years.
Funny how you ignored everything else I wrote and didn't even got the point. The point that Buster took his mom's passing as a motivation only enforces it.
Because your position is ignorant of hard , definitive fact and based on such broad based generalizations that going round and round with you is boring . You know better than Buster who was quoted that the death of his mother inspired him. This content is protected
I never said he didn't take it as a motivation and while underlining it you're actually making the point for me. I literally said that some things that some fighters use an excuse, can motivate other fighters to do better. Buster is the perfect example as he could have had even stronger excuses than Tyson for that fight, but he won, so he didn't need any. And just becaue Mike lost, his fanboys are doing a lot of mental gymnastics to why he did so, to silence the cognitive dissonance in their heads.