Thirty years ago, exactly, Michael Gerard Tyson became the youngest world champion in heavyweight history, a distinction he holds to this day.
This he achieved by reducing a strapping Jamaican giant far larger than himself to quivering jelly.
All the tortured angst of Tyson’s ruinous childhood in a New York crack house, all that venom stored from the abuse inflicted upon him in a juvenile institution, came prowling into the ballroom of the Las Vegas Hilton hotel.
The boxing fraternity had grown increasingly aware of Tyson as he mowed down 25 of his first 27 victims, no fewer than a dozen of them in the mere 10 months leading up to the evening of November 22, 1986, on that neon Strip in the Nevada desert.
Tyson entered the ring in his work clothes, the simple white towelling top with black shorts and black boots which would become his trademark.
Berbick arrived via his victory over Pinklon Thomas at the onset of a tournament contrived by the WBC, WBA and IBF to answer public demand for a unified heavyweight champion.
Tyson’s knockout record had established him as the marginal favourite in the casinos. A late rush of money in the minutes before the first bell tightened the odds still further as Berbick was seen to be avoiding his challenger’s malevolent gaze.
The punters would be rewarded. Promptly.
A hesitant Berbick managed to land one hefty blow early in the first round. But when he saw it had no effect on Tyson he became more overawed.
Not without justification. It was not only the thunderous power but the lightning speed of Tyson which rendered so many opponents impotent.
So quick was the jab and so fast his combination that his co-manager Jim Jacobs remarked: ‘Berbick looks like he’s fighting in slow motion.’
The end came just as rapidly as the punches. A vicious left hook to the temple sent Berbick crashing to the canvas.
Tyson, in his case, was at the not-so-tender age of 20 years, four months, three weeks and two days.
Tyson’s first words to Jacobs: ‘Would Cus have liked that?’
Thus he dedicated his first world title to the memory of the late Cus D’Amato, to whom Tyson was paroled from juvenile detention at the age of 14 and who became not only his trainer but also his legal guardian.
D’Amato took the young Tyson into his sprawling house in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York and told him that despite his comparatively small stature – he never measured close to the 5ft 11 ½ touted in the statistics – he could become the heavyweight champion.
His new home also offered a safe haven for Tyson’s pigeons.
He had begun knocking out bigger men when, as a boy, he turned on a gangster, in his crime-ridden Brooklyn neighbourhood, who had ripped the head off one of his beloved birds.
Now, with the felling of Berbick, the legend of Iron Mike was born. Along with it a new, dark, brutally menacing era for prize-fighting as he said: ‘I was out for blood tonight.’
Onward he would storm to wrap up that unification tournament, defeating James Bonecrusher Smith and then Tony Tucker to become the first heavyweight to hold the WBC, WBA and IBF belts.
A one-minute and 31 seconds demolition of Michael Spinks – a petrified testament to Tyson’s aura of psychological intimidation – added the Ring Magazine and lineal title to his collection. Another unique distinction, still undisputed.
There were mighty troubles ahead. The greatest of all upsets by Buster Douglas in Tokyo four years later was but the first.
A rape conviction – one of several run-ins with the law – put him behind bars for what should have been three prime years of his fighting life. And these are by no means the half of his turbulent misadventures.
When he re-joined the society he sometimes frightened, he regained a world title with his second stoppage of our own Frank Bruno. Bu then came the biting of Holyfield’s ear in the second of two back-to-back defeats by the great Evander.
His career petered out into three defeats in his last four fights, peculiarly against men from these isles – Lennox Lewis, Danny Williams and Kevin McBride.
But by then the power and the glory, the speed and the will had faded.
Gone, too, was all the money. We watched and worried as this innately likeable but bipolar man of considerable but uneducated and therefore unformed intelligence blew $300million.
Iron Mike is now a devoted husband and loving father who earns a reasonable, steady living from the one-man stage show in which he recounts quite brilliantly the story of his triumphs, trials, tribulations and eventual salvation.
Courtesy-The Daily Mail
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