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Tokyo Buster Douglas is an all time great
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00:25Hi, I'm Brian Kenney, and welcome to ESPN Classics' Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame.
00:30A series that takes a fresh look at sports personalities who are remembered largely for their mistakes, controversial moments, or
00:36questionable decisions.
00:37On February 10, 1990, heavyweight champion Mike Tyson was an overwhelming favorite to make short work of challenger James Buster
00:45Douglas.
00:46Tyson at the time was 37-0 with 33 knockouts. He was riding a wave of popularity and apparent invincibility.
00:53Very few of us could have known on that night in Tokyo the man they called Iron Mike would enter
00:58the first phase of a meltdown that would last a decade.
01:01Now, it's easy to blame the man himself, but over the next half hour, we'll explain why you can't blame
01:06Mike Tyson for being on the losing end of one of the biggest upsets in boxing history.
01:10Before we count down our Top 5 Reasons, let's take a look at the events which led up to that
01:15pivotal night when Tyson's career began its downward spiral.
01:20All you come get some. Mike Tyson's out here. He's waiting for you. All come get some.
01:25Wow, with that upper gun is Tyson. Tensles him with a leg. Let's go. And he goes down.
01:28And it's all over. Good run.
01:30My objective is to inflict as much pain as possible.
01:39If you wanted to build the perfect heavyweight fighter, you couldn't have done any better than putting it in Mike
01:47Tyson's body.
01:48Mike Tyson.
01:50The perfect heavyweight fighter wouldn't be 5'10".
01:55It was a killing machine.
01:58That's it. It's over.
02:01The emotions that Mike Tyson generated were fear in any opponent.
02:07He was going to wreck destruction on them.
02:10And it was going to be ugly and it was going to hurt.
02:12And they knew it.
02:16I will never forget when he fought Frank Bruno.
02:19He crossed himself more than the Pope.
02:22I mean, it's almost as if Frank Bruno was giving himself the last rise.
02:26Tyson knows he's got him in big trouble.
02:28It's all over.
02:30In 1988...
02:32Funny, that was his least brutal beatings.
02:34And he still almost killed him.
02:37...two years after becoming the youngest heavyweight champion at age 20,
02:42Tyson knocked out Michael Spinks in 91 seconds.
02:46This completed his leveling of the heavyweight division.
02:49Two TKOs later, Iron Mike led his entourage to Tokyo.
02:55Buster Douglas, to that point, had been one of the biggest underachievers for years in boxing.
03:02He was never...
03:03He was always...
03:04Overweight.
03:05He gave up...
03:06That time he wasn't.
03:09And he had actually held the title before.
03:11Like, WBO, WBC.
03:13Those alphabet notes.
03:17Didn't hold on to it for long.
03:20Fights.
03:21What kind of heart did he have?
03:23Nobody.
03:24But nobody thought he had a chance.
03:28Tyson was killing people at the time.
03:30It was almost like the guy wasn't human.
03:32He was such an overwhelming favorite, 42 to 1, that there were only about eight American journalists who went to
03:37Tokyo for that fight.
03:39Sportsbooks, you know, it wasn't even running numbers on it.
03:41That's why he went to Japan, because no one would buy the fight over here.
03:45The bet was how many seconds it gonna take for Mike to knock this guy out.
03:52Increasing the likelihood that Douglas would not fight with the necessary aggression was a recent death in his family.
03:59Here's a guy who just days before had lost probably the greatest force in his life, his mom.
04:05This was not the kind of frame of mind you wanted a fighter to be in.
04:09It's round one, the heavyweight championship of the world.
04:12There's a little saying about a cat being in a corner.
04:14You know, if he's got nowhere to go, he's gonna come out fighting.
04:17The champion misses.
04:20Good shot landed by Buster Douglas.
04:23And the champion gets nailed again.
04:25Tyson was taken out of his comfort zone.
04:28Which is the wreck havoc, and his offense was nowhere.
04:31It was about the third or fourth round, and we're all sitting there saying,
04:34well, at some point it's gonna turn around.
04:37And it didn't turn around.
04:39Oh, a right hand catches Mike.
04:42Things went downhill from there.
04:44Mike's knees by the fifth round, we're doing this, wasn't in shape.
04:49Oh, a good right hand.
04:51A left hand catches Mike.
04:52The head's really bouncing.
04:54The people who've been watching Tyson just dominate and dominate and dominate.
04:58It is shocking.
04:59In the eighth round, Tyson flashed his old colors by knocking the challenger to the canvas.
05:05But when the champ couldn't finish...
05:08No, correction.
05:10Buster Douglas never held a title before that.
05:13He fought for the IBF title.
05:15Knocked out.
05:18Douglas seized the moment.
05:22Good shot!
05:23Tyson staggered!
05:24Tyson staggered!
05:26It was shocking because, again, baddest man on the planet.
05:30You can't hurt this guy.
05:31But that was all proven wrong in one night.
05:35Oh, Tyson nailed!
05:41It was the greatest upset in boxing history, if not in sports history.
05:49No one really expected it, so you have to assume also that Mike Tyson didn't expect it.
05:54He had been taking it easy in Tokyo.
05:57He hadn't been training.
05:58He was out of shape.
05:59He didn't care.
06:01This was just another payday for Mike, and he didn't take it seriously.
06:04While Buster Douglas was sleeping, getting his rest and training, Mike Tyson was out.
06:07I think you can blame him because he wasn't prepared.
06:10Tyson at the time, like everybody else in America, didn't know what he was facing that night in Tokyo.
06:17You can blame Mike Tyson because he didn't train properly, and he took Buster Douglas lightly,
06:22and certainly was not prepared, either physically or mentally, to fight at the level we needed to fight to win
06:27that fight.
06:30Ah, but there's much more to this story.
06:32In just a few minutes, we'll count down the top five reasons you can't blame Mike Tyson.
06:35But first, here are a few reasons that just missed the cut.
06:38We call them the best of the rest.
06:42Donald Trump.
06:43After hosting a number of Tyson's fights, the real estate mogul tried in vain to sign the champ.
06:49Had the Donald handled Iron Mike's affairs, he may have been focused.
06:53I would have done a great job for Mike if that were my business, but it's not my business.
06:57Donald Trump, as a business person, made certain that Tyson trained and wasn't out partying as much as he ultimately
07:04did.
07:06Another best of the rest, referee Octavio Mehran's apparent slow count.
07:11When Douglas was knocked down, he beat the 10 count by one second.
07:15You see Octavio Mehran, the referee, pick up the count from the timekeeper at two, and Douglas is on his
07:22knees, and he's looking at the referee, and I'm saying, still not going to beat it.
07:26This guy's still alive because of a bad referee's call?
07:30That's got to affect you.
07:32So you can't blame Mike Tyson mentally because that would screw up anybody.
07:36The 10 count is hardly a precise tolling of seconds.
07:43One, as given by the referee, and one, as given by the clock, are not necessarily the same.
07:48Tyson's camp protested, but to no avail.
07:54The death of legendary trainer Cust Amato.
07:58Tyson never recovered from the loss of his mentor, in or out of the ring.
08:02If Cust D'Amato had lived, I believe that Mike Tyson would have remained as heavyweight champion of the world.
08:10Cust D'Amato became a father figure to Mike Tyson.
08:15D'Amato, who had made world champions of Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres, not only converted the volatile, street-tough
08:22Brooklyn kid into a devastating fighting machine,
08:25he took him out of a reform school and made him one of his own.
08:29He had a great teacher in Cust D'Amato, and that really wasn't fair to a lot of other fighters.
08:34Mike Tyson was programmed from the beginning, and Cust's way of training a fighter was to teach him to throw
08:43punches in certain sequences, and it worked very, very well.
08:47By channeling this guy's intensity and finding a vehicle, a way to take that intensity and to take that power,
08:56Cust D'Amato created a great champion.
08:57For his professional debut, D'Amato succumbed to pneumonia in November of 1985.
09:03A year later, Tyson knocked out Trevor Burbitt to become heavyweight champion, but mixed with the glory was the memory
09:10of a loss that would deepen with time.
09:13When Cust died, you can't underestimate what that did to Tyson's life.
09:19That was probably his only father figure, and things went haywire after that.
09:25After his mentor's death, Tyson wavered from D'Amato's old school principles.
09:30He was sued four times, and had numerous run-ins with law enforcement, often for violent behavior.
09:36I don't think Mike Tyson ever trained again.
09:40Went through the motions, got sweaty, and I think that's entirely traceable to Cust D'Amato being gone.
09:47And Tyson was just another poor soul out there trying to perform, and he couldn't, because Tyson was only as
10:00good as the program that created him.
10:04Then you saw a real downhill spiral in Mike's ring style.
10:10He has stopped being the scientific fighter that Cust D'Amato raised.
10:14He has become a headhunter.
10:16And that set him up for Buster Douglas.
10:23Mike Tyson would have competed at a higher level and wouldn't have had some of the crazy, out-of-the
10:28-ring personal problems that he had.
10:30He never recovered from Buster Douglas.
10:32He never recovered from the death of Cust D'Amato.
10:35That's what he never recovered from.
10:38Are we starting to change your thinking?
10:40Maybe...
10:41Robin Givens.
10:42She was to Tyson what Delilah was to Samson.
10:46There is no question that you can blame Robin Givens for everything that happened.
10:50He was a puppy dog around her in public.
10:53What he was like around her in private may be another matter.
10:56In February of 1988, Tyson and his actress girlfriend were married.
11:01Almost immediately, the changes to Iron Mike's demeanor were visible to members of the media.
11:07I went to watch Mike train, and he came out of the shower.
11:11And started toweling himself off.
11:13And I was talking with Robin at that point.
11:14And she interrupted the interview and just turned and said,
11:16Michael, that shower was much too short.
11:18Get back in there.
11:19And Tyson, who was this fearsome guy, the baddest man on the planet,
11:23tucked his head down, turned around, and went back in the shower.
11:26And stayed in for about 20 more minutes.
11:30What?
11:31We used to call Ruth Loper, who was the mother of the dragon lady.
11:34And we used to call Robin Dragonette.
11:38Because everything was applied.
11:39Mike, Tyson's former co-managers, had set up an irrevocable trust for Mike.
11:44And if he never fought again, he would, in his later life, be taken care of.
11:49One of the first things that Robin and her mother did was to break into and get control of that
11:55annuity.
11:55They had to have wanted it pretty badly, because there was definitely physical abuse going on.
12:01Just eight months after the wedding, Givens sued for divorce.
12:04Although the marriage was dissolved a year before the Douglas bout, Tyson still felt the impact.
12:11Here's this woman that he truly loved, and all of a sudden found out that she was just a gold
12:17digger.
12:17She didn't love him.
12:19She loved his money.
12:20So if you want to blame Robin Givens for making Mike Tyson lose a fight, he'd go after.
12:25She was a diversion.
12:26He wasn't focused on boxing like he was prior to Robin Givens.
12:31And that's one of the reasons why Robin Givens can be blamed for Mike Tyson's demise when it comes to
12:37Buster Douglas.
12:41Tyson's inexperienced corner men.
12:44I don't say that.
12:46I don't say that.
12:47I think you blame Tyson's corner a lot more than you blame Mike Tyson.
12:50The corner was a mess.
12:53It was doing worse than Tyson, if possible.
12:57Under trainer Kevin Rooney, a former pro welterweight and stablemate, Tyson racked up 35 straight victories.
13:05Ditching Rooney would have far-reaching effects on Tyson, in his preparation and in his corner during fights.
13:12Jay Bright, Aaron Snowell, nice people, but not the kind of people who train heavyweight champion boxers.
13:19He went in and his corner was unprepared, and he was unprepared.
13:26Big right hand landed that time.
13:28Look at that swelling of the left eye of Mike.
13:31Winning 33 of his 37 fights by knockout, Tyson went more than five rounds just seven times.
13:38When he didn't pull off an early KO, Tyson didn't have a savvy boxing mind to guide him as the
13:44fight wore on.
13:46An experienced corner man would have said, hey Mike, you need to step to your right, you need to cut
13:50off the ring, you need to get him in a corner.
13:52They just kept saying, go after him, Mike, go after him, Mike, and that wasn't really much instruction.
13:57He was getting hit with almost every jab that Douglas threw, and that's because he wasn't using head movement as
14:01he was coming in.
14:02That would have been something certainly they should have harped on him.
14:05Jesus beaten out of him.
14:07He had nobody to fall back on, nobody to listen to, and nobody to even ice down his swollen eyes.
14:14It was pathetic.
14:17So inexperienced was his corner that when Tyson's left eye started to swell after the fifth round, his handlers were
14:24not equipped to effectively treat him.
14:27They're trying to treat Tyson's swollen eyes with what appeared to be a prophylactic filled with ice.
14:35When I saw this balloon that passed for an ice bag, I thought to myself, what the hell is going
14:44on there?
14:45I kept looking for the end swell in the corner, which every professional trainer has this frozen metal to reduce
14:51the swelling and preserve the eyesight.
14:54They hadn't even brought the right material, not thinking this fight's going to go past two rounds.
14:59You can't blame Mike Tyson for this, the Buster Douglas, when he gets hit in the eye and he's got
15:04Larry, Moe, and Curley in there with a prophylactic device filled with ice water,
15:08saying, just, I hope this maybe makes the swelling go down, because they forgot the end swell.
15:12Playing the corner for the loss because nobody knew what they were doing.
15:15These guys should not have taken any money off that fight, because they were absolutely sunk.
15:21Have we begun to change your mind yet?
15:23If not, take a look at reason number two.
15:26Call him Larry, Moe, and Curley.
15:28Yo, Rob Burgess, he's never changed.
15:31Never changed.
15:32Like many great offensive fighters, Tyson's ability was easy to overrate.
15:38Mike Tyson had come to believe in his own invincibility.
15:42There's nobody on this planet that can beat me.
15:46Everybody was raving about him, and he was obviously raving about himself as the baddest man on the planet.
15:52Is there any way in your mind that you can see you losing this fight?
15:56No way.
15:57Perhaps if I chop off both of my arms.
16:00Mike Tyson was up here.
16:02Everybody else was down here.
16:04So I don't blame him for thinking that Buster Douglas was just going to be another win.
16:09Tyson's undefeated record included 18 knockouts in the first round.
16:13But critics questioned the quality of opposition.
16:16Despite the fact that Tyson was a huge favorite, I think that people still felt that Tyson had something to
16:21prove.
16:22He still hadn't really beaten anybody of any consequence at that point.
16:25Two things are missing from Mike Risman.
16:27The lengthy, legendary fight that really tested his medal for the long haul.
16:32The kind of fights that Ollie and Frazier for it.
16:35Only Hall of Fame everywhere he beat was Larry Holmes, and he was old.
16:40He was 38.
16:42And two, the really cagey opponent.
16:45In Tokyo, Douglas made the champ look human.
16:48Unlike most of Tyson's victims, he did not buy into his aura of invincibility.
16:54And this is certainly Buster Douglas to the ground.
16:56All right.
16:58And Buster not taking any of the shenanigans from Mike.
17:01Douglas was slowly ripping apart that cloak of Superman's cape.
17:06He was starting to tear at the shreds as the rounds clicked on.
17:10When an intimidator fails to intimidate, he becomes intimidator.
17:16Tyson getting hit like we've never seen it before.
17:19The first time he had a moment of real adversity in his entire career, he fell apart.
17:25Unbelievable!
17:27Unbelievable!
17:29I guess he thought he was so invincible that no one would dare punch Mike Tyson.
17:34I came to fight.
17:35That's when Mike Tyson, the bully, was unmasked and became just Mike Tyson, a generic fighter.
17:45He was still a championship resume after that.
17:48He just wasn't the greatest of all time, or what he was called.
17:55Buster Douglas.
17:56He fought a near-perfect fight.
17:59It was his finest night.
18:02He's never looked better.
18:04A middling contender with a 29-4-1 record, Douglas drew inspiration from personal tragedy.
18:12It spurred him on to train as he's never trained before, be focused as he had never been focused before.
18:18I wasn't going to allow that to stop me, because I knew that would hurt her even more.
18:22I always wanted to please her.
18:24He was a kind of a psychologically freed man, and he just let it all go.
18:30Oh, a right hit!
18:32Cut Tyson right on the button!
18:33What Buster Douglas did that night was beautiful.
18:39He would wait till Mike would plant his feet, pop him twice with the left jab, move back out of
18:45range, and throw the right.
18:47Same scenario, over and over.
18:50Tyson very patient at this stage.
18:52Now he gets a little bit more aggressive, goes after Buster Douglas.
18:55Douglas might back off the ropes.
18:57I didn't want him close to the guy.
18:58I wanted him always turned.
18:59Tokyo Buster Douglas could have eaten me.
19:04Maybe any heavyweight in history.
19:10And when you keep Mike turning, he can't punch.
19:13Tyson comes in, and he's getting hit again.
19:15I saw a look in Buster Douglas' eyes that I didn't see in Mike Tyson's eyes.
19:21And as the rounds went by, I saw Buster Douglas taking charge of the fight with the left jab.
19:28Oh, a good right hand!
19:29A left hand catches Mike!
19:31The head's really bouncing!
19:33Punching and moving with finesse and ferocity, Douglas was fast and fluid.
19:38Tyson, meanwhile, showed little in the first seven rounds.
19:43Eighth round, Douglas is doing everything beautifully.
19:47Doubling the jab, lead right hands, moving Tyson around, smothering him inside.
19:52And as Tyson's somehow caught up in the ropes, he throws an uppercut from, I don't know, second row.
19:58Oh, that's a nice, I forgot that time!
20:01The drop's fast to Douglas!
20:03Is he gonna get up?
20:04Yes, he does!
20:06He had a flash, a near knockout.
20:11He kind of got lucky.
20:14But it takes away from the fact that he was getting dominated the whole fight.
20:20In the ninth round, Tyson moved in for the kill, but Douglas wasn't finished.
20:26How he turned it around was one of the most incomprehensible things I've ever seen in sport.
20:31There's suddenly Buster Douglas putting everything together once again.
20:35Buster Douglas has really brought it up from the depths of courage to nail Tyson!
20:40And he's picking apart Tyson, who has come out, charging out of the gate as an angry bull.
20:47And by the end of the round, he's being beaten on like a cowbell.
20:51Douglas is gutting it on him, he nails Mike again!
20:54So that the ninth, basically, was a preview of things to come in the tenth.
21:01Surprising after Douglas went down to see him come back and nail Tyson like this.
21:05I was in the zone, man. I was in that zone, that zone.
21:11Oh, Tyson nailed! And yo, Tyson!
21:13If Mike Tyson didn't have a huge neck, he'd have ripped his head off.
21:17He didn't even know where he was at. They almost had to carry him back to the dressing room.
21:21Buster Douglas has never that good before, and never that good since.
21:25But on that one night in Tokyo, he was pretty near perfect.
21:32Well, there you have it, the top five reasons you can't blame Mike Tyson for losing to Buster Douglas.
21:37In 2005, when Tyson lost to Kevin McBride, he announced his retirement.
21:41He was asked if he felt he was letting down his fans for not continuing his career.
21:46Tyson laughed and said, come on, my career ended in 1990.
21:50Give him credit for at least knowing that.
21:51I'm Brian Kenney, thanks for watching.
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