A Boxing Memory: Tyson vs Holyfield

A Boxing Memory: Tyson vs Holyfield

By Garry White

Frank Bruno made his entry to the ring at the MGM Grand, looking terrified. Continuously crossing himself, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Albert Pierrepoint was waiting under the lights to execute him. The Saturday night, town-centre lager louts watching in the early hours of the morning on the other side of the Atlantic must have quickly realised that their monotone renditions of ‘Brunooo! Brunoooo!’ were about to look foolish or misdirected at best. Bruno’s chances of beating the smaller man were already of the ‘slim and none’ variety. But, at this point, as Mickey Duff was always so fond of saying: ‘Slim had left town’. I bet Bruno wished he could have hot-footed it to McCarran with him.

Big Frank crumpled in three. He left the ring without his green WBC belt and never came back. The aura of the beast was still strong. Its scent marked the apron, and Bruno couldn’t stomach it. Nor for that matter could Bruce Seldon, whose fight-night tactics appeared to adhere strictly to the teachings of Bertrand Russell. Suddenly becoming an avowed man of peace, Seldon refused to countenance any suggestion of violence, instead finding a comfortable place to lay down arms in what constituted his 109-second abomination of a ‘defence’ of his WBA title.

Since his release from an Indiana prison Tyson had fought four times in 13 months for a combined eight rounds and recaptured two [although he was subsequently stripped of the WBC iteration after signing to fight Seldon] of his alphabet titles along the way. But none of the wide-eyed adversaries in the opposite corner ever really wanted to fight him. The lure of a huge paycheque was their only driver; the veneer of a sporting contest hiding an exercise whose sole aim was to find the quickest and safest route to the nearest bank. Only Bruno may have presented some ambition, but entirely paralysed by fear he ‘fought’ as though he were in the catatonic night tremors of a port and cheese-induced dreamscape.

Just two months after the Seldon debacle, Tyson was back in the ring to fight Evander Holyfield. The man known as ‘The Real Deal’, already had a double blemish on his record courtesy of Riddick ‘Big Daddy’ Bowe, as well as another reverse at the hands of southpaw Michael Moorer. Despite having twice held a version of the richest prize in sports, hardly anyone gave the beefed-up cruiserweight a hope in hell of seeing off Tyson.

When they met in late 1996 at the MGM Grand, a bloated, shouting entourage directed ‘Iron’ Mike towards the ring as though he were a prize cash cow being led to market. A collection of gold-laden grifters clung like barnacles to Tyson’s hard yet docile flesh, hollering manically into the night with the familiar ‘Baddest man on the planet’ shtick. He didn’t need them, and he should have seen through them. The only sincerity left in his dark orbit was provided by his unconvincing, over-matched trainer, Jay Bright; whose presence provided the last unthreatening reminder of the old unbeatable Catskills crew.

Tyson’s legendary mentor Cus D’Amato had been dead for over a decade and Jim Jacobs for nearly as long. Kevin Rooney, a disciple of D’Amato, had been in Tyson’s corner from the opening bell to its high-watermark evisceration of Michael Spinks eight years earlier. Their combined rap sheet encapsulated a perfect 35 wins, 31 of which were recorded inside the distance. Yet in a bid for absolute control over his prize asset, the crocodile-eyed Don King had Rooney jettisoned along with any last vestiges of the old influences.

It was a decision that quickly saw Tyson hurt by Bruno [in their first encounter] and then completely undone by Buster Douglas in his shocking Tokyo humiliation. It proved how easy it is to carelessly unwind so many years of rote learning; ‘Peek-a-boo’ abruptly returning to just a game for kids as the previously dynamic and defensively adept Tyson, became stiff, leaden-footed, and easy to hit – but fortunately, up until this point at least, none of his post-incarceration opponents possessed either the ability or fortitude to attack him with any true menace.

Three years in an Indiana prison had irretrievably eroded him. Those victories achieved against knock-over opponents, despite some of them even ludicrously possessing world titles, told us nothing. Perhaps the manner of their celebration by gauche, grasping sycophants, told us more than we were ever willing to see at the time.

Mike now found himself in a new prison of Don King’s making. Its bars were gold-framed windows, and it was a place where the truth was whatever the popinjay with the electric-shock hair wanted it to be. The man who lightly carried a prison sentence for manslaughter on his untroubled conscience was convinced that the thrice defeated Holyfield was ‘washed up’. His complacency was unquestionably linked to the miscalculation that Tyson’s ‘Baddest Man on the Planet’ aura remained undented. That the former delinquent from the hopeless streets of Brownsville was still possessed of enough to keep the heavyweight treasure safely in his clutches. Ultimately, history records that when King rolled the dice on that night in Vegas that Mary-Lou was not rewarded with a new pair of shoes. Tyson, for his part, would never hold a world title again. He wouldn’t get remotely close… despite turning up with a gumshield and gloves on two more occasions.

But on that night among the heaving entourage, there was probably only one man truly on his side. That he was singularly unqualified to be so, probably only added to the sense of tragedy and farce. Jay Bright had been a collector of boxing videos, who, as a kid, had got to know renowned fight film collector Jim Jacobs. Something that ultimately brought him into the orbit of D’Amato.

When Bright first met the venerable boxing trainer, he was just 12 years old but already weighed more than 25 stones. In the preceding two years, he had lost both his mother and father, and like so many of the youngsters that turned up at D’Amato’s door, emotionally broken. Within 12 months, with the care and attention of D’Amato and his partner Camille Ewald, he had shed more than ten stones and learnt some of the rudiments of boxing. Seven years would pass before he would meet a troubled 13-year-old boy from Brooklyn named Mike Tyson.

Whilst Cus developed Tyson as the culmination of his life’s work, his own Sistine Chapel beaten and chiselled in the sweat and blood of the gym, Bright engaged in his own inauspiciously short-lived amateur boxing career. The likes of Rooney and Atlas, who had been chief disciples at the inner sanctum of D’Amato’s boxing gospel, looked on Bright’s subsequent appointment as trainer as little more than a poor joke. A sign of how broken and rudderless his camp was. “Jay Bright has no boxing knowledge unless you count quiche-making as a useful quality” sneered Rooney. More colourfully, Atlas described Tyson working with Bright as “like wearing a plastic thong under an Armani suit.”

Yet the chubby trainer was now the last of his links to D’Amato and all the old certainties. A loose string connects him to that old uncatchable plane where opponents would fold at his mere presence. King, for his part, was probably happy to indulge him with the continued involvement of such a singularly unthreatening figure.

As Bright peered on from behind the red corner post, the man nominally under his tutelage launched into centre-ring and sent the bald, moustachioed Holyfield back-peddling with a sharp, snapping right hand. It was to be the only time throughout the fight’s eleven rounds where ‘Iron’ Mike had the challenger in any real difficulty. Holyfield whose odds leading up to the fight had shortened dramatically from an outrageous 25/1 to a still mildly insulting 6/1 then proceeded to outthink, outmanoeuvre and most unexpectedly outmuscle the 1/5 betting favourite.

Quickly, Tyson settled into a predictable pattern of single punches that became a portent of what to expect from the remainder of his career. The predictableness of his approach and the ease with which Holyfield was able to counter mocked Bright’s assertions that he was some sort of continuity candidate for D’Amato’s boxing manifesto.

In the sixth, Tyson was cut and hurt by a headbutt that referee Mitch Halpern deemed to be accidental. Later in the round, he was dropped by a short-left hand to the head. Tyson rose quickly for what marked his first visit to the canvas since his infamous 1990 defeat to James ‘Buster’ Douglas. A further sickening clash of heads – again deemed accidental by Halpern – in the next round made Tyson’s legs buckle, and as he emitted a piercing cry of anguished pain the blood began to trickle from his left eye.

This point really marked the end of a contest that, in many respects, had been slipping away from the champion from the opening round onwards. All that was left in Tyson’s once unbreakable repertoire were wild haymakers as Holyfield carefully picked him off with measured, hurtful counters. Late in the tenth, Holyfield badly hurt his depleted foe and sent him staggering across the ring in what felt like an unwanted partial homage to Trevor Berbick’s drunken unravelling a lifetime earlier. The bell saved him, but a minute was not enough to recover his senses, as Halpern inevitably intervened to rescue an increasingly vacant Tyson with a little over half a minute of the eleventh round having elapsed.

At the end of the fight, Tyson and his team blamed the headbutts and, unsurprisingly, Jay Bright, who was never more than a stooge in the camp, and thus served as a convenient fall guy. These excuses allowed Tyson and his retinue to convince the boxing public that there was enough of the unquenchable 1980s vintage still lurking under the surface. All it needed was a new trainer, a competent referee, and everything would be right in the world again.

It was a lie that many in love with the latent aura of Tyson were more than happy to buy into. For King who was in love with nothing but the sight of crisply folded dollar bills, the mere continued presence of Tyson, as a bona fide contender or diminished sideshow, was sufficient to keep him in the style to which he had become accustomed.

But for Tyson, it was truly the end. He would fight on for another nine years. But there were no more meaningful good days and bit by bit he fell apart before our eyes. He shamed himself in the debacle of a rematch with Holyfield, was dominated by Lennox Lewis, and ultimately rolled over like a tired child against the unworthy fists of Danny Williams and Kevin McBride. By the end, there was nothing left of the old unbeatable monster that Cus D’Amato had lovingly created like some kind of fistic Dr Frankenstein, and the likes of King and a hundred other hangers-on had so coldly and carelessly pulled apart.