A Boxing Memory: Mike Tyson vs. Peter McNeeley

A Boxing Memory: Mike Tyson vs. Peter McNeeley

It does seem somewhat bizarre that a fight that turned out to be every bit as one-sided as most imagined it would be, still touched a million PPV buys.

Harry Mullan ringside for Boxing News wrote, “The affair was a disgrace, an embarrassing pantomime masquerading as a fight.” It is extremely difficult to argue with what Mullan said. We can forgive Mike Tyson for needing an opponent that wouldn’t upset the party. Can we really use the word party, for a fight that featured a fighter making his first appearance inside a boxing ring since his conviction for rape and his subsequent incarceration four years earlier? But there is safe and downright exploitative. Peter ‘Hurricane’ McNeeley had no chance of anything. It really was that simple.

The only intrigue about the fight was how long McNeeley would last, and that would be determined by how quickly the twenty-nine-year-old Tyson could shed the ring rust he had accumulated during his three-year stay at the Indiana Youth Center.

The Las Vegas crowd chanted “Bullshit, bullshit” when the inevitable happened. Seriously, what did they really expect? A competitive fight. A sell-out crowd of 16,736 had packed into the MGM Grand to see the return of Tyson in 1995. The former heavyweight champion of the world was still big business despite the choice of opposition. Tyson was paid a reported $22m for his comeback fight with Don King yet again back centre stage leading the not-so-merry dance. Around a thousand members of the media attended a pre-fight press conference. Interest in Tyson was still beyond high. The McNeeley fight was the first in a lucrative multi-million dollar deal with Showtime. Nobody had any real intention of putting that deal at risk in his first fight back. It was promoted as a credible first fight back. In truth, it was anything but.

McNeeley brought an impressive-looking record of 36-1 into his fight with Tyson. Despite his only loss being on a cut, the record still flattered to deceive. I am being kind. As one scribe wrote, most of those wins ‘were assembled mostly in places travel agents never speak of.’ Mullan called it deceitful and dangerous. Trust me, it was exactly that. McNeeley said all the right things. “I’m going to wrap you in a cocoon of horror,” he famously said at a post-fight press conference. He played his part. He helped sell the show. But McNeeley would need more than a few carefully scripted one-liners. He could sell the fight, but could he actually fight. It took us a mere 89 seconds to find out. The New York Times cruelly said, “McNeeley was a hurricane without an eye.”

It was perhaps the undignified spectacle it deserved to be. McNeeley showed early indications that he was here to fight. He rushed Tyson at the sound of the opening bell. But the initial exuberance was soon replaced by the brutality of reality. After his second trip tasting the canvas, McNeeley’s trainer Vinny Vecchione dived through the ropes to save his fighter. And everybody else. The crowd heavily booed, but in many ways, they had little reason to do so.

Tyson continued his comeback and did eventually regain several pieces of his old heavyweight baubles. But the time away and his rollercoaster lifestyle had taken away something from Tyson that couldn’t be put back.

McNeeley fought on in relative obscurity before retiring after two defeats in 2001. His final resume was forty-seven wins against seven defeats.

At the height of the pandemic in 2020 when Tyson was launching his improbable return to action when he was well into his fifties, McNeeley said he would fight Tyson again. Thankfully, we were spared that at least.