Looking back on Douglas' shocking 1990 KO of Tyson

By Joe Layden

Adapted from The Last Great Fight by Joe Layden. Copyright (c) 2007 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC.

Courtesy of St. Martin's Press

It's difficult to imagine James "Buster" Douglas passing unnoticed almost anywhere, but his arrival at a neighborhood coffee shop in suburban Bexley, Ohio, on the outskirts of Columbus, causes hardly a stir. Casually dressed in jeans, sport shirt and wool overcoat, he walks slowly and with surprising lightness for such a big man. (Precisely how big, Douglas won't say; somewhere in the vicinity of 300 pounds does not appear to be an impolite guess, although at 6-foot-4, with the wide shoulders and thick neck of an NFL lineman, he carries it reasonably well.)

Genial to the point of being disarming, there is nothing in Douglas' demeanor that suggests the hardness required of a boxer, let alone a boxer capable of pulling off the upset of the century. In the right moment, though, under the right circumstances, a man is capable of almost anything, as Douglas demonstrated so vividly on February 11, 1990, in Tokyo, Japan, when, as a 42-1 underdog, he knocked out previously unbeaten (and presumably unbeatable) Mike Tyson to win the heavyweight championship of the world. Hardly a day goes by, Douglas notes, that someone doesn't ask him about the fight. This is fine with Douglas, who is neither perturbed nor overly impressed by the fact that his life will forever be defined by and measured against that single event.

"I understand it," he says with a smile. "Everybody knows where they were that night."

While Douglas' movements have gone largely unnoticed over the years, his triumphs and hardships (and there have been both) generally ignored, Tyson has continually failed to evade the spotlight. Indeed, any attempt to evaluate Tyson's professional career is muddied by the static of his personal life: a hundred different episodes (including, most recently, a guilty plea to charges of drug possession and driving under the influence; Tyson faces the possibility of more than four years in prison when he is sentenced next month in Arizona) that, superficially at least, had nothing to do with boxing, except to the extent that they subverted his ability to perform in the ring. This is a man who earned approximately $400 million during his career, yet somehow wound up filing for bankruptcy; a fighter who won his first 37 bouts in a span of less than four-and-a -half years, before compiling a pedestrian record of 13-6 (with two "no contests") over the next 16 years.

"I (screwed) my whole career over," Tyson readily admits. "But I've come to grips with who I am. I'm content with myself."

There is no denying that Tyson resurrected boxing, brought it to a place in the public consciousness that it hadn't occupied since the heyday of Ali and Frazier, and he accomplished this as much through swagger as style. But then along came the 29-year-old Douglas, who, while no bum of the month, had certainly failed to live up to the family name (his father, Billy "Dynamite" Douglas, had been a tough and respected middleweight fighter in the late 1960s and early 1970s). Tyson was never the same after losing to Douglas. On a larger scale, it's also true that in battering Tyson, Douglas delivered a crushing blow to boxing, a sport that now occupies a humble place near the margins of mainstream popularity. Professional boxing has been in free fall for years, and one could argue persuasively that the tumble began in Tokyo, when Douglas beat the Baddest Man on the Planet.

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February 11, 1990 -- Fear is normal in the ring, a lubricant that encourages a boxer's machinery to work smoothly and safely; the trick is to balance courage with the natural instinct for self-preservation. In his reign as champion Tyson had proved to be not only a terrific and disciplined tactician, but also a master at the art of psychological warfare, a fighter whose very presence provoked a sort of temporary paralysis in even the most hardened and experienced of opponents. A single glance at Tyson, twitching and scowling and snorting as he paced in a tight circle, was enough to tighten the sphincter of any challenger. You could see it in their eyes: men who stood six inches taller than Tyson withering in fear as pre-fight introductions echoed through the arena.

Rigorous preparation notwithstanding, there was always the chance that Douglas (whose fortitude and focus had long been in question) would unravel before the opening bell. But as the fight drew near, that seemed unlikely. The 14-hour time difference between Tokyo and New York provided Douglas with an advantage claimed by few of Tyson's opponents: since Home Box Office's broadcast of the fight would begin at noon, local time (10 p.m. EST, on Feb. 10, in the United States), Douglas would be spared the agony of sitting around his hotel room all afternoon, time easily and unadvisedly given over to playing mental highlight reels of Tyson's greatest knockouts. By 10 a.m. he was in his dressing room at the Tokyo Dome, gloving up, chatting amiably with his handlers -- co-trainers John Russell and J.D. McCauley, and manager John Johnson -- and exhibiting none of the apprehension one might have anticipated.

"As I sat him down and started wrapping his hands, I saw no sweat on him, no fear, and I thought, we've got this guy," Russell remembered. "Every fighter is different in that situation. Some you can't talk to. Not Buster. He was so calm."

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