The ninth round of the Tyson-Douglas heavyweight title fight was boxing reduced–or elevated–to its essence. It was one of the most exciting rounds I’ve ever seen, and, mind you, I saw it some few days after the fight had taken place. The champion, Mike Tyson, had floored the challenger, James “Buster” Douglas, at the end of the previous round, after being dominated by the challenger through the early stages of the match. Douglas had risen to his feet just before the referee completed his count to ten, and the bell rang for the end of the round before Tyson could attempt to finish a fight he desperately needed to finish right there. That was Tyson’s state of mind as he opened the ninth: finish the fight. Even with a minute to rest between rounds, Douglas was, in the words of HBO commentator Sugar Ray Leonard, trying to “clear the cobwebs.” Tyson came out and landed two left hooks to the head and followed them with a right to the body. It was here that the momentum of the fight swung for the last time. Douglas responded with a flurry, lashing out with a series of punches, not in a precise offensive attack but purely in an attempt to defend himself and–one could see it in his determination–to protect the good work he’d already done in the ring that night.
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Douglas had to have felt, midway through the eighth round, that the fight was his, that he was in the process of humiliating a boxer considered–until two weeks ago today–one of the greatest champions of all time. Only a few minutes later, early in the ninth round, Douglas was in danger of seeing his hard work (not only 30 minutes’ worth in the ring, but–it should be emphasized–months of preparing for the fight and designing a perfect game plan), all of it, go up in smoke. That was what he defended with that rally. Tyson halted the flurry with a furious right cross, and–less than a minute into the round–they settled into a state of equilibrium with a lot of clinching. Both fighters were trying to gather their resources for an end–they both had to feel–would come soon. It was Douglas who seized the initiative. A minute after Tyson’s last significant punch, Douglas’s head was clear enough for him to go on the offensive. He battered a retreating Tyson into the ropes. Jim Lampley–the ringleader of a biased trio of HBO commentators–said Tyson would have gone down here without the ropes to hold him up. While this was not the case, the champ was, indeed, clearly reeling, but here–as he had in the previous round–he pulled an uppercut out of nowhere and landed it solidly (but without the strength behind it he’d had only minutes before) and then another as Douglas fired away. When the bell finally came after three minutes of drama in which the issue of who held the upper hand had shifted from instant to instant, I thought–forgetting that it was the following week, that I was watching a tape, that the conclusion of the fight was not merely foregone but fully achieved–that the fight would go to whichever boxer was able to summon more of his spent and scattered resources for the tenth round. This, it turns out, was not the case. Both fighters were on the verge, not of knocking the other out, but of being knocked out by the other. The distinction was critical, for it meant not picking the spot for a finishing rally–that was out of the question for both fighters, although probably neither knew it –but of marshaling forces for one punch. The next big punch ended the fight.
“No.”
Boomer took us on through the rest of the fight from there, first describing the slow-motion instant replay of Tyson’s knockdown of Douglas (“Jesus, what a punch!”), then the exciting ninth, rendered with a bit more chaos than above:
“Tyson! But Douglas is still punching. They’re whaling on each other! End of the round.”
The HBO commentary for the fight was more composed, more precise, but considerably less balanced. The threesome–Leonard, Lampley, and Larry Merchant–were so preoccupied trying to make Douglas into a suitable opponent early on that, by the time the fight turned into a fight, they were solidly in Douglas’s corner. Merchant pointed out before the bout began that Douglas’s best fights have been against the better opponents he’s faced, “so perhaps we’ll get a few rounds.” The following quote is indicative of Merchant’s questionable judgment: “If he should upset Mike Tyson, it would make the shocks in Eastern Europe seem like local ward politics.” Likewise, he said the first round was the best he’d ever seen Douglas fight, and he scored it for Douglas, but the round was even at best for Douglas, and he was to fight at least five better rounds over the ten-round fight.
Tyson’s career, at this point, is teetering between two possible outcomes. He may be inspired anew by his defeat; his determination to be the best may be redoubled–as was the case with Muhammad Ali after he lost to Joe Frazier. Or, like George Foreman, he could watch his skills decay amid bitterness as the new champ–whoever he is–refuses to fight him. In the greatest boxing upset before this one, Ali defeated Foreman in the famous “rope-a-dope” fight in Zaire. Ali never fought Foreman again, and by the time he lost the crown, four years later, Foreman was out of boxing. The careers of Foreman and Tyson are very similar up to the points where they lost their titles. Both were regarded as invincible punching machines of an amazing destructive power. Will Tyson follow Foreman’s path or regain the title?
