My favourite game: Holyfield v Tyson, WBA heavyweight title fight 1997

I was in Las Vegas on the night Mike Tyson bit his opponent’s ears twice in a fight that descended into jungle-grade anarchy

At the risk of undermining this admirable exercise in nostalgia, “game” is a towering misnomer when attached to the peculiar art of rendering a fellow human being unconscious. As the late Brendan Ingle famously said, you don’t play boxing; he also said it is the only sport in which it is legal to kill someone.

There were no deaths the surreal Saturday night of 28 June 1997 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. No knockout, even. But there was much blood, most of it pouring from an inch-long open wound running along where the top of Evander Holyfield’s right ear once resided. It was the third round of his world heavyweight rematch against the convicted rapist Mike Tyson, whom he’d knocked out seven months earlier and who was having his sixth fight since being released from prison in 1995.