Daniel Dubois broke The Code but so did some of the hardest men ever, including Roberto Duran and Mike Tyson When Daniel Dubois quit in the 10th round against Joe Joyce, the young heavyweight with the kind face and a good heart was hurled into a pit of shame alongside some of the hardest men in the history of boxing, Roberto Duran and Mike Tyson among them.The public court of social media – the modern equivalent of Robespierre’s revolutionary tribunal – pronounced that Dubois had committed the fight game’s unforgivable sin. The panel, surprisingly to some, included members of his own tribe: Dillian Whyte, David Haye, Johnny Nelson, Carl Frampton and others familiar with the reality of the ring. He...
Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr – both in their 50s – meet in Los Angeles in an unsanctioned exhibition boutNobody in the history of paid fighting has used the language of violence with as much undiluted enthusiasm as Mike Tyson. Iron Mike gave credible voice to the expression “bad intentions” and, from 1985 until 2005, he scared the pants off 50 lesser mortals until he began to rust and they started beating him up.Yet, on his return to the ring at 54 in the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Saturday night, the man who once threatened to ram an opponent’s nose bone into his brain and said he would eat Lennox Lewis’s babies (he didn’t), is being asked...
Iron Mike has chosen to eschew a taste of normality in returning to fight Roy Jones and with that continues his path alongside Sonny ListonNo one knows boxing history like Mike Tyson. He made plenty of it himself during 20 years as the most feared heavyweight in the world. But there are a lot of things he doesn’t know, and the consequence of his ill‑advised comeback is one of them. Tyson, 54, has not fought since Kevin McBride, a modest Irish heavyweight with much to be modest about, made him quit on his stool after six rounds on the undercard of a show in Washington DC, in June 2005. Like most champions, he quit too late, but what a ride...
This is an ideal confection of nostalgia and viral oddity – with an eerie synchronicity for anyone who, like me, has spent their confinement watching Tyson’s startling early career blitzMike Tyson wants to make a comeback. And who can blame him? So do I. So do you. So does the retail industry, going to school, having fun, being a grandparent, having a job and going to the corner shop without standing outside in a face mask looking like a socially awkward moped thief.In Tyson’s case it seems unlikely the comeback talk amounts to a serious plan, at least not one that will extend beyond some kind of hairspray-and-steroids boxer-tainment. Tyson is 53 years old. No matter how good he looks...
I was in Las Vegas on the night Mike Tyson bit his opponent’s ears twice in a fight that descended into jungle-grade anarchyAt 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...