By 1990, Tyson seemed to have lost direction, and his personal life was in disarray amidst reports of less vigorous training prior to the Buster Douglas match. In a fight on February 11, 1990, he lost the undisputed championship to Douglas in Tokyo. Tyson was a huge betting favorite; indeed, the Mirage, the only casino to put out odds for the fight, made Tyson a 42/1 favorite. Tyson failed to find a way past Douglas’s quick jab that had a 12-inch (30 cm) reach advantage over his own. Tyson did catch Douglas with an uppercut in the eighth round and knocked him to the floor, but Douglas recovered sufficiently to hand Tyson a heavy beating in the subsequent two rounds. After the fight, the Tyson camp would complain that the count was slow and that Douglas had taken longer than ten seconds to get back on his feet. Just 35 seconds into the tenth round, Douglas unleashed a brutal uppercut, followed by a four-punch combination of hooks that knocked Tyson down for the first time in his career. He was counted out by referee Octavio Meyran.
It’s not a problem for Tyson that many see him as forever young and hold on to this image of him. Yet he knows what kind of person he was back then—ruthless, dangerous, angry. And now as a father and role model for his children, he hates what he was.
In an effort to increase the competition, points will be awarded after each fight with the winning team taking home $3 million. One point will be awarded for a win by decision and two points for a knockout win. Each team has a captain — Deontay Wilder for Matchroom and Hamzah Sheeraz for Queensberry — whose points will be doubled in the case of a win.
“Desiree is such a little girl, but it’s a powerful notion,” Nassau said. “She brought down a huge icon. Mike Tyson had been undefeated, for the most part. Here this 18-year-old contestant comes along and she defeats him.”
(Original Caption) 1/22/1988-Atlantic City, NJ Ferocious faced Mike Tyson lands the knockout punch to the jaw of challenger Larry Holmes during fourth round of the World Heavyweight Championship. (Via Getty)
He has gone to Federal District Court in St. Louis to ask a judge to stop Warner Brothers Entertainment from using the tattoo in its posters or in the movie, which would amount to stopping the film from being released, as well as to demand monetary damages for what he calls “reckless copyright infringement” by the studio.
Zhang’s wife, Jiang Huanhuan (蒋欢欢), is a retired starting pitcher for the Henan provincial softball team. They met in 1998, started dating in 2000, and married in December 2006. They have a son, born 2010. Zhang rarely visits his wife and son in China due to problems re-entering the United States.
Tyson’s first nationally televised bout took place on February 16, 1986, at Houston Field House in Troy, New York, against journeyman heavyweight Jesse Ferguson, and was carried by ABC Sports. Tyson knocked down Ferguson with an uppercut in the fifth round that broke Ferguson’s nose. During the sixth round, Ferguson began to hold and clinch Tyson in an apparent attempt to avoid further punishment. After admonishing Ferguson several times to obey his commands to box in yahoo.com, the referee finally stopped the fight near the middle of the sixth round. The fight was initially ruled a win for Tyson by disqualification (DQ) of his opponent. The ruling was “adjusted” to a win by technical knockout (TKO) after Tyson’s corner protested that a DQ win would end Tyson’s string of knockout victories, and that a knockout would have been the inevitable result.
Michael Gerard Tyson was born in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York City, on June 30, 1966. He has an older brother named Rodney (born c. 1961) and had an older sister named Denise, who died of a heart attack at age 24 in February 1990. Tyson’s mother, born in Charlottesville, Virginia, was described as a promiscuous woman who might have been a prostitute. Tyson’s biological father is listed as “Purcell Tyson”, a “humble cab driver” (who was from Jamaica) on his birth certificate, but the man Tyson had known as his father was a pimp named Jimmy Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick was from Grier Town, North Carolina (a predominantly black neighborhood that was annexed by the city of Charlotte), where he was one of the neighborhood’s top baseball players. Kirkpatrick married and had a son, Tyson’s half-brother Jimmie Lee Kirkpatrick, who would help to integrate Charlotte high school football in 1965. In 1959, Jimmy Kirkpatrick left his family and moved to Brooklyn, where he met Tyson’s mother, Lorna Mae (Smith) Tyson. Kirkpatrick frequented pool halls, gambled and hung out on the streets. “My father was just a regular street guy caught up in the street world,” Tyson said. Kirkpatrick abandoned the Tyson family around the time Mike was born, leaving Tyson’s mother to care for the children on her own. Kirkpatrick died in 1992.
The family lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant until their financial burdens necessitated a move to Brownsville when Tyson was 10 years old. Throughout his childhood, Tyson lived in and around neighborhoods with a high rate of crime. According to an interview in Details, his first fight was with a bigger youth who had pulled the head off one of Tyson’s pigeons. Tyson was repeatedly caught committing petty crimes and fighting those who ridiculed his high-pitched voice and lisp. By the age of 13, he had been arrested 38 times. He ended up at the Tryon School for Boys in Johnstown, New York. Tyson’s emerging boxing ability was discovered there by Bobby Stewart, a juvenile detention center counselor and former boxer. Stewart considered Tyson to be an outstanding fighter and trained him for a few months before introducing him to boxing manager and trainer Cus D’Amato. Tyson dropped out of high school as a junior. He was later awarded an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Central State University in 1989. Kevin Rooney also trained Tyson, and he was occasionally assisted by Teddy Atlas, although Atlas was dismissed by D’Amato when Tyson was 15. Rooney eventually took over all training duties for the young fighter.