Word: tysons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...about lineage. The fight is in Atlantic City instead of Las Vegas, which might be called the aging champion of fight towns if the challenger were not so decrepit. Atlantic City forces its smiles through neon casinos that, like gold crowns, only emphasize the surrounding decay. Similarly, Tyson is the younger party involved, but it hardly seems so. The boardwalk age guessers would be lucky to pick his century...
...over Tyson's walls at the Ocean Club hotel are the old sepia photographs out of which he has stepped, going back to Mike Donovan, Jack Blackburn and Joe Jeannette, who in 1909 fought a 49-rounder that featured 38 knockdowns. Louis, Rocky Marciano and Ali are there, but Jack Johnson, Jim Jeffries and Stanley Ketchel are more prominent. (John Lardner told Ketchel's 1910 fate in a pretty good sentence: "Stanley Ketchel was 24 years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.") The repeaters...
...this at least, Michael Spinks can concur. Though ten years older than Tyson, he has managed to register three fewer professional bouts -- 31 to 34 -- and only four of those against heavyweights. All told, the two men share 65 victories and uneven parts of the mystical championship. While Tyson owns the various belts, Floyd Patterson says, "Spinks has the real title, my old title, the one handed down from person to person." Spinks was first to get to Holmes (whom he out-pointed twice), the acknowledged champion for seven years. Patterson forgets, though, that Holmes' branch of the title originated...
...Amato, the manager who stood up to the fight mob in the '50s, who defied the murderous Frankie Carbo and helped break the monopolist Jim Norris, died in 1985 at 77 and left Tyson in his will. "More than me or Patterson," says D'Amato's other old champion, the light-heavyweight Jose Torres, "Tyson is a clone of Cus's dream. Cus changed both of us, but he made Mike from scratch." In Brooklyn, Tyson had drawn the absent father and saintly mother, the standard neighborhood issue. "You fought to keep what you took," he says, "not what...
Torres recalls the very sight of Tyson at 13: "Very short, very shy and very wide." D'Amato pegged him for a champion straight off, though the resident welterweight Kevin Rooney was dubious. "He looked like a big liar to me; he looked old." Hearing that he was destined to be champ, Tyson shrugged laconically. But before long, everyone in the stable began to see him out of Cus's one good eye. "If he keeps listening," Rooney thought, "he's got a chance." The fighters' gym has a fascination of its own: the timeless loft, the faded posters...