Jack Todd: Mike Tyson-Logan Paul 'bout' a pale imitation of actual boxing

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It was Oct. 16, 1987. I was seated near ringside in a mostly empty Convention Center in Atlantic City an hour or two before fight time, awaiting a bout featuring Montreal’s Matthew Hilton on the undercard of the big show — Mike Tyson vs. Tyrell Biggs for the heavyweight championship of the world.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up. A guy was going along press row shaking hands with reporters. When I stood, I was looking down at a blond gent two or three inches shorter than me. It was Donald Trump. I shook his hand and forgot about it.

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Here we are, 37 years later, and it’s déjà vu all over again. Mike Tyson is about to step back into the ring and the scalawag who shook my hand that night is about to bring his unique brand of doom and chaos back to the White House. Somehow the two events, the fight and the election, are inextricably linked in a world in which everything appears ominous but nothing is real.

Tyson vs. Logan Paul has no business taking place. After other states refused, Texas sanctioned it at eight rounds rather than 12, with two-minute rounds and heavy gloves so the punches don’t do actual damage — though whether a bout between two men wearing pillows on their hands is meant to protect Tyson or Paul is unclear.

Either way, it is low farce, not the high drama of great boxing, an overhyped YouTube palooka against a man almost old enough to start cashing Social Security cheques.

Whatever skills Paul has been able to marshal, there are dozens of better boxers the world over who are fighting for peanuts as they dream the dream. By the time many of you read this, you’ll probably know who “won” Tyson vs. Paul. I won’t, because I won’t be watching.

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Against the Tyson I saw that night, Jake Paul would have been lucky to escape the first round with his life. Tyson was only 21 at the time, a force of nature who had taken the boxing world by storm. Watching the fight on YouTube today, Tyson (who is supposedly 5-foot-10) looks surprisingly small. Biggs towered over him.

“He’s never fought anyone like me,” Biggs declared before the fight. “He’s strong, but his strength will not hurt me.”

Wrong on all counts. Two months earlier, Tyson fought a very similar boxer in Tony Tucker, who was both more experienced and better than Biggs. Tucker rocked Tyson with an uppercut in the first round and survived to lose an honourable, 12-round decision.

Biggs would have no such luck. To see Tyson from ringside in those days was to feel that you were too close for comfort. Before the fight and between rounds, he sat on his stool, glaring at Biggs like an angry bull, rolling his head back and forth on that powerful neck.

When the bell rang, Tyson charged across the ring. There was no feeling-out period. Biggs danced and jabbed as Tucker had done, but to less effect. Tyson waded in with body shots that sounded like a man hitting a heavy bag with a baseball bat.

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With 30 seconds left in the seventh round, Tyson caught Biggs with a short, chopping left hook. He went down and almost through the ropes. Biggs got up — but that was a mistake. Tyson caught him with another left hook in the middle of the ring. Biggs staggered back and fell in the corner. Referee Tony Orlando stepped in then and stopped the fight.

At the post-fight news conference, someone asked Tyson why he had carried Biggs so long when it appeared he could have taken him out any time. He explained that he felt Biggs had disrespected him before the fight.

“When I hit him in the stomach,” Tyson said in that high-pitched voice with a slight lisp, “he screamed like a woman and I wanted to hear him scream.”

Most of what has happened to Tyson since that night in Atlantic City has been sad or ugly or both. First, he was thoroughly fleeced by Robin Givens and Don King. Then in February 1990, he was upset by Buster Douglas in Tokyo, puncturing the myth that he was invincible. (Had they been closer in age, Muhammad Ali would have put that myth to rest long before.)

In 1992, Tyson was convicted of raping a beauty pageant contestant and served three years in prison. Out of prison, he won back his title, but in June 1997, frustrated at his inability to dominate Evander Holyfield, he bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s ear.

It hasn’t been all downhill since, but in the lead-up to this travesty, a woman surfaced with a $5-million lawsuit claiming that Tyson raped her in a limousine in the 1990s. True? False? Who knows?

If you feel you must watch this burlesque of the fight game, be my guest. I’ll take a hard pass. I saw the real Iron Mike from ringside. The only way I would watch him fight again is if his opponent is Orange Donald Trump.

jacktodd46@yahoo.com

jacktodd.bsky.social

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