Mike Tyson (Text Only Edition). Monteith Illingworth

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СКАЧАТЬ a tough chin, came to a fight in good condition, could employ a full arsenal of boxing skills, and moved well in the ring. Beating Tillis would gain Tyson a measure of confidence, prepare him for the emotional pressures of the next stage in his pursuit of the heavyweight championship.

      A crowd of eight thousand people jammed into the Glens Falls Civic Center in upstate New York, and every one of them seemed to be a Tyson fan. When he entered the arena, Tyson got a standing ovation. He had won all nineteen of his fights by knockout. That’s what people expected to see, but it was not what he was prepared to deliver. “After coming off the ear injury, he needed one easy fight before Tillis to get into it,” Steve Lott recalled. “The pressure of fighting someone as experienced as Tillis made him nervous, and that reduced him to a one-dimensional fighter.”

      Tillis became a problem that Tyson had trouble solving. Tillis moved well in both directions, which made him a difficult target. And as he moved, he jabbed to keep Tyson at bay. When Tyson did get into punching proximity, Tillis blocked the blows or tied him up. By the second round much of Tyson’s aggression seemed to have drained away. He was racking up points, but many of his punches didn’t connect solidly. He worked the body, but rarely followed in combination with a blow to the head. And he took punches, too—jabs, uppercuts, and a few left hooks.

      Tillis fought far better than expected. He came into the bout seven pounds lighter than usual, which helped his movement, and improved his hand speed. When he took a punch, he struck back, usually in combination. He looked tight, measured, confident, and determined not to get knocked out. But he made one costly error. Near the end of the fourth, Tillis threw a wide, off-balance left hook that turned him around. Before he could turn back, Tyson looped in a hook that sent Tillis down. He got up quickly, though, and fought hard in the fifth, knowing that Tyson would try and end it. To his amazement, and everyone else’s, Tyson didn’t capitalize on the knockdown. He kept throwing single punches, and in clinches didn’t ram blows into Tillis’s body. He was still winning rounds, but barely. In rounds six through nine, he gave up trying to capture the inside positioning so essential for his ballet of defense and offense to work effectively. Tyson let himself be pushed back and tied up, and at times just followed Tillis around the ring in a passive, acquiescent state. In the latter half of the tenth and final round Tillis, no doubt thinking that if he scored heavily he could win the fight, stood toe to toe with Tyson. They exchanged blows for a spirited finale. As it turned out, Tillis was close to being right. The judges scored the fight for Tyson, but without the knockdown in the fourth, it would have ended in a draw. The judges gave all the middle rounds to Tillis.

      The Tillis fight made Jacobs and Cayton, for the first time, nervous about Tyson’s prospects. Did he come away from Tillis feeling that he’d passed a test or failed it? He’d won, but what had Tyson discovered about himself? Did he think that he was the future champion? Or did he see in his feeling of failure an irrepressible urge to give in?

      The match with Mitch (“Blood”) Green took place seventeen days after the Tillis bout in the 20,000-seat-plus main arena of Madison Square Garden. It was Tyson’s first fight on HBO and the first under the promotional banner of Don King. Green had a respectable record of sixteen wins, one loss, and one draw. Ten of his victories had came by knockout. He was not a contender for the title. Still, he was ranked seventh in the estimation of the World Boxing Council. Green was also big (six-foot-five and 225 pounds of sculpted muscle), and he fought with a lot of macho pride in a wide-open, undisciplined style.

      The first round set the pattern for the entire fight. Green had been told by his trainer to punch and move out of harm’s way, and if he did get caught inside to tie Tyson up. The plan, like Tillis’s, was to take Tyson into the later rounds, where he’d not often been and would perhaps be vulnerable. But this time, it didn’t work. Tyson had come to fight.

      Green, a former leader of the Black Spades gang of the Bronx, was overcome by his own recklessness. He tried to grab, but Tyson punched his way out. Instead of continuing with that tactic, or at least to punch, move, and then grab, Green decided every now and then to stand and trade blows. He took the worst of it. Tyson kept eluding Green’s best punch—his left jab—then crowding in and delivering. As Green backed up for room to swing, he only gave Tyson more space to get his punches in first, which he did, repeatedly.

      Tyson put on a boxing clinic as he scored with left and right hooks, body shots, and uppercuts, almost all in combination. One of his jabs knocked Green’s mouthpiece onto the ring apron—embedded in it were a bridge and two false teeth. By the end of the fourth round, Tyson had thrown 109 body punches alone, 70 (or 64 percent) of which connected. That was an unheard-of statistic for most heavyweights, who usually aren’t fast or well conditioned enough to do anything else but headhunt.

      In the fifth, Tyson evoked one of Teddy Atlas’s training techniques. As Green swung away, Tyson feinted, slipped, weaved, dipped, and bobbed in a series of eighteen separate defensive movements. He avoided every one of Green’s punches without countering with a blow of his own. It was a display of pride in his superior abilities, and a bit of arrogance.

      The fight went the full ten rounds. Tyson didn’t seem to care whether he could knock Green down, or out. He was taking pleasure in the process of chopping Green up, like a cleaver against a side of beef. He sometimes smiled through his mouthpiece at Green and at other times sneered. In the corner before the ninth, while trainer Kevin Rooney yammered away, he leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

      On the judge’s scorecards, Tyson won all but one round. Afterwards, at a press conference, Tyson spoke about the win in cool, professional terms. He had been well coached by Jacobs on his postfight posturing since the Ferguson incident. There was no Ali-style histrionics, none of Liston’s glum bluntness. “Not to be egotistical, but I won this fight so easy. I refuse to be beaten in there. I refuse to let anybody get in my way.”

      Tyson had clearly recovered from the Tillis fight. His technical prowess returned in fine form. More important he didn’t get frustrated with being unable to win by knockout. Tyson’s remarks afterwards also displayed a measure of confidence that Jacobs and Cayton wanted to bolster, and a maturity they had to protect. There would be no more risks like Tillis. They’d set up a string of breather fights until the final approach to the title could be determined.

      Still on his breakneck schedule, Tyson fought Reggie Gross about three weeks later (June 13, 1986), also at the Garden and under the promotional banner of Don King. Gross, with an eighteen-and-four record, had long arms but a lazy, inaccurate left jab that dangled out like a heavy salami. Near the end of the first round, Gross moved into the center of the ring and opened up with a series of five punches that Tyson easily avoided as he looked patiently for an opening. He put Gross down twice before the referee called it over. Gross protested. Tyson tried to console him.

      Fourteen days passed. Tyson traveled up to Troy to fight William Hosea. Hosea seemed like a fighter who could do a little bit of everything in the ring with a little bit of proficiency: except take a punch. It was over within two minutes and three seconds. Lorenzo Boyd came next—on July 11. A combination right hook to the body and a right uppercut on the chin ended the fight halfway through the second. Tyson was beginning to look bored.

      On July 26, Tyson met Marvis Frazier, the son of former champion Joe Frazier. Father was both manager and trainer. That was more a liability than an asset against the technically superior Tyson. Marvis was molded in his father’s image. He too bobbed and weaved. Tyson and trainer Kevin Rooney studied tapes of Marvis’s fights and noticed that when he crouched, he didn’t so much bend at the knees as he did at the waist. In the dressing room before the fight, Tyson announced his fight strategy. “As Frazier bent over, Tyson would time a right uppercut,” said Baranski.

      In the first round, Tyson launched at Frazier, backed him up into the corner, and, as per plan, sent in the right uppercut at the appropriate moment. That was enough to do the job, but Tyson added a left hook and another right. СКАЧАТЬ