Mike Tyson: The Rise, the Fall and the Long Second Act

In the spring of 1980 a counsellor at a reform school in upstate New York drives a thirteen-year-old boy to a small town on the Hudson called Catskill, to a gym above the police station, to show him to an old man. The counsellor, Bobby Stewart, has been boxing with the boy for months and cannot believe what he is seeing. The old man, Cus D’Amato, watches a few rounds of sparring and tells the boy, in front of everyone, that he will be heavyweight champion of the world.

The short answer to whether he was right is 22 November 1986, when the boy, now 20 years and four months old, stopped Trevor Berbick in two rounds. Mike Tyson was the youngest heavyweight champion in history and by 1990 a beaten man in Tokyo; he lost three years to prison, won and lost the titles again, and then spent longer being famous than he ever spent being champion. This is the documented career, from Brownsville to Arlington, Texas. For the sport itself, start with the site’s history of boxing.

Key facts

Born

Michael Gerard Tyson, 30 June 1966, Brooklyn, New York

Trainer

Cus D’Amato, Catskill, New York, 1980–1985

Style

Peek-a-boo: high guard, head movement, short combinations

Professional record

50–7, 44 KO, 2 no contests (1985–2005)

World titles

WBC 1986, WBA and IBF 1987; undisputed 1987–1990; WBC and WBA 1996

Retired

2005, after Kevin McBride; returned for Roy Jones Jr. (2020) and Jake Paul (2024)

Brownsville, Tryon and the old man in Catskill

Michael Gerard Tyson was born on 30 June 1966 in Brooklyn and grew up in Brownsville, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in New York. His father left before he was two; his mother, Lorna Tyson, raised three children. By his own account in Undisputed Truth he was small, lisping and bullied, kept pigeons on the roof, and was arrested dozens of times before he was thirteen. That was how he ended up at the Tryon School for Boys in Johnstown, New York, where Bobby Stewart, a former professional boxer, ran the gym.

D’Amato was 72 when they met. He had managed Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight title in 1956, when Patterson was 21 and the youngest champion ever, and José Torres to the light heavyweight title, and had fought the mob-run boxing establishment of the 1950s until he more or less retired from it, to a fourteen-room Victorian house in Catskill owned by his companion Camille Ewald. Tyson moved into it. His mother died in 1982, and D’Amato became his legal guardian.

Peek-a-boo

What D’Amato taught was a system, and it had a name. The gloves stayed high in front of the face, the chin behind them; the head moved constantly, slipping and weaving, so that a shorter man could get under the jab of a taller one; and the punches came in numbered combinations, called out by the trainer, that Tyson drilled until he threw them without thinking. Torres had used it. Patterson had used it. In Tyson, who stood 178 cm (5 ft 10 in) and would fight men 15 cm taller for his whole career, it became something else, because the speed of his hands was matched by the power in them. Set it next to the plain jab and you see the difference: D’Amato’s fighters rarely led with one.

The gym above the Catskill police station also had Teddy Atlas, who did much of the early hands-on work until he left in 1982, and Kevin Rooney, who took over as trainer. Tyson won the Junior Olympic heavyweight title in 1981 and 1982 and the National Golden Gloves in 1984, but lost twice to Henry Tillman at the Olympic trials that year, on points. Tillman went to Los Angeles and won the gold. Tyson turned professional.

Fifteen fights, fifteen knockouts, and a funeral

His debut was on 6 March 1985 in Albany, a first-round stoppage of Hector Mercedes. His managers, Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton, owned the largest fight-film archive in the world and used it: they put Tyson in the ring every two or three weeks against journeymen, filmed the knockouts and sent the tapes to television stations. By the end of 1985 he was 15–0, every win by knockout, most inside two rounds.

D’Amato did not see the year out. He died of pneumonia on 4 November 1985, aged 77, with his fighter a year short of the title he had promised him in the gym.

The run continued through 1986, and on 22 November at the Las Vegas Hilton, he met the WBC champion Trevor Berbick, the man who had beaten Muhammad Ali in Ali’s last fight five years earlier. Berbick went down in the second round from a left hook, got up, fell again, got up and fell a third time, his legs no longer answering. It was over at 2:35 of the round. Tyson was 20 years, 4 months and 22 days old.

Undisputed

The heavyweight title in 1987 was in three pieces, and Tyson picked them up one by one. On 7 March he outpointed James “Bonecrusher” Smith over twelve rounds for the WBA belt. On 1 August he outpointed Tony Tucker for the IBF belt, and for the first time since 1978 one man held all three. Larry Holmes, 38 and coming out of retirement, was stopped in four rounds in January 1988; Tony Tubbs lasted two in Tokyo in March.

Then came Michael Spinks, 27 June 1988, at Convention Hall in Atlantic City. Spinks was undefeated at 31–0 and had taken the lineal championship from Holmes. The fight lasted 91 seconds. Spinks went down from a body shot, got up, and went down again from a right hand. Tyson was 35–0 and 22 years old, and most of the trade regarded him as the best heavyweight since Ali.

The team that built him was already coming apart. Jacobs had died of leukaemia in March 1988; Tyson took Cayton to court over their contract, signed with the promoter Don King, and in December 1988 dismissed Rooney, the last of D’Amato’s people in the corner. He defended the title twice in 1989, stopping Frank Bruno in five rounds and Carl Williams in one.

Tokyo, 11 February 1990

James “Buster” Douglas was a 29-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, with a good jab and a reputation for fading late; Las Vegas listed him at 42–1. His mother had died three weeks before the fight. At the Tokyo Dome, in front of a quiet crowd, Douglas jabbed and moved and hit Tyson with right hands from the first round, and Tyson, without a trainer who knew him and with a corner that had not brought an ice bag for his swelling eye, kept walking forward into them. In the eighth Tyson dropped him with an uppercut, and Douglas got up at what the referee counted as nine and the stopwatch counted as longer. In the tenth Douglas landed an uppercut and a four-punch combination, and the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world was on the canvas, groping for his mouthpiece. He did not beat the count. King argued about the long count for a week. Nobody else did.

Tyson knocked out Henry Tillman, the man who had beaten him at the Olympic trials, in one round in June 1990, and beat Razor Ruddock twice in 1991, once by a stoppage that caused a riot in the ring and once on points over twelve rounds. A fight with Holyfield, now the champion, was signed for November 1991 and cancelled when Tyson injured a rib in training.

In February 1992 a jury in Indianapolis convicted Tyson of rape; he was sentenced to six years and served three, and was released in March 1995.

The second reign, and the ear

The comeback began on 19 August 1995 in Las Vegas against Peter McNeeley, who was disqualified after 89 seconds when his manager climbed into the ring. On 16 March 1996 Tyson stopped Frank Bruno in three rounds for the WBC title and on 7 September stopped Bruce Seldon in one for the WBA title. He gave up the WBC belt rather than defend it against Lennox Lewis, and on 9 November 1996 at the MGM Grand he met Evander Holyfield, 34 years old, written off after a heart scare and priced at long odds. Holyfield fought him at close range, leaned on him, out-punched him inside, and stopped him in the eleventh round. It was Tyson’s second defeat, and it was not close.

The rematch, 28 June 1997, in the same ring, is the fight most people who never watched boxing can describe. Holyfield’s head clashed with Tyson’s in the second round and opened a cut; in the third, in a clinch, Tyson bit a piece from Holyfield’s right ear and spat it onto the canvas. The referee, Mills Lane, deducted two points and let it continue. Tyson bit the left ear. Lane disqualified him. The Nevada State Athletic Commission revoked his licence and fined him three million dollars, and he did not box again until January 1999.

Memphis, and the last of it

The fights after 1998 were fewer, and the opponents chosen with care: Francois Botha, ahead on the cards when he was stopped in the fifth in 1999; Julius Francis in two rounds in Manchester and Lou Savarese in 38 seconds in Glasgow in 2000; Brian Nielsen in Copenhagen in 2001. A bout with Andrew Golota in October 2000 ended when Golota refused to come out for the third round and was later ruled a no contest.

Lennox Lewis was the champion Tyson had never faced, and a brawl at a press conference in New York in January 2002 cost Tyson a Nevada licence and moved the fight to Memphis, Tennessee. On 8 June 2002 at the Pyramid Arena, Lewis, 18 cm taller and with a reach more than 30 cm longer, jabbed Tyson’s face into a mess and knocked him out in the eighth round. Tyson said afterwards that Lewis was the better man. It was his last world title fight.

He beat Clifford Etienne in 49 seconds in February 2003. In August 2003 he filed for bankruptcy in New York, with debts that the court filings put at more than twenty million dollars despite career earnings of several hundred million. Danny Williams, a British journeyman, knocked him out in four rounds in Louisville in July 2004, and on 11 June 2005 in Washington, against the Irish heavyweight Kevin McBride, Tyson sat on his stool after the sixth round and did not get up. He said he no longer had the heart for it. The record closed at 50 wins, 7 losses, 2 no contests, 44 by knockout.

The long second act

There was a 2008 documentary, Tyson, made by James Toback, and a cameo in The Hangover in 2009. In 2012 he opened a one-man stage show, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, in Las Vegas; Spike Lee directed it on Broadway, and the memoir of the same title followed in 2013. The International Boxing Hall of Fame inducted him in 2011. In 2019 he launched the podcast Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson, which is still running.

Then, at 54, he put the gloves back on. On 28 November 2020 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles he boxed eight two-minute exhibition rounds against Roy Jones Jr., 51, which the WBC’s guest judges scored a draw. Four years later a promotion with the YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul was sanctioned by the Texas commission as a professional fight: eight two-minute rounds with heavier gloves, at the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium in Arlington on 15 November 2024, streamed on Netflix to an audience the platform put in the tens of millions. Paul, 27, won on all three cards. Tyson, 58, went the distance, and because Texas sanctioned the bout as professional, BoxRec counts it as his eighth loss. How the judges arrived at it is a question for the guide to how boxing is scored; how he arrived there at all is the whole story above.

Where to go next

• The boxing discipline hub collects training articles, workouts and gear; the history of boxing covers the sport from bare knuckles to the belts Tyson unified.
• Why heavyweights have no upper limit and why that mattered for a 178 cm champion: boxing weight classes explained.
• The champion D’Amato measured everyone against, and whose last conqueror gave Tyson his first belt: Muhammad Ali: The Life and Fights of the Greatest.
• Why Henry Tillman could beat Tyson twice in 1984 and lose to him in one round in 1990: amateur vs professional boxing.