Left hooks. Right hooks. Uppercuts.
Mike Tyson unleashed a barrage of punches, including a left to the body that dropped Hector Merced to a knee. The referee sent Tyson to a neutral corner, then began to count.
It was March 6, 1985.
Tyson, then 18, was making his professional boxing debut at the Empire State Plaza Conventional Hall in Albany, N.Y. One minute and 47 seconds after the opening bell, with Merced on his right knee and looking in no hurry to get up, the referee stopped the fight.
Tyson won by TKO, and a celebrated but turbulent career began.
Almost four decades later, Tyson is 58 and preparing to fight Jake Paul, 27. Of the millions of viewers planning to watch the heavyweight bout Nov. 15 on Netflix, a portion will know mostly about Tyson’s knockouts. There were 44 during a career that ended with a record of 50-6.
“This is a guy with tremendous talent, but is there a problem?” said Mike Silver, a boxing historian and author of “The Arc of Boxing: The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science.” “Yeah, there’s a problem.”
The problem would surface later in the ring.
Mike Tyson boxing career: How it started
Tyson started his pro career wearing white boxing trunks with a red waistband. But even without the ominous black trunks that later came to define him, he was devastating.
He scored knockouts against his first 19 opponents, including 12 in the first round. Almost as astonishing: Those 19 fights took place in just over the course a year, which meant on average Tyson was fighting once every 20 days.
The pace was part of a plan formulated by Tyson’s first trainer, Cus D’Amato. The goal: help Tyson to become the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history. The record belonged to Floyd Patterson, who also was trained by D’Amato and won the heavyweight title in 1956 at 21 years, 10 months, three weeks and five days.
Of his first 19 victims, Tyson knocked two of them down three times apiece and broke at least one nose. But only five of those fighters finished their careers with winning records, leaving Tyson to prove he could beat elite boxers.
Youngest heavyweight champion
On Nov. 22, 1986, at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas, Tyson was 20 years old with a record of 27-0 when he climbed into the ring. His opponent was Trevor Berbick, 32, the WBC world heavyweight champion who seemed determined to get under Tyson’s skin.
Fighters are not allowed to wear the same color trunks, and as the champion Berbick got to pick first. He chose black – the same color Tyson famously began wearing in his 20th fight. Tyson wore his black trunks anyway and faced a fine of $5,000.
Then Tyson made Berbick pay.
Tyson hammered Berbick from the opening moments and knocked him down twice in the second round. Twice Berbick fell after the second knockdown, prompting referee Mills Lane to end the fight with 25 seconds left in the second round.
With that, at age 20 years, four months and 22 days, Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion – more than a year younger than Patterson was when he beat Archie Moore for world heavyweight title in 1956. D’Amato’s plan had worked, but he was not around to see it come to fruition.
D’Amato, Tyson’s beloved trainer died Nov. 4,1985. But the grieving pupil continued his ascent.
Mike Tyson’s knockouts
Thirty seconds.
That’s how long it took on July 26, 1986 for Tyson to knock down Marvis Frazier with brutal uppercuts, prompting referee Joe Cortes to stop the fight. It remains the quickest knockout of Tyson’s career.
Tyson recorded 22 of his 44 knockouts in the first round. That included a KO of Michael Spinks, who entered their 1988 fight with a record of 31-0 and lasted just 91 seconds.
Of his KO victims, Tyson took out seven in the second round, four in the third round, two in the fourth round, three apiece in the fifth and sixth rounds, two in the seventh round and one in the 10th round. Silver, the boxing historian, said this was evidence of the emerging problem.
“If a decent fighter took him past the fourth or fifth round, he wasn’t as effective as a knockout puncher,” Silver said. “The great knockout punchers can score knockouts in the later rounds as (Rocky) Marciano as Joe Louis did. The problem with Tyson is he became frustrated.”
The frustration was clear in 1997 when he bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear during their rematch and got disqualified. And before that, Tyson’s invincibility was shattered.
On Feb. 11, 1990, Buster Douglas knocked out Tyson in the 10th round of their fight in Tokyo – still one of the most shocking upsets in sports history.
Holyfield stopped Tyson by TKO in the 11th round of their fight in 1996. Lennox Lewis also KO’d Tyson in the eighth round of their 2002 fight, as did the less-than-legendary Danny Williams in 2004.
Tyson retired in 2005 shortly after refusing to come out for the seven round against journeyman Kevin McBride.
Is Mike Tyson best boxer ever?
In a recent post on Tyson’s Instagram account, Tyson wore a T-shirt that on the back read, “I’m still the best ever.”
At his peak, Tyson might have been the most fearsome boxer in the history of the sport and his feats were impressive. He defended the WBC title he won from Berbick nine consecutive times and defended the IBF title he won in 1997 from Tony Tucker six straight times. Following a four-year absence from boxing while he served prison time after being convicted of rape, Tyson won the WBC title yet again.
But the best ever? Perhaps the most feared.
“He was a bully with a tremendous power,” Silver said. “He wasn’t a fighter in the mold of a Evander Holyfield or a Marciano, or even an Arturo Gotti, where you literally had to kill them to beat them.”
But Gene Kilroy, who managed Muhammad Ali, had a different take during a recent conversation with Tyson.
Said Kilroy, “The only one whoever beat Mike Tyson was Mike Tyson.”
