Tyson Has All the Facts at His Fists

I hate to brag but I just went 10 tough rounds with the guy who will probably be the next heavyweight champion of the world, Mike Tyson. And I did it without taking my glasses off. He never laid a glove on me.

Now, before you start thinking I’m the new George Plimpton, let me hasten to assure you that our weapons were nouns, verbs and adjectives, not left jabs and right crosses. Our contest was a form of Trivial Pursuit, not haymakers in close.

It was a tough fight, and I might have lost a split decision. But I went the route.

The subject was the fight game. Now, if you think it not unusual for a fighter to know the fight game, you don’t know fighters. Believe me, Mike Tyson is an anomaly. (No, Virginia, this does not mean he can hit hard with either hand. It means that he does not think, as do most young pugs, that the world started the day before yesterday).

Do you know who Lou Brouillard was? Probably not. I thought I knew who Lou Brouillard was. I thought I would trap Mike Tyson in our version of 20 Questions.

“Lou Brouillard? Oh, yes. middleweight champ in the 30s,” Mike Tyson said.

“Wrong!” I shouted. “He was the welterweight champ!”

“He was both,” Tyson corrected me quietly. “He won the welter title from Young Jack Thompson and the middle from Ben Jeby. Look it up.”

I looked it up. I lost.

Would you have a clue as to what Kid Gavilan’s real name was? Mike Tyson can spell it for you: Gerardo Gonzalez.

Would you know which heavyweight champion, an American, won the title outside the United States, lost it outside the United States and never defended it in the United States? Just ask Mike Tyson, who’ll tell you it was George Foreman, who won the title in Jamaica, defended it in Venezuela and lost it in Zaire.

Do you know who Louis (Kid) Kaplan was? I did because he fought in my hometown. But Mike Tyson knew not only that he was an undefeated featherweight champion but also that he was born in Russia. I didn’t know that.

Did you think the great Joe Gans fought Ad Wolgast? I did. Tyson knew better. “They both fought Battling Nelson but they never fought each other,” he said. “Gans’ big opponent was Mike (Twin) Sullivan.”

How many times do you think Gene Tunney fought Harry Greb, the only man ever to defeat him? I thought three. “Four,” corrected the future heavyweight champion. “The fourth time was a newspaper-decision fight in St. Paul.”

Mike Tyson is the 20-year-old terror of the prize ring who will fight Trevor Berbick, the World Boxing Council heavyweight champion, in a title bout Nov. 22 at the Las Vegas Hilton.

In the world of sport, it is highly unlikely for a modern practitioner of his art to be aware of predecessors. A modern-day Notre Dame halfback once asked me in all seriousness, “Who was George Gipp?”

It’s entirely possible that Willie Mays heard of Babe Ruth when he first came up to the big leagues, but it’s 10-1 he never heard of Rogers Hornsby. And as for knowing or being able to identify some obscure .290 hitter from the past, forget it.

That’s what makes Mike Tyson unique. He can tell you not only who Tommy Loughran was, but who the non-title winners were. He not only knows Jack Sharkey, he knows Tom Sharkey. He knows both Jack Dempseys. Most people didn’t know there were two. Gus Ruhlin is as familiar to him as Gus Lesnevich.

Not since Joyce Brothers locked herself in “The $64,000 Question” booth and came up with obscure answers from the dawn of prizefight history has anyone had as good a grasp on the lore of boxing.

And Tyson is so steeped in that lore that he hoots in dismay when you ask him something simple like who won the first Tony Canzoneri-Al Singer fight and how many rounds it went. “Come on!” he protests. “Ask me something hard!”

Tyson will one day be the answer to a trivia question himself. Like, maybe, “Who was the youngest man ever to win the world heavyweight championship?” Or, he hopes, “Who was the third undisputed heavyweight champion to retire undefeated?”

Tyson can not only tell you that Al Singer was a 1930s lightweight champion and that Kid Chocolate’s real name was Eligio Sardinias, he is impervious to the trick questions: Who was the champion when Louis and Schmeling fought for the second time? (Louis was.) Who won the lightweight title from Benny Leonard? (Nobody, he retired undefeated.)

Mike Tyson is no bookish, four-eyed devotee of the boxing game, studying yellowed manuscripts by the light of a bed lamp and magnifying glass. He was a street kid in Brooklyn, some of whose early fights made Dempsey-Firpo look like a minuet. He took that well-worn path to the fight game--police court.

As he stepped into a stretch limousine for a ride to a TV interview the other morning, a friend snickered, “Ten years ago, you’d probably be stealing the hubcaps off this thing.”

Tyson smiled. “No, I wouldn’t,” he said softly. “But I’d probably be robbing everybody in it.”

He was discovered when he was 13 and a ward of the juvenile authorities by the late Cus D’Amato. D’Amato, who used to manage former champion Floyd Patterson, imbued the young Tyson not only with a love of fighting, but of fight history. He may be the only heavyweight in the history of the game who will know when a reporter compares him to Johnny Risko whether the reporter is admiring him or insulting him.

Mike does not like to compare himself to any of the great pugs of the past.

“I’m me,” he says--but he does confess to an admiration for Gene Tunney, whom he considers an overlooked great champion. This is partly because every fight writer likes to compare him to a young Joe Frazier or Rocky Balboa, a brawler who fights with his face and is what Angelo Dundee calls a “trade deficit” fighter, i.e., one who takes two to get in one.

Tyson insists that he is more scientific and, despite a lack of height and reach, more of a boxer. “The object in this game is not to get hit,” he said. “I don’t get hit.”

Still, every fighter has a window of vulnerability. Joe Louis was susceptible to a right hand. Dempsey had trouble with the jab.

Trevor Berbick would give a lot to know what Mike Tyson’s weakness is.

I know.

He has no idea who Otto Von Porat was. Or even Stanley Poreda or Tuffy Griffiths. And he had the round wrong for the Schmeling-Stribling knockout.

Tyson’s weakness is 1931.