Against All Odds

Ed Schuyler, the Associated Press’ distinguished fight journalist, approached the customs officer at Tokyo’s Narita Airport.

This was 10 years ago, when Schuyler and other boxing writers began arriving in Japan to cover the Mike Tyson-Buster Douglas heavyweight title fight. The officer inspected Schuyler’s passport, then asked him what his business was in Japan. Schuyler told him he was covering the fight.

“How long do you expect to be working in Japan?” the officer said.

“About 90 seconds,” Schuyler said.

That’s what Tyson thought too.

That’s what everyone thought--but not Buster Douglas.

Ten years ago, Douglas, a 43-1 shot in Las Vegas, knocked Tyson on his backside, registering what many still call sports’ greatest upset.

As HBO commentator Larry Merchant said in the immediate aftermath: “This makes Cinderella look like a sad story.”

At the instant it ended, when Tyson was trying to regain his feet before the 10 count but instead collapsed into referee Octavio Meyran’s arms, it touched off a wild celebration that in a sense continues to this day.

It was a stunner. Tyson was 23 years old, 37-0 with 33 knockouts. He’d had 17 first-round knockouts. He was 10-0 in championship fights. The perception was that no one in the world could stand up to him.

James “Buster” Douglas? How could this happen?

Was this the same Buster Douglas who had flat-out quit in a title bout against Tony Tucker only three years before?

Everywhere, incredulity. As the fight wound down with Douglas in complete command, Merchant’s partner, Jim Lampley, said: “Can I be the first to say it? James ‘Buster’ Douglas--undisputed heavyweight champion of the world?”

Lampley nearly called the result before the fight, held at noon on Feb. 11 in the Tokyo Dome, when he said: “It’s becoming increasingly difficult for Mike Tyson to prepare properly for boxing matches most of us see as noncompetitive.”

He was exactly right. Tyson, in a Times interview six weeks later, admitted he’d not prepared himself properly.

“I never took the fight seriously,” he said.

“I was out of shape. I let myself get too heavy before the fight and had to lose 25 pounds in Japan, in the last month before the fight. It was too much. I was training hard and not eating, basically. But I wasn’t worried because I’d done it before and still won. I fell into sloppy habits.

“This time, I picked the wrong opponent to do that with. I don’t mean to tear down Buster Douglas because he was really prepared to fight me--but he beat an out-of-shape guy who didn’t prepare properly. That won’t happen again. When I’m right, I’m the best fighter in the world.”

Tyson’s version of why he lost greatly annoyed the Douglas camp, and Douglas’ then-manager, John Johnson, remains perturbed to this day.

“To the contrary, I think Mike was in great shape that day,” Johnson said recently from his home in Columbus, Ohio.

“You have to be in great shape to take that kind of whipping for 10 rounds. I never believed Mike’s version.”

Tyson, Johnson said, was the perfect matchup for Douglas, 29, a 6-foot-4 onetime prep basketball star.

“We were on Tyson undercards five or six times, and I told James several times: ‘If you ever get the chance, you’ll kick his ass.’

“On that one day, I thought James might have been the best heavyweight ever. He was awesome. If he could have maintained that, being in great shape over a long period of time, he could’ve had a long run.”

It was a short run, of course. The Douglas camp fell apart in the aftermath, fractured by internal bickering over control. Douglas’ handlers, angry at the Don King-Jose Sulaiman team for their protest of the result in Tokyo, spurned a Tyson rematch and Douglas was instead matched with Evander Holyfield the following October at Las Vegas.

Douglas hit the banquet circuit, shortened his training regimen just as Tyson had done in Japan, and the inevitable result ensued. Holyfield knocked out the 246-pound Douglas in the third round.

Douglas earned a $25-million purse from Mirage owner Steve Wynn, still believed to be one of the biggest paydays ever for a sports/entertainment figure. He’d earned $1.3 million in Tokyo.

The side story to Douglas’ astonishing victory in Tokyo was that his mother, 46, had died unexpectedly, 23 days before the fight.

In the days before the fight, he bore a stoic face, and talked often of his loss.

“I’m a good man, a Christian man,” he said. “I’ll do the right thing. I want to show my mom she raised a strong young man.”

Despite the death of the fighter’s mother, Douglas’ trainer that day, John Russell, said Douglas had had a “near-perfect” training camp.

“At that point I’d trained fighters for 20 years and I never had a fighter train as hard as Buster did for that one,” he said.

“With Buster, all the ingredients were always there. He was a tremendous athlete. I always told him I thought of him as a big middleweight. I told him in Tokyo if he could just get past the first two rounds, he could win.

“And that’s what happened. By the third round, you could see Tyson wasn’t going anywhere with Buster.

“The other important factor is there wasn’t a bit of dissension in our camp. For the Holyfield fight there was, and Buster’s the kind of guy who’s greatly bothered by that. He’s not the kind of guy to take charge and organize things.”

Johnson, the manager, was out shortly after Tokyo.

“It was heartbreaking, really,” he said.

“If you were to visit my house, you’d see pictures of James all over my house. So it’s sad we’re not even friends now. I think a lot about the times when it was just Buster and me, the times when no one else wanted Buster.”

And no one wanted Buster Douglas-Mike Tyson, either.

Only the Japanese.

In his prefight banter, HBO’s Merchant pursued the U.S.-Japan trade imbalance angle.

“Hey, we sold Tyson-Douglas to Japan for $6 million--about four times what it was worth in America,” Merchant said.

Tyson came in at 220 pounds, Douglas a trim 231.

Tyson was aggressive at the outset, forcing Douglas to fight fast. But Tyson expended a great deal of energy in the first two rounds without result. And in the third round, Douglas’ world-class left jab began finding the range. At the end of the round, Tyson’s knees were trembling.

Midway through the fifth, Douglas punished the champion for the first time, hammering him with a center-ring combination, and Tyson, for the first time, did not fight back.

Tyson’s left eye began to close, and between rounds Tyson’s cornermen were exposed as the most inept to work a heavyweight title fight. No one remembered to bring ice. A condom appeared, filled with bucket water, which was applied to the fighter’s eye.

For the rest of the fight, Douglas kept the fight in center ring, never allowing Tyson to pin him on the ropes. By the seventh, Tyson’s legs were gone. He leaped or lunged with his punches, with a flat-footed shuffle.

By the eighth, with Douglas well ahead on points, the only remaining question was the challenger’s stamina.

Douglas hurt Tyson on the ropes with a combination, but the champion bounced off the ropes and started a desperation right uppercut at his knees. It slammed home flush on the underside of Douglas’ jaw, putting the challenger on his back.

But he was only momentarily stunned and he was up, under control, at the nine count.

On the knockdown, the TV camera didn’t catch Tyson’s plight. Meyran directed him to the neutral corner and Tyson had great difficulty walking there.

In the ninth, another dramatic moment was set up by Tyson nearly toppling over with the force of his wild, missed punches. Then Douglas hurt him badly with three solid punches to the head. Then Tyson, still dangerous, staggered Douglas with a wild right hand.

Douglas ended it in the 10th with a debilitating seven-punch combination. Tyson, exhausted and battered senseless, tried to regain his feet, his mouthpiece dangling from his mouth.

In the aftermath, Tyson’s promoter, King, began barking at his stooge, World Boxing Council President Sulaiman, claiming Douglas had been down in the eighth round longer than 10 seconds.

King failed to point out a referee’s count is just that, a count, not 10 seconds. Nevertheless, he bullied Sulaiman into saying the WBC would withhold recognition of Douglas as champion, presumably pending an investigation. Two days later, the WBC and World Boxing Assn. recognized Douglas as champion.

Three hours after he’d knocked out Tyson, the new champion was visited in his hotel room by reporters. He lay naked in bed, one of Tyson’s championship belts secured around his waist.

All around him, a dozen or so supporters from Columbus were getting very drunk.

Yet Buster Douglas, cold sober and unsmiling, reflected calmly at what had just transpired.

“I don’t blame you guys for not picking me,” he said.

“Because until today, no one had ever seen the real Buster Douglas.”

Shed no tears for Buster Douglas.

Much of the $25 million he earned from the Holyfield fight was invested in blue chip stocks 10 years ago.

“James is a very rich man today,” Johnson says.

Douglas had a serious bout of diabetes in 1994, when his weight soared to well over 300 pounds. He passed out one day and was rushed to a hospital, where he was revived but passed out again. His blood glucose level was above 800 (120 is normal).

“I got my diabetes under control with insulin and taking a lot of weight off,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Columbus. Douglas, who has three sons, maintains another home at Marco Island, Fla.

He was asked about his most vivid memory of his victory over Tyson.

“The combination I hit him with in the ninth round,” he said. “I remember that best, because two of the punches were really good body shots.”

He said he doesn’t regret fighting Holyfield next instead of Tyson.

“There was so much going on for the Holyfield fight, it seemed like I had only two good weeks of training,” he said. “I really regret that, that I wasn’t able to give Holyfield a better fight.”