A requiem for boxing

The Last Great Fight

The Extraordinary Tale of

Two Men and How One Fight Changed Their Lives Forever

Joe Layden

St. Martin’s Press: 308 pp., $24.95

If you want to know what has happened to the sport that produced such boxing legends as John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali, Joe Layden’s exhilarating and hard-hitting account of the 1990 heavyweight championship fight between Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas and its aftermath will tell you. His tale in “The Last Great Fight” is about as pretty as Sylvester Stallone’s face at the final bell in a “Rocky” movie.

It was in Tokyo on Feb. 11, 1990, that an unheralded challenger from Ohio, James “Buster” Douglas, scored perhaps the biggest upset in heavyweight boxing history by knocking out the seemingly unbeatable Mike Tyson in the 10th round. Douglas was a 42-to-1 underdog -- if you could find anyone to take the bet. Consider that the famed “Cinderella Man,” James J. Braddock, was a 10-to-1 underdog when he beat Max Baer in 1935.

The bout should have made Douglas a national hero and given boxing a much needed boost Instead, it led to the swift unraveling of Douglas and Tyson’s careers. The fight game began, Layden writes in prose as crisp as a Sugar Ray Robinson jab, “a long and precipitous slide toward the margins of mainstream sport.”

Layden credits Tyson -- perhaps a tad too generously, given that at least one commentator saw him as “a cancer on boxing” -- with resurrecting the sport. The biggest draw since Ali, Tyson with his “menace and blood- lust . . . brought people to the arena . . . [and] compelled otherwise frugal and sensible consumers to spring for a Home Box Office subscription.” No heavyweight had seemed so invincible since Joe Louis demolished all comers in the late 1930s.

Douglas was “a thoughtful, introspective boy” who “loved boxing, which is not to say that he enjoyed fighting.” For just one time in his life, he was able to focus his energy and attention on training, beating Tyson so decisively that many thought Douglas would rule the heavyweight ranks for years. But in his first title defense, against Evander Holyfield, he was so listless and overweight that many thought his defeat by a fourth-round knockout was a disgrace. Tyson, meanwhile, demoralized by the loss of his crown, descended further into a pattern of violence and self-indulgence, including a rape conviction in 1992, that kept him in prison for most of his prime. Their much-anticipated rematch never happened.

Layden doesn’t belabor the obvious. The villain in the story is promoter Don King, who, with Tyson as his meal ticket, tried to have the result overthrown on a technicality. Failing that, King moved to Douglas’ hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and coaxed the fighter’s father, as well as NAACP director Benjamin Hooks, into convincing the champ to leave his white manager and throw his fortunes in with King. “I was harassed every day I was heavyweight champion of the world,” Douglas told Layden. “By the time the Holyfield fight came around, it was total chaos in our camp.”

When Douglas lost his title, King again hooked up with Tyson, who eventually sued the promoter for $100 million for stealing from his purses; Tyson was awarded $14 million but spent most of it settling numerous lawsuits. Douglas made one failed comeback attempt, then was diagnosed with diabetes. As Tyson’s former publicist Mike Marley crassly put it, his man “is railroaded into prison” and “the other guy becomes a happy fat man with a terrible illness. I don’t think you can find a better soap opera than that.” If Douglas wasn’t exactly happy, he at least walked away from boxing contented, having invested his money wisely, something as rare in the sport as a white heavyweight champion.

There are many reasons for boxing’s decline besides Tyson and Douglas, beginning with a lack of regulation that allows predators such as King to operate. The talent pool is drying up; as HBO boxing analyst Larry Merchant put it, there are hundreds of potential heavyweights “and they’re all playing linebacker” or engaging in other safer, more lucrative sports. Most of boxing’s audience, except in Latino communities, has abandoned it for the thrills of wrestling and mixed martial arts.

Whatever the reasons, it’s probable that boxing, if not dead, is unlikely ever to produce a fight of such significance as the Tyson-Douglas match. Fans will want to add “The Last Great Fight” to their collection of great books on the Sweet Science, from Ernest Hemingway to A.J. Liebling to Norman Mailer. File it at the end of the shelf; it’s the last one you’ll ever need.

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Allen Barra is a sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal.