http://www.boxing.com/the_one_hundred_greatest_heavyweights_of_all_time_part_ten_10_1.html
Iron” Mike Tyson denoted the significance of mental strength at the sharp end of boxing. Had he the will to match his astonishing physical capabilities, it’s possible that Tyson would have been the greatest heavyweight of all time. As it stood, a lack of discipline, commitment,
grit, prevented him fulfilling his astonishing potential. Tyson scrapes into the top ten here, but for a while it looked like number one was a possibility.
It was James “Quick” Tillis of all people that showed Tyson what boxing was. “I was out of shape because of [an] illness and also because of drinking and partying too hard,” he said of that fight. “He gave me such a body beating I couldn’t even walk…I found out what fighting was really about that night.”
But Tyson didn’t learn lessons; four years later, at the time of his expected outclassing of James “Buster” Douglas, Tyson was training on a steady diet of hotel-maids and “unconventional Japanese women” while supposedly eating only soup in a drastic attempt to lose the thirty pounds he had gained since the Carl Williams slaughter. He was unfocused, slovenly, complacent. Boxing punished him.
His complacency took hold by way of dominance. He smashed out nineteen overmatched journeymen before Tillis extended him the distance, and more seasoned men followed in similarly one-sided fashion. But it was his mid-late eighties prime that really established him as special, as a series of world-class fighters were dispatched with a steaming barrel of vicious torque unseen since Dempsey, but in this instance, the bull-rushing destroyer weighed 215 lbs. and hit accordingly. A creaking Larry Holmes fell in four, Pinklon Thomas in six, Trevor Berbick in just two; most terrifying of all was his first round knockout of legitimate lineal Champion Michael Spinks.
Jabbing fast, swinging wide, he had recognized in his prey the by now familiar vacancy of expression that stretched beyond fear and into hopelessness – “I see that moment, I got you” – and abandoned all pretense of humanity. He was a burning ogre of a fighter, delivering hot violence behind technical surety. Spinks was destroyed by Tyson’s malignant psychic presence almost as much as unequalled physical attack and Iron Mike had something that Holyfield never did; a night upon which he arguably could not have been beaten.
I don’t buy that argument, and Tyson crumbled soon after, emerging a convicted rapist armed with an untamed, eerie fury for a second career that could never have matched his first incarnation, but the unique brutality of his first will never be forgotten.
How is this different then anything I've been saying???
@ you thinking some 1940's fighters that them old nikkas was handling would fair well with the fighters Tyson knocked out in the 80's/90's. move along with that shyt.