Holyfield-Tyson I: 20 Years in the Blink of an Eye
By Cliff Rold
“Get in here. Tyson is getting his ass kicked!”
When a friend shows up at the door just as the bell rings to end the sixth, the urgency of not missing the replay of the knockdown is palpable.
As this is being written, we’re still a couple hours shy of exactly twenty years to the minute that the heavyweight title fight most had given up on finally got underway. There are moments in time that always feel like yesterday. For fight fans, Holyfield-Tyson is one of them.
But it wasn’t yesterday.
Twenty years is a long time indeed.
When they fought the first time, a Clinton was winning a Presidential election; a season of television took about nine months to watch and commercials weren’t optional; and comic book movies were a year away from the verge of extinction thanks to Batman and Robin.
Times change.
Times have certainly changed for boxing.
Holyfield-Tyson was the defining heavyweight rivalry of arguably the second greatest heavyweight era. Just a year ago, it was the subject of a masterfully done 30 for 30 documentary. No, it wasn’t the best rivalry. That honor was reserved for Holyfield’s trilogy with Riddikk Bowe.
It also didn’t produce the best single heavyweight fight of the decade. That honor also went to Holyfield and Bowe in their first tilt…unless one wants to make a case for Michael Moorer-Bert Cooper.
That’s a fair case too.
When Holyfield and Tyson stepped in the ring the first time, most thought it was a foregone conclusion. Holyfield opened as a lopsided underdog with some fearing for his health. There were plenty of outlets expecting Tyson to maul him in the first a la Michael Spinks.
Even with all that, in the heart of football season, there was no question what the biggest sporting event of the day was.
If there is one way to mark the passage of time for the sweet science in the US, it is the way a big fight is covered.
Fans got a taste of the good old days last year. Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao may not have delivered a classic in the ring, but the way it was covered delivered in spades. Daily fight week updates on ESPN, talk shows on location in Las Vegas, and wall to wall fight night coverage that included the post fight presser made boxing the major league of sports again for a night.
It used to be like that more often in the 1990s. Holyfield and Tyson was, in newspaper parlance, the top of the fold. It wasn’t alone though. Prior to his rubber match with Bowe, ESPN dedicated two hours to replaying their first two fights while both men looked on and then provided comment.
The sports move to premium cable was almost complete even then. Big fights, and fights that weren’t big at all, were already a fixture on pay-per-view. The net effect of it all on the sport hadn’t fully taken hold yet. Boxing, while declined in viewership and popularity, was still a steady if not constant fixture in the mainstream of sports.
Tyson fights were the biggest lure for fight fans then but they weren’t the only lure. One thing that stood out for Mayweather and Pacquiao was that, at their peak of attention, they were boxing’s sole true superstars for a few years.
They were the lone bridge to the news of sports.
Everything else was relegated strictly to the news of boxing.
When Holyfield-Tyson I took place, there was more star power to go around. Just months before, for negative reasons, Bowe’s first fight with Andrew Golota was global news. Julio Cesar Chavez-Pernell Whitaker was a Sports Illustrated cover story just a few years prior. Oscar De La Hoya’s gold medal mattered.
Boxing had foreign attractions and markets, big time in the United Kingdom, but the stadium show culture that hit during the Klitschko years in continental Europe was only laying its foundation. Hardcore fight fans interested in lighter divisions outside the US had to find someone to buy or trade VHS cassettes with. Mostly, it came down to reading about them in the results section of Ring Magazine and taking their word for it in the occasional feature.
It might feel like yesterday but twenty years has proven to be an eternity in boxing. This Saturday, one of the best heavyweights in the world (Luis Ortiz) will fight on an afternoon throwaway hour on HBO. The heavyweight division in general still pulls above the fold headlines; it just doesn’t do it in the US. Fans that want to see just about any other fight in the world can do so within a day on YouTube.
Even in this new reality, memories of a night like Holyfield-Tyson I make it all sort of melt together. What was, and what is, feel like they aren’t as far apart as they are.
And right now we’re a few minutes closer to the opening bell.