in his feeling of failure an irrepressible urge to give in?
The match with Mitch (“Blood”) Green took place seventeen days after the Tillis bout in the 20,000-seat-plus main arena of Madison Square Garden. It was Tyson’s first fight on HBO and the first under the promotional banner of Don King. Green had a respectable record of sixteen wins, one loss, and one draw. Ten of his victories had came by knockout. He was not a contender for the title. Still, he was ranked seventh in the estimation of the World Boxing Council. Green was also big (six-foot-five and 225 pounds of sculpted muscle), and he fought with a lot of macho pride in a wide-open, undisciplined style.
The first round set the pattern for the entire fight. Green had been told by his trainer to punch and move out of harm’s way, and if he did get caught inside to tie Tyson up. The plan, like Tillis’s, was to take Tyson into the later rounds, where he’d not often been and would perhaps be vulnerable. But this time, it didn’t work. Tyson had come to fight.
Green, a former leader of the Black Spades gang of the Bronx, was overcome by his own recklessness. He tried to grab, but Tyson punched his way out. Instead of continuing with that tactic, or at least to punch, move, and then grab, Green decided every now and then to stand and trade blows. He took the worst of it. Tyson kept eluding Green’s best punch—his left jab—then crowding in and delivering. As Green backed up for room to swing, he only gave Tyson more space to get his punches in first, which he did, repeatedly.
Tyson put on a boxing clinic as he scored with left and right hooks, body shots, and uppercuts, almost all in combination. One of his jabs knocked Green’s mouthpiece onto the ring apron—embedded in it were a bridge and two false teeth. By the end of the fourth round, Tyson had thrown 109 body punches alone, 70 (or 64 percent) of which connected. That was an unheard-of statistic for most heavyweights, who usually aren’t fast or well conditioned enough to do anything else but headhunt.
In the fifth, Tyson evoked one of Teddy Atlas’s training techniques. As Green swung away, Tyson feinted, slipped, weaved, dipped, and bobbed in a series of eighteen separate defensive movements. He avoided every one of Green’s punches without countering with a blow of his own. It was a display of pride in his superior abilities, and a bit of arrogance.
The fight went the full ten rounds. Tyson didn’t seem to care whether he could knock Green down, or out. He was taking pleasure in the process of chopping Green up, like a cleaver against a side of beef. He sometimes smiled through his mouthpiece at Green and at other times sneered. In the corner before the ninth, while trainer Kevin Rooney yammered away, he leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
On the judge’s scorecards, Tyson won all but one round. Afterwards, at a press conference, Tyson spoke about the win in cool, professional terms. He had been well coached by Jacobs on his postfight posturing since the Ferguson incident. There was no Ali-style histrionics, none of Liston’s glum bluntness. “Not to be egotistical, but I won this fight so easy. I refuse to be beaten in there. I refuse to let anybody get in my way.”
Tyson had clearly recovered from the Tillis fight. His technical prowess returned in fine form. More important he didn’t get frustrated with being unable to win by knockout. Tyson’s remarks afterwards also displayed a measure of confidence that Jacobs and Cayton wanted to bolster, and a maturity they had to protect. There would be no more risks like Tillis. They’d set up a string of breather fights until the final approach to the title could be determined.
Still on his breakneck schedule, Tyson fought Reggie Gross about three weeks later (June 13, 1986), also at the Garden and under the promotional banner of Don King. Gross, with an eighteen-and-four record, had long arms but a lazy, inaccurate left jab that dangled out like a heavy salami. Near the end of the first round, Gross moved into the center of the ring and opened up with a series of five punches that Tyson easily avoided as he looked patiently for an opening. He put Gross down twice before the referee called it over. Gross protested. Tyson tried to console him.
Fourteen days passed. Tyson traveled up to Troy to fight William Hosea. Hosea seemed like a fighter who could do a little bit of everything in the ring with a little bit of proficiency: except take a punch. It was over within two minutes and three seconds. Lorenzo Boyd came next—on July 11. A combination right hook to the body and a right uppercut on the chin ended the fight halfway through the second. Tyson was beginning to look bored.
On July 26, Tyson met Marvis Frazier, the son of former champion Joe Frazier. Father was both manager and trainer. That was more a liability than an asset against the technically superior Tyson. Marvis was molded in his father’s image. He too bobbed and weaved. Tyson and trainer Kevin Rooney studied tapes of Marvis’s fights and noticed that when he crouched, he didn’t so much bend at the knees as he did at the waist. In the dressing room before the fight, Tyson announced his fight strategy. “As Frazier bent over, Tyson would time a right uppercut,” said Baranski.
In the first round, Tyson launched at Frazier, backed him up into the corner, and, as per plan, sent in the right uppercut at the appropriate moment. That was enough to do the job, but Tyson added a left hook and another right. Frazier crumpled to the canvas thirty seconds into the round. It was Tyson’s quickest knockout. He tried to help the fallen fighter up, but by then Frazier’s mother and father had swarmed in. Tyson turned away, leapt up, and punched the air in a war dance. Jacobs rushed over and whispered something in his ear and Tyson calmed. “By then, we had him coached on what to say afterwards,” Steve Lott remembered. “With a name fighter like Frazier, we didn’t want Mike to be disrespectful. People liked Joe Frazier. I sat Mike down before the fight and told him what to say, word for word.”
On August 17, in Atlantic City, the betting line against José Ribalta beating Mike Tyson was 7 to 1. Ribalta had a respectable record of twenty-two wins, three losses, and one draw. Sixteen of the wins had come by knockout. The problem was that about a year earlier Ribalta had been knocked out in one round by Marvis Frazier. He was expected to go no more than a few rounds, if that, with Tyson.
What the experts didn’t expect, however, was that Tyson, coming off a series of easy fights, had lost some of his intensity and concentration. Gone were the elaborate slip-and-weave movements. He tried to win the fight the lazy heavyweight’s way—that is, on a single punch.
In the first round, Ribalta easily saw the punches coming and used a combination of leaning away, covering up, and putting Tyson in a clinch to avoid them. In the second round, realizing that he had to be technically sharper, Tyson doubled up with a right hook to the body and a right uppercut that knocked Ribalta down. The look on Ribalta’s face showed more shock than pain. He clearly hadn’t seen the uppercut coming. He got up and fought gamely for several more rounds. Tyson fell back into more of a conventional style, connecting often but without effect. He didn’t get frustrated; it seemed more like boredom. He wanted to win, but he’d lost interest in scoring a knockout. He appeared comfortable just being a good conventional fighter rather than a unique and spectacular one. The conclusion, at any rate, was foregone. Tyson wore Ribalta down with a total of 328 punches, 68 percent of which landed. A moment’s inspiration in the tenth sent in a flurry of punches that solidly connected. The referee ended the fight on a technical knockout.
Asked later if he was disappointed by his performance, a nonchalant Tyson opined: “What can I say? This happens. You don’t knock everybody out.”
Jacobs was also interviewed after the fight. He claimed not to be disappointed either. He talked about deciding within the week about whether to enter Tyson into the HBO series and to then, within a few months, fight for the title. He had the smug air of someone confident that all was proceeding by plan.
In a sense, he and Cayton had reason to be content. They had achieved the near miraculous. In twenty-six fights over nineteen months, Tyson had been steered to a top ten ranking. Although not yet ranked as a number one contender, he was being perceived by boxing and mainstream audiences alike as the next great heavyweight. He had been sold to America, via the fable of Cus and the Kid, as inoffensive outside the ring and indestructible within it. People believed that it was not a matter of whether he became heavyweight champion, but when.
Privately, however, Jacobs was still nagged by doubts about Tyson’s ability to perform at the higher