![]() Referee Octavio Meyran gives both the challenger Douglas and the undisputed king Tyson counts well over ten. ‘The Baddest Man on the Planet’ won the fight before Douglas could pummel Mike Tyson to the canvas. But what transpired on that fateful February 11 night has a startling significance. ![]() Tyson lost for the first time in his career as his world imploded on itself through a wild out-of-the-ring lifestyle. The controversial video proves Tyson defeated Douglas and never should have lost their historic 1990 ‘Upset of the Century.’ Mike Tyson KO’d Buster Douglas Mike Lee vs.Mike Tyson defeated James ‘Buster’ Douglas in Tokyo, only to get robbed of his undefeated record and formidable aura. Akhor Muralimov - 10 rounds, heavyweights Vito Gasparyan - six rounds, junior middleweightsĬBS Sports Network - Saturday, 10:30 p.m.ĭerric Rossy vs. Cleotis Pendarvis - six rounds, junior middleweights Michael Moore - six rounds, junior middleweights Brandon Adams - six rounds, junior middleweights And particularly since it took place on two continents.”Īlex Perez vs. “That is the most active day, in terms of doing different professional things, probably in the whole 40-year experience of being a sports broadcaster. “I get up in Tokyo, I call Tyson-Douglas, I get on a plane and fly from Tokyo back to Los Angeles, I go to a charity awards luncheon that afternoon in Los Angeles, I anchor the 5 o’clock news, I anchor the 11 o’clock news, I do a business dinner in between and I do a report for CBS This Morning on the weekend in sports – after the 11 o’clock news that night. And that day, Feb, 11, 1990, is by far the busiest day. “I had a lot of different gigs at that time. ![]() “It’s an unusual occasion in my life that I remember partially with a sense of humor,” he said. He was, among other things, both a news anchor for KCBS-TV in Los Angeles and a sports correspondent for “CBS This Morning” at the time, and he chuckled nostalgically as he turned to the jam-packed 2/11/90 page of a professional appointment journal he’d kept back then. Lampley and colleagues Larry Merchant and Ray Leonard spent the broadcast’s final few minutes trying to comprehend what they’d seen, but by the time post-fight viewers were tuning into cinematic classics “They Live” (on the East Coast) and “Police Academy 6” (on the West Coast), the then 40-year-old blow-by-blow man was already getting himself prepared for a hectic workday back home. “Everything became this sort of almost surreal, understated, matter-of-fact broadcast for which the final action is me, in the flattest tone imaginable, saying ‘Mike Tyson has been knocked out.’ Again, it was like calling a golf tournament. “Everything had been easy during that period of time, and now he’s getting waxed by Buster Douglas and, clearly, as each round passes, it’s on merit,” he said. Then, as the fight unfolded, Lampley said the comprehensive nature of the beating applied to the unbeaten champion - though surely unexpected - yielded its own brand of mechanical mic work. The perfunctory mindset was understandable at the start.Īfter all, Douglas was a prohibitive underdog, Tyson wasn’t the novelty he’d been upon first appearing in Japan two years earlier and on-site crowd estimates pegged the paid attendance as significantly less than it had been in the same building for that 1988 demolition of Tony Tubbs. “The atmosphere and the silence - the fact that at the beginning of the fight I could literally hear Mike and Buster’s shoes slapping against the canvas as they moved around - all of that combined to cause us ultimately to call the fight as though it was a golf tournament,” HBO’s Jim Lampley told, in a reminiscent mid-week phone interview. ![]() 11, 1990 - as the iron-fisted Tyson was violently overthrown by James “Buster” Douglas - did so while running point on a telecast from Tokyo that precisely no one had anticipated would still stand as seminal a quarter-century later. Ironically, though, the man who delivered those words on Feb. ![]() If you’re a boxing fan of a certain age, it’s an indelible memory.Īnd whether you watched the broadcast live or blearily scanned for results after a Saturday evening spent elsewhere, the moment a certain six-word phrase hit home was monumental. ![]()
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