James "Buster" Douglas is a former undisputed world heavyweight boxing champion who scored
a stunning upset when he knocked out previously undefeated champion Mike Tyson on February
11, 1990, in Tokyo, Japan. At the time, Tyson was considered to be the best boxer in the
world and one of the most feared heavyweight champions in history due to his utter domination
of the division. The Mirage Casino in Las Vegas, the only Las Vegas casino to make odds
on the fight, had Douglas as a 42 to 1 underdog for the fight, making his victory, in commentator
Jim Lampley's words, "Let's go ahead and call it. The biggest upset in the history of heavyweight
championship fights!" Douglas held the title for eight months and
two weeks, losing on October 25, 1990, to 28-year-old, 6-foot-2-inch, 208-pound Evander
Holyfield, via third-round KO, in his only title defense.
Growing up The son of professional boxer William "Dynamite"
Douglas, Douglas grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in the predominantly black Linden-area neighborhood,
Windsor Terrace. He attended Linden McKinley High School where he played football and basketball,
even leading Linden to a Class AAA state basketball championship in 1977. After high school, Douglas
played basketball for the Coffeyville Community College Red Ravens in Coffeyville, Kansas
from 1977 to 1978 where the seventeen-year-old was a 6 feet 0 inch power forward. He is
in the Coffeyville Red Ravens Men's Basketball Hall of Fame. He also played basketball at
Sinclair Community College from 1979 to 1980 in Dayton, OH before attending Mercyhurst
University on a basketball scholarship. He moved back to Columbus to focus on boxing.
For a brief period of time during his early twenties, Douglas was known as the "Desert
Fox" within the Columbus boxing community. This moniker was affixed to Douglas because
of a misinterpreted encyclopedia entry regarding Douglas MacArthur and Erwin Rommel. Several
friends of Buster Douglas mistakenly believed that Douglas MacArthur was known as the "Desert
Fox" and subsequently addressed the future Heavyweight Champion as such. However, Buster
Douglas distanced himself from the "Desert Fox" label no later than 1985 because of clarification
from his promotional team and the concern that he might be confused with Syrian boxer
Ghiath Tayfour. Boxing career
Douglas made his debut on May 31, 1981 and defeated Dan O'Malley in a four round bout.
He won his first five fights before coming into a fight with David Bey twenty pounds
heavier than he usually did in his early fights. Bey knocked Douglas out in the second round
to hand him his first defeat. After six more fights, all wins, Douglas fought
Steffen Tangstad to a draw on October 16, 1982. He was penalized two points during the
course of the fight which proved to be the difference.
After the draw Douglas went on to beat largely journeyman fighters over the next fourteen
months. Two of his wins were against Jesse Clark, Douglas fought him a total of three
times and knocked him out all three times. In his last fight of 1983 Douglas was dominating
opponent Mike White, only to lose the fight when White knocked him out in the ninth round.
On November 9, Douglas was scheduled to fight heavyweight contender Trevor Berbick in Las
Vegas. Berbick pulled out of the bout three days before it was scheduled and Randall "Tex"
Cobb elected to take the fight in Berbick's place. Douglas defeated the former heavyweight
contender by winning a majority decision. The next year he fought up and coming contender
Jesse Ferguson, but was beaten by majority decision.
Douglas fought three times in 1986, defeating former champion Greg Page and fringe contender
David Jaco in two of the fights. This earned him a shot at the International Boxing Federation
championship that Michael Spinks was stripped of for refusing to defend it. Douglas started
well against Tony Tucker and was ahead on points, but he ran out of gas and was stopped
in the tenth round. After the Tucker defeat Douglas won four consecutive
fights and went on to fight Trevor Berbick in 1989, winning by a unanimous decision.
He followed that up with a unanimous decision victory over future heavyweight champion Oliver
McCall, and earned a shot at the undisputed heavyweight championship held by Mike Tyson,
who became the universally recognized champion after knocking out Spinks in one round in
1988. Championship fight against Mike Tyson
The fight was scheduled for February 11, 1990 and took place in Tokyo at the Tokyo Dome.
Almost everyone assumed that Douglas' fight versus Mike Tyson was going to be another
quick knockout for the champion. Only one betting parlor in Las Vegas would hold odds
for the bout, and many thought it was just an easy tune-up for Tyson before a future
mega-fight with undefeated Evander Holyfield, who had recently moved up to heavyweight from
cruiserweight where he became the first boxer to be the undisputed champion of the weight
class. Douglas' mother, Lula Pearl, died 23 days
before the title bout. Douglas, who had trained hard, surprised the world by dominating the
fight from the beginning, using his 12-inch reach advantage to perfection. He seemingly
hit Tyson at will with powerful jabs and right hands and skillfully danced out of range of
Tyson's own punches. The champion had not taken Douglas seriously, expecting another
quick and easy knockout victory. He was slow, refusing to move his head and slip his way
in but rather setting his feet and throwing big, lunging hooks, repeatedly trying to beat
Douglas with single punches. By the fifth round, Tyson's left eye was swelling shut
from Douglas' many right hands, and ringside HBO announcers proclaimed it was the most
punishment they had ever seen the champion absorb. Larry Merchant memorably added "Well
if Mike Tyson, who loves pigeons, was looking for a pigeon in this bout he hasn't found
him". Tyson's cornermen appeared to be unprepared
for the suddenly dire situation. They had not brought an endswell to the fight, so they
were forced to put tap water into a latex glove to hold over Tyson's swelling eye. By
the end of the fight, Tyson's eye had swollen almost completely shut. In the eighth round,
Tyson landed a right uppercut that knocked Douglas down. The referee's count engendered
controversy as Douglas was on his feet when the referee reached nine, although the official
knockdown timekeeper was two seconds ahead. In the ring the final arbiter of the knockdown
seconds is the referee and a comparison with Douglas's winning knockdown count issued to
Tyson two rounds later revealed that both fighters had received long counts.
Tyson came out aggressively in the dramatic ninth round and continued his attempts to
end the fight with one big punch hoping that Douglas was still hurt from the 8th round
knockdown. Both men traded punches before Douglas connected on a multi-punch combination
that staggered Tyson back to the ropes. With Tyson hurt along the ropes Douglas unleashed
a vicious attack to try to finish off a dazed Tyson but, amazingly, Tyson withstood the
punishment and barely survived the 9th round. Douglas dominated the tenth round from the
outset. While setting Tyson up with his jab Douglas scored a huge uppercut, followed by
a rapid combination, and knocked Tyson down for the first time in his career, making boxing
history. Tyson struggled to his knees and picked up his mouthpiece lying on the mat
next to him. He awkwardly attempted to place it back into his mouth. The image of Tyson
with the mouthpiece hanging crookedly from his lips would become an enduring image from
the fight. He was unable to beat the referee's count, and Douglas was the new heavyweight
champion of the world. As Buster Douglas said in an interview years later '“I thought
Tyson was getting up until I had seen him looking for that mouth piece and then I knew
that he was really hurt. So anytime you know you only got ten seconds to get up so you
aren’t going to worry about anything but just getting up first. So when I had seen
him looking around for that mouth piece I knew he was really hurt.”. By contrast,
during Douglas's knockdown two rounds earlier, the fighter shows to be ready to continue
early in the count. Douglas, however, clearly waits for the referee to count to 8 before
getting up. Douglas long dreamed of the moment when he
would be awarded the Heavyweight Championship Belt and his joy at receiving it and putting
it on in the ring following the bout is apparent. His joy soon turned to confusion and then
anger as manager John Johnson informed him in the dressing room that Tyson and Don King
were lodging an official protest about the referee's knockdown count in the eighth round.
A week later, during an in studio interview with HBO's Larry Merchant, Douglas admitted
that the protest and the post fight confusion ruined what should have been the best time
of his life. During that interview with both fighters, Merchant asked the first 4 questions
of Tyson infuriating Douglas' management crew who stopped just short of walking out of the
HBO studios. After the upset
While still Champion, Douglas appeared on the February 23, 1990 episode of the World
Wrestling Federation's "WWF The Main Event", as special guest referee for a rematch between
Hulk Hogan and Randy "Macho Man" Savage. Originally, Mike Tyson was scheduled to be the guest referee,
but following the upset, the WWF scrambled to sign on Douglas for the event. At the end
of the match, Douglas was provoked into a 'storyline' punch and knockout of Savage,
who was the 'heel' wrestler in the match. The defeated Tyson clamored for a rematch
and Douglas was offered more money than he had ever made before for a fight. Not wanting
to deal with Tyson's camp or his promoter Don King, Douglas decided to make his first
defense against #1 contender Evander Holyfield, who had watched the new champion dethrone
Tyson from ringside in Tokyo. Douglas came into the October 25, 1990 fight at 246 pounds,
15 pounds heavier than he was for the Tyson match and also the heaviest he'd weighed in
for a fight since a 1985 bout with Dion Simpson, in which he tipped the scale at just over
247 pounds. In the third round of the fight, Douglas attempted
to hit Holyfield with a hard uppercut that he telegraphed. Holyfield avoided the uppercut
and hit an off-balance Douglas with a straight right to the chin to knock him down. Douglas
did not get up from the punch and lost his championship, electing to retire after the
fight. Later career
Douglas vs Holyfield was a reported $24.6 million payday for Buster, though years later
he said on the Howard Stern show he walked away with $1.5 million after taxes, managers,
trainers, etc. In that same interview he said he received $1.3 million for the Tyson win,
but for the same reasons netted $15,000. Doing little for the next several years, Buster
gained weight, reaching nearly 400 pounds. It was only after Douglas nearly died during
a diabetic coma that he decided to attempt a return to the sport. He went back into training
and made a comeback. He was successful at first, winning 6 straight fights, but his
comeback almost came to a halt in a 1997 disqualification win over journeyman Louis Monaco. In a bizarre
ending, Monaco landed a right hand, just after the bell ending round one, that knocked Douglas
to the canvas. Douglas was unable to continue after a five-minute rest period and was consequently
awarded the win by disqualification. A fight with light-heavyweight champion Roy
Jones, Jr. was touted in the late 1990s, although ultimately fell through. In 1998 Douglas was
knocked out in the first round of a fight with heavyweight contender Lou Savarese. Douglas
subsequently had two more fights, winning both, and retired in 1999 with a final record
of 38-6-1. Film and game
Douglas made his feature film acting debut in the Artie Knapp science fiction comedy
film Pluto's Plight. Douglas was the star of the video game James
'Buster' Douglas Knockout Boxing for the Sega Master System and Sega Genesis. This game
is considered as a response to Nintendo's Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, especially since
Tyson lost to Douglas, which Sega took advantage in order to promote their early "Genesis does
what Nintendon't" advertisements. In 1995, HBO aired Tyson, a television movie
based upon the life of Mike Tyson. Douglas was portrayed by actor Duane Davis.
Honors Douglas is one of the few non-students to
be honored by Ohio State University with the opportunity to dot the "i" during the performance
of the Script Ohio by The Ohio State University Marching Band.
Professional boxing record See also
List of heavyweight boxing champions List of WBC world champions
List of undisputed boxing champions References
External links Official website
Professional boxing record for Buster Douglas from BoxRec
Buster's new book with co-author Tony Reynolds: Buster's Backyard Bar-B-Q, Knockout Diabetes
Diet Buster's Twitter ID: iambuster
Buster Douglas' movie Pluto's Plight Video of the knockout of Mike Tyson