Back in 1997, when
you witnessed Mike Tyson bite off a chunk of Evander
Holyfield’s ear in a heavyweight mega-fight, you always knew that 15 years
later, the fighters would mark the anniversary of this horrible event by making
jokes about it on something called Twitter.
On June 28, 1997, Tyson disgraced
himself — and his sport — on that crazy Saturday night in Las Vegas. Do you remember where
you were at that moment? I was a summer intern at WFAN, the New
York sports radio station. A bunch of us were
watching the fight on a studio TV with overnight host Tony Paige, a boxing
expert, who was about to go on the air. I’ll never forget Paige jumping around
the basement studio, apoplectic, when Tyson went cannibalistic. Paige had seen
a lot of fights, and this was like nothing he’d ever seen.
As Steve Wulf wrote
in TIME, in a story headlined “Heavyweight Chomp”
The rematch between
Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson was billed as “The Sound and the Fury,”
borrowing a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. How fitting then that Saturday’s
World Boxing Association heavyweight championship fight at the MGM
Grand Garden
in Las Vegas turned out to be not
only a tragedy but also a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
The idiot was Tyson.
The former champ and eternal bully, having already lost the first two rounds,
decided to retaliate for an accidental head-butting cut over his eye by biting
part of Holyfield’s right ear off with 40 seconds left in the third round. The
reigning champ jumped up in pain and walked away in anger, blood streaming from
the ear. Tyson then ran after Holyfield and shoved him in the back before
referee Mills Lane
intervened. During an ensuing four-minute delay, a physician examined Holyfield
and determined that he could continue, while Lane deducted 2 points from
Tyson’s score and warned him another bite would get him disqualified. “I told
Tyson, ‘One more like that and you’re gone,’” Mills recalled later. Sure
enough, when the fight resumed, Tyson bit Holyfield on the left ear, and when
the round was over, Lane disqualified him. Bedlam followed as Tyson tried to
get at Holyfield and struck a police officer.
Tyson, who obviously
had “eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner,” said afterward,
“He has a cut on his ear, and he didn’t want to fight. Regardless of what I
did, he had been butting for two fights. I addressed it in the ring…What else
could I do?” Holyfield, who was taken to Valley
Hospital after the fight to
surgically repair the ear, addressed Tyson by saying “I truly believe fear
itself causes people to do the easy thing. The quickest way was to get out. If
you think you can whup me, do it with the gloves on. You had a chance to fight.
Why did you bite?”
JEFF
HAYNES / AFP / Getty Images
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