Mike Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion 35 years ago today. He had just turned 20-years-old just 145 days before beating Trevor Berbick for the WBC heavyweight title. He had fulfilled his and D’Amato’s bold predictions of him becoming the youngest world heavyweight champion and would only continue amassing a celebrity status in the next […]

Jimmy Jacobs and Bill Cayton had been expertly implementing Cus D’Amato’s deliberate strategy to get Tyson to become the youngest world heavyweight champion. With Don King’s influence, HBO established a tournament to crown an undisputed heavyweight champion; a perfect storm of circumstance was brewing that eventually led to Tyson’s unraveling, but not before he unified […]

Tyson was being hyped as “the next great heavyweight” by sports publications and introduced as “the exciting young heavyweight the world has been waiting for” during his bout against Steve Zouski. Nearing the summer of ’86, three months into HBO’s heavyweight unification series, Tyson signed new multi-fight, million-dollar deals1 with HBO and ABC that further […]

Tyson began finding more nationwide exposure after his first appearance on Sports Illustrated, and his carefully managed matchmaking resulted in his highlights shown on cable television. His manager, Jimmy Jacobs, and his trainer, Kevin Rooney, were trusted friends of Cus D’Amato, continuing to see that D’Amato’s declarations of Tyson becoming the youngest heavyweight champion would […]

1986 wound up becoming a triumphant year for Mike Tyson. After starting the year 15-0, unranked, and roughly only two months removed from Cus D’Amato’s passing, he ended the year 28-0 while winning the WBC heavyweight championship, becoming the youngest man to become heavyweight champ in the process. Unlike ’85, Tyson didn’t gift us the […]

Welcome back to this edition of “Game Film,” where we will finish the remainder of Tyson’s professional fights in 1985 in this article. Last time I only managed to get through six bouts before ending the article, but luckily for us, Tyson finished all but one of this stretch of opponents in the first round. […]

Any pause for consideration for why the title of this article is titled under my recurring series, “Game Film,” is fair, as this is the first time I have covered anything other than basketball under that title. Choosing one of the three other major North American sports leagues is more logical, especially considering the title […]