Expertise Blinds Us

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

 

One of the more unsettling things I’ve ever watched on television is a replay of the greatest upset in boxing history.

 

The 1990 fight between James “Buster” Douglas and “Iron” Mike Tyson was billed as “Tyson Is Back!” There was no need to give the opponent the dignity of actually contending with Tyson. In front of 40,000 people at the Tokyo Dome was the undefeated and undisputed world heavyweight champion, who held the WBC, WBA, and IBF titles with a 37–0 record, including 33 knockouts. Douglas was 29–4–1. He had lost his big up-and-coming fight, against Tony Tucker, in 1986. But he put together a string of impressive wins against Trevor Berbick and Oliver McCall. This earned him a shot as Tyson’s “tune-up” fight. The fight everyone was waiting for. Heavyweight legend Evander Holyfield was there, already under contract to face Tyson in a fight that would make both of them fabulously wealthy. The contract, however, stipulated that Tyson remain undefeated.

 

The announcers, longtime boxing aficionados Larry Merchant and Jim Lampley, predicted that they were going to see “another 90-second annihilation.” This was the conventional wisdom. The AP’s Ed Schuyler had told a Japanese customs official that he was in Japan to work, reporting on the fight. When asked for how long he’d be working in Japan, Schuyler had replied, “Oh, about 90 seconds.” Merchant compared Douglas to a can of tuna from the Tokyo fish market. Douglas was a 42–1 underdog in the fight. Compounding doubts about his ability to stand up to Tyson was the fact that Douglas’s mother had died three days before the fight. Before the bell, Merchant said that Douglas promised to shock the world but averred, “If he should upset Mike Tyson, it will make the shots in Eastern Europe look like local board politics.” “He would shock most of the world if he made it into the middle rounds,” replied Lampley.

 

The 90-seconds remark was built on years of watching Tyson simply unman his competition. Tyson was a true terror in the ring, and often beat even very competent fighters in the first or second round. In ’86, he put down Trevor Berbick in round two on a TKO. He felled Larry Holmes in 1988 in the fourth round. He easily dispatched contender Tony Tubbs in Tokyo that same year in two rounds. But the most frightening work was the 91-second knockout of Michael Spinks in June 1988. Tyson brought to this and his other fights a never-before-seen combination of skills, an extremely tight but orthodox “peek-a-boo” defense, to which he added the most aggressive, athletic, and powerful punching style ever seen in the sport.

 

Any decent montage of Tyson’s victories by this point included scenes of his lesser opponents walking out of their corner at the opening bell and starting to cringe immediately as Tyson charged at them, throwing up their hands in fear for their lives. Douglas was assumed to be one of these.

 

I didn’t watch the fight live of course — I was a small boy at the time. But boy, I heard about it over and over. Sister Georgette, the nun teaching my class, had run out of folders to give students and sent me up to the sixth-grade class to acquire one that I needed. Unlike the neon-colored kiddie stuff on offer in our classroom closet, there was more exotic stuff on offer for the twelve-year-olds. I took the one that was a picture of Tyson punching Berbick. Sister Margaret hesitated at my choice, but relented. The classmates who were sputtering with jealousy on the day I acquired the folder, after the Douglas fight, loved pointing out that I was carrying my spelling tests home with a loser.

 

It wasn’t until years later that I saw a replay on ESPN Classic. It is unsettling to watch because, after the montages of what Tyson normally does to his opponents, it is obvious to the amateur viewer that Douglas is not going to be an easy out. It’s obvious from the first ten seconds, as Douglas fearlessly springs from his corner and begins throwing combinations.

 

What is so unnerving about watching the fight so many years later is that the announcers cannot see what’s happening. They actually refuse to see it. Douglas survives the initial Tyson barrage unscathed. But his own punches are hardly noted by the announcers, who are clearly already thinking about the potential fight with Holyfield. The only indication of doubt is when Lampley calls out the 90-second mark and says that Tyson hasn’t inflicted damage yet.

 

If it’s ever on someday, you must watch it. Your eyes tell you one thing is happening almost immediately: Douglas is winning the fight. Any amateur viewer could clearly see that by the end of round one, Douglas was ahead. When you count the punches, Douglas landed twelve of 31 jabs and 22 punches overall. Tyson landed six of 19 jabs. And Douglas’s jabs were landing harder, slipping right through the peek-a-boo stance of Tyson and landing with a snappy thud. But if you just listen to the two expert announcers, you are waiting for Tyson to land one devastating blow and end the night. Even the announcers’ rare compliments on Douglas’s performance were disguised as slights. In round one, with the obvious bravery and springiness of Douglas already evident, Lampley notes that Carl Williams “looked loose and relaxed” in a fight with Tyson until he took a body punch 45 seconds into the fight.

 

By round two, Tyson doesn’t look like the fighter who’d notched 33 knockouts. And Larry Merchant simply refuses to analyze what is happening in front of him. “Look at Buster! Landing some shots here!” he said with genuine surprise. And then a few seconds later, he repeats himself, “Look at this, Buster landing some shots. This is surprising here.” And then again: “Look at this, Buster landing some shots here.”

 

By round three, the announcers inform the audience of something even more unsettling. The scorers cannot see the fight in front of them, either. They note the punch count: Buster Douglas has landed over 50 punches. Tyson only 17. The first round was scored even. The second to Douglas.

 

EVEN?!

 

By round five, Tyson is genuinely starting to drown. In six rounds, Douglas landed 51 percent of his punches per round, while Tyson was landing only 41 percent of his. Tyson’s entire game plan started to disintegrate. Instead of his combinations, Tyson settled on a predictable attack of moving in, throwing a punch, then clenching or being clenched. His head began to swell from Douglas’s jabs.

 

In the announcers’ defense, Tyson would put together a few promising combinations, and any one punch — especially from a boxer as powerful as Tyson — can end a fight. At the end of round eight, Tyson landed an uppercut and Douglas dropped to his back, surviving only because the referee that night had a slow count to ten (a slow count that would count out Tyson two rounds later). But even in round eight, after Tyson had been losing from the jump, and arguably drowning for three rounds straight, the praise of Douglas from the announcers was totally muted: “Douglas is asking of Tyson some questions he hasn’t been asked before . . . In the last few rounds of a fight you have to come back and win it.”

 

Even at the end of the fight, which Douglas won by a knockout, the scorecard had Tyson within one good round of defeating Douglas. Such was the investment in Tyson’s greatness that even the official scorers feared telling the whole truth about the fight to themselves.

 

I think about those experts, as well as Lampley and Merchant, all the time now that I write about politics. During the pandemic, experts told us that border closures hurt the fight against the pandemic — until they couldn’t say it anymore. They told us racism was spreading faster than the virus. “I’ve seen anti-Asian racists before looking loose and relaxed.” Or it’s the central banks. We’ve learned the lessons of history and know that inflation is transitory.

 

Obviously, when I watch the Douglas–Tyson fight years later, it is easy for me to see what was happening. And of course, years later, Merchant and Lampley can tell you all sorts of things about the fight that a layman wouldn’t immediately see. But on that night, their eyes were shelled by their knowledge. Their mouths were shut by the normal human impulse not to say something that their brains were over-conditioned to dismiss. Their thoughts were limited by what everyone else thought: 90 seconds for this tuna can.

 

The genius of our democratic republic is that the experts are supposed to remain in the subordinate position. A self-governing people is a body of amateurs who are freed from the constricting knowledge, guild manners, and professional politics that regularly entrap experts. A self-governing people is a people who are free to see reality for themselves. Meanwhile, the official scorekeepers are almost certainly going to get anything notable dead wrong.