A requiem for boxing

The Last Great Fight

The Extraordinary Tale of

Two Men and How One Fight Changed Their Lives Forever

Joe Layden

St. Martin's Press: 308 pp., $24.95

If you want to know what has happened to the sport that produced such boxing legends as John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali, Joe Layden's exhilarating and hard-hitting account of the 1990 heavyweight championship fight between Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas and its aftermath will tell you. His tale in "The Last Great Fight" is about as pretty as Sylvester Stallone's face at the final bell in a "Rocky" movie.

It was in Tokyo on Feb. 11, 1990, that an unheralded challenger from Ohio, James "Buster" Douglas, scored perhaps the biggest upset in heavyweight boxing history by knocking out the seemingly unbeatable Mike Tyson in the 10th round. Douglas was a 42-to-1 underdog -- if you could find anyone to take the bet. Consider that the famed "Cinderella Man," James J. Braddock, was a 10-to-1 underdog when he beat Max Baer in 1935.

The bout should have made Douglas a national hero and given boxing a much needed boost Instead, it led to the swift unraveling of Douglas and Tyson's careers. The fight game began, Layden writes in prose as crisp as a Sugar Ray Robinson jab, "a long and precipitous slide toward the margins of mainstream sport."

Layden credits Tyson -- perhaps a tad too generously, given that at least one commentator saw him as "a cancer on boxing" -- with resurrecting the sport. The biggest draw since Ali, Tyson with his "menace and blood- lust . . . brought people to the arena . . . [and] compelled otherwise frugal and sensible consumers to spring for a Home Box Office subscription." No heavyweight had seemed so invincible since Joe Louis demolished all comers in the late 1930s.

Douglas was "a thoughtful, introspective boy" who "loved boxing, which is not to say that he enjoyed fighting." For just one time in his life, he was able to focus his energy and attention on training, beating Tyson so decisively that many thought Douglas would rule the heavyweight ranks for years. But in his first title defense, against Evander Holyfield, he was so listless and overweight that many thought his defeat by a fourth-round knockout was a disgrace. Tyson, meanwhile, demoralized by the loss of his crown, descended further into a pattern of violence and self-indulgence, including a rape conviction in 1992, that kept him in prison for most of his prime. Their much-anticipated rematch never happened.