Why I pity Mike Tyson, 58, as he rakes in £15m from fighting a 27-year-old professional idiot, after speaking to the first man who beat him – writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI

There are good ways for an old fighter to tap into lost youth, not that the man on the other end of the phone line would care for such descriptions. He’s 64 now, Buster Douglas, but he always feels that bit lighter on his toes when he walks into the Thompson Community Centre in Columbus, Ohio.

That is where he works and has done for 10 years. It is also just a couple of miles up the road from the gym where he first laced up gloves as a kid, long before he caused the greatest upset in boxing history.

‘I know why you’re calling me from the UK,’ he said after picking up. ‘Mike Tyson, right?’

That’s just the way it has been ever since one surreal night in Tokyo, February 1990. You might be able to think of Mike Tyson without thinking of Buster Douglas, but you can’t think of Buster Douglas without thinking of the time he slayed a monster and killed the bookmakers at 42-1.

And Douglas is happy enough with that – there are worse things to be remembered for than being the first man to beat Mike Tyson. Beat him so hard the gum shield fell out of his mouth and he was still fumbling to put it in when the count got to 10. ‘Unbelievable,’ as the ESPN commentator screamed, and it is as true today as it was then.

But the reminders can be tiresome in a pleasant sort of way, because they follow Douglas everywhere. And that means they accompany him to the community centre.

He coaches the boxing classes there but it isn’t the kind of place where he moulds boxing greatness – it’s less of a spit-and-sawdust gym and more recreational.

So he’ll wash the hand wraps, wipe down the gear, take a few people on the pads and run through some drills, as he has done since he took the gig in 2014 on $18 an hour. Having had some particularly hard times, it has given him a sense of purpose as much as a living.

When I called him on Tuesday, he reckoned there might be 15 or 20 passing through those doors during his shift, and they will be aged anywhere between five and 90, boys and girls, men and women. He enjoys it and every so often, one of them will ask about the day he shocked the world.

‘When I think of the fight, it can feel like yesterday,’ he said. ‘That’s probably because I get asked about it a lot – it’s why you and me are talking now, right? But that’s okay – if people want to know, they want to know. If they don’t, they don’t. I remember it all.’

Douglas remembers what we remember about Mike Tyson. The aura. The mystique. The sheer vision of violence and malevolent intentions. He was sold as the baddest man on the planet, even before he was convicted of rape, and then one day 34 years ago he ran into an unspectacular, unfancied contender.

‘Everyone thought he would win,’ Douglas said. ‘No one gave anyone else a chance against him and I was huge underdog. Huge. He was just a wrecking ball, smashing people. He destroyed people. Superhuman. They thought he would destroy me too.

‘No one could foresee in the future that anyone could beat the man. I am just happy that I could prove some people wrong and have my time.’

Time. It’s what this conversation was always going to be about – Douglas’s time, Tyson’s time, the way it was and the strange way it now is, both for Tyson and boxing in general.

Because Tyson is getting back in the ring next Friday, of course, and he is doing so at 58, when he will undertake a professionally-sanctioned fight for the first time in 19 years against a professional idiot.

We should talk only a little at this point about Jake Paul – he is a nonsensical man, a social media influencer with 50 million followers who has leveraged boxing’s sleazy appetites to further a brand built on YouTube pranks.

That has meant having 11 fights, which include a loss to Tyson Fury’s younger brother Tommy Fury. And anyone who has lost to Tommy Fury has no business competing in an 80,000-seat stadium in Texas. But this next dance will rake in fortunes. Tyson, the former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, is estimated to make around £10m to 15m, and Paul will get around double.

With all that in mind, I called Douglas, because he decked Tyson when decking Tyson meant something. When he amounted to more than a YouTuber’s sidekick. It was for the same reason I spoke to Kevin McBride a few months ago, when this sham of a fight was first announced – Douglas was the first to beat Tyson and McBride was the last in 2005.

Even coming off a hiding against Danny Williams, the Tyson aura still flickered back then; McBride needed hypnosis to get through his training camp. To tell him he wouldn’t get smashed. It worked. He did the smashing.

The Tyson of today hasn’t fought anything other than a single exhibition since McBride stopped him. The Tyson of today is a museum artifact. But here he is, stripped to the waist again, and we all know why.

And yet that needs perspective – he isn’t financially poor. Far from it. Those difficulties came and went long ago. By flogging cannabis, by being Mike Tyson for films and podcasts, he is worth a decent fortune by all accounts. Around £10million, some reckon.

But his body has been through some hard awfully hard living. Counting only what has happened since he stopped accruing damage in the ring, there have been drug addictions so severe he feared he was close to death, pain from sciatica that put him in a wheelchair for chunks of 2022, and even this year there was a medical emergency. It’s the reason the original fight date with Paul was postponed – he was throwing up blood from a stomach ulcer. Again, he asked the doctor if he was going to die.

Sympathy isn’t always in abundance when it comes to Tyson. We can start with the rape and don’t need to go much further.

But I pity him now. I pity that he has reasons, and some may go deeper than money, to reduce himself to this. I pity him for being famous in a sport that is so shameless, so abysmally regulated, that it has been allowed to happen. I pity him for his willingness to be the stooge in a YouTuber’s latest prank.

Win or lose, I’m not remotely fussed, so long as any damage is limited to pride.

But there are ways for an old fighter to move on. Ways that don’t earn a lot of money. Ways that are less glamorous and perhaps more fulfilling. It’s not for any of us to tell Mike Tyson which is best for him, but there is far more dignity in Douglas’s way.

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Good directors are awfully hard to find, as Mikel Arteta might soon discover at Arsenal without Edu, and Amorim is about to say his goodbyes to Hugo Viana. Everything they have won at Sporting, they have won together, a pair that go hand in glove. 

But whereas one is going to United, the other is joining City. Judging by the competencies of those they will soon be surrounded by in their new jobs, I’d suspect Viana is privately feeling more comfortable than his mate about the separation.

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