One fateful day in the winter of 2003, Mike Tyson decided to get an enormous tribal tattoo right on his face. You might think that’s the sort of thing he’d look back on now at the age of 50 and regret, but no.
Hence, Paul mimicked Tyson’s famous words from his famous post-fight interview after he defeated Lou Savarese in 38 seconds. Instead of trash talking, Paul is doing provocative mimicry and using Tyson’s own words to hype a ‘brutal battle’.
Robinson married Marjorie Joseph in 1938; the marriage was annulled the same year. Their son, Ronnie Smith, was born on September 25, 1938. Robinson met his second wife Edna Mae Holly, a noted dancer who performed at the Cotton Club and toured Europe with Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. According to Robinson, he met her at a local pool he frequented after his boxing workouts. In an attempt to get her attention he pushed her into the pool one day, and said it was an accident. After this attempt was met with disdain, he appeared at the nightclub she danced at and introduced himself. Soon the couple were dating and they married in 1944. They had one son, Ray Robinson Jr. (born 1949) before their acrimonious divorce in 1962.
Back in his apartment, Zhang enjoys two distractions: cooking and making tea. As part of his strict diet plan, he eats only two meals each day, with plenty of fruits. When he is making tea — normally his favorite, Longjing — he follows the ritual of a tea ceremony, from which he says he has gained inspirations for the ring.
While Tyson once joked on Twitter about getting the tattoo removed, it’s become a part of his identity. “A lot of stuff happened out of this tattoo, a lot of good stuff,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2016. “Other young athletes come to me and said, It’s because of you they call it the Mike Tyson.”
Dominating the ring between 1987-1990, Tyson is the youngest ever boxer to win a heavyweight title at 20 years, four months, and 22 days old, but his career has also been controversial. He was convicted of rape in 1992 and served three years behind bars before returning to the ring, winning back several of his titles before his 1997 match against Evander Holyfield pretty much ended his career when Tyson bit off part of Holyfield’s ear.
“Mike was a very nice young man. If it wasn’t for Jim Jacobs, the fight probably wouldn’t have been made. Jim gave me an opportunity because he felt I deserved it. Mike was coming up, he was creaming everybody, knocking ’em dead. He was a gladiator. I was 29, he was 20. I was training at the Ruby Street gym in L.A with Ken Norton and Scrap Iron Johnson. I exchanged punches with my sparring partner and my right shoulder popped. I went to a chiropractor and he told me to put some ice on it and come back in a few days. I continued to work, but every time I worked my shoulder, it would pop out. I called Angelo and told him, ‘Angelo, my shoulder keeps popping out, I don’t know what’s going on with it.’ He said, ‘Pull out the fight.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not pulling out this fight. I’m willing to fight.’ Mike was beating everybody and I thought I could beat him with my left hand. Mike came out steaming and I was anticipating that. After I got through the first and second round, I thought, ‘I’m in good shape now.’ With my experience I was doing what I needed to do, but unfortunately my shoulder popped out and my glove split. I don’t make no big deal about that, Mike’s a good fighter, he did what he had to do. I got dropped, but I got up because I didn’t want to be counted out. I’ve got a lot of respect for Mike. I think he was a great champion.”
Despite its popularity, the Mike Tyson tattoo has also been the subject of legal disputes and controversies. One prominent example is the lawsuit filed by tattoo artist Victor Whitmill over the use of the design in the movie The Hangover Part II.
“He has been dominating since beating Klitschko – he earned it. But after his losses to Oleksandr Usyk and Andy Ruiz, I feel like he probably has to come back mentally and physically as well. I know that he is training very hard.”
Mercer had planned to attempt a dabble in mixed martial arts as early as 2003; he was scheduled to Kazuyuki Fujita, who was 9-4 in the sport, in Kobe, Japan as the main event of the Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye. The fight was to be in a MMA ring. However the bout was cancelled after Mercer missed his flight to the country.
After retiring from amateur boxing, Zhang — a super heavyweight silver medalist at the Beijing Olympics — went pro in 2014 by signing a four-year contract with New Jersey-based American boxing promoter Dino Duva. Since then, Zhang has snatched a 12-0 record with eight knockouts — including Friday’s eight-round heavyweight victory over Georgian boxer Gogita Gorgiladze in Wenzhou, an eastern Chinese city.
Going to the Olympic Team, he was one of the most highly regarded American Olympic boxers. Of all the U.S. 1988 Olympians, Angelo Dundee, a legendary trainer, chose Ray Mercer and Andrew Maynard, as the most likely to develop into world champions after they would have turned into professionals: “Mercer’s 27, but that’s not too old. The maturity is there. And the punch. Give him 10 fights as a pro and he’d be ready to start moving up,” Dundee said on Mercer’s potential as a pro. According to Kelvin Richardson of the ’88 All-Army Team, box Mercer was such a hard puncher, that even 16-ounce gloves weren’t of much help for his sparring partners from being knocked off the ring, and his superheavyweight Olympic teammate, Riddick Bowe, didn’t want to spar with Mercer for that reason.