According to 10TV, James “Buster” Douglas leaves the punching to other people these days, but 25 years after scoring what many consider the greatest upset in boxing history — a stunning 10th-round knockout of Mike Tyson in Tokyo for the undisputed heavyweight championship — he is swinging away for what he thinks is an even nobler cause.
“Helping people, I think that comes from my mom,” Douglas said, referring to Lula Pearl Douglas, who died suddenly less than a month before that Feb. 11, 1990, fight. “She was always about being generous, lending a helping hand to someone who needed it.
“That’s just something that carries over. It’s the way I was raised.”
Which is why, as a crowd gathers on Wednesday at Villa Milano on the Far North Side for the “Silver Anniversary Celebration” of the victory, Douglas and his long-time manager, John Johnson, pushed hard for the evening’s subtitle — “Fighting to save lives.”
“Maybe in a lot of ways, what we have been able to do to help other people because of what James accomplished with that win has made it even greater,” said Johnson, who estimated that their influence on various charitable functions in the past five years has helped raise about $500,000. “That’s been awesome. … Our theme has been try to help save lives.”
They have such cachet 25 years after the fact, though, because that upset still resonates. Douglas was a 42-1 underdog; Tyson, undefeated at the time, was expected to use that fight as a steppingstone toward a promised bigger payday for an anticipated showdown with Evander Holyfield.
Tyson took a beating from the more resolved Douglas, only to deliver an uppercut late in the eighth round that knocked Douglas down. But Douglas got up. And in the 10th round, he delivered the series of blows that sent Tyson reeling and shocked the world.
“I still feel it. It is something deeply imprinted in me,” Douglas said. “Being there and having experienced it, it’s like something that happened just last night. Just the impact — it made a major impact on my life, for sure.”
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