“I WOULD’VE reigned supreme, if it weren’t for Iron Mike Tyson.”
So boldy states Frank Bruno in an upcoming Sky Sports documentary on his historic bid to become the first ever bona fide British world heavyweight champion when he faced Mike Tyson on February 25 1989 at the Las Vegas Hilton Centre.
Older readers will recall the fight as one of the most eagerly anticipated sporting events in years, and even perhaps of the eighties, one offering up a Manichean struggle between a symbol of absolute good in the shape of the most beloved and jovial British heavyweight since Henry Cooper, and in Tyson a man who emitted an aura of such pristine malevolence you would not have been surprised to learn that he routinely basebatted his own reflection for looking at him the wrong way.
Bunce Diaries: Visions for 2021
Steve Bunce has got his crystal ball at the ready to look ahead to what is already a fascinating year
THERE was once a truly sad run of clairvoyant shop fronts on the Atlantic City boardwalk, each with dirty windows, bad lights and a woman hovering by the door offering to tell you your future.
In the days before Lennox Lewis and Andrew Golota fought in 1997, I paid a Russian woman 10 dollars in one of those fortune-telling palaces for the result of the fight.
“Lets me see, honey,“ she told me from her seat behind a curtain, as her hands hovered with heat over her very own crystal ball. “I see a big nights for the Polish mans. He is winners.” Thanks for that, her prediction lasted longer than the 95-second fight.