...it was the age of press pass confusion, it was the age of Mike Tyson's presence, it was the epoch of excitement that I was about to finally meet him, it was the epoch of hearing he had left the locker room through the back door.

So I didn't get to meet Mike Tyson.

But to tell you the truth, I would rather almost meet Mike Tyson than actually meet anyone else I can think of at the moment. So here we go.

The drive was long, but the wait in front of the Press Credentials booth seemed much much longer. As I entered the chilly vestibule just inside The Chevrolet Center, I approached the designated window to proudly represent TysonTalk.com. It was an awesome night for a Tyson fight. Birds were singing and flutes where whisping.

Queue harsh record scratch.

I got stood up fellas.

Today it’s trendy to take a look at past events and put another spin on them, which often times are in direct contrast with the original perspectives. The two contemporary revisionist perspectives that I’m in complete disagreement with are that 1) Mike Tyson wasn’t a great heavyweight and 2) Sugar Ray Leonard’s victory over Marvin Hagler wasn’t astonishing due to the fact that all the factors revolving around the fight were in Leonard’s favor.

Another qualm I have about a recent perception of boxing history is that it seems of late that a lot of writers have drastically diminished Mike Tyson’s place in history by describing him as an over-rated heavyweight that used his reputation to decimate a sub-par group of heavyweights. They point to his losses to Buster Douglas, Lennox Lewis, and Evander Holyfield to validate this belief and they also downgrade the length of his reign as well as the quality of his opposition.

Let’s get a couple of things straight. First the Mike Tyson that fought Lewis and Holyfield was a shell of his former self. Tyson hasn’t been remotely close to being a prime Tyson since before his incarceration in 1991 and counting those wins against Iron Mike would be like counting Sugar Ray Leonard’s loss to Terry Norris or Wilfredo Benitez’s loss to Matthew Hilton. Ray was only 34 at the time of the Norris fight and Benitez was still in his twenties.

So do you consider Matthew Hilton and Terry Norris to be greater than Sugar Ray and Benitez? No, of course not because even though age is often times the primary factor that diminishes fighters abilities, sometimes their skill level just fades away whether it’s from drinking, women, or just plain fate.