By Cliff Rold

“You really ain’t the champ. You ain’t beat Tyson.”

So says Evander Holyfield, reflecting on the public opinion of him in his first heavyweight title reign. His 1990 knockout of James “Buster” Douglas gave him the championship. It didn’t give him the throne. It’s easy to forget, knowing now what we didn’t know then, how true that was. Chasing Tyson, the latest installment in the outstanding ESPN 30 for 30 series debuting Tuesday, November 10th at 8 PM EST, is a captivating reminder.

It’s not just a reminder of that truth.

Chasing Tyson is a reminder of the passage of time.

Fans of a certain age grew up watching, and have continued to watch, retrospectives about the great fights that came before them. The great rivalries of Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali have been, and continue to be, well documented.

Those fights belonged to our grandfathers and fathers.

Time has caught up and now it’s our turn. Evander Holyfield-Mike Tyson was the rivalry, the spectacle, the centerpiece of our time. We’ve seen other vehicles, like HBO’s Legendary Nights, look at some of the key moments of the 1990s golden era at heavyweight, but finally we have a deep dive into the biggest fights of them all.

We are old enough for OUR fight to get its proper place.

Among the boxing themed stories under the 30 for 30 imprint, it’s a dramatic improvement on the examination of the relationship between Tyson and the late Tupac Shakur and only a hair short of the sad reflection on the battle between Larry Holmes and Muhammad Ali. It’s must-see viewing for any boxing fan.

For fans of that certain age, it’s also must remember. The structure of the film works on two levels. For those who were too young, or not around, for the Holyfield-Tyson rivalry, there is a sense of just how big it was both in its aborted incarnation in 1991 and by the time of their 1997 rematch. For those who were around, it might be worth watching twice. It’s impossible not to get distracted filling in the blanks as the story moves along.

We get to hear trainer Georgie Benton in the Holyfield corner, Don King at the peak of his salesman form, and are treated to glimpses of the men around them. There is the sight of Pernell Whitaker and Meldrick Taylor walking Holyfield to the ring for Douglas. Remember the way the 1984 US Olympians used to act as each other’s entourage? The pictures speak for themselves.

That’s the thing that works best throughout the film.

The documentary lays out in the simplest manner possible. We’ve grown used to a documentary format that shows clips then cuts to modern analysis. Here, we get voice over reflections from the fighters and reporter Jim Gray for context. It adds to the film but doesn’t break what is a deliberate attempt to tell their tale as it was. This is a film that uses fight footage, interviews, and news reports from the era of the fight to frame what we’re seeing.

To be sure, this is Holyfield’s story. It’s about his rise from cruiserweight to heavyweight, his emergence as a potential rival, development as a contender and champion, and ultimate resurrection as improbable conqueror. It’s impossible to do that without conveying just how big Tyson was.

Fans who will remember the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao saga as theirs this way someday will get a glimpse of a different kind of magnitude. The volume of network news footage used here spans the entirety of their time and recalls a different kind of media influence on the sport. Holyfield and Tyson doing a split interview on ABC’s Wide World of Sports in 1989 is one gem to look for.

It’s also a look at the fundamental building blocks of a monster fight. Tyson, baiting Holyfield about how long he’ll make him wait shows off how serious Tyson took him all along. As Tyson admits from the now, he was already “trying to get in his head.” Holyfield explains how early heavyweight fights with James Tillis and Pinklon Thomas were selected to show off how he handled former Tyson foes to whet the public appetite.

The ups and downs of the road to Holyfield-Tyson are well traveled here. We get footage of Tyson interviewed ringside as Holyfield unifies the cruiserweight title in 1988 and Holyfield sweating bullets in Japan as Douglas stripped him of an intended title shot later in 1990. Larry Merchant can be heard on the HBO telecast commenting on the payday Holyfield had on the line. “Right now that $12 million isn’t in the bank.”    

Some of the fight footage used has been more television available over the years and with YouTube almost any of it is easily found. The first two fights of the Holyfield-Riddick Bowe rivalry are well covered and Tyson tells what he thought of “Fan Man” from an Indiana prison. We even get the ‘faith healing’ of Holyfield by evangelist Benny Hinn after a diagnosis of heart trouble in the first Michael Moorer fight.

The bonus is the two big matches.

This is the first time in a long time that extensive footage of the actual Holyfield-Tyson fights has been on TV like this. Remember the look on William Shatner’s face when Holyfield dropped Tyson in their first fight? The first post-fight press conference? It’s all here as is the build to and outcome of their biting return match.

None of this is to say the film is perfect. Without a single point of narration, archive footage is used to briefly address some of the whispers and wonders about Holyfield. Bryant Gumbel asking Holyfield about steroids on The Today Show after the heart problems in 1994 could have used some of the context of the Evan Fields controversy just a few years ago. That it uses the footage at all at least floats the idea.

There are also some holes in the storytelling. It’s fairly complete up until the release of Tyson from prison in 1995. How Mike Tyson came to hold titles again in the division, and the mess the title scene became between 1994-96, is glossed over. It will leave those unfamiliar with some of the idiosyncrasies of the era needing to look it up. It could annoy viewers who remember and know what’s missing.

This is also true in building just why Holyfield was such a huge underdog going into the first fight. It wasn’t just the lackluster performance against Bobby Czyz, from which we get footage, prior to the first Tyson fight. It was also the knockout loss to Bowe in their third, here overlooked, showdown. The way the movie lays out, one might get the impression Holyfield went from Hinn to Czyz to Tyson. He didn’t.

Not overlooked, or improperly embellished, is the underlying thesis: Evander Holyfield would never have been as regarded as the immortal he is now without Tyson. That was the mark the public set. It was the barometer he had to meet. It was the fight he had to win.

Eventually he did. Remembering how he got from champion to the throne is worth the walk down memory. Chasing Tyson is must-see television next Tuesday night.     

Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America.  He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com