FORTITUDE MADE DOUGLAS A BIG HIT A CHANGE OF HEART LED TO TRIUMPH IN TOKYO PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER , Thursday February 15, 1990 Robert Seltzer, Inquirer Staff Writer Edition: FINAL , Section: NATIONAL , Page: A01 COLUMBUS, Ohio - In the history of the working class, no one has revised his job resume more dramatically than James "Buster" Douglas. With his shocking upset over Mike Tyson on Sunday in Tokyo, Douglas went from stiff to heavyweight champion in about 30 minutes. "He was James 'Buster' Douglas one day," said his manager, John Johnson. "And James 'Buster' Douglas Inc., the next." Douglas, who appeared on Late Night with David Letterman yesterday, has fielded requests to appear with Arsenio Hall and Johnny Carson. A Las Vegas hotel and casino has offered him $5 million - $4 million more than he earned against Tyson - to spend five nights there, walking through the game rooms, and signing autographs and, well, just being seen. "The President called to say he wants to shake my hand," said Douglas, trying to relax in the small ranch-style home of his manager. "Now that's major. "Will I have time to meet him? I don't know. I guess I'll have to pencil him in sometime next week." Douglas was joking, but his sudden shift in fortune is anything but laughable. How did he do it? Douglas is a man who never before even demonstrated a passion for boxing. More than once, his handlers complained he just didn't have his heart in it. Yet, he says, he came to this fight with attributes he had never had before. He was in shape; he had a battle plan, courtesy of an unsolicited phone call from Larry Holmes; he had been unimpressed by Tyson both in the flesh and on film, and he knew what the 37 men who went before him had failed to recognize: To beat a monster, it is important to remember that ogres are sometimes patsies in disguise. Iron Mike Tyson a patsy? As absurd as that notion is - or was - Douglas went into the fight convinced that it was true. Armed with that belief, Douglas became miracle worker No. 1 instead of victim No. 38. "All the papers said he was invincible," Douglas said. "I expected to see a big 'S' on his shirt. And then I saw him at the first press conference for the fight, oh, about two months ago. I couldn't believe how small he was. I shook hands with him, and I said, 'Hmmmm, that's Mike Tyson?' "There was another press conference a few weeks later, and I got the same feeling. I said to myself, 'Something's wrong.' I figured that, the next time I saw him, he would have horns sticking out of his head. But, no, he hadn't changed. He was just a man. Just an ordinary man." Douglas made that observation, but it was his handlers who re-enforced it, showing their fighter tape after tape of the supposedly invincible champion. "I don't know why everyone is so surprised that Buster won," said his uncle and trainer, J. D. McCauley. "The tapes are there for everyone to see and study." The tapes were there, true, but some fighters refused to view them. Pinklon Thomas, who lost to Tyson two years ago, had said before their meeting that he had no interest in watching films of pugs "flying this way and that way." Thomas, a former heavyweight champion, may have paid for his curious study habits by joining the list of the airborne. Douglas was no Pinklon Thomas. Where other fighters might have seen an invulnerable champion, Douglas saw a boxer with glaring flaws. "We knew that Tyson was limited," McCauley said. "He's a big bully. The only way to fight a bully is by fighting him back." McCauley knew that, if his nephew was going to bully Tyson, Douglas would have to be in the best shape of his career. With the help of Doug Owens, a fitness instructor who attends Ohio State, the trainer developed a weightlifting program for Douglas, who increased his poundage from 180 to 400 pounds on the bench press. When Douglas entered the ring, he was 231 pounds of muscle - compared with the 260 pounds of jiggling beef that he had been for some of his previous bouts. "Lifting weights was an important key," McCauley said. "He became stronger. But you know what was even more important? He knew he was stronger. He felt it. It gave him confidence." Once Douglas acquired his confidence, both through viewing tapes and lifting weights, the only thing left was to devise a battle plan. McCauley got some unsolicited - but welcome - help in that area. It came from Holmes, a former heavyweight champion who was one of the 37 victims on the Tyson resume. "Larry called us, and he gave us some advice because he wanted Buster to beat Tyson," McCauley said. "He said Buster should jab and move back, jab and move back. Then, when Tyson charged forward, Buster was supposed to either move to the side and throw the right or meet him head-on with some uppercuts." Douglas executed that plan perfectly. "I was surprised that he was so easy to hit, especially from the third round on," Douglas said. "He had never been in against someone who threw combinations at him. He expected a punching bag, and that was the one thing I wasn't going to be." Nevertheless, the popular notion seems to be that Douglas did not win so much as Tyson lost. Tyson was sluggish throughout the whole bout, even in the early rounds, when he should have been fresh and murderous. For a fighter who loves to boast about his "bad intentions," he appeared tentative, even timid. Then, too, Tyson received little support from his two cornermen - Jay Bright and Aaron Snowell. Bright was an off-Broadway actor who had fought briefly under the late Cus D'Amato, the trainer who had guided and nurtured Tyson. Snowell was an employee of promoter Don King, and his real function seemed to be to baby-sit the champion. Tyson did not require any advice from his corner until the middle rounds, when it became apparent that he was facing the first crisis of his career. Tyson needed a poised, experienced, knowledgeable trainer - a trainer who was thousands of miles away, watching the fight from his living room in Catskill, N.Y. His name was Kevin Rooney. "I knew right away that something was wrong," said Rooney, who trained Tyson until their split late last year. "Mike looked flabby. He had no fire. He fought like he was an accident waiting to happen. "Those guys in his corner let things get out of hand. There were a few rounds where they almost forgot to give Mike his mouthpiece. It was crazy." Like the rest of the world, Philadelphia promoter J. Russell Peltz was shocked at the upset, but he had more reason to be. Peltz had promoted Douglas for three fights in the early 1980s. One of those bouts was against a Mississippi fighter, Eugene Cato, who was so scared, he was hiding in the swampy backwaters of his home town, where his wife found him and drove him to Atlantic City. "Buster knocked him out in less than two minutes," Peltz recalled. "Buster always had a lot of potential, a lot of speed and talent for a big man, but he was never in condition. He would always come in between 250 and 260 pounds. " The fighter and the promoter parted company on Dec. 17, 1983, when Mike White knocked out Douglas in the ninth round of a scheduled 10-round bout. "Buster went down from exhaustion," Peltz said. "And he had been ahead by about seven rounds. After that, I didn't renew my options with him. I didn't see him going anywhere." Douglas called the fight - and the subsequent decision by Peltz - the low point of his career. "I wasn't doing the right things, wasn't training hard," Douglas said. "It was a business decision for Russell, and I didn't blame him. I was just sorry that things weren't going to work out for us." Another low point came on May 30, 1987, when he met Tony Tucker for the then vacant International Boxing Federation title. Douglas, comfortably ahead on points, walked into a right hand that ended the fight in the 10th round. He was so disgusted afterward that he fired his trainer - former middleweight and light heavyweight Billy "Dynamite" Douglas, his father. "Don't get me wrong, Buster learned everything he knows about boxing from Billy," according to a source in the Douglas camp. "But Billy seemed more interested in promoting himself than in helping Buster. At the Tucker fight, he wore a T-shirt that had his name on it. Everyone else was wearing a 'Buster Douglas' T-shirt. Buster and Billy get along outside the ring, but firing his father turned things around for Buster." Even at an early age, it did not seem as if things would ever work out for Douglas - at least not in boxing. "I stepped into the gym for the first time when I was 10," Douglas recalled. "I felt like I was in a Star Wars cantina. Everyone looked like an alien. It was kind of scary. Then, after about a week, it all looked normal to me. But I never really liked boxing. I never wanted to be a boxer." Douglas, who had worked in warehouses as a teenager, changed his mind in 1981, when he was studying physical education at Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania. "I became a boxer for money," Douglas said. "It was strictly a financial decision. It was either fight or get a job making $5 or $6 an hour. I didn't like that program." Douglas earned $50 for his first fight, and it was hard to foresee that he would ever win the title. "I had seen flashes of Buster's brilliance before, but it had never been sustained for a whole fight," Johnson said. Why did he think he could do it against Tyson? "Because I had never seen him so confident and so focused," Johnson said. "I knew he could win, but I didn't know that he would." Douglas did, and he credits his victory to his handlers and to the recent death of his mother. "Nobody else thought I could win," Douglas said. "But I knew my mother did. I knew that, somewhere, she was saying, 'That's my boy. He's gonna do it.' If I didn't do my best, if I didn't do what I was capable of, I thought my mama's ride to heaven would be a little harder. I didn't want that." Johnson said Douglas won because of a belief in himself - and in God. "This sounds corny, I know," Johnson said. "But we wear our crosses, and when we pray, we pray to Jesus Christ, not Mike Tyson." With a future that now seems full of promise, Douglas and Johnson have the luxury of reinterpreting the past. "When I first hooked up with James about five years ago, I told him that one of these days, he would be bigger than Jack Nicklaus (another sports hero from Columbus)," Johnson recalled. Bigger than Jack Nicklaus? You can bet your 5-iron on it. At least for now. PHOTO (1), 1. James "Buster" Douglas; Received advice from Larry Holmes\021 Philadelphia Inquirer © 2002 Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.