Thirty years ago: It was 30 years ago Tuesday that Douglas, a journeyman heavyweight who never seemed to fight to his potential, came off the canvas to stop Tyson in the 10th round at the Tokyo Dome. A half hour later we got the official news and I just said, ‘Wow’ and went home.” “I told the kids who put the final scores not to put it in the system because I thought it had to be wrong and I didn’t want to end up paying both sides. “I was in my office and the word came in that Douglas won,” Vaccaro said. Not even the guys behind the counter at the Mirage sportsbook. The line seemed fair enough at the time, mostly because nobody thought Tyson could possibly lose. The line at the Mirage became so iconic that an ESPN documentary on the fight was named after it, and bookies still talk about it anytime the most storied odds come up in conversation. That would be 42-1, a number that still lives in sports betting lore. “The number went to 37-1 and then finally to where it ended up.” “To this day I’ve never seen so many people who would lay such a big price on anything,” Vaccaro said. If anything seemed like a sure thing in 1990 it was that Tyson would knock out Douglas to retain his heavyweight titles. Others soon followed, handing over fistfuls of $100 bills across the counter at the Mirage hotel sportsbook. The next day a customer came in and bet $54,000 to win $2,000 on the expected Tyson beatdown.
There was no way Buster Douglas was going to go to Japan and beat the baddest man on the planet, so 27-1 seemed like a reasonable line for what everyone figured would be a short fight with Mike Tyson.Įxcept it wasn’t. That was the number that popped into oddsmaker Jimmy Vaccaro’s head in early February 1990, though at the time it didn’t seem to matter.
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