It wasn’t a record that lasted long. But 30 years ago today, on August 19, 1995, Mike Tyson vs. Peter McNeeley became – for about 15 months – the highest selling boxing pay-per-view of all-time.

A total of 1.52 million American homes purchased the fight, a notable number that becomes especially remarkable when you consider that everyone buying it, hardcore boxing fans and casuals alike, knew that it was a complete mismatch.

And yet 1.52 million shelled out for it.

The lesson should have been apparent the instant those PPV receipts were reported: Promoters can make the best, highest-level, most evenly matched bouts they want, but those polished gems will rarely outsell the raw curiosities.

Maybe everyone should have already known this based on the success of Evander Holyfield vs. George Foreman in 1991. Even though that turned out to be a real fight, going in, it was mostly the curiosity that sold it.

Tyson-McNeeley took it to a different level, a level since stretched by Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor and, though this wasn’t on pay-per-view, the ultimate curiosity disguised as a sporting event, Tyson’s return against Jake Paul.

Tyson-McNeeley was a boxing match that the gossip magazines could latch onto. It was the former phenom who’d just wrapped up a three-year prison sentence for the rape of a beauty pageant contestant, competing for the first time in four years and two months, starting on his path toward finding out if he was still the Baddest Man on the Planet. That was all the dramatic tension you needed. The opposition didn’t matter. Don King just had to find a live body to put in the ring with him.

Not a live underdog. A live body.

Enter McNeeley, who that summer took the term “tomato can” mainstream. He was accused of being one. And whether he was or wasn’t a can, there was no doubt he’d built his record of 36-1 (30 KOs) against a bulk shipment of them.

Of all McNeeley’s opponents pre-Tyson, just three had winning records when they fought the Medford, Massachusetts “Hurricane.” And those three – Ron Drinkwater, J.B. Williamson and Stanley Wright – weren’t exactly a murderers’ row. They weren’t even an involuntary manslaughterers’ row.

By the way, McNeeley lost to the 8-5 Wright via eighth-round TKO.

Last year, veteran matchmaker Eric Bottjer told me a so-sad-it’s-hilarious story about McNeeley’s final fight prior to landing the date with “Iron Mike.” Manager Vinny Vecchione lined up an off-TV fight on April 22, 1995, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, against Frankie Hines, a jobber who sported a record of 14-70-2. McNeeley proceeded to KO Hines with a left hook in what was said to be a professional boxing record of six seconds.

The result mystified Bottjer because, as ghastly as Hines’ win-loss record was, Hines could handle himself in the ring and would usually last a couple of rounds. Bottjer bumped into Hines not long after.

“I’m like, ‘How could you lose to that guy in six seconds?’” Bottjer recalled. “And he kind of smiled at me, and he goes, ‘I’ve never been in Arkansas.’ So I immediately realized what had happened.”

If the story is accurate, it means Vecchione wasn’t taking any chances with McNeeley against the real Frankie Hines, so he found someone willing to play the role of Frankie Hines in a jurisdiction where the commission wouldn’t go out of its way to prevent such things.

Boxing has a strange way of doling out rewards.

Without facing a single credible opponent, McNeeley got himself a No. 7 ranking from the WBA. In other words, the WBA expected the suckers to accept that its rankings board believed McNeeley was the eighth-best and/or eighth-most-title-shot-worthy heavyweight in the world at the time.

And Vecchione got himself a Manager of the Year award at the end of ’95 from the Boxing Writers Association of America. In fairness, nobody knew Bottjer’s Hines story yet. All they knew was that McNeeley’s manager had maneuvered him from three-digit and four-digit paydays into a $540,000 score against Tyson.

Tyson’s managers, John Horne and Rory Holloway, were arguably robbed by the BWAA, as they got Tyson $36 million (counting the PPV upside) for some of the easiest work of his life. He earned almost as much for each second that the fight lasted – about $405,000 per – as McNeeley did for the whole thing.

That this fight generated the money that it did for all involved spoke to the depth of the public fascination with Tyson.

He was so destructive in his brief prime that many people believed from 1991-94, the best heavyweight in the world resided in an Indiana prison and the likes of Holyfield and Foreman and Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis were just fighting for second place.

On the opposite end of the spectrum were the skeptics, who wondered if Iron Mike had peaked in the ’80s, who wondered about the effects of ring rust, who wondered how diminished he’d be at age 29, who wondered if prison and his religious rebirth as a Muslim had altered the state of the former “Kid Dynamite’s” fuse.

The question was not whether McNeeley could present problems for him. The New Englander was a 13-1 betting underdog. And nobody considered that good value – the sportsbooks just didn’t want to risk taking a bath by listing him at a more fair price of 50-1 if by chance Tyson couldn’t fight at all anymore after all that time behind bars.

McNeeley

And that really was the central question here. It wasn’t whether Tyson would knock McNeeley out. It was how he would look doing it. 

People were paying their hard-earned money for a total mismatch because they missed Iron Mike Tyson and they were eager to find out whether Iron Mike Tyson still existed.

Ringside seats at the MGM Grand Garden Arena reportedly went for $1,500 and were filled by celebrities as A-plus list as Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, Denzel Washington, Kevin Costner and the then-married Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. The fight was a sellout, officially drawing a paid attendance of 16,736.

Obviously, Tyson was the draw, but McNeeley did his part. Along with King and Vecchione, McNeeley had a personality built for press conferences and uttered quotes that were perfect for the next day’s paper.

He first captured attention with some very amateur Ali-style poetry: “I’m Peter McNeeley, from Medford, Mass, and I’m here to kick Mike Tyson’s ass.”

But it was a line at a press conference about a week before the fight that stuck. McNeeley declared, “When I wrap Tyson in a cocoon of horror, he’ll be singing with our friends down at the House of Blues.”

Good luck deciphering what the latter part of the phrase meant. But the important bit came just before the comma: “cocoon of horror.” It’s a ridiculous trio of words, made decidedly more ridiculous by the goofy, mullet-ed man speaking those words ahead of a hopeless mission against one of the scariest offensive forces heavyweight boxing had ever known.

As Jimmy Lennon Jnr introduced the combatants on fight night, Tyson did not bear the look of a man concerned about the cocoon-wrapping coming his way. He paced with an appearance that vacillated between disinterested and ready to explode. If there could be such a thing as a mellow caged tiger, that was Tyson.

Referee Mills Lane got the crowd to pop with his signature “Let’s get it on!” and McNeeley took it as an order, running straight to Tyson the instant the bell rang – charging so hard and getting so close to his opponent that Tyson’s first punch, a left hook, landed on McNeeley’s mullet. They both let their hands go, and Tyson comfortably ducked under a McNeeley hook and countered with a right to the cheek, dropping him on his rump.

Six seconds had elapsed – the length of McNeeley’s fight against a man who may or may not have been Frankie Hines.

McNeeley got up immediately, ran to his corner, then started skipping around the ring, leaving Lane to grab his arm and redirect him so he didn’t skip right up into Tyson’s face. Lane finally picked up the count at four, though it should have been more like eight or nine by then.

Action resumed, and McNeeley resumed swinging away, showing absolutely no fear as he landed a couple of half-decent shots while exchanging with a cornered Tyson. 

Just over a minute into the opening round, McNeeley tried to headbutt his way out of a break, and Lane called time to admonish both men: “Knock that shit off, come on!”

They touched gloves, and the first right hand out of the break buckled McNeeley’s knees a bit. Another Tyson right hand followed, and the underdog’s right knee might have touched the canvas, though Lane let the action roll on.

It wouldn’t last much longer. 

Tyson opened up and crashed home a sizzling right uppercut, and McNeeley teetered sideways and down, ending up on two knees, one shoulder and one forehead. He again rose quickly but was wobbling about, at one point teetering to the right until he bumped into the ropes. Lane may have been willing to let the fight go on, but we’ll never know, because Vecchione entered the ring to stop it, forcing a disqualification one second shy of the midway point of the round.

The whole affair pointed to that occasionally thin line between boxing and professional wrestling. Tyson-McNeeley wasn’t scripted, but it was a setup. Only one man could possibly win.

And the loser’s corner’s entire focus was on not letting their man get badly hurt. Give ’em a show, earn your money, but be safe about it.

Vecchione later explained his decision to end the fight by saying, “I remember Jimmy Garcia and Gerald McClellan,” referring to one fighter who died from injuries suffered in the ring and another who suffered permanent damage. It was perhaps a touch dramatic to suggest a similar fate awaited McNeeley if he’d been allowed to see the second half of the first round. But Vecchione had done him a favor, allowing McNeeley to complain that he was ready for more after having briefly demonstrated the ideal warrior spirit.

And there was more money to be made. Probably the second-most memorable thing about McNeeley, behind his being the B-side of Tyson’s first post-prison fight, was that he parlayed his fame into a commercial for Pizza Hut afterward. That McNeeley got knocked down by a slice of pizza was not great for his image, but one assumes it was beneficial for his bank account.

Much of the rest of McNeeley’s career resembled his bouts with Tyson and that stuffed-crust pie: He finished 47-7, with six losses by KO or TKO and one, of course, by DQ. The most brutal, at least to whatever remained of McNeeley’s pugilistic reputation, was a first-round drubbing at the hands of Butterbean in 1999 on the undercard of the Fight of the Year between Paulie Ayala and Johnny Tapia.

As for Tyson, the rest of his career after the McNeeley fight needs no recounting, but boxing news Mike Tyson stories consistently showed that his ability to sell tickets and pay-per-views endured long after his boxing talents had eroded.

The curiosity factor kept popping up. Could he reclaim a heavyweight belt? Could he avenge an upset loss to Evander Holyfield? Could he bounce back from biting Holyfield’s ears? Could he somehow defeat heavyweight champion of the world Lennox Lewis? Did he have anything left after Lewis sent him to Bolivian? How would he look in an exhibition against fellow long-faded legend Roy Jones? And finally, what could he do at age 58 against a YouTuber?

That the Paul fight and the McNeeley fight are the bookends of Tyson’s post-prison career is perhaps fitting. Both were utter mismatches that made mountains of money, but Tyson was in the opposite role against Paul, playing the McNeeley part – that of the no-hoper.

Iron Mike lasted a lot longer than 89 seconds last November. The irony is that everyone watching would have been better off if he hadn’t.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.