Troy Percival on Oct. 28, 2002
Buster Douglas shocked the world when he KO'd Mike Tyson 25 years ago. (Getty)

If you’re a boxing fan of a certain age, it’s an indelible memory.

And whether you watched the broadcast live or blearily scanned for results after a Saturday evening spent elsewhere, the moment a certain six-word phrase hit home was monumental.

“Mike Tyson has been knocked out.”

Ironically, though, the man who delivered those words on Feb. 11, 1990 -- as the iron-fisted Tyson was violently overthrown by James “Buster” Douglas -- did so while running point on a telecast from Tokyo that precisely no one had anticipated would still stand as seminal a quarter-century later.

“The atmosphere and the silence -- the fact that at the beginning of the fight I could literally hear Mike and Buster’s shoes slapping against the canvas as they moved around -- all of that combined to cause us ultimately to call the fight as though it was a golf tournament,” HBO’s Jim Lampley told CBSSports.com, in a reminiscent mid-week phone interview. “We were speaking in hushed tones.”

The perfunctory mindset was understandable at the start.

After all, Douglas was a prohibitive underdog, Tyson wasn’t the novelty he’d been upon first appearing in Japan two years earlier and on-site crowd estimates pegged the paid attendance as significantly less than it had been in the same building for that 1988 demolition of Tony Tubbs.

Then, as the fight unfolded, Lampley said the comprehensive nature of the beating applied to the unbeaten champion -- though surely unexpected -- yielded its own brand of mechanical mic work.

“Everything had been easy during that period of time, and now he’s getting waxed by Buster Douglas and, clearly, as each round passes, it’s on merit,” he said. “Everything became this sort of almost surreal, understated, matter-of-fact broadcast for which the final action is me, in the flattest tone imaginable, saying ‘Mike Tyson has been knocked out.’ Again, it was like calling a golf tournament.

“Phil Mickelson has won the Masters. Mike Tyson has been knocked out.”

Lampley and colleagues Larry Merchant and Ray Leonard spent the broadcast’s final few minutes trying to comprehend what they’d seen, but by the time post-fight viewers were tuning into cinematic classics “They Live” (on the East Coast) and “Police Academy 6” (on the West Coast), the then 40-year-old blow-by-blow man was already getting himself prepared for a hectic workday back home.

He was, among other things, both a news anchor for KCBS-TV in Los Angeles and a sports correspondent for “CBS This Morning” at the time, and he chuckled nostalgically as he turned to the jam-packed 2/11/90 page of a professional appointment journal he’d kept back then.

“It’s an unusual occasion in my life that I remember partially with a sense of humor,” he said. “I had a lot of different gigs at that time. And that day, Feb, 11, 1990, is by far the busiest day.

“I get up in Tokyo, I call Tyson-Douglas, I get on a plane and fly from Tokyo back to Los Angeles, I go to a charity awards luncheon that afternoon in Los Angeles, I anchor the 5 o’clock news, I anchor the 11 o’clock news, I do a business dinner in between and I do a report for CBS This Morning on the weekend in sports – after the 11 o’clock news that night.

“That is the most active day, in terms of doing different professional things, probably in the whole 40-year experience of being a sports broadcaster. And particularly since it took place on two continents.”

Weekend Watch List
ESPN2 -- Friday, 9 p.m.
Alex Perez vs. Brandon Adams -- six rounds, junior middleweights
Stanislav Skorokhod vs. Michael Moore -- six rounds, junior middleweights
Ricardo Pinell vs. Cleotis Pendarvis -- six rounds, junior middleweights
Simeon Hardy vs. Vito Gasparyan -- six rounds, junior middleweights

CBS Sports Network -- Saturday, 10:30 p.m.
Derric Rossy vs. Akhor Muralimov -- 10 rounds, heavyweights
Mike Lee vs. Gary Tapusoa -- six rounds, cruiserweights