One of the longest-established combat sports writers is calling it a career. That would be Kevin Iole, who spent 46 years as a paid sportswriter (as his farewell post notes, though, he started writing even before then) across a variety of sports and outlets, but became particularly known for decades of boxing and MMA work as a reporter and columnist.
Iole’s career includes work at the Valley News Dispatch in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, the Burlington Free Press in Vermont, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and especially Yahoo Sports, where he helped launch their combat sports verticals in 2007 and worked through December 2023. He’s been running his own KevinIole.com site since then. And that’s where he penned his farewell piece Friday, saying he’d retire after Saturday’s UFC 317:
BIG NEWS: #UFC317 will be the last fight card I cover. My farewell column is here #retirement https://t.co/yUbPsMGw5l
— Kevin Iole (@KevinI) June 27, 2025
That farewell piece has a lot of notable lookbacks at Iole’s career, including the time he almost died in a plane crash on his way to cover Oscar De La Hoya’s training camp in 2002, some highlights from his early coverage of Tiger Woods (to aggrieved reaction from fellow golfer Fred Funk), and the time his laptop was almost stolen ringside in Mexico. But maybe the most remarkable part is what he writes about a 2003 interaction with Mike Tyson:
In 2003, as Mike Tyson was preparing to fight Clifford Etienne, I was invited to watch him train.
I arrived at the old Golden Gloves Gym in Las Vegas with [AP boxing writer Tim] Dahlberg. Trainer Freddie Roach was in the ring with Tyson. An attractive woman who turned out to be the actress, Meg Ryan, was shooting photographs.
A week or so before, I’d written what had been a complimentary column on Tyson, so I expected him to be in a good mood.
I got a call from someone the day after the column came out who identified himself as Tyson. The person acting as Tyson was praising the column and thanking me for it.
I listened for a while until I was tired of being played.
“Dude,” I said, “This is the worst Tyson impersonation I have ever heard. Give up on it.”
I hung up the phone, proud of myself.
As the five of us walked into the tiny dressing room Tyson was using, Tyson looked at me and said, “Man, Kevin, I’m disappointed. I called you the other day to thank you for the story and you hung up on me and treated me like an N.”
I was dumbfounded.
“That was you?” I asked, incredulous.
It was only then, in front of Roach, Dahlberg and Ryan, that I realized that it wasn’t a bad Tyson impersonator I’d hung up on.
It was Tyson himself.
I laughed, and thankfully, Mike did, too.
Thinking that Mike Tyson himself was a bad Mike Tyson impersonator is remarkable enough, but having that revealed in front of Meg Ryan and Freddie Roach? That’s quite the story. But it illustrates some of the remarkable moments Iole was there for across a long career, and one where he made a notable impact, perhaps especially in establishing Yahoo Sports as a combat sports destination (and serving as part of the remarkable team of journalists and bloggers who made the late-2000s Yahoo a go-to sports site for many). We wish him the best in retirement.
