Outside the ring, wearing normal clothes, Mike Tyson is not that intimidating. He's quiet and rather introverted. It's only when he puts those black trunks and boots on that the dangerous animal side of his personality emerges.

My heart had been jumping and racing when I stood next to a cardboard cut-out of him at a press conference. By the time I was standing outside the MEN arena, in Manchester, I was raring to go - the fight couldn't come soon enough. On the way out to the ring I was drinking in the atmosphere. They played my music - the army even sent a load of guys down to drum me in - and the crowd were screaming and shouting. I was loving it.

To be honest I was intimidated by him - he'd had more knockouts than I'd had fights. But no one could have told me then that he was going to beat me. I just thought whoever landed the biggest punch would win the bout.

Once the fight started it was an entirely different story. Coming across the ring towards me, Tyson had this unbelievable intensity and ferocity about him. My plan went straight out the window. You have studied the way he comes out and you practise defending it, but the way he does it is nothing like what you have prepared for. If someone hits me I want to hit him back, that's the sort of person I am, but it's different against Tyson. He hit me immediately with a big right and, though I was well up for the fight, I was shocked by the speed and power of the punches that followed. I was knocked down in the first round. I got up, he carried on and the rest of the fight was a bit of a blur. He was hitting me with all sorts of body and head shots; he even lifted me off the ground with some of them and I weighed 17 stone! It was relentless.

He would come at me from one side and then from the other. The angles he got into me from were incredible. People always talk about his punching power but his technique and timing are also excellent. He always gets inside you and can outbox and outjab you. He was such a gifted fighter.

When I was interviewed afterwards, they told me I had been knocked down five times and I was amazed. I didn't believe them until I watched it on a monitor. I wasn't really thinking about it at the time and just kept on getting back up. The pain didn't kick in properly until I was back in the hotel, after the press conference; then I was in all sorts of agony. I lay in the bath for hours recovering. I won't forget the pain in a hurry.