Luis Suarez, the Liverpool forward and one of the elite bad boys in modern soccer history, made news today when he bit the arm of the Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic.

Got to give Suarez some credit. He fairly rooted around till he had brought his teeth to bear on Ivanonic’s upper arm, and gave him a chomp. Didn’t seem to cause any bleeding, though.

The notion of athletes biting … seems exotic, no? But, in fact, when we wanted to whip up a list of five sports biting incidents, we had little trouble finding them.

The most notorious? Not up for discussion.

Mike Tyson.

And I never forget this one … because I was at ringside when it happened.

Sixteen years later, it seems hard to imagine that boxing was as big an attraction as it was in the late 1990s. So many interesting fighters out there, and none more interesting than Iron Mike, who was getting a rematch with Evander Holyfield, who had knocked him out in their first fight. It was billed as Holyfield-Tyson II: The Sound and the Fury.

I drove up to Las Vegas from Southern California to cover the fight, as I often did for big events, and I expected something interesting … but certainly not the performance Mike Tyson gave.

The fight was at the MGM Grand, which then (as now?) was a semi-scary casino that seemed to be popular with gang members. Or maybe that was only on fight nights. But I digress.

Tyson still was box office, and Holyfield had fairly well handled him in the first fight, which was considered a shucking upset. Tyson fans still thought he could recapture the old magic, back when he terrorized the heavyweight division as the world’s baddest man. (Remember Michael Spinks, a heavyweight champion, almost fainting with fright, against Iron Mike?)

So, an electric atmosphere, which is what big fights are about (literally nothing in sports matches it), and I came out of the press room just before the main event and took my seat in the rows of chairs packed between tables in the press area — which takes up one of the four sides of the ring.

Active fight from the off, things going on, and Tyson seemed to suggest that Holyfield was getting in close so he could use his head to butt Tyson. Which he did, in Round 2, opening a gash over Tyson’s eye.

Tyson is not a guy you imagine dealing well with frustration, and Holyfield was frustrating him, and in Round 3 they were in another clinch, and Tyson craned his neck to get his mouth near Holyfield’s right ear … and then he bit off about an inch of it.

I saw it happen. I saw Holyfield spring back and shout out in pain … like, well … like someone had just bitten his ear off.

It was something so unexpected it took all of us — me, for sure — a few seconds to process it.

“Tyson didn’t just bite Holyfield, did he? I didn’t see that, did I?”

And about when those questions were hanging over me like thought balloons, Iron Mike spit out the chunk of Holyfield’s ear. I remember it sailing through the air, a big enough chunk to see with the naked eye from 50 feet away.

And what can you say to something like that other than: “What … the … hell?”

And this is where it got crazy, so crazy I would not have believed I remembered it correctly if I had not gone back to check the sources.

The fight continued.

Mills Lane, the referee, looked at Holyfield’s ear, which was about half gone … and he let the fight continue. No. Really.

Round 4 began, and Tyson bit Holyfield on the other ear. The crowd, by now aware of what they didn’t believe they had seen the round before, began to go nuts. But Mills Lane allowed that round to finish, too, before checking Holyfield’s other ear — gnawed but otherwise intact.

And only then did he declare the fight over.

In nearly 40 years of covering sports, I have never seen anything as bizarre. Nothing. Not even close. Who goes to any sports event and expects someone to bite off a piece of his opponent and spit it out?

So, Luis Suarez, not a bad try. And those other guys on the list, some pretty objectionable stuff in there — the scrotum-biter, in particular. But nothing compares, in the “I’ll eat you alive” annals of sports biting to Mike Tyson snacking on Evander Holyfield, June 28, 1997.