Is Lennox Lewis too decent to be a world boxing champion? Gavin Evans
When Lennox Lewis chose South Africa as the venue for his next defence of his world heavyweight title, he met with concerted opposition from within his own camp. HBO, the American cable television network which puts up most of the money, objected because, being American, they tend to believe that things are better kept at home. He’d already mildly ruffled their feathers by choosing his London birthplace to fight South Africa’s Francois Botha in April last year and they felt, well, enough was enough. His long-term British promoter Panos Eliadis also objected, preferring one of the alternative offers from Canada, the United States and Europe.
But Lewis’s decision to insist on South Africa says a good deal about the man holding boxing’s most prestigious title. He fired Eliadis, claiming mismanagement, and decided to promote himself, stared down the HBO bosses and in the end got his own way. It is the first undisputed (or not seriously disputed) world heavyweight title fight in Africa since Muhammad Ali stopped George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle” 27 years ago. “Thunder in Africa”, featuring Lewis against the top American Hassim Rahman, will be held at Carnival City in Brakpan in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Lewis’s decision to fight in Africa, and the way he asserted his will, gives a hint of the man, his concerns and his identity.
The world heavyweight champion is one of those rare creatures who seems so comfortable with his body and his brain, that he has nothing to prove in his day-to-day interactions with people. With most elite-level boxers it doesn’t take long to find the jagged edge driving them to excel in this most brutal of professions, but in all my interviews with Lewis over the past decade I have come away wondering what it is that compels this gentle man to fight, or at least to fight on.
Every time I have spoken to him he has responded with courtesy and generosity but it is not only we journalists who receive this treatment. When he was training for his second fight against Evander Holyfield, I went around speaking off-the-record to the staff of the motel resort in Pennsylvania where he was living and training, as well as to all his sparring partners. Without exception every one of them seemed amazed that an A-list celebrity like Lewis treated them with such consistent kindness and politeness: never rude, never prickly, never defensive, always thinking before acting.
Take, for instance, the hotel porter, Vincent Manning: “I’ve met Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier but no question Lennox treated me the best of them all. He’s a real class-A gentleman always goes the extra mile for you and shows nothing but kindness and respect.”
However, in one sense, it’s the side to Lewis that most worries his head trainer Emmanuel Steward that his chess-obsessed boxer is a bit too decent and analytical for his liking. “It’s the one thing we need to judge him on because he doesn’t have that staying-in-trouble mentality,” he said.
“There’s too much of the diplomacy, of the British conservatism within him.”
It is only when you get to know him a bit better, and to talk to him about his upbringing, that you realise there is pain lurking behind that gentleness. Certainly it would be a mistake to assume that Lewis prospered purely because of his size and extraordinary athletic ability.
For a start, his childhood was no cakewalk. He was born in London’s East End to Jamaican parents: Carlton Brooks, an already married mechanic he seldom saw, and Violet Lewis, who resisted her colleagues’ advice to have an abortion and instead gave birth by Caesarean section.
His memories of his early years are jolly enough but things started going wrong when he was expelled from primary school. “Some kids wouldn’t let me play soccer, so I took their ball,” he explained. “One guy tried to get it back so I punched him in the face and was taken to the principal’s office. They told me I was going to get it, so I smashed my hand through his window see, I still got the scars,” and he showed me the reminders of his petulance. “I remember the note they sent home with me: Sorry, but we have to expel Lennox. He’s a danger to the other kids.”
Soon after Violet Lewis took a factory job in Ontario, Canada, leaving Lennox to board with aunts while being despatched to various boarding schools for miscreants, and at one of them he had his first exposure to boxing. “The headmaster would put on the gloves with me and he’d let me punch at him just to get that aggression out and get me tired because I was a hyperactive boy with a bad temper who needed his mother’s attention,” he said.
At the age of 12 this insecure Cockney boy was reunited with his mum in the German-Canadian town of Kitchener, Ontario, and there he had a far more positive educational experience, excelling at his school work as well as in sport. Much of this had to do with his mother’s influence, and Lewis remains extraordinarily close to her still living together with her in his North London mansion. But even the Canadian experience had its rough edges. “I was called ‘nigger’ and stuff, and chased and teased and the police wouldn’t look at my heart; they’d look at my colour and would stop to harass me. These were things I came to expect.”
These experiences were seminal to the sense of self that emerged. “I’m very conscious of my blackness and my culture and my history,” he said. I asked him who were his heroes, and he didn’t hesitate. “[Nelson] Mandela, Malcolm [X] and Martin [Luther King] look at their life stories and what they’ve overcome and my mother because she’s been through a lot to bring me up in today’s society; not an easy task.”
His pride in being a black man is certainly part of the reason for his determination to follow Ali by fighting in Africa. As Rodney Berman, the South African promoter of the April 22 event, put it: “When you speak to him it is very clear that Africa has a special significance for him because of his sense of his roots.”
Lewis’s roots in boxing lie in pride of a different kind. As a teenager he was supposed to meet another young tough outside the police gym for a fistfight, but when the other fellow failed to pitch, Lennox accepted an invitation by the gym’s trainer to spar a few rounds, and never looked back.
“I really started to enjoy it when I found that I could make people miss, and I started imagining I was Ali.” He also flirted with wrestling, judo and karate, but it was in the amateur boxing ring and the street where his reputation was spreading. “I never lost a street bout. I’m very proud of that. With me, it’s over in a couple of punches and you’re out.”
Boxing also helped to control his volatile temper. “When people call me names now it doesn’t really bother me unless they touch me. I don’t get hyped up fast.”
The last scuffle he admits to came during the 1984 Olympics when the steroids sprint king Ben Johnson attacked him with a stick over an identity-tag mix-up, and even then Lewis refrained from beating him up doing no more than disarming Johnson and then putting him into a headlock until he submitted.
Four years later Lewis won the Olympic gold medal by stopping Riddick Bowe and the defeated American favourite tried to deal with the humiliation by taunting Lewis, calling him a “faggot” whenever he crossed his path. This prompted rumours, which eventually spilled over into the British tabloid press that Lewis was gay.
For a long time he kept a dignified silence on the subject, although he told me he despised Bowe for the cheap way he had insulted him. “I didn’t hate him but I had it marked in my memory: you called me a faggot. Alright, you’ll see, Redemption will come.”
For what it’s worth he quietly states that he is not gay. He told me he wanted to have a family when the time was right. “Oh yeah, man, and I’m definitely going to get married when I find the right girl.”
The one side to his identity which confuses people is his nationality Jamaican parents, first decade or so in Britain, next one in Canada, back in Britain, training and fighting in America, holidaying in the West Indies, with an accent that is sometimes hard to define. “When I’m in England people say I sound American. When I go to Canada they say I sound English. So Ijust say I’m mid-Atlantic. I’m someone who lives on planet Earth.” For the moment though, he wants to tour the world, displaying his talents to people who have not yet seen them first-hand. If he eventually gets to fight Mike Tyson it will almost certainly happen in America, but after his South African sortee he is also interested in fighting in the Far East, Germany and his old stomping ground of Canada.
I asked him where he eventually intended to settle. “Mmm, I haven’t really decided,” he said. “Probably just enjoy the planet”