Frans Botha will be on a hiding to nothing on Saturday when he fights a great heavyweight champion
Gavin Evans
I suppose I should admit to some bias here: first, I feel passionately about Lennox Claudius Lewis. Second, I’m not so wild about Francois Johannes Botha.
The Botha thing I can get out of the way quickly. He’s a loquacious, friendly fellow but I feel edgy when any boxer goes on about being a white hope, and when it comes from a white South African I feel ill. This week the “White Buffalo” told me he wanted “company” in the heavyweight rankings – white company, that is – and would “prove the white man can fight”. He said he was disillusioned with South Africa because former president Nelson Mandela only sent him a letter of support rather than a personal emissary. That’s probably enough, except perhaps to add I also don’t care for his route of entry into the rankings – through a bribe from his then-promoter Don King – nor that he’s had more chances than he deserves, nor that he’s avoided Corrie Sanders for so long. So, no cigar for Botha just yet.
My support for Lewis is more complicated. Boxing is a game that only really gels when you follow a particular fighter. You need household gods to worship. Anyway, in 1988, when Lewis stopped Riddick Bowe to win Olympic gold, I adopted him in much the same random way that makes a Leeds United
supporter out of a Sebokeng shack dweller. The initial rationale was simply that he was not from the United States and therefore might be the nemesis of those who felt the sport’s premier bauble belonged by right in the land of the free – which then raised the awkward question, what was he?
His parents are Jamaican, but he spent his first 12 years in Britain, and most of his last 12 as well, won gold for Canada, does his fighting and training mainly in the US and his holidaying in the West Indies, and his accent is a quaint blend of the lot. He carries his flags lightly and views himself as a global champion. “Yeah, one who lives on planet Earth,” he said with a grin and a shake of his long Rastaman braids. “I haven’t even decided where I’ll settle. Probably just enjoy the planet.”
Throughout his career he has resisted intense pressures to mould him into someone else’s image. It started when he turned down the offers to fight out of the US, and instead returned to London. It continued when he fought off the overtures – effectively bribery and blackmail – to sign up with King, with the result that he was frozen out of a world title shot after losing his World Boxing Council (WBC) world title to the King-prompted Oliver McCall on a dubious stoppage in London six years ago. He successfully battled King and the WBC in the courts and eventually claimed revenge over the weeping McCall, before beating off periodic King- backed challenges and finally outpointed the King-owned Evander Holyfield for universal recognition as the The Man.
What was remarkable throughout this process was Lewis’s stoicism. Other heavyweights like Bowe, Michael Moorer and of course Mike Tyson were in the process of violent self- destruction. Holyfield was ranting about God, fathering children all over the place, and riding on King’s largesse. Not Lewis though. As a child he was expelled from his east London primary school for violence and in his late teens he came close to ripping Ben Johnson’s head off during an “incident” at the Los Angeles Olympics, but as an adult professional his behaviour has impeccably cool in the face of extreme provocation. After being frozen out by King he was robbed of victory in his first fight with Holyfield and then his private life was being picked apart by insidious rumour.
There were little whispers – like the talk of ganja smoking while on vacation in the West Indies – and then there was the drip, drip, drip effect of the big rumour: the one that says this homefires mummy’s boy is gay. Of course this should not be a big deal and he is hardly alone in British public life. Tory leader William Hague, for instance, faces similar tittle-tattle, but for a male boxer it creates a different kind of problem than for a male politician. Not that there have never been gay boxers – Freddie Mills, world light heavyweight champion of 50 years ago, revelled in the rough trade and had an affair with the former South African champion Don McCorkindale – but even today in gay-attuned Britain I can’t quite imagine a fighter coming out and staying on his feet, so to speak.
In Mills’s day the media kept this kind of conjecture to itself when it came to the rich and famous. Lewis has not been so lucky. It started, in public at least, when Bowe provocatively alluded to it nearly a decade ago. When I asked Lewis about this, he did not seem fazed by the specifics, implying it was more the lack of respect that got to him. “When people call me names it doesn’t bother me much. I don’t get hyped up fast, so it wasn’t a situation where I wished him dead – I don’t hate any opponent – but I had it marked in my memory: ‘You called me a faggot. Redemption will come.'” Since then the issue has never died. The tabloids and even the broadsheets have started to play with it and the innuendo within the profession has turned into taunts. Former sparring partner and would-be opponent John Ruiz, for instance: “I think he has a crush on me. Someone should tell him I’m married with two kids.”
Lewis, as always, has responded with dignity. Like Hague, he has denied he is gay, but unlike the Tory leader he has not felt it necessary to indulge in gay-bashing antics. He merely says – quietly as always – that everything is on the level. As he put it to me: “I’m definitely going to get married and start a family after I retire, but only when I find the right girl.” Next question please.
The public airing of the sexuality rumours is having at least one positive spin-off: it is helping to make Lewis a figure of greater intrigue. Until now the public image has been one of the slightly aloof, reserved thinker – a contemporary equivalent of Gene Tunney, the Shakespeare-quoting stylist who twice whipped Jack Dempsey in the 1920s but was never a popular heavyweight champion. Lewis is known as a cautious man – a cerebral heavyweight who plays a fine game of chess; a boxer who thinks too much; an interviewee who refers to himself in the third person, as if to say, that other fellow, the fighting man in the ring, is really someone else.
Yet examine Lewis’s achievements and it is clear he deserves serious consideration as one of the better champions in heavyweight history: one controversial defeat in 38 fights; the first undisputed heavyweight champion in eight years; two reigns totalling over five years (so far) as WBC champion; 11 out of 12 wins in world title fights. He has weaknesses – in particular that caution and a tendency to fight in spurts and run short of gas – but when you combine his enormity and strength with that jab, uppercut and right cross, and with his defensive excellence – you have an outstanding fighting machine.
The US public has never taken to him, however, mainly because he’s not American, dammit. There was an eight-month caveat after that outrageous draw with Holyfield when he was lionised for his status as a victim of injustice, but then he outpointed Holyfield in the tighter return it was back to normal. Michael Grant, a huge, charismatic, unbeaten American, was meant to relieve the tedium but Lewis knocked him cold. With Tyson’s grip on sanity more dubious than ever, and Holyfield slurring his speech, the Americans have now run out of serious challengers. Lewis’s next challenger, the sawn-off Samoan David Tua, who fights like Tyson in treacle, will be picked off at long distance. If Tyson makes it to the ring he will be confused, hurt, discouraged and when he can’t register, he’ll revert to type and suffer another disqualification. Holyfield will be blown away if they fight again.
Lewis turns 35 soon, and has already announced that the Botha fight will be his 18th and last in Britain, and that retirement is beckoning. At that point the contrast between Lewis and the majority of other ex-pubs should become more blissfully apparent.
In a quiet way he has started to carve out a role as representative of causes rather wider than dissing King. “I’m very conscious of my blackness and my culture. When I was growing up I was called nigger and stuff and the police wouldn’t look at my heart, they’d look at my colour and would stop to harass me,” he said.
He cites Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Mandela as his heroes. He talks about the US government being the enemy of black people, about gun control being a means of state control and of state-sponsored conspiracies. More significantly he draws immense pride from his lofty status in Britain’s black community, in stark contrast to his old rival Frank Bruno, whom Lennox called an “uncle Tom”. “He didn’t take a stand on anything until he said he’d leave Britain if the Tories lost the election – and look at that party’s history: not the best,” Lewis says.
Unlike so many sports stars, this is more than cheap talk. In one of many charity projects, he put in R30-million of his own money to set up the Lennox Lewis College in working-class Hackney – a school catering for 60 rough- edge teenagers excluded from state institutions. Now he’s talking about a new, hands-on venture – to start a school for amateur boxers from all over Europe. I like to think he can extend himself rather further once the pressures of training and fighting have been lifted.
For the moment though, there’s Frans Botha to deal with. Lewis tends to underperform against lesser contenders like Botha, who is three years younger, equally experienced and far fitter and better prepared than ever before. But the gap in size and class will be too great and I expect Lewis to take him out before the halfway mark.