If the former champion fails on Saturday his legendary trainer could go down with him
Richard Williams
Manny Steward will be in Lennox Lewis’s dressing room on Saturday, taping the fighter’s hands with tender care. Steward’s will be the last words Lewis hears before entering the ring in Las Vegas to recapture his world heavyweight titles from Hasim Rahman. And if the attempt ends in failure, it is hard to know which man’s credibility will suffer the greater damage.
Within the space of a few days last spring, British boxing lost both its world champions. While there are those who will say that one of those defeats might have been foreseen, the other came as a shock. But there was a common denominator in the dethroning of Naseem Hamed in Nevada on April 7 and of Lewis on the East Rand on April 22 and it was the presence in the loser’s corner on both nights of one of the world’s most highly rated trainers.
Steward is no longer associated with Hamed but he will be among the attendants when Lewis attempts to regain his belts at the Mandalay Bay hotel this weekend. And he is concerned to stress the importance of this fight to the reputation of a fighter he had ranked, in terms of pure talent, on a level with Muhammad Ali.
“All Lennox’s 24 years in boxing will be condensed into this fight,” Steward said during a break between training sessions. “He realises he’s put himself in a position that, if he loses this fight, he retires. This is it for him. He’s got to win this or all his accomplishments will be pretty much washed away. The Holyfield fights and the Golotas and the Tuas and the McCalls will mean nothing. All he’ll be remembered for will be the fights with this man. I’ve made it very known to Lennox that this will be his legacy.”
But what is true for Lewis will be just as relevant to history’s view of Steward. Born 56 years ago in West Virginia, the son of a coal miner, he has been involved with boxing since his parents split up and his mother took the children to Detroit, where she encouraged him to practise pugilism as a way of keeping him off the streets. At 18 he won a Golden Gloves title, finishing his amateur career with a record of 94 victories from 97 bouts as a bantamweight.
A warm, talkative and popular man, Emanuel Steward has known setbacks, and not all of them in boxing halls, in the 30 years since he gave up his job as an electrician to work as a trainer at the Kronk gym in Detroit. Three years ago he paid $1,1-million in settlements to the United States tax authorities, narrowly averting the confiscation of his Lincoln, Rolls-Royce, Jaguar and home. He has also enjoyed mixed fortunes with a sideline career as a Detroit restaurateur.
Nothing, of course, can take away the achievements he racked up during his time advising Thomas Hearns, Evander Holyfield, Julio Cesar Chavez and Oscar de la Hoya. In the event of another Lewis defeat on Saturday, however, it is hard to believe a new generation of fighters would be lining up to offer him 15% of their purses.
At the moment the criticism remains muted but there are those who look back at the events of last April and say that, while losing one champion might be down to bad luck, losing two inside a month is something close to dereliction of duty.
Nor is the case for Steward’s defence strengthened by his role as boxing adviser to the producers of Ocean’s Eleven, Steven Soderbergh’s remake of the old Frank Sinatra caper movie, starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. Lewis spent three days in early April playing a walk-on role in the film, which kept him in Las Vegas at a time when his critics say he should have been in South Africa, acclimatising himself to the altitude.
“I don’t regret the movie commitment at all,” Steward said. “Lennox trained so hard and we always take three or four days off anyway … The movie had no effect.”
Yet there must be some residual embarrassment, not least in Steward’s mind, over the fact that, while the film’s producers hired Lewis when he was the king of the world, what they may have on their hands when it has its premiere on December 5 is a twice-beaten ex-champ.