Lennox Lewis prepares to fight what he sees as a cartoonish embodiment of evil
It appeared to be a TV interviewer who gave him the idea. ”Is this good versus evil, Lennox?” The champion paused for a moment, as if trying the idea for size. It fitted well enough. ”Yes,” he said. Afterwards, he repeated it himself several more times.
It is a fashionable kind of notion at the moment in the United States, where the president has been trailing the same line of thought for the past eight months. There is just one snag. Evil on this occasion appears to be represented by the American contender. That tends not to go down that well in these parts.
On June 8 Lennox Lewis of Britain, recognised as heavyweight champion of the world by three governing bodies, if no more have been invented in the past week, will defend his titles against the man now widely presumed to be the incarnation of sporting evil, Mike Tyson. The fight is in Memphis, Tennessee. Rumours that the underbidding cities were Baghdad, Pyongyang and Kandahar are evidently false. Boxing wants and needs this contest, which is supposedly going to be the richest of all time. Tyson is 35, Lewis is 36. It couldn’t wait much longer.
Evil being inherently the more interesting of the two, all the focus has so far been on Tyson. When their long-heralded meeting was supposed to be announced in January, he used the occasion to take a bite out of Lewis’s thigh. Two weeks ago, when the boxing writers came to pay court to him in Hawaii, Tyson said, among other courtly remarks, that he intended to kill Lewis.
So now the press came to Lewis’s training camp in the Pennsylvania hills to get his response. And he duly delivered, saying that Tyson was ignorant, arrogant, an imbecile, and off his head. Asked where the Tyson story would end, he replied: ”At the end of my fist”.
But his heart was never in it. After 13 years as a professional boxer, Lewis wants the massive pay day or two that can only come from fighting Tyson. He is no good at the by-play and the bluster of the fight game though, which is why Britain’s most successful heavyweight of all time could walk down the street with Frank Bruno or Chris Eubank and pass unnoticed while his companion got mobbed.
He came up with one or two Ali- esque phrases that had the sniff of a scriptwriter about them: ”I’m the best there is. I’m the top of the food chain. That doesn’t mean he can take a bite out of me again.” Lewis also compared Tyson to a cartoon character, but he couldn’t remember which one: eventually his camp decided he meant the Rhino from Spiderman.
Emanuel Steward, Lewis’s trainer, stood on a chair and shouted: ”I’d like to apologise for Lennox’s workout being so boring and not threatening to kill anyone or tell all the women he wants to take them to bed. So we won’t make CNN or anything like that.” This is a shrewd assessment.
It is Tyson’s bizarre personality that takes this contest beyond the increasingly narrow confines of the boxing community. The problem is that no one really knows just how bizarre he has become: how much of his behaviour is a satirical version of traditional boxing hype, how much is some form of psychosis and how much is a very calculated attempt to frighten his opponent.
What’s clear to most observers is that Lewis now has to do more than conquer a once-great boxer who may or may not have rediscovered some of his old ability. He has to deal with an opponent who may choose to box him or eat him. Lewis’s thigh, Evander Holyfield’s ear. They all come alike to Tyson.
It cannot be easy to concentrate if you are not sure what part of your anatomy might be the plat du jour. For Lewis – so Tyson’s theory seems to go – once bitten, twice shy.
In straightforward boxing terms, if that can possibly apply, all seems to be well. For the past month, Lewis has been here at his favourite holiday resort in the Poconos: doing a lot of conditioning work, running up a ferocious incline known in the camp as Motherfucker Hill, and sparring (with smaller men, to replicate Tyson) in the Boardwalk Fun and Fitness Centre, separated only by a curtain from families playing indoor crazy golf.
Uncharismatic as he is, he probably passes without notice round the lakeside. Stripped for action, though, he wears his years lightly. Lewis has lost only two professional fights, to opponents he failed to take seriously: Oliver McCall in 1994 and Hasim Rahman a year ago. And no one has ever declined to take Tyson seriously.
”I respect his power. He’s still got that,” Lewis says. ”But he’s only got one way of fighting, coming straight forward.
”If he comes up with something else, it just makes me greater. If he bites me, if he’s coming in low, coming after the bell, that just makes me a better person.”
Well, most of us are better people than Mike Tyson. Lewis talks of ”disciplining” him, and he thinks Americans will support him for that, especially in view of Tyson’s behaviour towards women. Maybe.
But boxing’s hard. And it gets harder if an opponent starts messing with your head. Or your ear. Or your thigh.