Lennox Lewis feels he is on the victory lap of his long career. After a year in the pasture, he planned to test the waters once more against Canada’s Kirk Johnson before taking on mandatory challenger Vitali Klitschko, followed by a big-bang send off against Mike Tyson or Roy Jones and then retirement, marriage, children and a new entrepreneurial career.
But two weeks before fight-time Johnson withdrew, injured, and Lennox was feeling so sharp that he thought, what the hell, why not accelerate the process by feeding on Klitschko first. And so it happened that after months of failed negotiations, he is about to settle scores with the 2,03m German-based Ukrainian.
”I’m up for this fight,” he says. ”I’m a competitor by heart. If somebody says, ‘I can beat you up the stairs,’ I say, ‘Let’s go!’ The race is on and that’s what brings me excitement.”
I find him in a vibrant mood — free with his answers, seldom indulging in his usual habit of talking about himself in the third person and more willing than usual to put the boot into those he despises. My first question is about whether the change of opponent has caused a loss of focus. ”I’m not taking him lightly because I realise I suffered from those mistakes against Oliver McCall and Hassim Rahman [the only men to beat him in 43 professional fights] and I don’t want to go through that again. You can’t really cut corners in boxing.”
Klitschko is a more dangerous opponent than Johnson. For a start there’s the raw statistics. He’s six years younger than Lewis and 7,5cm taller. His only defeat in 33 bouts came when he damaged the rotator cuff in his left shoulder against Chris Byrd (when he was winning the fight) and he’s won 31 of his 33 fights on knockouts. However, Lewis showed no concern about the change.
”Vitali is living within my shadow, in one sense, in that he’s been pleading for this fight for a long time but it will be too much of a step up for him,” he says. ”I don’t believe there is anybody my size who can beat me. Vitali and his brother Wladimir have a lot of hype about them but they haven’t been through what I’ve been through, which why I’ve been saying I could have one for breakfast and one for lunch.”
Why, then, did he support the successful bid by South Africa’s Corrie Sanders to upset Wladimir — offering tactical advice and encouragement before the fightl and congratulations afterwards? The main reason, he explains, boiled down to the fact that Sanders was one of his boxers — part of Lewis’s Lion Promotions/SEM stable. ”But it was also because Corrie is a very nice guy who has always treated me with respect.”
He’s clearly up for this fight, but surely there must be some worrying rust after a year of champagne-quaffing and continent-hopping? Lewis laughs. ”I kept up a level of conditioning before coming to training camp. I’m a multi-athlete. I play basketball, tennis and I kept my strength up, which is great. There’s different periods when you can do those other things. Champagne is OK, but when it comes to harder alcohol like rum, that’s where you have a problem.”
And with all that holiday time spent in Jamaica and his affinity to Rastafarianism, how about ganja? ”Well, I don’t really discuss that kind of stuff, but it’s not involved. It doesn’t help you in boxing. A lot of people think that because I have the locks, ganja is part of the package, but it’s definitely not always the case.”
No ganja or hard booze, but there’s still the question of his age? At 37 years and 10 months he’s one of the oldest heavyweight champions yet. ”Actually, he’s boxing better than ever before,” his head trainer, Emanuel Steward, cuts in. ”It’s not like [Muhammad] Ali who, after 32, was getting hurt in every fight. Lennox has never taken a beating, and he doesn’t let himself go between fights.”
Lewis reinforces this view, insisting he’s noticed no major signs of rust — aside perhaps from the salt and pepper in his locks, beard and chest hair. ”The only thing is the injuries, which take longer to recover from, but we make sure we avoid injuries.”
The evidence from his training camp is promising. He certainly looks in magnificent shape — a view reinforced by Steward: ”I think the long break has been good for both of us. His fights against Rahman and Tyson were emotional fights, so he needed a good rest from boxing and I could see from the way he has been working that it has been good for him. He’s sharp and ready to go.”
Lewis returns the compliments, praising his eight-person squad, most of whom have been with him for almost a decade. ”It really helps that I have a great team behind me,” he says.
His longest-serving team member is his chef, who doubles as his mum, Violet. ”I’m a self-professed mother’s boy,” he says. ”I don’t mind saying I’m a mother’s boy, and with me saying it, other athletes say it. There’s a lot of mother’s boys out there — people who appreciate their mothers. I realise all the heartache she’s gone through and the oppression she went through as well, and it’s not easy raising a couple of sons. She’s very loving, very giving, very kind, very spiritual. If Mike Tyson had a mother like mine he’d be a very different person.”
With mum minding his back, Lewis resists the temptations of nights on the town, and even abstains from seeing his Jamaican, masters student-come-beauty queen girlfriend Violet Chang. ”The old-time boxers refrained from sex for weeks and it used to get them primed up for the fight. I think it’s a good sacrifice. You can look forward to having it afterwards, like a reward, and the abstinence clears your mind.”
Instead he spends his time playing chess, watching videos and reading. ”I love history books because if you look back you will find out why some things are hard today,” he says.
History and chess are temporary diversions that lose their focus as the fight approaches. Steward insists that Lewis never takes it easy in a training camp — not even for the first Rahman fight in South Africa, when he lost his title. ”No, he was in good shape then. The problem was that he was too relaxed because he thought Rahman wasn’t up to the quality of most of his opponents over the previous years, so he wasn’t focused enough in the ring.”
Lewis stopped Rahman in the return fight and announced in the ring that he was dedicating his victory to Nelson Mandela. He tells me his historical heroes are Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, but none can match his living hero, whom he met in 2001. ”The one thing I really had to ask him, and I was surprised by his answer, was, ‘Don’t you feel hate because of what you went through and the fact that they put you in jail for so long?’ And he said no — that when he came out he felt love and spread love, and I thought that was a great statement.”
Many believe Lewis should have retired after beating Rahman and Tyson rather than dragging his career out and risking defeat. ”It definitely crossed my mind to retire,” he admits. ”But then I thought, ‘let me see what’s going on’.”
Lewis says he would like to fight Tyson again but doubts that Tyson will ever meet him in the ring. ”Mike has already said he doesn’t want it so now we know where we are going. I’m not going to force a man to fight unless he wants to fight.”
There is, however, another name starting to crop up: Roy Jones Jnr. ”If Roy beats Evander Holyfield, he will have the confidence at heavyweight to feel he’ll have a good chance of beating Lennox,” says Steward. ”I see that fight as the last of Lennox’s career.” The idea sounds ridiculous — a 1,8m, 87,5kg former middleweight against a 1,95m, 112kg super-heavyweight, but when you consider that Lewis may be 39 years old by then and Jones will have bulked up to over 90kg, it sounds feasible.
”Jones has the speed to cause problems,” says Steward. ”After conditioning, there is nothing more important than speed, so we would have to find a way of dealing with that.”
Lewis strongly believes there is a need for more black promoters and that boxers like himself are well-placed to take on this role. ”Once you retire, you always need to have something else to look at and I definitely want to change boxing.” Don King does not provide the appropriate promotional role model, he adds.
”I realised that in the boxing you’re going to be used and abused, but my thing was to keep the abuse down to a low level. That means not signing blank contracts, not being sucked into the game of, oh, here’s a suitcase of money, here’s a couple of cars, here’s some women. I ain’t sucked in like that.”
But while some combination of world travel and boxing promotion may be the future, defending his world title is the present. And so, a final word on the man who will do his best to take that title away from him.
”I really love fighting big guys because something gets in me and I want to go and beat them up, and I believe that’s what will happen with Vitali — I will stop him. I don’t think it will go the distance. I have definitely learnt my lesson from my experience in South Africa. What is important for me, is to come out on top.”