A 16x20 photograph from the defining fight
for undisputed heavyweight World Champion Lennox Lewis. Comes with
a photo of Lennox Lewis signing and our certificate of authenticity.
Lennox Lewis £99.00
Undisputed Heavyweight boxing champion. Born in London,
but spent most of his childhood in Canada. Took up boxing
at 12, became World Junior Champion at 17. Represented Canada
at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles where he lost to future
Olympic champion, Tyrell Biggs, but became a national hero
in Canada.
Over the course of one week in April 1984, two future heavyweight champions went at each other in a series of amateur sparring sessions in Catskill, N.Y., that were tempered by a friendly relationship outside the ring.
Eighteen years later that fleeting friendship is gone, replaced by sound bites of Mike Tyson threatening to kill Lennox Lewis, vivid images of their Jan. 22 news conference brawl — and doubts their heavyweight title bout in Memphis will really take place Saturday.
Lewis was 18 and Tyson 17 when they first met half a life ago, but Lewis remembers.
"He gave me a fat lip, and I gave him a bloody mouth," Lewis says of their sparring as he sits on the ring apron at his Pocono Mountains training camp, only an hour or so drive from where those sessions played out. "One time he smiled at me and there was pure blood in his mouth."
Lewis had won the 1983 junior world championships a few months earlier in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and would go on to further amateur glory.
Representing Canada, after moving from England at 11, Lewis boxed in two Olympics and won a gold medal in 1988 before launching a pro career and winning the heavyweight crown three times.
Tyson, also a promising amateur, was training in 1984 under the guidance of mentor Cus D'Amato in the Catskill Mountains. A little more than two years later Tyson would be crowned the youngest heavyweight champion in history after demolishing Trevor Berbick in two rounds.
Tyson was supposed to represent the USA in Santo Domingo in 1983. But with the country in the midst of occupying nearby Grenada, combined with D'Amato's fear of flying, Tyson stayed home.
Still, D'Amato wondered how Tyson would have fared against Lewis and invited him and Arnie Boehm, his amateur coach, to the Catskills so the young fighters could spar.
Lewis and Boehm flew from Ontario to Albany, N.Y., where D'Amato, then-assistant trainer Kevin Rooney and Tyson picked them up for the drive back to Catskill.
The story goes that the 5-11 Tyson took the back seat, but only because the 6-4 Lewis was taller and needed the legroom.
Although they got along well, Lewis got a glimpse of Tyson's rage in the opening moments of their first sparring session, when Tyson gave him a bloody nose.
"The bell rang and all of a sudden, Tyson just turned into an animal," Boehm told the paper.
"Mike came charging across the ring like a raging tiger, like a man possessed."
When that first session was over, Lewis and Tyson were back hanging out together.
But as they boxed more rounds, Lewis began to assert himself.
And, as Boehm recalled, "By the end of the fourth or fifth session, Lennox was taunting Mike. Lennox was laughing at him, playing with him.
"Mike said, 'Come on, come on, hit me you son of a bitch.' And Cus said, 'That's enough, Mike,' and it stopped right there."
Rooney, who still lives in Catskill, has a more hazy recollection of that week but he does remember the sessions at the Catskill Boxing Club, above the local police station.
"Mike more than held his own with Lennox," Rooney says.
"Mike did good with him, and Lewis didn't dominate. We brought him up because we were having a hard time getting sparring for Mike and we'd heard about Lewis."
When his visit to the Catskills was over, Lewis says that D'Amato told him that he and Tyson were "destined" to fight each other as pros.
"At that time, Cus D'Amato actually said we would meet one day — and it's coming true," Lewis says of the trainer who died in 1985 at 77.
"It's unbelievable that he could have that kind of foresight."
Says Rooney: "I can see Cus saying that in a serious manner. Cus could visualize things like that."
LEWIS VS TYSON - THE FIGHT
Lennox Lewis showed the bully who was boss.
Using a masterful left jab and landing his right hand at will, Lewis battered a befuddled Mike Tyson before stopping him with a crashing right hand in the eighth round to keep his heavyweight titles Saturday night.
Tyson was bleeding from cuts over both his eyes and from his nose when Lewis landed a punch that sent him sprawling on his back in Lewis' corner. Tyson tried to stand up at the count of eight, getting to one knee, but he was counted out by referee Eddie Cotton at 2:25 of the round.
"Some of the punches he took, I was shocked," Lewis said. "I felt them right through to my hand."
It was a sudden end to a dominating performance by Lewis, who overwhelmed the former champion from the opening bell at the Pyramid Arena.
"There's no way I could ever beat him," Tyson said. "He's just too big and too strong."
Lewis, the IBF and WBC champion, had vowed to beat Tyson to restore order to the heavyweight division. He pounded him with jabs from the first round on, keeping Tyson away and out of range. When Tyson did get close, Lewis hit him with a right uppercut or an overhand right.
"I wanted to prove I was the best fighter in the world," Lewis said. "Nobody gets away from my jab."
Tyson certainly didn't. He was exposed as a fighter with limited skills who kept trying to throw punches at the champion but connected only occasionally. Tyson kept trying to rush in and land a big punch, but he never hurt Lewis with any of them.
The sight of Tyson being so thoroughly dominated was almost as shocking as his behavior afterwards, when he tenderly wiped the blood off of Lewis' cheek as the two answered questions.
"He's a magnificent, a prolific fighter, and he should continue fighting," Tyson said. "I love him and respect him too much to do something to him."
Early in the eighth round, Tyson was already bleeding when Lewis hit him with a series of punches that buckled his legs and nearly put him down. Cotton ruled it a knockdown and gave Tyson an 8-count.
When the fight resumed, Lewis went after Tyson again, throwing right hands and jabs before finally connecting with a huge right hand that crashed into the side of Tyson's face, sending him sprawling on his back.
"He was ducking to my right, and I just wanted to catch him as he was doing that," Lewis said. "I caught him and he went down."
Tyson had gone into the ring an underdog for the first time in his career, and it was quickly apparent why.
He had said he would "crush Lewis" skull, but Lewis made him look like an amateur, dominating inside and out with his jab and big right hands.
Punch Stats showed Lewis threw 328 punches and landed 193 of them, while Tyson threw 211 and landed only 49.
Officials had worried so much about Tyson fouling Lewis that there was a contract clause that a fighter who committed a vicious foul had to pay the other $3 million if the fight ended because of it.
Once the fight started, though, it was Lewis who was warned by Cotton for elbowing, pushing and holding. Cotton took a point away from Lewis in the fourth round for holding.
The three ringside judges gave Tyson only the first round, while The Associated Press had Lewis winning every round.
Lewis, who said he needed to beat Tyson to cement his legacy as a great heavyweight, not only did just that, but looked very impressive in the process.
At 6-foot-5, 249 1/4 pounds, he was bigger, faster and stronger than the 5-11 Tyson, who weighed 234 1/2.
"Mike Tyson was not ready for this kind of fight," Lewis' trainer Emanuel Steward said. "I was disappointed, but I was also relieved. It went pretty much exactly the way we wanted it to. The main thing was to make Mike Tyson fight Lennox's kind of fight and once we did that we knew it was going to be over."
Lewis said he never worried about Tyson biting him or committing a foul to change the outcome of the fight.
"I thought Mike Tyson was going to behave himself. There was too many people watching. I wasn't going to give him any reason to bite me," he said.
Lewis, criticized in other fights for being too cautious in the ring, wasn't against Tyson, who was disqualified for biting Evander Holyfield on both ears in a 1997 title fight. Lewis pushed Tyson around, didn't let him get inside and generally acted like the bully himself.
Still, Steward kept telling Lewis between rounds to finish off Tyson.
"Emanuel was pleading with me to take him
out," Lewis said. "Emanuel told me to take him out earlier.
I was just waiting for the time."
Watch the Lennox Lewis vs Mike Tyson Boxing
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