The public have always been gagging to see him fight real fights I’m not knocking Lennox just talking reality

The public have always been gagging to see him fight real fights I’m not knocking Lennox, just talking reality. There was a time when we first brought him to London that I genuinely believed he could be a great figure in this country, but since he beat Evander Holyfield for the undisputed title nearly three years ago that chance has been missed. Since he won back his titles in November, he hasn’t set foot in Britain. It means that while Tyson is America’s anti-hero, Lewis is virtually stateless.”It is a point which accentuates the sense of a huge event that has none of the usual compulsions which surround a great fight.There is no real edge of antipathy – Tyson once spoke of eating Lewis’s unborn children, but the father of the intended victims merely shook his head at the tackiness of the hype – no aspect of boxing history to be defined, no serious points to be made. It is just that Lewis and Tyson are the last survivors of a boxing generation which could have been great, which had the potential to swell with a series of classic fights, but instead chose to milk a credulous public with one mis-match upon another.So Tyson-Lewis is a bizarre, historical after-thought. It is nearly 20 years since they fought in a gym above the fire station in the town of Catskill, New York, two teenagers whose handlers believed they had fighters who could join the pantheon of great champions.Lewis’s first trainer, Arnold Boehm, recalls a week of sparring which some critics might say probably even now serves as a useful guide to the course of the superannuated fight which comes in April.Boehm reports: “So the guys get ready We lace the gloves up on them They’re joking and the best of pals. Cus [Tyson's fabled mentor D'Amato] rings the bell and Tyson comes tearing across the ring like a raging tiger.

He caught Lennox completely by surprise and put a number on him So Lennox’s nose is bleeding. He had a bad cold, so at the end of the round I said: ‘We don’t have to spar today, you know,’ but Lennox said he didn’t want to run away. That first day it was all Mike, but by the end of the week it was very even indeed. I thought right then: ‘One day these guys are going to fight for the world title’.”Five or six years ago the prospect would have been pugilistically sumptuous, Tyson reproducing that youthful charge, Lewis, jabbing and working his way into the fight, seeking leverage for his big right hand. Now even Lewis is sceptical about the bout carrying any even historical significance. “I do recognise the fight is the biggest one out there for me, and I do want it – but I don’t really think anyone is going to change their opinion of me particularly if I beat him Obviously the real Tyson was a different matter. He was something I worked for as a young pro, he was big challenge at the end of the road, but, of course, he didn’t happen.

A lot of things didn’t happen.”Most devastatingly, and possibly most injurious to the good name of the heavyweight division, a fight with the world champion Riddick Bowe, beaten by Lewis for the gold medal in the Seoul Olympics of 1988, didn’t happen “That really hurt me,” Lewis said. “I couldn’t understand why a world champion would sooner throw into a rubbish bin the world title belt once worn by Muhammad Ali than fight a legitimate challenger.”After he beat Holyfield – in a great fight – I went to his press conference expecting him to talk about our fight I was his one real contender. I had beaten Razor Ruddock, and I’d beaten him in the Olympics. It was a real fight, a fight no one could seriously question, but he just ran away. A lot of what happened after that was dictated by that.”That, and Tyson’s slide into prison and recidivism, helped to shape the Lost Generation of heavyweight boxing Bowe’s reputation as a fighter, and a man, is shot through. He fought superbly against Holyfield, then wasted himself in self-indulgence. Holyfield fights on, a shell of the great fighter he once was.