Month: June 2002

After a week of being denied the opportunity, Memphis finally got to see reclusive heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis spar.

Unfortunately, the workout was the main event at The Pyramid, the overmatched sparring partner was challenger Mike Tyson, and the ticket prices ranged from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand to see the bloodied Tyson go down flat on his back in the eighth round.

Still, nobody seemed to mind. Not the 15,000 fans, thousands of whom showed up less than hour before the fight and cleared out minutes after it was over and, in between, roared their approval even when it was clear after the third round that Lewis was going to win.

Not The Pyramid’s general manager Alan Freeman, who said the gross would be $16.5 million instead of the predicted $23 million, but still a record pay day. “I’m happy,” he beamed, sitting alone above the crowd waiting for Lewis to hold his news conference after midnight.

And certainly not Mayor Willie Herenton, who was mainly responsible for the fight being in Memphis in the first place. “Our pride was in this,” Herenton said after the fight. “Memphis should be a major fight venue. We pulled off a major sports event in a relatively short period of time. If they have a rematch, we deserve an opportunity to host it in Memphis.”

Contrary to some reports, Memphis did not embrace the fight wholeheartedly. Its banks wouldn’t put up the letters of credit for the site fee, which came from rural Dyersburg instead. Corporate leaders did not stand shoulder to shoulder with promoters, as they did in the NBA drive. There were plenty of skeptics in the local media until the saturation coverage began the week before the fight. Tunica casinos provided both impetus and lodging, and Nashville contributed promoter Brian Young. (As they waited for the Lewis press conference to begin, Young and his helpers were gathering up the ring pads and stools as souvenirs of the nice pay day they had earned.)

Herenton and state Rep. Joe Towns were the politicians who stuck their necks out to get the fight and make it a success. Herenton looked like he was still working all night long. Before the fight, he strolled the concourse with a cell phone to his ear and a serious expression on his face. No tuxedo or preening in the television lights on a night when the reputation of Memphis was at stake and America is at war with terrorism. When it was over, he was still working The Pyramid like a civil servant right until he sat down next to Lewis at the press conference.

They were a pair of cool customers. Lewis, who worked out at the Racquet Club, looked more like a man who had finished a couple of vigorous sets of doubles than a guy who had gone eight rounds with Iron Mike. He speaks elegantly enough to host Masterpiece Theater if he gets tired of the fight game. Alluding to the only bit of controversy in the fight — the one-point penalty he was assessed by the referee — he shrugged and explained, “It didn’t seem like the right thing to argue with the referee.”

Doing the right thing was the order of the night. There were no incidents of violence in the crowd. Tyson fought bravely, if ineffectively, even after the seventh round when he told his trainer, “I’m done.” In defeat, he was sweet to both the champ and his mother. Lewis was gracious in victory. And with a successful week at the center of the world’s media stage, Memphis had clearly done the right thing, too.

As he waited for Lewis to arrive, the mayor confided that he had won a $10 bet with one of his security people by picking Lewis. But he had, in fact, risked and won a lot more than that.

During the long intermission Saturday night between the second of two featherweight matches that immediately preceded the spectacle that everyone awaited — Lewis vs. Tyson to settle old scores and the question of world heavyweght supremacy — the crowd in The Pyramid turned to star-watching.

Cameras located the celebrities who milled about on the floor and in the aisles. There was Samuel L. Jackson, there Kevin Bacon, over here Denzel. My man! And, hey, Michael Spinks, a champ from the distant past, and Evander Holyfield, one from the recent past. But finally one of the celebrities made a round of ringside and yelled something which everybody nearby heard. And which everybody everywhere would surely have agreed with.

“Let’s get this [maternal-lover] on!” said Cuba Gooding, and a cheer went up to second him. That was as nothing compared to the next cheer, only minutes later as a phalanx of yellow-shirted security personnel flooded the ring — a clear indication that the arrival of the fighters was imminent.

And suddenly there was Iron Mike on the overhead Jumbotron, wearing a scanty white dashinki-like cover and on his way. A ripple of boos started, then a prolonged chorus of cheers, duplicating the sequence that had flooded the arena when Tyson had first been shown arriving two hours earlier during an intermission on the undercard.

Tyson had paused to lay a kiss on one of the network girls during that first passage, and, though she had blanched at first she finally smiled with a kind of blushing satisfaction. The crowd had applauded and cheered lustily.

It had seemed to be a Tyson crowd, then, with the audience still filling the seats. The response to Lewis’ arrival had been tepid by comparison. As State Representative Joe Towns, one of the first Memphians to have lobbied hard for the fight back in January when it was chased out of Nevada, had said from the box where he overlooked the arena, “I’m with Mike. He’s bad! And he’s American!”

Things had somehow gotten balanced out, though, as fight-time approached and the fighters entered the ring. Each received his share of encouragement. From the point of view of crowd sympathy, the fighters would be on their own — a turn away from that early sense that it was a Tyson crowd.

The security people stayed in the ring, even as Michael Buffer announced the bout, his traditional “ready to rumble” flourish seeming overblown and superfluous given an energy of anticipation that needed no artificial boosting.

Good vs Evil, wasn’t that the intended scenario?

So when the fight got on and Tyson made is customary first-round rush, and referee Eddie Cotton had to keep cautioning Lewis about clenching, it looked like a Golden Oldie was under way — maybe a standard Mike Tyson bash session, a victory by attrition or annihilation, like those of his heyday ten and fifteen years ago, before some unexpected losses, a rape conviction, and various other scrapes with the adversity had tarnished Tyson’s edge.

But then a strange pattern began to develop. Cotton had to keep reprimanding Lewis — for clenching again, for holding, and finally, once he had clearly begun to get on even terms with Tyson, for pushing — an offense which cost the champion a point after Tyson was shoved all the way down to the canvas in the fourth round. In a strange way, the roles had been reversed. Tyson, flat on his back and looking forlorn, looked like a fighter down on his luck, shove or no shove. Lewis , the bigger man, took on the look of a bully. But, perversely enough, he started getting the crowd on his side — not just the British/Canadian contingent that had hollered itself hoarse for him earlier, but all of it. Lew-is! Lew-is! resounded through the arena. The gentleman dandy had metamorphosized into the bad boy — and the clear crowd favorite, too.

As the fight wore on, Tyson clearly was being beaten. Punch after punch from Lewis sprayed the ring with perspiration from Tyson’s head. He was cut over both eyes and couldn’t land a single good punch in return, much less a combination. The outcome began to look as painful and inevitable as that of a suddenly and visibly old Ali trying to hold on vs. Larry Holmes in 1980.

Lewis used Tyson’s increasingly stationary head as a speed bag for his jab and then, for uppercuts and right crosses, as a heavy bag. When Tyson went down — hard — in the 8th round it was a formality. He was a spent case long before. So was his era.

The strangest aspect of the denouement was the post-fight joint TV interview in the ring involving both a revived Tyson and a victorious and remarkably relaxed Lewis. Tyson, who had done more than his share of trash-talking before the bout, was suddenly the model of contrition, a veritable Boy Scout. He professed his regard for Lewis (“He knows I love both him and his mother”), said that all his bad-mouthing had only been to hype the fight, and suggested, almost plaintively, that he’d like a rematch.

One reputedly is called for in the contract, but it may not be in the cards. Tyson had not only lost the fight, overwhelmingly, winning only the first round of the seven completed ones, but he seemed to have lost forever the killer image that had fascinated us for so long.

That little-boy voice that always before sounded so ironically menacing now just sounded like a little boy’s. On his best behavior. An Eddie Haskell trying to Be Good. But what was the point? This was nothing that P’s and Q’s could alter. As the English say, The King is dead. Long live the King!

A little later, Lewis, flanked by manager Emmanuel Steward and Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, met the press and sounded some gracious notes toward both his fallen foe and the city of Memphis, where he indicated he might fight again if he didn’t retire first.

And still later, some more comments from Tyson were distributed to the media pack by a pool reporter. The once-upon-a-time champ and fright figure explained the mutual-politeness pact between himself and Lewis by comparing it to the pigeons he once kept. They would scrap ferociously until they were fed, he said. Then they became placid and still.

The implication was that there was nothing left to fight over. The metaphor carried over to the ring, where the issue had been joined and resolved, and the eight-figure purses enjoyed by both fighters had surely sated their appetites — at least for a while.

As for that putative rematch, the other pigeons, the ones who paid the huge ticket prices Saturday night — well, they’d been fed, too. And probably wouldn’t bite so readily again.

Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson got weighed in separately Thursday for their Saturday night title fight here, as they have done everything separately so far, and that suits the two fighters’ camps and all the other interested parties just fine.

The first time heavyweight boxing champion Lewis and ex-champ Tyson will actually encounter each other in this week of their long-awaited showdown, will be at approximately 10:15 p.m., Central Standard Time, Saturday night — when they start flailing away in earnest and one of them first feels the, er, bite of the other’s leather.

They’ won’t even do the ceremonial pre-fight touching of gloves, and they will have already received their instructions from the referee separately — each fighter in his own dressing room at The Pyramid, the ten-year-old facility which is doomed to be replaced as the prime local sports arena by the new one about to be created expressly for the city’s newly acquired NBA Grizzlies.

No one responsible for this second-chance Bout of the Century (alternately — depending on which flack or writer is doing the describing – “of the Millennium”) is taking his chances in this second-chance venue — not after the riot that broke out in January at the New York press conference that was supposed to be announcing the fight in one of the familiar Las Vegas watering holes.

On the heels of that debacle, in which the two fighters and their handlers became involved in a brawl and Tyson allegedly sank his infamously errant teeth into Lewis’ leg, Nevada canceled out of the fight, and the other two major boxing states, New York and California, refused to license it.

Memphis, which, as HBO analyst Larry Merchant sees it, went after the fight “the way it would go after a new automobile plant,” won out for the rights when even the District of Columbia, where pro-Tyson sentiment is strong, could not or would not put the right deal together.

Merchant stood back shaking his head after Tyson’s 3 o’clock weigh-in, which the former champ, whom Merchant sees as a “psycopath,” had played to the crowd, flexing his muscles and generating by his mere presence the kind of whoops from the attendees that Lewis, whose weigh-in three hours earlier had been a brief and quiet affair by contrast, could never have hoped to generate.

“Boxing will lose if Tyson wins,” pronounced Merchant, whose HBO network is collaborating with Showtime in producing the pay-per-view version of the fight. “He’s convincing people that you don’t have the obey the rules, that boxing has no rules. And it does!”

As Merchant expounded on that theme (a somewhat self-serving one in that Lewis is contractually bound to HBO, just as Tyson has been to arch-rival Showtime), he referenced as cases in point such boxing misadventures as the notorious ear-biting incident in Tyson’s second loss to Evander Holyfield, and his evident attempts to break the arm of another opponent, South African heavyweight Frans Botha, as well as the disturbance caused in the hosting Vegas casino by Tyson backers after the earbite fight with Holyfield.

All of that is on the record, and a scenario of Good vs. Evil, with the dull-normal Lewis playing the good guy and a maniacally grinning Tyson portraying the villain, is just as clearly a part of the buildup to this fight as it is in most World Wrestling Federation ventures.

Yet there is another sense to the notion that Tyson is breaking the rules. Outside the Convention Center where the weigh-ins were taking place Wednesday were Lesbian activists holding signs which read, “THANKS MIKE FOR SAYING BEING GAY IS OK.” This was in the wake of Iron Mike’s leaving the Cordova gym where he works out the other day and making a point of embracing gay demonstrator Jim Maynard, whose sign had been protesting what he then presumed to be Tyson’s homophobia. In random remarks caught by reporters or TV crews Tyson has been at some pains to sound agreeable and professing himself more at peace with himself than ever before – though many of the monologue snatches captured on videotape have still needed to be bleeped a little before being played on the local air.

There were no few defenders of Tyson among the journalists inside the Convention Center – people ike Tony Datcher of BOSS Magazine , an inner-city magazine published in Washington, D.C. Datcher, who had been among those cheering the challenger, defended Tyson as “the people’s champ, who comes from the grass roots. The streets. You know? He’s no worse than Elvis, who got his cousin pregnant and married her at 14. He’s not perfect.” That this account scrambled the histories of two local music avatars, Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, didn’t matter so much as the proletarian sympathies it bespoke.

For better or for worse, the two fighters were certainly leaving different imprints on the event and on the consciousness of those checking it out.. Both fighters are domiciling in Memphis and working out here, as well. But each has allowed a different establishment in the nearby casino town of Tunica, Mississippi, to claim itself as the fighter’s “official” headquarters. In practice, this has meant that each of the two pugilists held a press conference-cum-workout this week at the place in question.

Tyson’s Tunica media op, – at Fitzgerald’s on Tuesday – eschewed elegance and featured a savagely brief speed-bag session involving Tyson, followed by profanity-laced tirades directed at Lewis and his posterity by Iron Mike’s handlers – one of whom, unofficially, was “Panama” Lewis, banned from the sport for life for doctoring one of his pugilist’s gloves so as to permanently maim an opponent.

By contrast, the fastidious Lewis, who upon his arrival in Memphis last week was the subject of a motorcade parade through Beale Street and proclaimed aloud (despite later confessed misgivings about the humidity) “I Love Memphis,” spoke to reporters at length at his media-op at Sam’s Town, across the lot from Fitzgerald’s, then played ten minutes of chess with a local high school student before gallantly conceding. He finished by climbing into a ring and going through an extended workout routine, showing off his fast combinations and hip-hop footwork to an amplified reggae soundtrack. At one point, trainer Emmanuel Steward seemed to tip a bit of his fight plan when he affected a head-on bobbing and weaving style like Tyson and kept coaxing an obliging Lewis to attack his ribs.

Whatever its dimensions as a morality play, the Big Fight represents the potential coming of age for Memphis. The city is on something of a roll, sportswise, having not only having coaxed the Grizzlies away from Vancouver last season but attracted as team president and brand-new resident the NBA legend Jerry West, ex-of the LA Lakers as player and official.

Larry Merchant probably has it right. Tyson-Lewis may have been unacceptable to most places on the established landscape of professional boxing, but it is pure opportunity for an up-by-the-bootstraps place like our own. At the head of the effort to land the fight was Memphis’ African-American mayor of the last decade, Willie Herenton, a polished former schools superintendent who went after the fight once it got chased out of Vegas (abetted by such durable local figures as pol Joe Cooper, who kept on being an unofficial spokesman for efforts even after seasoned promoters had cut him out of the action).

His Honor will no doubt find in the consummation of his efforts Saturday night personal as well as civic satisfaction. At 6′ 5″, which would put him eye-to-eye with Lewis, the lanky 60-year-old Herenton is a former amateur boxing champion who has always believed he got sidetracked from his real destiny – which was to be a pro champion himself, a headliner..

“I never got beat once I got my growth,” says Herenton. He’s got two champions on his hands right now, and one of them, depending on how things get resolved Saturday night, may end up a champion for the ages. The loser may be compelled — WWF-style — to slink out of town. And out of boxing. A lot of people will be watching, both at home, via pay-per-view and in The Pyramid – at ticket prices which, to start with, ranged from $500 to $2400 but have been dropping at the street level as advance scalpers got stuck with too much inventory.

Meanwhile, the world won’t come to an end no matter what happens — not even the boxing world. As even Larry Merchant reluctantly concedes, “A big fight is good for boxing. Even if it’s boring.” Nobody imagines that this one will be.

One of the host of boxing characters who have descended on Memphis in this last week is a man named Steve Fitch, a.k.a. “The Motivator,” a member of Tyson’s entourage who seems to play the same exhortatory role with Iron Mike that Drew “Bundini”Brown used to with Muhammad Ali. All week the Motivator has been going around doing general trash talk and loudly counting down the days to the fight.

“Four days and a wake-up call,” he said on Tuesday, and he’s kept up the refrain all week, dropping the number a notch on each succeeding day. After Tyson’s weigh-in Thursday, which was two days and some-odd hours away from the promised wake-up call, he discovered HBO’s Merchant holding forth about the ill fate awaiting the boxing world if his man, Iron Mike, should win.

“Remember that man right there when you become champ of the world,” Fitch said to his two-year-old Malik, whom he’s been hoisting about on his shoulder, sometimes prompting him, parrot-like, to repeat the “wake-up call” line. “As long as you’re a winner, he likes you,” said the Motivator to his child… “But when you lose he don’t like you no more. Remember that guy right there.”

Merchant shook his head. “When you lose I’m going to say you lost. I’m not going to say you won.”

Then the Motivator began to dip back into some incident from their shared past.when, as he reminded Merchant, he was in the camp of another boxer, Lonnie Smith. “Remember it was dark one night in Santa Monica. It was a long time agoÉ.”

Whatever this was about, Merchant interrupted it with a quick, dismissive “All right” and waved Fitch off.

“See you fight night,” said the Motivator, evenly, and he and Malik took their leave.

They like Mike.