Boxing: Lennox Lewis vs. Mike Tyson, 14 Years Later

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It should have been one of the hottest attractions in boxing history, sought after by every metropolitan area with even the tiniest vestige of ring history, a large and well-appointed arena and scads of fight fans willing to travel to the host city to pay outrageously high prices for the privilege of seeing two of the most accomplished heavyweights of their era slug it out.

Instead, Lennox Lewis’ defense of his WBC, IBF and IBO championships against two-time former titlist Mike Tyson became an orphan of the storm, winding up in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 8, 2002. Las Vegas, Atlanta, Fort Worth, Texas, and any number of other American cities wanted no part of it because of Tyson’s checkered past (he was a convicted rapist, after all), his time-bomb persona or would-be promoters bowing to intense political pressure. The final faceoff came down to Memphis and Washington, D.C.; Memphis won out in no small part because it was relatively close to some Mississippi casinos that presumably were willing to front a sizable percentage of the enormous site fee required to make the finances work.

Memphis Mayor Willie W. Herenton, a former amateur boxer, envisioned visitors from throughout the nation and the world filling the city’s hotels and restaurants, taking in the sights and returning to their homes with such a favorable impression that they might consider return trips just for fun. There were reports, wildly exaggerated, that The Pyramid’s 19,185 tickets all were purchased within days of the time when they went on sale -- actual attendance was generously listed at 15,327 -- thus guaranteeing a record live gate of $23 million. The truth was not so giddily positive. The casinos in Tunica, Mississippi, weren’t exactly nearby; they were about 40 miles away, and they didn’t have the requisite numbers of high-rolling customers who might gladly drop big bucks at the tables for the privilege of seeing Lewis and Tyson whack each other, even if a tour of Elvis Presley’s digs came with the package.

With tickets priced from $250 to a jaw-dropping $2,400, even British fight fans who likely would have come in force to New York or Vegas opted to stay home and catch the action on television. “People are coming in,” Memphis cabdriver A. Lewis -- he smilingly pointed out he is not relation to Lennox Lewis -- told me a few days before the showdown. “It’s building little by little. By Saturday night, I’m hoping everything will bust loose.”

Well, he was right about that, at least in one respect. It was more a case of someone being busted up inside the ropes -- Lewis dominated a shopworn Tyson en route to knocking him out in the eighth round -- than a financial busting out in and around Beale Street. What had been hyped as a clash of the titans wound up being a garden-variety ass-kicking by a still-great fighter (Lewis) over someone whose best days were in his rearview mirror (Tyson) and whose future going forward would be filled with more professional disappointment and humiliation.

I arrived early during fight week in the blues- and barbecue-flavored city on the banks of the Mississippi River to take the temperature -- Fahrenheit-wise, it was in the 90s and muggy -- of the event that had brought me there, sample the local attractions and ascertain for myself whether the place that had given the music world B.B. King and Elvis was now gripped by boxing fever.

The mood of the average visitor, I found, was more in keeping with that of Switzerland’s Dietr Preiswerk, who, along with his wife and two children, was part of a crowd of several hundred that jammed the lobby of the stately Peabody Hotel. The Preiswerks were there to observe the march of the Peabody ducks, which spend their days swimming around in a fountain before waddling off on a red carpet to their penthouse suite. It’s a local tradition that dates back to the 1930s. Asked whether he’d rather see the fight or the ducks, Preiswerk considered the question for a moment and said, “The fight, probably, but the kids would rather see the ducks, I think.”

As a revenue-generator and sort of advertisement that tourists are always welcome, Lewis-Tyson wasn’t exactly a strikeout, in baseball terms, but neither was it the grand slam for which Mayor Herenton and Memphis’ business community had hoped. It probably was more of a slide-into-second double, a reason for the boxing world to take a quick peek at a place not normally associated with the sport before again turning its pugilistic attention to more familiar destinations.

If Tyson hadn’t spent three-plus years in an Indiana slammer on the rape conviction or lost twice to Evander Holyfield once he was freed, his representatives might have come to the negotiating table for the Lewis bout with a bit more leverage. Then again, if he hadn’t been incarcerated or had beaten Holyfield at least once, Memphis likely would have had as much chance to land Lewis-Tyson as anti-gambling crusaders would have had of leading a successful referendum to have all the casinos in Nevada shut down.

Although Tyson was widely -- and correctly -- viewed as a shell of his former dominating self, he was still in the eyes of many -- also correctly -- the kind of loose cannon still capable of doing something utterly unpredictable and tinged with a certain entertainment value. Who knows? Were he to connect with just the right shot at just the right moment, the rusted “Iron Mike” might even do unto the favored Lewis what two previous opponents, Oliver McCall and Hasim Rahman, had done, which was to knock the big Briton cross-eyed with huge right hands to the jaw.

At a New York City press conference on Jan. 22 to announce the matchup, a frothing-mad and seemingly unhinged Tyson had revisited the Holyfield rematch debacle when he lunged at Lewis on the stage and gnawed a quarter-sized chunk out of the champion’s left thigh. If nothing else, Tyson had served notice that his teeth were as dangerous as ever.

“I said I bit Lennox because that is what everyone wanted to hear,” Tyson said later. “I will say anything to get under his skin, but on June 8, flesh will not be enough. I will take Lennox’s title, his soul and smear his pompous brains all over the ring when I hit him.”

Had the fight landed in Philadelphia, it’s a pretty safe bet that visiting sports writers would have been regaling their readers with every tired putdown they’d ever heard about Philly boo birds and Santa Claus being pelted with snowballs at an Eagles game. With Memphis getting the gig, the blue-suede shoe was on the other foot, so Geoff Calkins, a columnist for the Commercial Appeal, was obliged to suffer all the stale, old Elvis Presley jokes. The late “King of Rock and Roll” had left the building only to be replaced by the ear-chewing Tyson? Maybe they should call the event Dis-Graceland. Drum roll, please.

“Welcome, boxing fans!” the unamused Calkins wrote in his paper’s Monday editions. “Now shut up with the Elvis jokes, won’t you? Really. We’ve heard them all before.”

Yes, why pick on Elvis, who left his mortal coil on Aug. 16, 1977, when Memphians had Tyson to kick around for another few days? Boy, talk about your easy targets.

The pay-per-view fight was at The Pyramid, which obviously was the venue where Tyson should have fought Michael Spinks. While Iron Bite offered a comedic alternative to all that Elvis material, any travelogue of Memphis had to begin with Graceland, the mansion where Presley ate trayfuls of his favorite fried banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches, shot out the screens of televisions if he didn’t like what was on and couldn’t find the remote and did some really dubious interior decorating. Would Elvis have been interested in taking in Lewis-Tyson?

“I think he probably would have been,” said Todd Morgan, a member of Graceland’s public-relations staff when I posed the question to him. “Elvis was a boxing fan. Muhammad Ali gave him some autographed boxing gloves, and Elvis had his costume designer design a robe for Ali.”

As I wrote for my paper, the Philadelphia Daily News, Lewis-Tyson probably was Memphis’ only shot at hosting a major fight because boxing buffs are creatures of habit and Vegas has the Strip, Atlantic City the Boardwalk and New York is, well, New York. Memphis, meanwhile, has … well, quite a lot, actually. Besides Graceland -- which welcomes 600,000 pilgrims a year, most of whom are so awestruck you’d think they were looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel -- there is Beale Street with its blues clubs, the Peabody with its ducks, the National Civil Rights Museum at the former Lorraine Motel, where in 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. laid down his life upon the altar of equality. The Bluff Walk, at the edge of downtown, affords tremendous view of the Mississippi. There are worse places to have to spend a few days.

The fight, to no one’s surprise other than the staunchest Tyson diehards, was a bit of a going-away party for both principals, each in his own way. After beating Tyson to a frightful pulp, the payoff punch from Lewis came on an overhand right that sent the bloodied challenger flying onto his back, where he was counted out by referee Eddie Cotton. Lewis would fight just once more: He won a sixth-round TKO on June 21, 2003, when it was determined that challenger Vitali Klitschko, who was ahead on all three scorecards, was too badly cut around the eyes to continue. Perhaps reading the writing on the wall, “The Lion” retired at 37 and resisted all offers to make a comeback. His net worth has been estimated at $50 million.

Tyson’s skid, alas, would continue. After rebounding from the beatdown by Lewis with a first-round knockout of Clifford Etienne, he was stopped in back-to-back bouts against Danny Williams and Kevin “The Clones Colossus” McBride, neither of whom would have made it out of the third round against the snarling beast that Tyson had been in his abbreviated prime. It later was revealed that he had not only gone through the $300 million he had earned in boxing but somehow wound up $60 million in debt.

Memphis also has undergone its share of changes. It did host another kind-of major fight, on June 17, 2006, in which WBC and WBA middleweight champion Jermain Taylor, an Arkansas native who considered Memphis something of a home away from home, retained those titles on a controversial draw with Winky Wright at the FedEx Forum, which opened in 2004 and is the home arena for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies and University of Memphis basketball. Despite being just 13 years old, The Pyramid has not been used as a sports or entertainment venue since 2004; it is now a Bass Pro Shops “megastore,” in a complex that also includes a hotel, restaurants, a bowling alley and an archery range.

Although the blues clubs still swing and Beale Street’s barbecue joints remain amazingly treacherous to dieters, B.B. King, who was 89 when he passed away on May 14, 2015, has joined Elvis on the other side of the celestial divide. Memphis’ biggest sports star in the past few years has been 6-foot-7 quarterback Paxton Lynch, for whom the defending Super Bowl champion Denver Broncos traded up to select with the 26th pick in the recent NFL draft; and, yes, Lynch, 22, still is being claimed as a Memphian by the city’s populace even though he was born in Texas and played his high school ball in Florida.

Don’t know if I’ll ever get back that way, but it was a pretty interesting scene when I was there 14 years ago. The sight of the floor-to-ceiling blue-shag carpeting in Elvis’ Jungle Room has remained imprinted in my memory, as has the sticky-fingered ecstasy of chowing down on a rack of BBQ ribs the likes of which you can’t really find in Philadelphia.

For any tourists planning to check out Memphis, just tell them Lennox or Iron Mike sent you.

Bernard Fernandez, a five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, received the Nat Fleischer Award from the BWAA in April 1999 for lifetime achievement and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame in 2005, as well as the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013. The New Orleans-born sports writer has worked in the industry since 1969 and pens a weekly column on the Sweet Science for Sherdog.com.