LAS VEGAS – Saturday night, David Tua ate something that didn’t agree with him.
Lennox Lewis’ jab.
Two hundred and thirteen of them, to be precise.
Now, Lewis would like to feed the same diet to Mike Tyson.
The only question is, will Tyson take his medicine like a man?
In the wake of Lewis’ so-easy-it-was-boring victory over Tua in defense of the heavyweight title the other night, there really is only one fight left for him to fight in order to cement his legacy in the history of the heavyweight division at the turn of the millennium.
Lewis has got to fight Tyson, and sooner rather than later.
And Tyson has got to fight Lewis, the sooner the better.
Of the recent crop of prominent heavyweights, Tyson’s is the only scalp missing from Lewis’ belt, with the exception of Riddick Bowe’s, who escaped a beating from Lewis only because Andrew Golota got to him first.
And Lewis is Tyson’s only hope of ever regaining the title he held from 1986 to 1990 and has been trying to get back ever since.
So what is holding it up?
The easy answer is, of course, television.
Lewis fights exclusively for Time Warner and HBO, Tyson only for Viacom/Showtime, and never the twain has met. Even immediately after the Lewis-Tua fight, Time Warner executives were digging in on their position that a Lewis-Tyson
fight could only happen on TVKO, Time Warner’s pay-per-view arm.
The hard answer, however, is the one fight fans may find a bit tougher to swallow.
Although Tyson has expressed a rabid desire to devour Lewis’ offspring (he has none) and a compulsion to bust a cap in his head (Lewis has a big one), the erstwhile Baddest Man on the Planet has yet to say he actually wants to fight Lennox Lewis in a boxing ring with gloves on.
“Until Mike Tyson and (advisor) Shelly Finkel step forward and say they are willing to fight Lennox Lewis, the whole issue is moot,” said Ross Greenburg, the new president of Time Warner Sports due to the defection of Seth Abraham to Madison Square Garden. “They really have not shown they want the fight.”
“Mike wants to fight Lennox,” said Finkel.
Next? “I didn’t say that. But soon.”
Logically, it would seem there is too much money in a Lewis-Tyson fight for it not to take place because of a squabble between cable TV networks.
According to Finkel, Lewis and Tyson would each be guaranteed more than the $30 million Evander Holyfield was paid for his 1997 rematch with Tyson, the highest fee ever paid to an athlete for a single performance, based on a projected PPV buy rate of 1.8 million homes.
Greenburg took a more conservative view, saying Lewis-Tyson would do in the neighborhood of 1 million buys, but compared to the expected 250,000 buys for Lewis-Tua, it would still be a pay-per-view bonanza.
“We haven’t crunched the numbers yet,” Greenburg said. “But there’s a lot of money in it for both fighters.”
Of course, the ease with which Lewis handled Tua, who fights in a style roughly similar to Tyson’s but less ferocious, could serve to hurt the appeal of Lewis-Tyson.
After all, if a 29-year-old Tua, near the peak of his skills, could not seriously threaten Lewis, how could Tyson, who at 34 is some 10 years past his best days?
“The public still wants to believe that Mike Tyson is in a time capsule locked into 1986 and still capable of exploding, still having a puncher’s chance,” Greenburg said.
Finkel said he spoke to Tyson after the Lewis-Tua fight, and Tyson expressed disgust with Tua’s effort, or lack thereof. “How can they pay a guy that much money for not fighting?,” Tyson asked, according to Finkel.
Tua tried to fight, but Lewis, harnessing his boxing skills and fighting with discipline and restraint for one of the few times in his career, simply would not let him. Lewis’ jab and 15-inch reach advantage thwarted Tua’s efforts to work inside, and his occasional sharp right leads, which swelled and eventually cut Tua’s left cheekbone, took all the aggressiveness out of the challenger.
Lewis’ main drawback, his extreme caution, was still evident, but it is easy to call upon a fighter to take more chances when it’s his health on the line, not yours.
“I knew he had a great left hook, and I’m glad he hit me with it early in the fight, so I knew I could withstand it,” Lewis said. “But I was not going to let him hit me with it again.”
Tyson’s recent performances have done nothing to indicate he would menace Lewis any more than Tua did. His KOs over Julius Francis and Lou Savarese were little more than the performance of a circus ape, and the sluggishness of his KO last month of Golota was overshadowed by Golota’s quitting on his stool and the subsequent reports of injuries he allegedly suffered in the bout.
But Tyson is faster than Tua and more volatile, at least in the early rounds of a fight, when he still believes he can win. And his punching power is at least equal to that of Tua, who shook Lewis with the first – and really only – solid hook he landed, in the first round.
After the Tua fight, Lewis read a crude poem he had written:
“If Tyson wants a test
I will put him to rest
Lennox Lewis is the best.”
“He claims he wants to eat my children and shoot me,” Lewis observed, “But he never says he wants to fight me.”
Perhaps Tyson knows that if he and Lewis ever do fight, he will be forced to get a taste of what used to be his medicine.
That would be a bitter pill for him to swallow, that and a couple of hundred jabs.