Lennox and I worked together on the celebrity version of The Apprentice in the United States last October and November. They had us doing all sorts of tasks like selling hot dogs and theatre tickets on the streets of New York and devising an advertising strategy for a pet adoption agency.
We spent a lot of time together - we were often working an 18-hour day - we clicked and became good mates. He is just a very cool dude, and charming with it. I had met him before but never really appreciated how smart and articulate he is. A lot of people think he's this lumbering boxer but he is in fact a very good chess player. I thought I was good - I was champion at my prep school two years running - but he just wiped the fl oor with me.
We must have played nearly 40 times, during which I think I only won once. I remember asking him if he really considered himself British. And he was emphatic about it. He is very proud of being born and bred here, it was just family circumstances that forced him to move to Canada when he was young. One of the reasons why we clicked on the show was that we saw ourselves as fl ying the fl ag for this country. What's also surprising is how famous he is, even more than me.
You can imagine how disconcerting it was when people were mobbing him and not me. New Yorkers were always coming up to him in the street and saying, 'How's it going, champ?' It was like walking around South Africa in the company of Nelson Mandela. He is revered in New York. I think that's because he beat up Tyson and Tyson was The Man, as far as most New Yorkers were concerned.
Understandably, Lennox takes a lot of pride in his boxing record. He only lost two fi ghts in his career and the important thing about those defeats is that on both occasions he went back and destroyed the guy who had beaten him. At the end of the day, he's beaten every fi ghter who's been put in front of him. I know he believes that as time goes on, more people will recognise just how good he was as a champion.