By: James Blears
After a comfortable year out of the ring and ballooning up to over 300 pounds Lennox Lewis’s inflated ego, has convinced him it might well be worth coming back aged 39 to try to beat Father Time, and take a terrible beating in the process.
A thinker and chess buff, rather than a all out slugger, Lewis who’s knockout losses to Oliver McCall and Hasim Rahaman abeit revenged, mean he’ll never be mentioned in the same awed tones as Ali, Marciano or Dempsey, has still made a pot of gold and easily enough to fuel a long happy, and financially secure retirement. So where’s his astute business savvy now, and why can’t he see than Mammon is clouding his judgement? He’s been on the sidelines, and indeed in the sidings too long!
Lewis says his desire to come back was stoked, when he watched Danny Williams against Vitali Klitschko, and saw ample opportunities which could have been exploited.
Yet in his 2003 defense, against Vitali, he was under prepared, overweight, plus huffing and puffing like Thomas the Tank Engine.
He did exploit Vitali’s face first aggression, by cracking in some precise shots which cut up the Ukrainian appallingly. And only just in the nick of time, because Klitschko was firing on all cylinders, while all the steam had gone out of Lewis. His advancing age was oozing out of every pore. He looked more like a trundling old milk train, than a freight train. In fact he was a train wreck waiting to happen.
Lewis says that the money he can earn would be as much as 39 million dollars. It’ll no doubt be the hardest cash he ever earns, and perhaps he’ll have to blind himself to the realities of what could so easily happen, before he shuffles back.
Sugar Ray Robinson died of Parkinson’s Disease after a marathon ring career, Ezzard Charles,after eating up Marciano’s thunderous firepower also died of the same illness. Muhammad Ali suffers from it, and Greg Page is wheel chair bound after suffering brain clots. All of them were great, or highly talented. None of them belonged in the ring beyond a certain point, but all soldiered on well beyond the time when they should have called it a day and enjoyed the fruits of their labor.
George Foreman did indeed win the heavyweight title at the age of 45. But he took such a cruel beating from Michael Moorer and although he brilliantly used his anvil fists to exploit a momentary lapse, he was so lucky to escape with his faculties intact.
Lewis was probably never going to be remembered as one of the truly greatest heavyweight champions of all time. If he’d stuck to his guns and made his retirement stick, he would have been remembered as one of the smartest. Now if he comes back, he’ll go down in history as one of the greediest and most foolish.