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Former world heavyweight champion and one of the all-time great big men, Lennox Lewis is one of the lucky ones.
Post-boxing, there have been few public struggles, no tabloid stings, no roller coaster of trauma and Lewis – a 2009 International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee – banked fortune.
The 59-year-old left boxing on his own terms. He’d defeated Vitali Klitschko on a vicious cut in an excellent fight, declined the rematch and – unlike many previous great heavyweight champions – never looked back.
But he can sympathise with those who walk away from boxing and find it hard to keep walking. Lewis also believes he has learned why that is the case.
“Yeah, actually I have,” Lennox said. “There’s a couple of reasons why, a couple of things they struggle with, people coming up to them and saying, ‘Hey, when’s your next fight.’ Even for me. Even now. People are saying, ‘When are you going to fight again?’ And I say, ‘Dude, I’ve been retired for 20 years.’ That’s one thing they struggle with. Because you walk around and you’re known as a boxer and anywhere you go people are gonna say, ‘When’s your next fight?’
“Or even when it comes down to trainers, trainers are gonna say, ‘You’ve got another one, you should go after this guy,’ encourage you to fight and stay in the ring. Also, I’ve looked at the old-time fighters, when they used to fight, they used to fight because of money. They needed money. Nowadays fighters don’t need money like that because they’ve made so much. So now they’ve got to look at who they fight, what are they fighting for, is there a health issue, what’s the problem? Why should I fight any more? And usually the reason is money.”
Many have also conceded that, no matter what they try, they have been unable to replace the euphoric drug of the ringwalk and the feeling of having their hand raised.
“How I replaced the buzz of fight night, [was by] becoming a commentator,” Lewis smiled. “Because HBO made me a commentator and I don’t know if they were trying to get me back into the ring by being close to the fighting time and putting that in my blood. It never worked, but it was a good try.”
But Lennox’s life has not been without obstacles and it has been almost a year since his beloved mother, Violet Blake, passed away. Lennox’s mum was a constant presence by his side throughout his career, beaming with pride, but on November 30 she died aged 85 with Lewis posting on social media he was feeling: “an indescribable type of hurt that has me reeling, yet also has me comforted to know she is in a better place with no more suffering.”
“I’m doing good. I’m in a good place,” he said when asked how he was feeling about her loss. Regal and dignified as ever, he added: “She grew a strong son, so I feel good, and her memory lives on with me and I had a great mother.”
Lewis was able to include her on his whole incredible Hall of Fame journey and showed her a life she would have only otherwise been able to dream of.
“It feels good, because not only did she watch me achieve it, she helped me achieve it,” Lewis added. “And she did her part. Her small part to me was cooking my food and looking after me during camp. She did her part, she was part of the team, and she was part of the boxing fraternity in one sense. And I didn’t know, but she was like the therapist in the camp. Any trainer or boxer that had a problem, she was a therapist for them. I was happy to realize that.”
Lewis retired with a record of 41-2-1 (32 KOs) and was the last heavyweight champion to earn the undisputed championship until Oleksandr Usyk managed it briefly this summer.
Now it is down to Tyson Fury to try and reclaim heavyweight gold against Usyk in December, and Lewis knows all about rematches, having avenged his only losses, to Hasim Rahman and Oliver McCall. He believes Fury will have learned plenty from having already done 12 rounds with the Ukraine star.
“For me, it was easy because I knew what I did wrong after the fight. So, for him, he can look at the fight himself and say, ‘Maybe I should throw more combos or maybe I should do something else,’ because it’s not hard. He’s got a great trainer, too. He just has to go in there and do the work, throw the combinations and do the work in the ring to make sure he’s successful.”
Fury and Usyk are nearer the end than the start of their careers, and so are the two other big earners from the era, Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder.
When Lewis was king, the other big names were Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson and Riddick Bowe, and there was a supporting cast of Michael Moorer, Tommy Morrison, Razor Ruddock, Ray Mercer and many others.
“This era of heavyweights has been a good era. I like the fact that this era brought in boxing, it also brought in entertainment,” Lewis grinned. “When did you ever see a heavyweight champion sing after his fight? So you’re getting a boxing match and also a concert at the same time!”
Lewis was taking a light-hearted look at the times Fury has grabbed a mic post-fight but, asked what he truly felt of the heavyweight crop, he continued: “That’s a hard question for me because I don’t want to be down on anybody and make them feel bad. But I think I can say this: I think training for our era was taken very seriously. We put ourselves in camp, we took ourselves out of our environments, and we went away. Most of the heavyweights now do camps in their own towns. Camp for them is like, ‘I’m in camp right now,’ and they go out to the country or something but still people can get a hold of them; still they do a lot of social media and all that type of thing.”
Lewis is understandably content in life. He has mostly squashed any previous bad blood he had with former opponents, including Hasim Rahman, and the pair of them harboured genuine animosity for years following their three fights, two in the ring and one in an ESPN studio.
Rahman has recently been in Jamaica with Lewis, and they took pictures together on Instagram.
“We buried the hatchet,” said Lewis. “Now we’re involved with creating a place for the youth and helping them be successful in life. So, what we’re doing is boxing camps. I do the Lennox Lewis League of Champion Boxing Camp in Jamaica, Canada and different places around the world.”
Rahman was one of Lewis’ great rivals given he stunned Lewis with a vicious knockout in South Africa before Lewis ironed him out in Las Vegas seven months later.
Lewis reckoned one of his most complete performances came against Zeljko Mavrovic, whom he outscored. “I think Rahman was a good performance for me. The Mavrovic fight was a good fight for me because he was lighter and he was hard to catch and he was awkward for me, but I came through it.”
Then, among his more entertaining wins, Lewis lists Shannon Briggs and his Madison Square Garden slugfest with Ray Mercer.
Lewis’ career was recently chronicled in living color in the Amazon four-parter The Kings, which shone a light on the careers of 1990s British cult heroes and UK household names Lewis, heavyweight counterpart Frank Bruno and Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn. It was a golden period for the sport in England, with Lewis defeating Bruno in a big fight and Benn and Eubank sharing two huge, high-profile contests.
“It was good,” Lewis said. “I think The Kings is a great show. It’s something that shows the life we led when we were boxing, so it brings today’s crowd into what happened yesterday. That’s what I love about it.”
Lewis is presently travelling around the UK on a speaking tour, meeting fans and taking part in Q and A sessions. He is often home in Jamaica but still maintains he is a man of the world and he wants to give his fans the chance to meet him while he is back.
“I haven’t really toured a lot,” he explained. “It gives me the chance to go to cities that I actually haven’t been to, and I get to meet the people that haven’t seen me. There’s a lot of people that follow me on Instagram and on TV but haven’t had that chance to meet me or be in the presence of greatness, so I’m happy that I’m able to do that, have a tour, meet the people, go to the cities I haven’t seen and hear from the people who haven’t see me.”
Still, however, Lewis maintains a mysterious air. In 2020, Lennox: The Untold Story documentary was released but he’s never put himself out in the open like other big-name fighters have. There’s been no tell-all book and few interviews that have ever got beyond the soundbites to find out what has made him tick.
Despite almost four decades in the public eye, since he captured gold at the Seoul Olympics, he admits not many know who the real Lennox Lewis is even now.
“Not really, because when people meet me and sit down for a while and speak to me, they’re like, ‘Oh man, you’re different to how I thought,’” he said, smiling once more. “I’m always like I am, but I guess they don’t get me sitting down with them for a minute.
“I’m an introvert. It’s kind of weird, especially when I was training. I’m focused on the training, focused on what I need to do type of thing, and when people ask me to go and do interviews, I usually try to stay away from it. With the boxers now, they have all-day press days and (spend) seven hours on this day, so they’re kept busy with the press. I felt the press was a distraction, especially before a fight, so it would be hard to get an interview with me like days before, because I’d want to focus on the fight. Everything means so much, because it’s the fight. I didn’t like distractions.”
He might have been one of the lucky ones, but he made his own luck, too.
Lewis’ tour takes in Wolverhampton, Cardiff, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Maidstone, Sheffield, Great Yarmouth and Blackpool and tickets can be purchased at goldstarpromotions.co.uk/events.
