LAS VEGAS - As former world heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis made his way out of the MGM Grand Arena, he looked around and said: “Who says boxing is dead?”
“I think this is great,” Lewis told the Toronto Sun, as waves of excited fans slowly made their way outside the MGM Grand following Friday afternoon’s weigh-in for Saturday night’s Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao world unification welterweight title fight, the richest fight in history.
“It kind of reminds me of me and Tyson,” added Lewis, who won the super-heavyweight gold medal for Canada at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Lewis, who was born in England and raised as a young man in Kitchener, Ont., faced Mike Tyson at the The Pyramid in Memphis, Tenn., on June 8, 2002, scoring an eighth-round KO and defending his WBC and IBF world titles. He says he can relate to both Mayweather and Pacquiao, who are about to endeavor on the biggest fight of their lives on a stage unmatched in boxing history.
The key at this point said Lewis, who retired as the world champion in 2003 after beating Vitali Klitschko, is for the two fighters to relax and not deviate from their normal pre-fight routines, despite the unprecedented hype of this weekend’s bout.
“I used played chess and I watched karate flicks to relax,” said Lewis. “Both were very relaxing. The chess was methodical thinking and the karate was more getting me in the fighting mood.”
“Hopefully (Mayweather and Pacquiao) are not going through too much stress,” he said. “They’ve done it so many times, it’s normal to them. Only when they do something that’s not normal it may affect them, like if they go for a five-mile run or come out here in front of this public and hear something they don’t want to hear.”
