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Lewis’s understated dignity is in sharp contrast to the menace that his former foe still effortlessly exudes. But Tyson is bankrupt and apparently lost, drifting from place to place like a nomad, so that Lewis feels sympathy for his predicament.
“You can’t help but sympathise. I mean, when you look at his life you really wouldn’t want your life to be like that, never,” he admits. “But a lot of it he’s brought upon himself. People took advantage of him and they may have affected the outcome but there’s a part of you that has to self-teach. Once you know right from wrong you have to build on that and you have to take responsibility. He got seduced in the old-fashioned way when people threw money in his face and told him that he could have it here and now. ‘I can get a car,’ he thought. ‘Hey, yeah, I can get a fleet of cars and girls, too. This is great.’
“He got caught up in that. With me, my attitude was that all of the rewards were still going to be here once I’d accomplished my goals in the boxing ring. I faced the same pressures, the same temptations that Tyson did, but the difference was in my upbringing, the fact that I had a mother in my life and that I was afraid to upset her. I didn’t want to mess up at school, knowing that I would have to go home to face her. I even chose the strap once at school after getting into a fight with another kid, rather than have the principal call home to tell my mother – of course, he told her anyway and she shouted at me a lot.
“Tyson never had that strong mother figure and when the person who cared for him [Cus D’Amato, Tyson’s former trainer and guardian] died, the man who stepped in to rescue him [promoter Don King] had fuzzy hair and his own agenda. Tyson was in trouble from that point. I heard that he’s looking like a bit of lumpy custard, is that true?”
“He is looking old and podgy,” I tell him. “But his life was always going to end in a bad way.”
“Actually, Tyson, for me . . . how I knew him . . . I don’t know him as he’s been portrayed,” Lewis asserts. “I know him as a nice person, humble and polite with good manners, that’s how I know him. But when you put gloves on him and he’s across the ring and comes at you like a madman . . . later on I got to understand why: he was afraid of the other guy.”
Lewis was 18 and Tyson 17 when they met for the first time at D’Amato’s training camp in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. It was April 1984 and Lewis was the junior world amateur champion on his way to the Olympics in Los Angeles, for which Tyson failed to qualify.
They sparred over a period of several days, five sessions in total, until D’Amato called a halt when a frustrated Tyson spat out at Lewis: “Come on, come on, hit me you son of a *****.” But they formed a bond over the course of that week, running, eating and watching film of old fights together, indulging in Tyson’s favourite pastime.
“I used to ask myself the question, ‘Why did Tyson watch old fighters so much?’ Then I realised that he watched them to see how many dirty tricks he could get away with,” Lewis suggests, smiling. “Up in the Catskills he would always talk about how this fighter had this move and that fighter had another move, and he was referring to a guy who came in with his head or threw punches low on the referee’s blind side. He was working on perfecting those types of things.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/spo...cle3295356.ece
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