Lennox Lewis was KO’d by Hasim Rahman in huge upset and it put Mike Tyson clash in jeopardy
Lennox Lewis was established as the world’s leading heavyweight and was targeting a lucrative fight with Mike Tyson when on April 22, 2001 he fought Hasim Rahman in what was expected to be a routine defence of his IBF and WBC titles.
If Baltimore’s Rahman at altitude at Carnival City, Brakpan, outside of Johannesburg was not the opponent Lewis had been dreaming of he was seen as capable of enhancing Lewis’ agenda when negotiations would inevitably resume for the defining night with “Iron Mike”
With Tyson continuing to unravel and the complex conflict of interests surrounding both fighters threatening to prevent them from ever fighting, the fight with Rahman was another occasion for which Lewis would be handsomely paid. A child once full of admiration for the great Muhammad Ali, he was also heartened by the prospect of fighting in front of impoverished Africans as Ali and George Foreman once had in The Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire.
Lewis had also agreed to a cameo role in Ocean’s Eleven, in which he would play the world heavyweight champion in a fictional fight against Wladimir Klitschko. Where he was typically content preparing to fight in peace and relative isolation in the Poconos mountains in Pennsylvania, his commitment to Ocean’s Eleven contributed to him training in the desert city of Las Vegas.
Already short of time to fly to South Africa and adjust to the altitude ahead of fight night, the filming of his scene had been postponed. His training camp, unusually, was also somewhat tense. The unity that existed among Lewis and those closest to him in the Poconos had been undermined by them being divided between rented houses. A collective sense of camp fever even manifested itself in heated confrontations between the often-serene Lewis and Scott DeMercado, his friend.
When they eventually arrived 11 days before he was due to fight, Lewis, still lacking focus, attended a memorial service at Ellis Park in Johannesburg for the 43 football supporters who had died days earlier in a crush during the fixture between the local rivals Kaiser Chiefs and Orlando Pirates, and sought to console the victims’ relatives and friends.
Lennox Lewis
Lewis and his team were also presented with the logistical difficulties of, for security reasons, never taking the same route between destinations, and of the fact that they would be fighting at 6am, and therefore running at 2am, training at 3am and sleeping during the day. Rahman, like Lewis aware that they would be fighting 5,200ft above sea level, had arrived a month in advance.
At the start of fight week, in one of his media commitments Lewis declared “I’m way ahead of schedule” and yet, in a pre-fight interview from his dressing room, he confirmed that had Tyson or Klitschko been his opponent that night he would have arrived earlier to adjust.
It has since been suggested that a sense of foreboding had grown in the minds of those around him. DeMercardo had dreamed that Rahman would stop him; Emanuel Steward had been unhappy about the prospect of fighting in South Africa from the very start; some were troubled by the fact that Melissa Mathison, shadowing Lewis while writing about him, had been given permission to become the first woman allowed in his dressing room, pre-fight. Lewis, who had been losing at chess all week, had even had a premonition that Steward would be unhappy with his condition, which he was.
When “Thunder in Africa” started there were 5,000 in attendance and yet few of the Africans Lewis – who had also visited Soweto and AIDS orphanages, and transported deprived children to open sparring sessions – had liked the thought of watching him were present. He was the lead attraction at a fight for the wealthy and, weighing a then-career heaviest 18st 11/2lbs, performed sluggishly and was breathing heavily until, in the fifth round, Rahman knocked him out by landing that most explosive of right hands.
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Unlike after the defeat by Oliver McCall, which precipitated a rebuild, Lewis – who also visited Nelson Mandela before leaving and aware of where he had gone wrong – sought an immediate rematch. Those ambitions, however, were complicated by Don King.
A story persists that the promoter persuaded Rahman to accept $200,000 in cash for his signature when $14,000,000 – not in cash – was reportedly on offer from HBO. The heavyweight, contractually, owed Lewis a rematch, but it was one he and King were determined to avoid so, at a time when Lewis had also dismissed his long-term manager Frank Maloney and was being sued by his former promoter Panos Eliades, he also had to take Rahman to court.
Two months after Lewis had lost his titles the New York judge Miriam Cedarbaum then ruled in his favour, stating that Rahman couldn’t make a defence of his titles in the following 18 months without first fighting Lewis, and, in time, the rematch he was desperate for was scheduled for November 17 at Vegas’ Mandalay Bay.
The tension that had been building throughout a press tour to Baltimore, New York and finally Los Angeles then heightened between them when Rahman, perhaps seizing on rumours that have long surrounded Lewis – who has since married and fathered four children with one-time Miss Jamaica contestant Violet Chang – questioned Lewis’ sexuality during a radio interview.
On a later television appearance on ESPN’s Up Close, Lewis said that in doing so Rahman had crossed a line. When Rahman insisted, “I said what you did was gay – I said it was gay to take it to the court”, Lewis, uncharacteristically heated, responded: “Why are you starting with that gay stuff? I’m 100 percent a woman’s man. If he has worries about that bring your sister; bring anyone.”
When their verbal exchanges escalated to the point of them coming face-to-face, Lewis pushed Rahman, who, as others went on stage in an attempt to break them up, manoeuvred Lewis on to the interview desk, which couldn’t handle the 6ft 5ins Lewis’ weight in the middle of a wider, two-minute brawl.
Lewis, training once again in the Poconos, permitted far less access to him to the media – a delegation from Sky Sports was turned away upon their arrival – and prepared with the focus it was tempting to suggest Rahman lacked.
The challenger claimed beforehand that he intended on boxing patiently, but at a leaner 17st 81/2lbs he ended Rahman’s reign as champion 89 seconds into the fourth round when he countered an inaccurate left hook with the punch that put Rahman flat on his back, where he landed perfectly beneath the crown on the canvas promoting the Don King Productions brand. When Rahman tried to stand he again fell, face first, and the referee Joe Cortez counted him out.