Iron Mike
This Saturday is the Tyson/Lewis fight. Lewis is 6 inches taller than Tyson, 25 pounds heavier, and has an unbelievable 11 inches reach advantage (82 vs Tyson’s 71). The odds favor Lewis, but it’s far past time for Lewis’s prattle to be silenced, and I hope Tyson rips the limbs off of Lewis’s defenses and puts him to sleep. Lewis is constantly trying to paint Tyson as mentally imbalanced (which the American media lap up like dogs), while at the same time revealing his own pathetic insecurities by trying to portray himself as some sort of intellectual warrior-poet. In his press conference yesterday, Lewis even staged a chess match between himself and a 13 year-old kid from the chess club. Too bad they had to make the match “abbreviated” because Lewis was getting his ass kicked. Watching a heavyweight champion try to pass himself off as an intellectual is even worse than watching NBA players try to be rappers. It’s bad enough that Lewis had to file a lawsuit and get a judge to declare the last match standing in the way of Tyson in his favor (the judge ordered a rematch with no reasonable time for tune-up). Sad as it may be that Lewis couldn’t win without litigation and multiple rematches with people who beat him, even sadder is the cowardly way he has tried to get Tyson disqualified from this match. The “outburst” that led to the fight being moved from Vegas was clearly instigated by Lewis’s people, and the tape shows Lewis taking a cowardly punch at the back of Tyson’s head, before Tyson ever even looked at Lewis. And at his press conference, Lewis even admitted that he has been obsessed with Tyson since they were both 16.
Read this account of Mike, and you can see that he has had to fight for everything in his life, but is at his base an honorable guy. Compare that with the way that Lewis started with a childhood of privilege and pays society back with his shifty and surreptitious behavior, and ask yourself why the media are so hypnotized by this effete British bufoon. And for heaven’s sake, how many times is he going to trot out his mother to show how “sensitive” he is?
But keep in mind all of Lewis’s advantages when you are watching him prance around with fear in his eyes, shielding himself with those long limbs of his on Saturday. As the announcers talk about how “graceful” Lewis’s prancing is, and how “savage and beastly” Tyson is, you’ll be able to see the truth. You’ll see a Lewis who is trying desperately to stay out of harm’s way, hoping that Tyson gets tired. You’ll see Tyson setting aside all of the external “noise” and going to work focused, efficient and with all of his heart. Lewis will have a hard battle ahead of him, even with those long arms to hide behind, because Tyson is such a dedicated professional. Lewis probably never expected Tyson to make it this far, past all of the lawsuits and slander, and no doubt Lewis will initiate another of his trademark lawsuits if he loses Saturday’s fight. But if anyone can cut through Lewis’s smokescreen and restore *boxing* to the sport of boxing, it’s Tyson. And that’s exactly what Lewis is worried about.