Lennox Lewis Biography: The Story Told Backwards

Heavyweight champions almost never stop on time. Lewis did. So his life reads better in reverse, starting at the exit and working back to the reasons he could afford it.

February 2004: He Left Holding the Belt

Lewis announced his retirement in February 2004, aged 38, as WBC heavyweight champion of the world.

There was a rematch on the table worth a great deal of money and a public that assumed, as it always does, that he would take it eighteen months later.

He never fought again. Twenty-two years on, that is the first fact anyone reaches for: 41 wins, 2 losses, 1 draw, 32 knockouts, and a man who walked out of the building with the title in his hands. He was appointed CBE in 2002 for services to boxing and inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2009.

21 June 2003: A Cut Above the Eye Ends Everything

The last fight was Vitali Klitschko at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, taken on roughly six weeks’ notice after Kirk Johnson pulled out injured.

Lewis came in heavy. Klitschko, huge and badly underrated at the time, was ahead on all three scorecards when the ringside doctor examined the gash over his left eye and stopped it after the sixth round.

Officially, a technical knockout win for Lewis. In practice, he had been outworked for long stretches by a man he was supposed to handle, and he knew it. The clamour for a rematch was instant. Declining it is what turned a scrappy night into a retirement.

8 June 2002: Memphis, Because Nowhere Else Would Take It

The year before, in the Pyramid at Memphis, Lewis finally fought Mike Tyson.

The bout had been chased for most of a decade and nearly died at a New York press conference in January 2002 that ended in a brawl on stage. Nevada refused Tyson a licence for it. Tennessee took the fight.

The boxing was one-sided. Lewis used his 84-inch reach and the straight punching Emanuel Steward had drilled into him, and knocked Tyson out in the eighth. The event generated $106.9 million in pay-per-view revenue, and it closed a question that had shadowed both reputations for years.

The Two Men Who Beat Him, and the Court Case Nobody Mentions

Both defeats came the same way: fast, unexpected, against opponents he was heavily favoured to beat.

On 24 September 1994 at Wembley, Oliver McCall dropped him in the second round with a right hand and took the WBC title. First professional loss. It triggered the change that defined everything afterwards, because Lewis hired Emanuel Steward, the Kronk trainer who had helped prepare McCall for that very fight, and rebuilt around the jab.

On 22 April 2001 in Brakpan, South Africa, an underprepared Lewis was knocked out in the fifth by Hasim Rahman, a heavy underdog.

Most retrospectives stop there and skip to the rematch. What happened in between was a lawsuit. Rahman signed with Don King Productions and looked to fight elsewhere rather than honour the rematch clause. Lewis sued in the Southern District of New York, and on 21 June 2001 Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum enjoined Rahman from taking any other heavyweight bout for eighteen months unless he first met his contractual obligation. The case is reported at 147 F. Supp. 2d 225. Lewis won that rematch in a courtroom before he won it in a ring.

Both men were then dealt with in person. He regained the vacant WBC title from McCall in February 1997, in a bout the referee halted in the fifth after McCall stopped throwing punches and became visibly distressed; contemporaneous reports described it as a breakdown, and Lewis’s record credits a technical knockout that explains nothing about the night. Rahman was knocked out in the fourth on 17 November 2001 at Mandalay Bay.

Holyfield, and the Draw That Started an Investigation

On 13 March 1999 at Madison Square Garden, Lewis fought Evander Holyfield to unify the division and was given a draw that almost nobody at ringside recognised. Judge Eugenia Williams scored it 115-113 to Holyfield. The verdict prompted official investigations in the United States.

The rematch in Las Vegas on 13 November 1999 removed the argument. Lewis took a unanimous decision and became the first undisputed heavyweight champion since Riddick Bowe in 1992.

He had first been handed the WBC belt without fighting for it, in December 1992, when Bowe gave it up rather than face him. Lewis had earned the mandatory position by knocking out Donovan “Razor” Ruddock in two rounds that October. Correcting the impression that he had been gifted a title is, in retrospect, what the next decade of his career was about.

West Ham, Kitchener, Seoul

Lennox Claudius Lewis was born in West Ham, east London, on 2 September 1965, to Jamaican immigrant parents. At twelve he moved to Kitchener, Ontario, where his mother had settled. He learned to box in Canada.

He won super-heavyweight gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, stopping Riddick Bowe in the final. It was Canada’s first Olympic boxing gold in 56 years, and he carried the flag at the closing ceremony. He turned professional in 1989 under a British licence.

The Case for Lewis, Made Plainly

I think the reverse order flatters him for a reason: his career gets better the further back you look, and his reputation gets worse the closer you get to the end. That is exactly backwards from how most heavyweights are remembered, and it is why he is still underrated.

Consider what is on the ledger. He beat Holyfield, Tyson, Klitschko, Ruddock, Tommy Morrison and Frank Bruno. He lost twice, to punches rather than to systems, and erased both. He fought in an era with no shortage of dangerous heavyweights and did not swerve one of them.

The knock is that he was cautious and hard to love. Fair enough. He was also the last man to hold every heavyweight belt at once for a generation, and the only one in living memory to leave while he still could.

He is 60. He married Violet Chang in 2005, has four children, plays chess seriously enough that it forms part of his public identity, and works as a broadcaster. What the career left behind is set out on his net worth page, where he sits near the top of the richest boxers, largely because stopping on time meant never having to earn any of it back.