It turned out to be a famous night in the history of boxing, all right, although the atmosphere in this world-famous arena was, at first, profoundly disappointing for a girl who had relished the idea of a Saturday off from British football fans. All week, the news hounds in our midst had been telling us that ‘six or seven thousand’ British fans were travelling to New York to support Lennox Lewis, yet it somehow never occurred to me that this was a coded warning to make for the Adirondacks. I never guessed the British fans would bring their usual boorish British-fan manners with them to MSG. But here they were, many in England football shirts, and all in full-throated away-game mode, in an enclosed place of entertainment well past bedtime (the fight didn’t start till after 11 p.m.), chanting that Don King was a ‘fat bastard’ - which was fair enough actually - and also roundly booing everything American in sight.
I had mixed feelings. These fans were funny, but they were also incredibly depressing. They booed the ringside celebrities; they booed ‘The Star Spangled Banner’; they couldn’t pipe down even for the tribute to the just-deceased American hero Joe DiMaggio. All those old boxing movies had not prepared me for the reality of this particular fight crowd. True, I’d seen scenes of angry fight-goers jeering, whistling and throwing folded programmes, and sometimes even uprooting furniture and trampling defenceless well-dressed women underfoot - but that was usually after the fight, not before. Why such animus towards the inoffensive Paul Simon? Bridge Over Troubled Water was not only an enduring classic album, it included that sensitive song ‘The Boxer’ which we would surely all do well to remember this evening. ‘Why do they hate Donald Trump so much?’ I asked Rob. ‘Do they even know who he is?’ When the presence of Jack Nicholson was announced, however, they stopped booing and gave a big cheer. Perhaps they were scared of him. It was a mystery I never got to the bottom of.
On the plus side, however, it’s a big arena, holding over 21,000 people, and there was plenty of salt popcorn. Rob and I had seats quite a long way back from the action, but we had taken our binoculars, and there were large screens suspended above the ring. I felt really, really bad about how I’d been planning to murder Rob and dispose of his body, but I won’t go on about it. I was now quite glad he was there. And I have to say, the build-up was horribly prolonged for someone already near to a state of hyperventilation, privately fretting about what might unfold within the next hour. Boxers have been known to die in the ring, you know. They have also died in hospital afterwards, without recovering consciousness. The crowd goes crazy, I was informed, at the first sight of blood. Holyfield was predicting a knockout in the third. Although Joyce Carol Oates insists in her book that boxing is statistically less dangerous than other mainstream sports such as horseracing, motor-racing and American football (and that therefore liberal middle-class hand-wringing about boxing is less straightforward than it looks), it’s still true that boxing is all about efficiently biffing someone on the head, which is the most violent thing you can do to another person without resorting to weaponry (or to crime).
It’s all to do with how soft the brain is, and how little protection it has inside the brain box. If the boxing authorities could only find a way of packing the fighters’ cranial cavities with little polystyrene balls, or kapok, or feathers - just for the duration of a fight - a lot of squeamishpeople in the wider world would definitely relax more. But no one has ever come up with a suitable material (or indeed, even tried to), so the brain is left to slosh about inside a hard casing, which isn’t such a good idea when organised biffing is going on. Basically, if you carefully place a nice wobbly milk jelly inside a biscuit tin and then kick it against a wall for half an hour, you get a fair idea of what happens to the human brain during a heavyweight fight. A wellaimed blow from a professional heavyweight carries the equivalent force of 10,000 pounds, says Oates - and you can’t help wondering whether boxers themselves are deliberately cushioned from this kind of information.
As an ersatz sports writer, I loved the drama of all occasions. I never felt it was my job to testify to greatness, as some sportswriters do; it was my job to see how an unwritten story ineluctably formed itself, in front of my very eyes, from quite unpromising basic ingredients - such as a flat rectangle of grass with lines on it and twenty-two men in shorts; or an undulating landscape with flags and sand pits at intervals, and dozens of individual men, dressed in natty knitwear, each with a small white ball and a bag of sticks. Waiting for the start of my first heavyweight fight was a moment of reckoning. The basic ingredients here were a spot-lit ring with ropes, and two very large men wearing padded gloves, with designs on each other’s sense of physical well-being. A heavyweight fight was completely different from all other sporting occasions I’d encountered because this ineluctable drama contained in it the potential for ineluctable tragedy, and this was the first time I’d ever had to address anything quite so serious. As Joyce Carol Oates kept reminding me, this was not a metaphor for something else.
I still wished they would get on with it, though. Even when the fighters finally made their appearance in the arena the suspense was terrible, because it took them such a bloody long time to reach the ring. The Lewis entrance (first) was a shambles, with his ragged entourage having to shove its way through a crowd that appeared to be shoving back. Laid-back reggae was the incongruous accompaniment to this disgraceful near-riot, involving Garden security staff, fans, bodyguards, and a chap with a flag, and it would have been quite funny if it hadn’t been so dreadful. ‘Whose fault is this?’ I wanted to know - but then I’ve already established how I feel about things being badly organised. Still, Lennox looked focused and unfazed by the turmoil holding up his progress, possibly because the mellow music was working so well for him, but also possibly because he towered literally head and shoulders above everyone else, and all the aggro was taking place about a foot below his eye-line. I ought to mention that in the thick of the mêlée was the tiny figure of Frank Maloney, Lewis’s boxing manager, tastefully dressed up as a parody of the Artful Dodger in a Union Jack suit with a Union Jack cap. This fact alone, perhaps, kept Lewis’s eyes fixed resolutely on the middle distance.
Holyfield entered - with considerably more ease - to a warm gospel song that was probably about how incredibly big his heart was, but I couldn’t tell, there was so much cheering. And then, with just enough time for me to get used to the almighty size of the shorts they were both wearing (‘What enormous shorts!’), there was the announcement of the two men, the belts they already held, the three ringside judges (one from South Africa, one from Atlantic City, and one from London), mention of the referee being the son of another referee, twelve rounds of three minutes, and ding-ding, blimey, before I could worry too much about how many synonyms for ‘horrified’ I was going to require before the night was out, it had started, amid roars from the crowd, and thousands of cameras flashing at once. Lewis came out very positively, left arm horizontal, left fist level with Holyfield’s face, delivering smart, straight-arm jabs every few seconds, with Holyfield largely back-pedalling and evidently trying to figure out some way of getting to the ‘inside’. Lewis was clearly in control, as Rob and I sagely agreed. We had decided to keep personal point scores according to the proper system - i.e., 10 points to the winner of a round and nine to the loser, unless there’s a knock-down (then it’s 10-8), or a draw (10-10). In the event of a knockout, it’s still technically a win on points, apparently, but I never quite mastered the maths of that. I merely knew, as everyone does, that a knockout means it’s all over. Meanwhile marks out of six for artistic interpretation and technical merit don’t come into it at all, which was a shame because, by my calculations, Lennox was doing quite well on those counts as well.
At the end of round one, I felt pretty good. True, I needed a spongeful of water on the back of my neck, and a respite from the gum-shield, but I wasn’t out for the count. Lennox also looked as if he felt ok. Holyfield was mainly looking a bit thoughtful, like someone who’s been punched in the face non-stop for three minutes while concentrating on walking backwards. At the end of the round he had suddenly lowered his head between Lewis’s legs and, bizarrely, lifted him off his feet rather in the manner of a trainee fireman - an unconventional, not to say desperate-looking and ungainly move that had earned them both a reminder from the ref about keeping it clean. In the second round, Lewis again efficiently kept Holyfield at arm’s length, but also landed a couple of classy blows with his right. But Holyfield’s prediction that he would knock out Lewis in the third was probably uppermost in both their minds during those first two rounds; it was certainly uppermost in mine. The fight would be won or lost, surely, in that third round - and if the drama were to be cranked up a bit now, to be frank, most people wouldn’t complain.
Although I felt guilty about it, I had begun to see what people moaned about in Lewis’s fighting style, and why his trainer got so short-tempered with that travelling chess set of his. Even when in control, you see, Lewis had the air of someone manifestly thinking, pondering his options, eyes narrowed, as if deliberating whether the Budapest Gambit would leave him too exposed, eight moves down the line, to the classic Schleswig-Holstein Defence. Holyfield, by contrast, with his head forward and sweat pouring off him, seemed to be simply more engaged in a bout of fisticuffs (as seemed fitting in the circumstances). Finding himself on the back foot in the more explosive third round, Lewis did stop calculating for a little while - Holyfield had charged out of his corner at the bell and started throwing serious blows, including two solid rights to the side of Lewis’s head. But a temporary shifting of Lewis’s rock-like centre of gravity was all that Holyfield had achieved by the end of a heroic and exhausting three minutes, and Holyfield walked back to his corner with his shoulders down, and his head down, too - or, at least, his head bent forward as far as it would go, given how firmly his prodigious neck muscles are attached like splints to the back of it. Was it all over for Holyfield? Lewis seemed to have been shaken, though, because the fourth was quite even. Only in the fifth did Lewis look back in control again.
Obviously, I’ve watched this fight again recently. By an absolute fluke, while I was researching and making notes for this book, I ransacked the house for my video of Raging Bull, and found at the back of a drawer a forgotten tape with ‘Lewis fight’ written on it in small letters. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was in among my Jeff Bridges collection, behind such unforgettable classics as Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). I turned it over in my hands, wiped off a layer of dust, and thought, this is exactly the sort of invaluable resource that usually turns up just after you’ve finished your book, or just after it’s gone to press. So what a miracle. The week after my return from New York, it turns out, Sky Sports had re-shown the fight, in full, with in-studio analysis, and I’d recorded it (and then, for whatever reason, hidden it to be found after my death by the house-clearers). If I had found this tape at any other moment in the intervening eight years, by the way, I would undoubtedly have recorded University Challenge, Pet Rescue or an even lesser-known Jeff Bridges film on top of it. I still can’t get over this domestic miracle, as you can tell.
What I had remembered from the fateful night was that Lewis had a good fifth round and that thereafter he seemed to be coasting, confident of winning on points. What the tape showed was that the first half of the fifth round had some terrific boxing from Lewis, but that old fight hands (including Lewis’s animated trainer) were in despair that he didn’t finish off Holyfield there and then. Later, Don King would say, ‘When you have a man on the ropes, you’re supposed to finish him, not play chess with him.’ Lewis would reply, as always, that there was no sense in exposing himself unnecessarily to counter-attack, which is a perfectly defensible point of view. As far as Lewis was concerned, he was winning this fight and doing it his own way, by anticipating and frustrating Holyfield’s moves, while landing a huge number of blows. Holyfield was bruised, puffy and in manifest need of a long lie-down (with his trousers on). My own impression at the time was that, ‘While working Holyfield relentlessly with the famous left jab and openly dominating him, Lewis was like an angler teasing a fish on his line. Just because he didn’t bang the fish on the head with a mallet doesn’t mean he didn’t catch him.’
But now I don’t know. The rest of the fight was, in reality, not so one-sided as it seemed on the night. Lewis landed vastly more punches than Holyfield, but he didn’t have a clearly brilliant winning round again until the last, while Holyfield rallied in the tenth. At the arena, however, we had stopped scoring quite a long time ago, and were convinced Lewis had won it comfortably, and won it in style. When the final bell sounded, Lewis raised his arms in triumph, and Holyfield just breathed heavily. It had been a thrilling fight, and the great thing for me was that there had been no excessive violence to be sickened by. The sense of relief was fabulous. The jellies were largely safe in their biscuit tins, after all - and at no point had I jumped up and screamed, ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ (which was what I had secretly feared). Everyone in the ring congratulated Lewis on his brilliant fight. Rob and I congratulated each other on our outstanding professionalism in the face of this historic triumph. Because it was historic, by the way: not only because it temporarily united the titles, but because no British man had held the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world in the whole of the 20th century until this moment, in 1999, in the very last tickings of the millennium. From Lewis’s point of view, his wait was over, he had silenced his critics, and his question mark could be changed forthwith to an exclamation point. A transparently legitimate fight had been transparently won. Lastly, those world-weary boxing commentators could at last start reaching for synonyms for ‘hallelujah’ and ‘coming up smelling of roses’.
But then the scores of the judges were announced, so we all listened carefully - with smiles turning quizzical, and eyes narrowing, and heads shaking, and (finally) hackles rising. Because this is the part of the proceedings that the night is actually famous for. The American judge (a woman called Eugenia Williams) had scored it 115 points to 113, apparently, which seemed a bit close, but never mind. Except, hang on, she had scored 115-113 in favour of Holyfield! Good heavens. Only in America, right? But she was only one judge, after all. The second judge, the South African (Stanley Christodoulou) had scored it 116-113 to Lewis, which was a bit more like it, although still surprisingly close. And finally, the British judge (Larry O’Connell) had scored it 115-115, a draw. Both fighters therefore retained their belts and the contest was announced to have no winner, thank you and good night, drive home safe everybody, see you next time, just be careful on the stairs. ‘What?’ we all said. ‘What?’ The place was full of bewilderment, disbelief and booing. We blinked, confused. Could they run that past us again? There must be some mistake. By most calculations, Holyfield had won three rounds at most. Such a decision was impossible, unless - unless, well, I mean, listen, buddy; do I need to spell it out for ya?
As, one by one, we saw how Lewis had been robbed, the temptation was to burst into tears. How could we have been taken in? Didn’t they have us all fooled this time, eh? I found myself not bothering to think of synonyms for ‘stinks’. I was too upset. I had been completely wrung dry for a full week for this? ‘This stinks,’ I kept saying, as disbelief turned swiftly to disgust. ‘It stinks. It really stinks. Oh, poor Lennox. Someone should say to him, this absolutely stinks.’
The astonishing thing was that the crowd didn’t riot. Footage of Lewis’s reaction in the ring shows him, vertiginously puzzled, looking around him and mouthing a short, one-word exclamation beginning with the letter ‘M’ (presumably ‘Man!’) and not beginning with ‘F’, which is remarkable in the circumstances. Then the fighters left the ring, and the crowd dispersed, and the next thing on this long, wearisome night was a rolling boil of a badlyorganised press conference full of seethingly indignant men - and not just the British press, either; the American press was livid as well. The most significant outcome of the draw decision was that the American press was so outraged on Lewis’s behalf that it forgot all about its previous assessment of him as a negligible fighter with a small squeaking hand-pump where his true boxer’s heart ought to be. In fact, on ESPN (the sports channel), the bearded pundit who had spent all week rubbishing Lewis picked up the judgement and tore it in half on screen. Next day, the New York Post wrote: ‘The fight plan may have been drawn up by the Lord, but the scorecards bore the mark of the devil. It was a night in which the glory and honour of boxing was supposed to return to its former home; instead, the stink returned to the air over the ring.’ ‘They robbed Lennox Lewis of the championship he won in the ring,’ wrote the Washington Post. ‘They damaged the sport they love. They called a fight a draw when it had been no such thing.’ Meanwhile the New York Times said the decision resembled ‘a Brinks truck heist perpetrated in front of 21,284 fans’.
We arrived at the post-fight press conference clutching the statistics, which had been released immediately, just to rub it in. Evidently these numbers had meant nothing to the judges, but they looked very persuasive to most of the people now assembled. Lewis had connected 348 punches (from 613 thrown) as against Holyfield’s 130 connected (out of 385). As for jabs, Lewis had connected with 187 (from 364 thrown); Holyfield had connected with 52 (from 171). When you consider that a fight of 12 three-minute rounds totals 36 minutes, these statistics meant that Holyfield had been successfully hit, on average, 10 times a minute, and had been jabbed in the face five times a minute as well. No wonder, when he turned up for the press conference, he looked puffy and pained and had to keep leaning on the table for support. Meanwhile Lennox, with just a couple of Elastoplasts on small cuts, stood tall in his sunshades and FCUK hat (he was sponsored by French Connection uk, with its charmless acronym), and looked - relatively - fresh as a daisy.
The sense of let-down was almost unendurable. Had it all been a fix, after all? The bout that was supposed to settle everything had settled nothing - except, perhaps, that you can fool all of the people all of the time. Sensitive as ever, Don King tried to smooth the situation by summing up: ‘Some are BORN GREAT, some ACHIEVE GREATNESS, and some have greatness THRUST UPON THEM. Tonight, Lennox Lewis had greatness thrust upon him!’ - which was a characteristically perverse application of the Bard, I’d say, since Lennox’s greatness had been very much achieved on this occasion, and then blatantly stolen from him in full view of millions of people around the world, some of whom had been persuaded to suspend warfare for the privilege. When you consider the murderous mood of the assembled press, the almighty nerve of Don King on this occasion was breathtaking. He started to plan a re-match. ‘What this is, is MORE EXCITEMENT!’ he urged us, as if we were missing the bigger picture. ‘It ain’t over yet, this is so great! What do you do when you got a DISPUTE? You resolve it! So let’s do it again! Let’s do it AGAIN! Hey, judge NOT that YE be not JUDGED!’ Lewis’s camp walked out when they couldn’t stand it any more, with Frank Maloney stating that the ‘people’s champion’ was leaving the building. ‘NOT a smart move,’ King remarked.
Over the following week, conspiracy theorists tried to unpick the judging decision, convinced that there had been skulduggery. Nothing was ever proved. The American judge, Eugenia Williams, upheld that she scored the fight the way she saw it, even in giving Holyfield the fifth round. When shown the round again, she admitted she’d made a mistake, but argued that her view had been obscured by photographers. The British judge, Larry O’Connell, maintained he had handed in his scores round by round, and was surprised that these agglomerated scores had amounted to a draw. Putting it in context, it seems that iffy judging decisions occur all the time in boxing, which is why trainers so strenuously urge chaps like Lewis to finish off opponents when they get the chance, to put matters beyond dispute. But I will never accept that it was Lennox’s fault that he didn’t win at Madison Square Garden. If the draw decision wasn’t downright corruption, then it was wilfully bad organisation. With so much at stake, they should have employed a more experienced judge than Mrs Williams. But hark at me. It wasn’t Holyfield who turned into a crushed old man that night in Madison Square Garden: it was me. I muttered and railed. If I’d known how to do it, I’d have spat on the floor. I had fostered fond illusions about the nobility of boxing for only two or three days at the outside, but now those illusions had been shattered, I felt as cynical and embittered as the chaps who had inwardly wept about this stuff for years and years and years.
Rob and I walked back up 7th Avenue, discussing events and trying not to have our faces torn off by the freezing wind. I got to bed around 2.30 a.m., and went to sleep still clutching the fight stats, which turned out to be quite a good idea, as I was woken an hour later by a call from my boss in London, who had got up early to watch the fight (around 4 a.m. local time) and then gone straight to the office in Wapping in an excited state of mind. It was now only 8.30 a.m. in London, but he was raring to go, and already scheming to get the story on the front page of Monday’s Times. So I read him the stats, made some coffee and started writing my column. It had been a comfortable week for the writing, by and large. The London first-edition deadline being 6.30 p.m., I had needed to file by 1.30 p.m. EST each day, which meant I could write (comfortably and in private) at the hotel in the morning, generally about things that had happened the day before. I had written about the sparrings, the weigh-in, Don King, and of course quite a lot of technical stuff about hooks, jabs and uppercuts in case the readers weren’t quite sure of the difference. I had also taken an interest in an undercard fight between ‘Ferocious’ Fernando Vargas (from the us) and Howard Clarke (UK) - ‘Ferocious’ being the rather terrifying 21-year-old IBF junior middleweight champion, and Clarke a likeable 31-year-old Englishman from Dudley who was fighting - adorably - under the sponsorship of ‘Fonz Leathers’, the shop he worked in. Clarke’s was the most heart-warming story on the night, as it happens. He went four rounds before being knocked out by Vargas, and I saw him having his dinner afterwards in a backstage area, fully dressed, evidently unharmed and completely thrilled to bits. He had earned £18,000 in a single night, and had acquitted himself better in the ring than he could ever have dreamed. His was the kind of benign boxing story not often made into a major motion picture, so it was all the more a privilege to hear about it.
As I started writing in the early hours of Sunday morning, I realised that this was to be not only my last piece about the fight, but possibly my last piece ever about boxing. This was strange and sad, but I tried not to dwell on it. Life would have to get back to normal - and very quickly indeed, as it happened. At the back of my mind I was trying to adjust to the peculiar fact that I had bought tickets (for me and a resolutely non-sporty New York friend) to see Sophocles’ Electra at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre that afternoon, which I now saw required an absurdly large mental leap from one culture to another that might easily leave me falling short, scrabbling for a bit of vine to hold on to, and dangling over a bottomless ravine. As a person, I am nothing if not efficiently compartmentalised, but this was ridiculous. My friend wouldn’t even want to hear about Lewis and Holyfield. She was an art historian. And I was full of this fight. My ears were still ringing with it, and I was still hot with indignation. The only way I could smooth this transition was to remind myself that this particular Greek tragedy would be considerably more violent than the thing I had watched last night. It is noticeable in Electra, for example, that when the father-avenging Orestes gets his mother Clytemnestra against the ropes (so to speak), his bloodthirsty sister Electra does not call out, ‘No need to finish her off, Orestes! You’re winning on points. Any fool can see you’re winning on points!’
I duly went to the theatre that afternoon, and it was as confusing for me as I had expected - especially when only one hour’s sleep separated me from events at Madison Square Garden. Zoë Wanamaker was fantastic as Electra, I have to say; and with a very original haircut and Iron Curtain trench-coat to boot. The production was great, and I liked the translation. All in all, Electra very nearly succeeded in putting all thought of the Holyfield-Lewis stinkeroo decision out of my still-racing mind. But the audience was the trouble, ultimately: it was so damned quiet and inert compared to the fight crowd. I squirmed in my seat at how sedate it all was. Throughout the play, I sighed and harrumphed, clenching and re-clenching my leg muscles. How can people just sit here like lumps, with all this interesting and semi-justified slaughter going on? Did the ancient Greek audiences sit mute like statues? I’m sure they didn’t. This lot didn’t even boo when Clytemnestra appeared. They didn’t even jump up and down when the first blood was shed (offstage, of course), or shout ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it!’ when the carnage was described. There were no half-naked showgirls coming on between scenes in stilettos, either, holding up bits of card - which wouldn’t add much to the cost of the production, surely, and would really brighten things up. Blimey, was I in a strange perceptual state. I wanted to be back at the Garden, yelling ‘Fix!’ and ‘Bastards!’ and here I was, in a small, darkened auditorium, strenuously empathising with a cropheaded grudge-nurser who’d been crying vengeance for going on 3,000 years. The injustice of Holyfield-Lewis might not be of mythical proportions, but it happened only last night. If anyone should be wailing and demanding attention from the gods, surely, it was poor, poor Lennox Lewis?
As it happened, however, I had two further brushes with boxing. When ‘Holyfield-Lewis II’ duly took place eight months later in Las Vegas, I stayed up all night to watch it on TV. Lennox finally got his undisputed title, and I got fully re-animated in instant-know-all mode, especially when the commentators kept saying, ‘Lennox has forgotten his left jab!’ which really incensed me. ‘What nonsense,’ I kept saying. If Lennox wasn’t using his left jab, and was mixing it more, it was because he knew that battering Holyfield’s head at arm’s length was a strategy that had failed to impress the judges on a previous occasion. ‘Lewis knows what he’s doing!’ I started to yell at the telly. ‘Is it likely that he has forgotten his left jab, sir, when you and I have not?’
Then, in July 2000, I was sent to see ‘The Homecoming’ - not the Pinter play, alas, but Lewis’s triumphant return to the London Arena, in a fight against Frans (or Francois) Botha, a scared-looking South African who never stood a chance, quite honestly, and was knocked half out of the ring in the second round. Feeling remotely comfortable in fight surroundings was even more surreal than feeling like an alien, I discovered. I waved hello to the chap from the Sun. I recognised lots of boxers, all done up in tuxedoes and dicky-bow-ties. There was a moment before the fight when Garry Richardson (of Radio 4) tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to get the attention of boxing promoter Frank Warren (who was sporting a blood-filled eye at the time, rumoured to be the outcome of a disagreement with Mike Tyson). Anyway, I tapped Frank Warren on the shoulder and said, indicating behind me, ‘Frank, sorry; Garry wants a word.’ And I did feel very proud at that moment. Going up some stairs with the chap from the Guardian, we passed George Foreman going down. I think he even said ‘Good evening.’ But I decided not to stop him and say, ‘I don’t suppose you remember this, Mr Foreman, but in 1974 in Zaire, Muhammad Ali really took you by surprise.’
Yes, some people had paid £750 to be at this event, but it was just a day’s work for Sports Writer Truss. Lewis entered the arena through a flame-licked portcullis flanked by skinny blondes done up like Beefeaters - and this time the lengthy procession to the stage was drawn out intentionally. Why Botha chose to wear a white fluffy bathmat for his own walk through the booing crowd at the London Arena, by the way, only the gods of comedy could tell us. But from the moment he made his entrance, wearing the bathmat in jaunty poncho style with a black knitted bobblehat to top the ensemble, Lennox’s chances of knocking him out in the first round started to look extremely good. I assumed Botha intended to look like a white buffalo - this being his adopted soubriquet. But only if he had come out dressed as a rubber duck could the omens for a fifty-fifty contest have been worse. Not that Botha was an unworthy opponent in theory (or even on paper), but because from the moment they stood face to face, he had the look of someone whose torso might be packed to the neck with ‘heart’ (not that again), but whose brain was sending the message, ‘Run! Run! Run for your life!’
This was a much less worrying occasion, as you can tell. I had a whale of a time. The battle between Botha’s chief internal organs was quite as exciting to observe (by examining the look in his eyes) as the fight between Botha and Lewis.
HEART: Stay on your feet, Frans. Draw him in. You have very fast hands, don’t forget, and a good right hook. Duck, reverse, footwork, come on. Just avoid his left jab, Frans, and you’ll be dandy.
BRAIN: Run! Run for your life!
HEART: Don’t listen to him, Frans. Listen to me. You’re a good boxer. You took Tyson to five rounds -
BRAIN: But he’s enormous! And he keeps punching the side of your head!
HEART: Don’t listen.
BRAIN: Save yourself and flee!
HEART: Shut up.
HEART: You shut up.
BRAIN: (AND CHORUS OF OTHER SENSES): Quick, Frans. Run! Run for your life!
The end was mercifully swift. Two minutes and 39 seconds into the second round, it was all over. Lewis jabbed Botha, then punched him with the right, and seeing Botha buckle, delivered two more immense blows to send the ‘white buffalo’ halfway through the ropes and out of the fight. It was the sort of undignified exit usually associated with two muscular nightclub bouncers with the benefit of a run-up. Lewis, however, delivered it with one punch from a position of rest, and if you’ve never seen power of such magnitude at close range, I can only report it’s worth seeing. The only time I’d seen anything like it before would have been in Popeye.
When I stopped writing about sport later in 2000, it wasn’t that I was finished with it. Mainly, I was finished with the lifestyle of the sports writer - or, at least, the lifestyle of the middle-aged female sports writer, which (as Alan Bennett once beautifully said of being Prince of Wales) is not so much a job as a predicament. But if I had mixed feelings about sport while I was fully submerged in it, I have even more mixed feelings now that I have been safely back on dry land for over half a decade, blocking my ears to Premiership transfers, refusing to look at points tables, and reading newspapers resolutely from the front to the back, instead of the other way round. My idea of myself is that I can now identify equally with both sports fanatics and sports agnostics - acting as a kind of human bridge
- but it’s not strictly true. There is more than a remnant of Moonie-style thinking still in me, so that when a sports agnostic says that he ‘doesn’t like’ sport, I think, ‘Ah, but you would if you just knew a little more about it.’ There was a time when a man professing not to like football made him tons more attractive to me; now I receive the news with a polite smile and try not to blurt out, ‘Blimey, were you born this negative, or did you have to work at it?’ I am the agonised and restless result of a scientific experiment, like the poor, tortured creatures in The Island of Dr Moreau. I am neither one thing nor the other. Which is why I feel compelled to look back at those four years in sport and think, ‘Was being persuaded to become a sports writer the best thing that ever happened to me, or should I consider suing the paper for the lasting damage it did me?’
I have certain cool feelings towards sport, of course. I have made up my mind about a few things. I feel, for example, from the fan’s point of view, that it wastes one’s life, colonises one’s brain and wrings the emotions, all in unhelpful ways. It encourages the appalling know-all that abides within us all. It is sometimes stultifyingly dull, although you’re not encouraged to say so. I have been all day at a Test match at Headingley and seen only 14 runs scored; I have been at Wimbledon and seen only two points played, leaving the game tantalisingly poised overnight at no sets to none, no games to none, 15 all. One night I paid £27 to see Chelsea at West Ham and the only exciting bit was when I dropped my pencil. It isn’t remotely comfy, and the food is often dreadful - and as the chap famously said about the battle of Waterloo, ‘The noise, my dear! And the people!’ Even when it’s good, it’s agony. In fact, agony is very largely the point.
Yet I look back at Holyfield-Lewis and I am immensely glad I was there. It was a privilege to see this particular bit of history being made, and it doesn’t matter to me that I subsequently never watched another fight after Lewis-Botha, and have only just found out for certain that Lewis retired - evidently with dignity and his brain still intact - exactly as he planned, while reigning champion. To many people, this battle between two overpaid and overgrown men in an artificial context counts for absolutely nothing. It is entirely trivial. In a world where real wars are going on, and people suffer under tyranny, what can it possibly matter that Lewis won the fight but didn’t get the decision? To other people, the Holyfield-Lewis fight was a landmark event about which they cared deeply. No one keeps stuff in proportion; it’s not human to do so. Sport’s main claim to significance is that it acknowledges this great human failing, and provides an official outlet for it. Years ago, Boris Becker famously said, after losing at Wimbledon, ‘Nobody died. I just lost a tennis match.’ And while some people applauded him for his healthy sense of proportion, it didn’t ring remotely true. While I was writing about sport, I was caught on the horns of this dilemma for the whole bloody time. I was like the poor confused jurors in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland who sit in their jury box, writing emphatically on their little slates, both ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’, because both words are equally valid.