VITALI Klitschko was a 21st century heavyweight, a giant who could punch his weight. The 31-year-old was the elder of the two Klitschko brothers representing Ukraine, a sovereign state in Eastern Europe. At 6ft 7in, he was one of the few fighters who could look down on Lennox Lewis, at least physically. Although not an aesthetically pleasing boxer to watch, the former WBO champion was sturdy and strong and had 31 knockouts against just one defeat, an injury retirement to Chris Byrd.

Klitschko had been due to appear on the undercard at the Staples Center after originally failing to agree a fight with Lewis, but stepped in at the 11th hour when the Canadian Kirk Johnson pulled out with a pectoral injury. Klitschko’s participation ended up playing a far bigger role in Lewis’s future than most expected: it persuaded the champion that his time was up.

Before the fight, Klitschko put the job of challenging Lewis into perspective. His words were a clear indication of how he intended to fight – without fear. ‘We are not talking about a god here,’ Klitschko said in a report in the Irish Examiner. ‘We are all human beings. Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. I heard Lewis say he is going to destroy me and knock me out in the first five rounds. People say I am not strong enough or in the champion’s league. But I don’t care what people say.’

Lewis, who had been out of the ring for a year, remained resolute in his belief that he was still number one. ‘I am totally focused on this fight and there has been no complacency,’ he said in a report in the Irish Times. ‘I respect Klitschko but he is not in my class.

‘Klitschko just does not have my experience or my skills and I will prove that in the ring. I am in good shape and I am ready. Now I just can’t wait for the fight as he is going to get it full force.’

The fight was a war that Lewis so nearly lost. Klitschko, fighting valiantly, traded with Lewis from the start and had him rocking badly in the second and fifth rounds. But hampered by deep cuts over and under the left eye, Klitschko knew he was on borrowed time. He survived a huge right uppercut in the sixth and was starting to come on strong again as he bullied Lewis around the ring. But it was his final act of defiance. At the end of the round, the ringside doctor inspected Klitschko’s injuries and stopped the fight. Once he realised what had happened, Klitschko became incandescent, shouting: ‘No, no.’

Lewis had escaped. Drawn into a slugging match, he had rarely looked so wild and vulnerable. Although he said afterwards that the cuts had spared Klitschko from a knockout defeat, the truth was that it was Lewis himself who might have been saved. At the time of the stoppage, Lewis was tiring and behind 58-56 on all three scorecards, with Klitschko still well in the fight.

‘Right now, I feel like the people’s champion,’ Klitschko said in a report by George Willis of the New York Post. ‘I did not want them to stop the fight. My strategy was to take it into the seventh and eighth rounds. My strategy was working perfect. I knew his condition was not good. It was not easy, but I felt like I was winning.’

Lewis said: ‘He has never been in a dogfight. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. He stuck in there with me and he made it a good fight.’

It seemed Lewis couldn’t win with some members of the American press whatever he did. Vilified in the past for not showing enough aggression, he had done just that against Klitschko and still got criticised.

In a somewhat contrived critique, Dave Anderson of the New York Times opined: ‘It’s in the record book forever. Lewis was knocked out by Rahman and McCall. Now put an asterisk next to his KO6 over Vitali Klitschko. Those three names will haunt Lewis’s eventual place in history, just as Buster Douglas haunts Mike Tyson’s place in history.

‘Whenever boxing buffs measure Lewis against other heavyweight champions, those three names will sabotage his stature. When the best heavyweights of the past lost, it usually was to worthy opponents.’

After 14 years as a professional, Lewis had fought his last fight. He was 37 years old. A rematch was mooted but never came to fruition. According to Klitschko, that was down to one person – Lewis’s mother Violet.

‘Lennox promised me but his mum decided he wasn’t going to fight,’ Klitschko told the Press Association in an interview that appeared in The Guardian seven years later. ‘He invited me to London, without managers. He said he wanted to talk just together. I came to the room and his mum is there. We talked for two hours and his mum was looking at me and scanning me.

‘After that, I went away and he called me a couple of hours later and said: “Sorry, but no.” I felt it wasn’t his decision, his mum decided. I tried to change his decision, but it’s difficult.’

In the end, it wasn’t difficult for Lewis to walk away. He had beaten every opponent he had faced, achieved all his goals and gone down as the best heavyweight of his era. No one could have asked for more.