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