Get Her Off the Pitch! (4 page)

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.'