Evander Holyfield is a randy hypocrite who doesn't practise what he preaches! Yeah? Well, Lennox Lewis is a great big sissy with a glass jaw and a heart the size of a gerbil's who will fold his tents the moment he is subjected to pressure!
Considering that their March 13th encounter at Madison Square Garden is already the most eagerly-anticipated heavyweight fight in 28 years - since Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali met in the same ring - you wouldn't think the participants would need any extra incentive. But the boxing press played right into promoter Don King's hands this week by managing to stir a name-calling feud where none had existed.
At the risk of allowing the facts to get in the way of a good story, let us recapitulate what really happened.
On Monday afternoon, members of the media were invited to visit Lewis at his training camp in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Knowing that a substantial segment of the boxing press had congregated in New York over the weekend for the Felix Trinidad-Pernell Whitaker welterweight fight at the Garden, publicists were hoping for a fair turnout, and they got it.
After lunch, and prior to his workout, Lewis sat down with a medium-sized mob of scribes. Toward the end of the session, the question which arose - and lest there be any mistake about this, we have relied on a tape recording of the conversation - went like this:
"What do you like and what don't you like about Evander Holyfield?"
"The only thing about Evander Holyfield I may not like is the fact that he doesn't practise what he preaches," said Lewis, measuring his words carefully. "What I do like about him, you know, he's a man who's been through it all. He's gone through the same sacrifices that I've gone through, so I know the hard work he's gone through."
"What doesn't he practise that he preaches?"
"Well, you know, I don't really need to delve into that," Lewis attempted to demur. "I won't be bashing him up here, but I'm sure you guys know."
By now his inquisitors were circling like piranhas.
"You mean the illegitimate children?" one pressed on.
At this point Lewis clearly had his back to the ropes.
"Yeah," he confirmed after a slight hesitation. "And then he comes back and says he's religious, and then he goes and does it again, and then he comes back and says how religious he is. To me, I just look at that as being a hypocrite."
That was the sum of it, a brief snippet out of a dialogue that had lasted nearly an hour. At the conclusion of the interview there was a mad rush to the telephones to see who could be the first to breathlessly inform Holyfield "Lennox just called you a hypocrite!!"
Now, for the record, Holyfield has freely acknowledged having fathered five children - by four different mothers - out of wedlock. He dutifully supports each of them financially, as he does his three children from his first marriage and his most recent issue, a product of his current marriage. As someone pointed out in the course of the Lewis confab, "Evander only has a problem with one commandment - but that one he keeps breaking over and over again!"
When reached at his training camp in Houston, Holyfield seemed unruffled by the incipient war of words.
"It doesn't bother me," said Holyfield with a chuckle. "What he's saying is I made some mistakes. If I can be heavyweight champion of the world and make mistakes, why can't I be a man of God and make mistakes? Why can't I clean myself and get back up?"
But a day later wire-service stories were moving around the world under headlines that read "Holyfield, Lewis in Verbal Battle" and "Holyfield Shrugs Off Lewis Accusation." It wasn't what you'd call journalism's proudest moment. Anyway . . . "What he's trying to do is psyche himself up," opined Holyfield, which may be true. What Lewis was clearly not trying to do was sell tickets, but the guy who had to be delighted by all of this was King, who has a big stake in the pay-per-view gate for the Madison Square Garden unification bout.
All 19,808 seats for Holyfield-Lewis were sold out two months before the fight, at prices ranging from $100 in the nosebleed sections to $1,500 ringside. (Occupants of the Garden luxury boxes will bring the live attendance to better than 21,000.)
(Update on King's special section for distinguished women guests: President McAleese has still not responded to the invitation of the World's Greatest Promoter to sit at ringside for Holyfield-Lewis, nor have Lady Thatcher, Hilary Rodham Clinton, or, unsurprisingly, Mother Teresa taken him up on his offer. But - or so claimed King the last time we spoke with him - "Mo Mowlam is gonna be there!") The showdown between Lewis, the 33-year-old World Boxing Council (WBC) champion from Britain (or Canada, or possibly Jamaica), and the 36-year-old Holyfield, who holds the titles of the World Boxing Association and International Boxing Federation, has taken on additional significance for the former. Lewis has fought most of his career in the shadows of other heavyweights - George Foreman and Riddick Bowe, Holyfield and Mike Tyson. He feels he had not received his due, particularly from the US boxing media and American fans.
Holyfield, who shares with Ali the distinction of being the only man to win the heavyweight title three times, has a secure place in boxing history regardless of the outcome, having faced and beaten everyone from Buster Douglas and Larry Holmes to Foreman and Tyson (twice), as well as having avenged losses to Bowe and Michael Moorer.
Lewis has faced less formidable opposition (although sometimes through no fault of his own: Bowe and Tyson, for instance, each gave up the WBC title rather than face him), and continues to be dogged by his only career loss - a 1994 knockout in London which briefly elevated Oliver McCall, a career-long sparring partner, to the heavyweight championship.
"Lennox is a two-time heavyweight champion," is the way trainer Emanuel Steward put it this week, "but if he don't beat Evander Holyfield that won't mean anything. He'll just be another guy with dreadlocks from England.
"He's going to have to live the rest of his life with this," explained Steward, who once trained Holyfield and was in McCall's corner the night he beat Lewis. "He knows his whole career is going to be defined in one fight."
