BOXING: "His teeth are capped, his middle is girdled, his voice is a husk, his eyes film over with glassy impersonality. He has tantrums on stage and, like some ageing politician, is reduced to the ranks of the grotesque."

So wrote critic Peter Graining in the 1976 Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, less than a year before Elvis Presley was found dead in his Graceland mansion.

Now Memphis prepares to present us with another fallen hero of whom Graining's words ring eerily true; another altogether more unpalatable vision of jailhouse rock will appear at at Memphis's 20,000-seater Pyramid Arena when Mike Tyson finally challenges Lennox Lewis for his IBF, IBO and WBC titles on June 8th.

When Tyson was denied a licence by the Nevada State Athletic Commission in the wake of his press conference brawl with Lennox Lewis in New York in January, he and his promoters knew he was not going to be short of alternatives.

Even then the fight was only made after Tyson's backers, the Showtime television network, agreed to stump up the $12.5 million US dollars site fee guaranteed as part of Lewis' original contract.

Lewis will have blanched at the prospect of giving Tyson another chance, but can hardly be blamed for not turning his back on a bout which will guarantee him a minimum $17 million and the era-defining fight he could never get against Riddick Bowe.

The authorities insist they will not allow a repeat of the ugly scenes in New York, with WBC president Jose Sulaiman saying: "One of the asks is to avoid face-offs which give nothing to the sport. We will forbid any physical aggressiveness."