George Kimball reports from Memphis: Once Lennox Lewis took over the fight in Saturday night's second round, it became apparent what a mismatch was unfolding. The heavyweight champion at work was a disciplined master beating the rage out of an unruly pet, and did such a good job of domesticating him that when the end came, a surprisingly civil Mike Tyson appeared dangerously close to having been housebroken.

When closure arrived with Tyson, bleeding from both eyes and his nostrils, stretched out on the canvas being counted out by referee Eddie Cotton, Lewis strutted about the ring, pounding on his chest with his left glove.

"This is my defining fight," he proclaimed. "It's what the whole world wanted."

Perhaps not the whole world, but at least that portion of it which had decided that Saturday night's match-up constituted a morality play.

Lewis had promised to "rid boxing of its last misfit", and he may have done just that. Although the contracts Lewis and Tyson signed for Saturday night's heavyweight championship fight at the Pyramid provided for a rematch, Lewis' performance was so decisive and Tyson's so, well, toothless, that there are few compelling reasons for them to stage a reprise, or for the rest of us to watch it.

Saturday night's fight may not only have ended Tyson's championship pretensions, it may have signalled the end of his career as a useful boxer.

After battering and pulverizing Tyson over the last seven rounds of the eight it lasted, Lewis waved an extended left arm in Tyson's face and crushed him with a roundhouse overhand right, and the onetime "Baddest Man on the Planet" was counted out at 2:25 of the eighth.

From the second round on it was apparent that Tyson was but a shell of the dangerous fighter who burst onto the heavyweight scene 17 years ago.

Lewis, in registering his 40th professional win against two losses and a draw (all three of which were avenged in subsequent rematches) completely dominated Tyson, landing 109 jabs and 84 power punches, most of them right uppercuts which Tyson was unable to avoid.

The upset, if there was one, was that Tyson, in Lewis' words, "took it like a man" and did not resort to the foul tactics many among the announced crowd of 15,327 had come half-expecting to witness. There were no bites, no scratches, no arm-breaking attempts in the clinches, and by the time Tyson aimed a couple of punches at Lewis' scrotum late in the fight, he was too spent to do any damage to even that tender spot.

The one-sided beating may have pleased the more sadistic among Lewis's army of supporters, but it did little to whet the appetite of the public for another fight between the two.

Lewis is next obligated to defend the IBF portion of his championship against that organisation's top-rated contender Chris Byrd, and assuming he gets past that mandatory defence would then theoretically be free to fight Tyson again. But selling the reprise as a competitive match would tax the imagination of showman PT Barnum.

For nearly a dozen years now, Tyson has been more sideshow freak than legitimate threat, and even those who clung to that delusion will by now have been disabused. Finding a site for Lewis-Tyson II wouldn't be a problem.

Some boxing backwater will always be willing to follow Memphis' example and risk bankrupting its fortunes by underwriting the fight as a civic endeavour, although it is unlikely any venue would match the $12.5 million site fee Memphis posted for this one.

If all else failed, one could always take the fight to Lewis's native Britain, where the boxing public is so gullible they'll believe almost anything as long as it involves one of their own. (See Naseem Hamed, et al).

The larger problem would lie in selling a rematch to the living-room consumers who pay the freight in the world of contemporary boxing economics.

The pay-per-view telecast of Lewis-Tyson was priced at a world-record $54.95, and while Saturday night's sales were brisk, most viewers grudgingly shelled out to watch what they had been persuaded was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Fooling them again would take some doing, and the notion of persuading Lewis (who contractually would earn the better end of a 60/40 split in any rematch) to fight Tyson at a reduced price seems fancifully unlikely.

There is no earthly reason to suppose that the outcome would be any different the second time around, but that having been said, in a very odd sense, Tyson, on the strength of bravery alone, probably deserves a second fight more than he deserved the first one.

If his number one ranking (by the World Boxing Council) was demonstrated to be a sham illustrative of boxing politics at its worst, he is at the same time probably no worse than many among today's poor crop of heavyweights likely to come knocking at Lewis's door.

"Anything is possible," allowed Lewis when asked about the possibility of Tyson II. "If the public demands it, we should do it."

If the public demands it, the public should have its collective heads examined.