Mike Tyson's fight against Lennox Lewis turned out to be a big turning point in his illustrious career
Mike Tyson’s knockout defeat to Lennox Lewis 20 years ago marked the end of his time as an elite-level heavyweight, but the beginning of his unlikely renaissance with the sporting public.
The bad blood before the Lewis-Tyson fight had been intense. “I want your heart, I want to eat his children,” snarled Tyson about a then child-less Lennox afterin Glasgow. When the pair later came face-to-face to promote their contest, Tyson stalked across the stage to attack Lewis. Tyson, the vulgar street thug, had been vanquished in his last heavyweight title fight. Yet in the aftermath, public opinion was already turning his way. As Lewis and Tyson paid one another respect in the ring, ‘Iron Mike’ admitted that his pre-fight insults were just part of the hype, pausing to gently wipe away blood from Lewis’s face mid-interview. The man who had wanted to eat Lewis’s kids was now telling him how much he loved the Brit and his mother.
The answer to a question on where Tyson went next brought a more ominous answer. “I might just fade into ’bolivian,” Tyson said, famously mangling ‘oblivion’. “I don’t have nowhere to go or nuthin to do. I’ll just go fly my pigeons on the roof in New York, you know.” His bravery during the fight and humbleness after it softened views of Tyson. But they did nothing to take the edge off his demons. Tyson’s private life continued to veer out of control and in 2003, he filed for bankruptcy despite having earned over $300million in his career. But opinion was shifting. Instead of condemning the spendthrift fighter, many were asking who had been ripping him off all this time.
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