Is Lennox Lewis an All Time Great?
By Geoff “The Professor” Pounder
Ringside Report
Lennox Lewis
By Diego
It is perhaps not surprising with Samuel Peter having been exposed as a fraud, and with the Klitschko brothers rise to the top of the heavyweight championship, that there should come calls for Lennox Lewis to step out of retirement and clean the whole mess up. After all, Lennox was the last heavyweight to have been able to legitimately lay claim to being the undisputed best of his era.
That Lewis was the dominant heavyweight of his time is not open to question – but where does it place him alongside the all-time greats of the flagship division? Does Lewis bear comparison with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano or Jack Johnson?
His record was sound on paper: only 2 losses in 44 contests, with both those losses avenged in emphatic style – Lewis can claim to be only one of two heavyweights in history to have beaten every man he faced, which should place him squarely at the top table of any all-time heavyweight list.
Yet for all his undoubted abilities, Lennox Lewis was never able to quite grasp the imagination of the boxing public in the way that Ali, or Tyson, or even Holyfield was able to. There are striking similarities with the career of Larry Holmes, who fought in the shadow of Ali despite being a true and great champion, in that Lewis was never able to generate the kind of excitement at fight-time that Mike Tyson was able to engender. Of course, we all tuned in to Lennox’s title contests as we dutifully do whenever two men are pitched into a contest for the heavyweight title – but never with the same throb of anticipation that accompanied Tyson as he approached a ring.
Maybe this was because Lewis appeared to adopt a safety first approach to his boxing too often, something that certainly could never be said of Larry Holmes, Evander Holyfield or Mike Tyson. It’s true that the general public, not necessarily steeped in the beauty of boxing for boxing’s sake, likes it’s Heavyweight Champion to be a brawler, a predator, a man evincing menace and thuggery – and if they can’t have that they look for an entertainer, a man dripping with charisma and charm, disdainfully dismantling his foe with wit and wisdom. They want the bull, or the matador, and will shout equally for both.
The trouble for Lewis, and probably for Holmes, is that they were neither. Lewis boxed conservatively (never a good word to attach to a heavyweight champion) and skillfully, and often found himself dominant in fights that invariably stunk the place out. Unable to maintain an aura of invincibility through two crushing knockout defeats to middling contenders Oliver McCall and Hasim Rahman, Lennox took a hesitancy into the ring that left on-lookers dissatisfied with performance after performance, and it was only very late in his career, when he dismantled an aged and unhinged Tyson, and then very nearly came unstuck against Vitali Klitschko, that Lennox finally came to life, at least in the public’s fickle imagination.
The question is: should an assessment of Lewis’s place in history be marred by a lack of the popular vote when he was clearly an outstanding fighter with a huge arsenal of gifts at his disposal. After all, he beat everyone that was put in front of him: Tyson, Holyfield, Shannon Briggs, Andrew Golota, Ray Mercer, Frank Bruno, Razor Ruddock, Frans Botha, Michael Grant. These were the “names” in his heavyweight division – and whilst some claim that Lewis made a lucrative career out of fighting nobodies, I say take a look at Mike Tyson’s record. The “names” are pretty much the same, and where there are uncommon opponents, Lewis’s were of equal quality to Iron Mike’s.
If I have to take task with Lennox, it’s that he ushered in the age of the giant Heavyweight. Before Lewis came along, men who stood more than 6 feet 4 inches were thought of as too big to be capable pugilists – and history bore this out. Before Lewis won his first WBC Title in 1993 there were two “tall” Heavyweight Champions – Jess Willard (6ft 6 1/2inches) , who reigned between 1915 and 1919, and Primo Carnera (6ft 5 ½ inches) who held the title between 1933 and 1934.
Now both Willard and Carnera hold the distinction of being, in many commentators’ views, the very worst combatants ever to have laid hands on the championship! Willard won his title in dubious circumstances when he knocked out the great Jack Johnson in Havana, Cuba in 1915 (Johnson later claimed he threw the fight), defended it once in four years, before 6 feet 1 inch Jack Dempsey took him apart in the most brutal three rounds of boxing seen before or since in a heavyweight ring. Carnera, who was nicknamed sweetly “The Ambling Alp”, was marketed more often than not as an oddity, and was widely thought to be mafia-managed, to the extent that his annexing of the title with a 6th round knockout of Jack Sharkey in 1933 was felt in some quarters to have been pre-ordained. Certainly when Carnera came up against the enigmatic and prodigiously talented Max Baer a year later, he was bounced off the canvas 11 times in 11 rounds, before the referee called a merciless halt to proceedings.
Until Lewis came along at 6 feet 5 inch, the best heavyweights tended to measure somewhere around 6ft 1inches to 6 feet 3inches tall. Of course, since Lewis, they’ve shot up still further, with the Klitschko brothers over 6’6,” and of course the freakish Nikolay Valuev, who stands over 7 feet tall. The point is – such height may well translate into a certain type of physical advantage, but it may also prove disadvantageous in terms of speed, leverage (it’s harder to punch down than up) and mobility. It is perhaps informative that the likes of Rocky Marciano, Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson stood less than six feet tall, and the most-often stated all-time greats in the division, stood just over 6 feet tall – Louis, Dempsey and Johnson. Ali, of course, was a big heavyweight for his day, at 6 feet 3 inches. When these Champions stood across from a ring with the giants of their day, they invariably had easy nights. Dempsey had his Willard, Joe Louis dispatched the 6 feet 6 inch Buddy Baer in less than a round, and Ali destroyed Ernie Terrell (6 feet 6 inches) in 1967.
So what does all this have to do with Lennox Lewis’s legacy? Well, it’s this scribe’s view that Lewis was a good, big heavyweight in an era when that was often enough to get him through. He struggled with Evander Holyfield, a “small” but highly skilled protagonist, and got himself knocked out by two smaller men in McCall and Rahman. It has been said that had Lennox had an opponent worthy of him, a Frazier to his Ali, then he would have been more highly thought of. Many people believe that that opponent should have been Riddick Bowe, had he not frittered away his promise on cheeseburgers and paranoia. We’ll never know, although one suspects that given the problems that Holyfield presented for Bowe, the latter was not perhaps destined for the heights that Lennox himself managed to climb.
In conclusion, then, Lewis was good, but not great. I don’t believe he would have beaten the likes of Dempsey, Louis, Ali or Johnson – and in fact, I believe he would have been taken out by an in-prime Tyson (ie before Kevin Rooney jumped ship). For this writer, Lewis stands just outside the top ten or fifteen heavyweights of all time. Granted, he was thirty-seven when in his final contest he took on Vitali Klitschko, but he came desperately close to annihilation in that match against a man who’s family have set new standards of heavyweight clumsiness. I invite anyone to watch over the tape of Klitschko in the Lewis and Peter fights, and then go into the archives and pull out some footage of the Ambling Alp, Primo Carnera himself, in action. The similarity is startling.
