SLAM! Sports
SLAM! Boxing
COLUMNS
CANADIAN PUNCH
UPPERCUTS
LOOKING BACK
GALLERIES
INTERACTIVE
ALSO ON SLAM!
Round 2: Lewis versus Holyfield
Tonight's rematch features two boxers battling each other for a unified heavyweight title, but also joined together in the fight for the sport's survival.
While it may be fashionable to depict tonight's heavyweight title fight as being at the crossroads of boxing's survival, things are not entirely grave in this well-battered sport. As long as two men have a pair of fists, you may be certain they will use them for the entertainment of themselves and an audience.
But when Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis step into the ring around 11:30 p.m. tonight out in Las Vegas, how their scheduled 12-round fight unfolds will directly affect the financial future of their multi-million-dollar sport. They are opposition forces in the curious position of collaborating on a rescue mission.
Let's face it: Boxing has suffered more black eyes in the last couple of years than at any time in the last two decades, and that's saying something in an industry featuring ubiquitous promoter Don King as its spiritual leader.
Mike Tyson chomping on Holyfield's ears, the ludicrous draw rendered after Lewis dominated Holyfield in their first match, Andrew Golota's infamous low blows against Riddock Bowe, Lewis's first-round dispatch of a Golota, who later claimed to have been drugged, all exerted a huge strain on credibility.
Whoever else might be lured back to ringside, a good part of the television industry has been less-inclined to get involved in what has rapidly been declining into a gloved WWF. Boxing has, in fact, all but vanished from network TV.
CBC hasn't carried a bout since 1991. Fox, NBC and CBS don't televise any pro boxing any more, either. Even some cable outlets are pulling back, such as USA network dropping its weekly program. Last time NBC did a fight was seven years ago and it has been almost two years since Fox put one on. ABC showed a couple last year and might do a couple more next year.
Pay-per-view TV is big, no question. A lot of Canadians will be paying $79.95 a pop to call up tonight's fisticuffs on their home TVs. But it is the major networks that deliver sports to the masses and whets the appetites. Without them, a mainstream future is unsustainable.
It leaves tonight's go a single bout fought on two fronts. Each of the combatants has a lot at stake personally in financial and professional terms. Together, they also have inherited a mission to restore some semblence of pugilistic normality to an embattled sport.
Curiously, with so much at stake to boxing, this one does not have the usual punchy apocalyptic banner shouting a superlative catch-phrase, no Thrilla in Manila or Rumble in the Jungle or The Last Hurrah. King had to employ a complete if unwieldy sentence: The Search for the Truth . . . Unfinished Business, although he has been heard to murmur "A November to Remember."
It's the recent past he'd rather forget.
The truth being sought is whether boxing can lift itself out of its recent torpor with a competitive, suspenseful engagement via an outcome that does not ignite a barrage of ringside chairs and bottles from another shortchanged public. The elements for a good bout exist.
Lewis (34-1-1, 27 knockouts) and Holyfield (36-3-1, 25 KO's) bring more to the ring than their first outing. Barring one or the other suddenly getting old in one night, as sometimes happens to fighters in their 30s, it falls to Holyfield to solve the long-range control Lewis exerted with such precision the first time they met. If Holyfield can get inside, it will be a fight. If Lewis can enforce his cautious ring generalship through his educated jab and footwork, Holyfield is in for a long night. Or a short one.
The guy who defused Tyson twice has more to prove than Lewis, having become one of the great beneficiaries of judging malfeasance through the nonsense draw of last March. Holyfield is a proud and cagey champion who takes his place in boxing history seriously, so that it would be folly to imagine he'll walk into this one without a solid strategy.
But Lewis has to know his control of the first bout will be challenged immediately and will have to respond with his own battle plan. Holyfield figures to bob and weave from angles toward the inside this time, rather than be content to load up with the counter-punch bomb he never landed last time.
Lewis is favoured and should be. But he'd better be even more cautious this time.
So had everyone connected with this card. This game can't entirely survive another dog.
 Bert's back on blades Blue Jays boot game Bombers drop Peterson Felicien rebuilds race | Visit our Polls Archive |