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Using a masterful left jab and landing his right hand at will, Lewis battered a befuddled Mike Tyson before stopping him with a crashing right hand in the eighth round to keep his heavyweight titles Saturday night.
Tyson was bleeding from cuts over both his eyes and from his nose when Lewis landed a punch that sent him sprawling on his back in Lewis' corner. Tyson tried to stand up at the count of eight, getting to one knee, but he was counted out by referee Eddie Cotton at 2:25 of the round.
"Some of the punches he took, I was shocked," Lewis said. "I felt them right through to my hand."
It was a sudden end to a dominating performance by Lewis, who overwhelmed the former champion from the opening bell at the Pyramid Arena.
"There's no way I could ever beat him," Tyson said. "He's just too big and too strong."
Lewis, the IBF and WBC champion, had vowed to beat Tyson to restore order to the heavyweight division. He pounded him with jabs from the first round on, keeping Tyson away and out of range. When Tyson did get close, Lewis hit him with a right uppercut or an overhand right.
"I wanted to prove I was the best fighter in the world," Lewis said. "Nobody gets away from my jab."
Tyson certainly didn't. He was exposed as a fighter with limited skills who kept trying to throw punches at the champion but connected only occasionally. Tyson kept trying to rush in and land a big punch, but he never hurt Lewis with any of them.
The sight of Tyson being so thoroughly dominated was almost as shocking as his behavior afterwards, when he tenderly wiped the blood off of Lewis' cheek as the two answered questions.
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Early in the eighth round, Tyson was already bleeding when Lewis hit him with a series of punches that buckled his legs and nearly put him down. Cotton ruled it a knockdown and gave Tyson an 8-count.
When the fight resumed, Lewis went after Tyson again, throwing right hands and jabs before finally connecting with a huge right hand that crashed into the side of Tyson's face, sending him sprawling on his back.
"He was ducking to my right, and I just wanted to catch him as he was doing that," Lewis said. "I caught him and he went down."
Tyson had gone into the ring an underdog for the first time in his career, and it was quickly apparent why.
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Punch Stats showed Lewis threw 328 punches and landed 193 of them, while Tyson threw 211 and landed only 49.
Officials had worried so much about Tyson fouling Lewis that there was a contract clause that a fighter who committed a vicious foul had to pay the other $3 million if the fight ended because of it.
Once the fight started, though, it was Lewis who was warned by Cotton for elbowing, pushing and holding. Cotton took a point away from Lewis in the fourth round for holding.
The three ringside judges gave Tyson only the first round, while The Associated Press had Lewis winning every round.
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At 6-foot-5, 249\ pounds, he was bigger, faster and stronger than the 5-11 Tyson, who weighed 234½.
"Mike Tyson was not ready for this kind of fight," Lewis' trainer Emanuel Steward said. "I was disappointed, but I was also relieved. It went pretty much exactly the way we wanted it to. The main thing was to make Mike Tyson fight Lennox's kind of fight and once we did that we knew it was going to be over."
Lewis said he never worried about Tyson biting him or committing a foul to change the outcome of the fight.
"I thought Mike Tyson was going to behave himself. There was too many people watching. I wasn't going to give him any reason to bite me," he said.
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Still, Steward kept telling Lewis between rounds to finish off Tyson.
"Emanuel was pleading with me to take him out," Lewis said. "Emanuel told me to take him out earlier. I was just waiting for the time."
The loss may have been disastrous to the career of Tyson, who terrorized the heavyweight ranks in the 1980s, but has looked very ordinary in the ring since.
He and Lewis each made about $20 million for the fight and their contract called for a rematch. But it is not likely one would sell after the beating Tyson took - even worse than the one Holyfield gave him in their first fight in November 1996.
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Tyson and Lewis had been kept apart since they brawled in January at a news conference. A dozen yellow-shirted security guards entered the ring before the fighters and made sure they were separated until the bell.
Tyson came into the fight with only 18 rounds in the ring since biting Holyfield. During that time, Lewis was in 12 title fights, winning all except for a fluke punch by Hasim Rahman and a disputed draw with Holyfield.
The ring rust showed. Tyson appeared confused every time Lewis backed him up with the jab. He said after his last fight that he needed two more fights to get ready for Lewis, but claimed after 160 rounds of sparring that he was ready to beat him.
"He hurt me early, and he just kept pressure on me," Tyson said. "I could take a shot from him but I just couldn't see every punch."
Born to be rivals, they fought for keeps too late
Email this StoryThey began circling each other as teen-agers, the two best prospects in a generation brimming with promising fighters. It seems remarkable now that it took nearly two decades to match them up, though this late in their careers proved only slightly more satisfying than never.
"Heavyweights mature at different times," Lewis said Saturday night.
Moments earlier, he had finished off a brutal knockout with a crashing right hand that put Tyson down at 2:25 of the eighth round.
"When Mike was 19, he ruled the world. I'm like a fine wine," Lewis said. "I came along later on. I went along, just took my time, and I'm ruling now."
Afterward, Tyson was still bleeding from the mouth and nose, and both eyes were swollen. He said he didn't worry about what might have been, about whether the result would have been different had they met in their primes.
"It wasn't meant to be," Tyson said.
The first time the two clashed, there was nothing on the line. The fighting covered a few sparring sessions in 1984, when they were brash youngsters going at it over the course of four days in a makeshift ring in the Catskills in New York.
Cus D'Amato, the manager who had plucked Tyson from a Brooklyn ghetto and pointed him toward the title, warned his young charge to keep an eye on Lewis' progress even then.
Six years ago, Tyson decided he'd seen enough. At about the same time, Lewis decided he'd heard enough.
The one-time Olympic champion was already conducting a very public crusade to clean up the sport. Nothing would have pleased him more than sweeping Tyson out with the rest of the garbage Lewis claimed was clogging up the heavyweight division.
There was only one thing separating them at the time, but it was a formidable obstacle: The cable networks that held each fighter's TV rights had become even fiercer rivals than the boxers themselves.
"Frankly," HBO Sports senior vice president Mark Taffet said, "this fight wasn't even on our radar screen any more. The one and only reason we did it is because Lennox asked us to. He said at this point in his career, this was the fight that would cement his legacy and his place in the sport."
Remembering the day the contract was finally signed, sealed and delivered, Showtime chief Jay Larkin smiled mischievously.
"Our priority was to get Tyson a shot at the title," he said. "Everything else we viewed as details."
Oh, but what details were in the contract to make certain the only fighting Saturday night was inside the ring.
The inches-thick document is a testament to lawyers and the notion that money, finally, is what makes the world go round. It guarantees each fighter $17.5 million and an equal split of worldwide revenues that could reach $150 million if the pay-per-view buys (at $54.95) approach the record 1.9 million recorded for Tyson-Holyfield II.
HBO and Showtime are companies that do business in radically different ways, but once they sat down to negotiate, the single most important detail was security.
The contract called for a $3 million penalty to be paid from one fighter to the other if either was disqualified because of a vicious foul. Instructions were delivered to the fighters in their locker rooms beforehand. Security guards stood shoulder to shoulder in a diagonal line to keep Tyson and Lewis apart during the introductions. The first time they were close enough to touch each other was when the bell rang.
Yet all the precautions turned out to be unnecessary.
Lewis is 36 and Tyson 35, and as the fight wore on, it was clear which fighter's skills had diminished with age. The 5-foot-11 Tyson could not fight his way inside against the 6-5 Lewis. Despite repeated threats to "crush" Lewis' skull and "smear his pompous brains" all over the mat, Tyson rarely dented Lewis' defenses and never tried to foul him.
"I love and respect him too much to be disrespectful that way," Tyson said as the fighters stood side by side afterward.
He thanked Lewis for giving him a chance at the heavyweight championship when no one else would and then, in the most touching moment of the evening, Tyson reached up and wiped a spot of blood off Lewis' cheek.
With Tyson's blood still splattered across his white satin trunks, Lewis was equally gracious.
"Some of the punches that I caught him with, he took like a man. I felt them all the way through to my hands," Lewis said.
But he stopped short of committing to a rematch.
"He's asked for one. I definitely would consider it, but it depends on what the people want," Lewis said.
Iron Mike is done.
People who want to see more of this should have their heads examined.
Lewis was stronger, faster and better conditioned, and he will be every time they meet from here on out.
This wasn't a fight as much as a clinic. Once turned out to be enough.
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Jim Litke is the national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org
