When Lennox Lewis looks at Shannon Briggs, he sees a challenger destroyed. Despite a brief moment of self-doubt when Briggs rocked him in their fight's opening moments, the WBC heavyweight champion looks back on that evening as a dominating performance that ended as so many of his fights have -- with his opponent on the floor.
"I wasn't that hurt but it made it real exciting for the public," Lewis said this week. "You can't walk in the ring without getting hit. Shannon Briggs pulled out all the stops."
Eventually Briggs got hit, falling to his knees in exhaustion after missing a wild hook. The referee decided he had seen enough of Lewis' fists and stopped the fight.
A few feet from the ring sat another heavyweight contender, Zeljko Mavrovic. Mavrovic watched Lewis totter back on rubbery legs and smiled. That is the image he has retained from that night as his own night with Lewis approaches.
So when he thinks of Saturday night -- when the two square off on HBO -- Mavrovic doesn't see Shannon Briggs at all. What he sees is Lennox Lewis in trouble.
"What I saw that moment was a fighter who didn't have the motivation for the training," the unknown Croatian heavyweight explained this week. "I saw a fighter who has a problem with his mind and his motivation. He didn't prepare well.
"I prepared 11 months for this fight. I always train very seriously and I can fight! I know his good points and his bad points."
Mavrovic is the WBC's No. 1 contender, which doesn't necessarily mean anything. For the past three years, he has also been the European heavyweight champion, which is like being the Super Bowl champion of Hong Kong.
Title or no title, few people give Mavrovic much of a chance against Lewis and that probably includes the 250-plus lb. champion. For all Lewis' professed respect for his opponent, the only heavyweight on his mind is WBA-IBF titleholder Evander Holyfield.
Talk with Lewis for long and the conversation always drifts away from Mavrovic to Holyfield. Lewis has been chasing him for two years without catching him.
Lewis has twice agreed to a purse figure for a unification fight with Holyfield but has never been able to come to an agreement with the man who conquered Mike Tyson. And so he has ended up with lesser lights like Briggs and now Mavrovic, marking time for the fight he wants.
"If I lose this fight, there is no afterfight," Lewis (33-1, 27 KOs) says. "There is no Holyfield fight. So I've got to keep it going."
To do that, Lewis believes he must do more than defeat Mavrovic (27-0, 22 KOs). He must rid the ring of him quickly, not only destroying his challenger but uplifting himself -- in contrast to Holyfield's lackluster 12-round decision over his own mandatory challenger, Vaughn Bean, last weekend.
Such a desire can open a man up to possible disaster if not undertaken with some control, but Lewis seems to believe that Mavrovic is, like Briggs, a victim in the making.
"I expect him to try and box, to go into survival mode," Lewis says. "He'll try to use the ring to his advantage. I'll just search and destroy. I don't plan on this guy going the distance."
Neither does Emanuel Steward, Lewis' trainer. Steward once trained Holyfield and now is in pursuit of him, but he knows that Lennox Lewis must do more than beat Mavrovic. He must destroy him and everyone else who comes between him and Holyfield.
"The only remote chance he has to fight Evander is for Lennox to look so impressive that the American public will start to give him some credibility against Evander," Steward says. "He'll need tremendous public pressure to make that fight. Zeljko Mavrovic hopefully will be the beginning of that."
This fight is about turning one man's dream into another man's nightmare. The
one who does will have moved closer to fighting Evander Holyfield.
