Sports

OBSESSED LEWIS CHAMPING AT BIT

SCOTRUN, Pa. – Fittingly, Lennox Lewis did not say the words, so much as he bit them off. For a moment, the smile vanished from his face, his eyes went dead. For the only time all day, his mood became serious.

“Bite on the leg. Bite on the leg. That changed everything,” he said. “Up until that, Mike Tyson was just another guy I was going to fight.”

To illustrate his point, Lewis passed around a copy of a new coffee table book about his life, titled simply and regally, “Lennox.”

On page 183, directly across from a photo that captured Tyson in full snarl just before their Jan. 22 news conference at the Hudson Theater erupted into chaos, is a closeup of a man’s left forefinger pointing to a quarter-sized wound on the same man’s exposed left thigh.

The thigh belonged to Lewis and the teeth were Tyson’s, the story goes. Hey, stranger things have been passed off as truth in the world of boxing.

“Can you believe he did that?” Lewis asked a group of reporters who attended his Poconos training camp yesterday. “I knew he bit Holyfield, but I was actually a little surprised that he fights that way. I remember I said to Troy [the bodyguard Tyson blamed for precipitating the brawl], ” ‘He’s biting my leg, man!’ “

For a man who interviews as cautiously as he fights, it was as close as the heavyweight champion had ever come to a moment of self-revelation.

Until that moment – when the real fury and depravity of Tyson emerged for all to see – Lewis had assumed this would be no different than the other 42 professional bouts he’d fought during the past 13 years.

Now, Lewis knows that any meeting with Mike Tyson is more than just a fight, the same way any interview with him is more than just a talk.

Now, Lewis knows he must be prepared for anything, inside or out of the ring as well as the rule book.

“He bit me on the leg,” Lewis said. “Truly, I don’t know what else he can do.”

In recent years, Tyson, the anti-Lewis, has allowed his dysfunctions to run wild. There has been no aspect of his life too private to be revealed – he has explained in graphic terms how taking Zoloft ruined his sex life – no manifestation of his anger too depraved to be expressed.

Last week alone, Tyson expressed the desire to crush the skulls of children and stomp on their testicles. This week, he said he wanted to kill Lewis when they finally meet on June 8 in Memphis. Perhaps more tellingly, he also said he wished Lewis “was dead already.”

“In a sense, I don’t even think he really wants the fight, with some of the things he says,” Lewis said. “Seriously, I think a lot of times, he’s talking for his own benefit. He’s trying to make himself out to be some kind of bad man, that he can say and do whatever he wants. But he’s going to learn that there are repercussions.”

Lewis, of course, could have brought some of those consequences to bear on Tyson.

The brawl at the Hudson Theater was the first of about a half-dozen legitimate excuses Tyson gave Lewis not to go through with the fight. The leg bite was another. Tyson’s failure to get licensed by Nevada was a third, and the collapse of the original April 6 date for the bout was another.

Through it all, Lewis kept his mouth shut, played it coy, held his judgment as to whether Tyson should have been permitted to fight.

“At one point, I thought the best way to punish Tyson would be to not fight him,” Lewis admitted. “When he bit me, I thought, ‘OK, he’s definitely trying to get out of the fight.’ But I wanted him to get out of the fight on its own merits, not with me helping the situation. So I never said anything.”

Now, the bite is out of the bag, and barring some bizarre circumstance, the bout will go off as scheduled.

Now, Lewis says he only thinks about how he will win.

“That bite changed the whole thing for me,” he said.

Now, Lennox Lewis said, he is “obsessed” with the thought of knocking out Mike Tyson, to “rid the world of the last misfit in boxing,” as he put it.

A bite on the leg will do that to a guy, even one as cautious as Lennox Lewis.