At the same Seoul 1988 Olympics in which Lennox Lewis defeated Riddick Bowe for the superheavyweight championship, Ray Mercer beat somebody named Baik Hyan-man for the heavyweight gold medal.
At the time, Mercer was a noncommissioned officer in the US army. Sergeant Mercer is now 40, and while his advanced age saved him from being recalled to active duty for the present unpleasantries in Afghanistan, he bears an even weightier responsibility in his next mission: Ray Mercer is the only man alive who can save the pay-per-view boxing world from shelling out (at least) $50 a pop to watch Lennox Lewis fight Mike Tyson.
Twice.
Lewis vs Tyson may not loom the most compelling match-up on the contemporary heavyweight horizon (and Part II may be even worse), but it is the one the public thinks it wants to see, and that, in the end, is all that matters. Lewis' fourth-round knockout of Hasim Rahman in Las Vegas last Saturday night will allow Home Box Office (HBO) and Showtime to implement a scheme for a two-leg series, the bare bones of which had been laid out before Rahman derailed the plot by knocking Lewis out in South Africa last spring.
The rival networks will bury their adversarial relationship to co-operate on a two-fight package. HBO will televise Lewis-Tyson I, slated to take place in Las Vegas the first week in April, with Showtime getting the rights for the tape-delayed (free) home broadcast a week later. The networks would then switch those roles for the rematch later in 2002.
Since the boxers themselves figure to earn as much as $20 million apiece for each of the two fights, you can almost take it to the bank that the networks will earn even more.
It might seem surprising, then, that Showtime is insisting that Iron Mike go ahead with his planned test against Mercer on January 19th (probably in Atlantic City, possibly in New York), but with a substantial investment in Tyson, the network is apparently determined to squeeze every drop from the cash cow while it is still viable.
"Mercer bangs hard and doesn't get knocked out," explained Showtime executive producer Jay Larkin. "He's a serious test for anyone. Tyson believes he needs this level of competition to prepare to challenge for the title. The fans will be the beneficiaries."
Back in 1995, you may recall, Mercer made Evander Holyfield look so bad that Tyson jumped at the chance to fight him. A year later Mercer fought Lewis so tough that one ringside judge scored it a draw.
Mercer is on a five-year, six-fight win streak since those back-to-back losses. On the undercard of last month's Tyson-Brian Nielsen fight in Copenhagen, he stopped the immortal Bryan Scott in two rounds of a fight that lasted just long enough for Mercer to get cut. That wound proved fortuitous in that it took him out of an HBO date against Wladimir Klitschko that was already on the books for December 1st, and made him available for Tyson in January.
Lewis, in the meantime, rehabilitated himself Saturday night at the Mandalay Bay casino with a thundering right hand that separated Rahman from his titles as well as his senses.
If Rahman represented, as the Lewis camp maintained, a journeyman heavyweight who got lucky with one punch in South Africa, he had convinced many boxing experts, including this one, that he had a chance in the rematch simply because he appeared to be winning the psychological battle in the days and weeks preceding the bout.
Rahman admitted that he was trying to rattle Lewis by provoking his anger, and he certainly did that, with relentless taunting that at times verged on gay-bashing.
At one point Rahman suggested that it was entirely appropriate that Lewis' fights were preceded by the singing of God Save the Queen, and during a late August television interview at a California sports bar he invoked the "G" word so repeatedly that it precipitated an unseemly wrestling match on the saloon floor.
When the Lewis camp cried "foul", it was pointed out that their man had resorted to psychological warfare preceding his two fights with Holyfield, in which he had described Holyfield as a "hypocrite" for professing piety while simultaneously (and prodigiously) fathering a platoon of out-of-wedlock children.
When this dichotomy was pointed out to Rahman, the then-champion barely hesitated before offering his own mischievous spin on the issue: "Hmm," he smiled in mock puzzlement. "How many babies does Lennox have?"
"I don't care what Lennox says, he got to him," said Rahman's trainer, Adrian Davis, when we ran into him at the Las Vegas airport the day after the fight.
Lewis admitted as much.
"He did get under my skin a little bit," said Lewis after reclaiming his titles, which he quickly insisted had merely been "on loan". Lewis spent three rounds punishing Rahman with his jab before he showed him a left hook and then knocked him silly with the right hand.
After all of that you might have expected that Lewis wouldn't exactly be gracious in victory, and he wasn't. He dismissed Rahman's reign as a Warholesque "15 minutes of fame", referred to his fallen adversary as "Has-Been Rahman", and, perhaps most cruelly of all, described the ex-champion as "the Buster Douglas of the 21st Century".
But if Lewis thinks for a moment he knocked out the trash-talking by knocking out Rahman he will shortly be disabused of the notion. If history has shown anything it is that Tyson is even better at intimidating opponents than he is at punching their lights out, and having been shown a chink in the Lewis armour he is likely to go right after it with a ferocity that will make Rahman's pre-fight banter seem downright good-natured. This could get real ugly, and it probably will.
