Mayweather's grandson gets hyped up after watching Mayweather boxing in adorable video He was the lead attraction at a fight for the wealthy and, weighing a then-career heaviest 18st 11/2lbs, performed sluggishly and was breathing heavily until, in the fifth round, Rahman knocked him out by landing that most explosive of right hands. When “Thunder in Africa” started there were 5,000 in attendance and yet few of the Africans Lewis – who had also visited Soweto and AIDS orphanages, and transported deprived children to open sparring sessions – had liked the thought of watching him were present. Lewis, who had been losing at chess all week, had even had a premonition that Steward would be unhappy with his condition, which he was. DeMercardo had dreamed that Rahman would stop him Emanuel Steward had been unhappy about the prospect of fighting in South Africa from the very start some were troubled by the fact that Melissa Mathison, shadowing Lewis while writing about him, had been given permission to become the first woman allowed in his dressing room, pre-fight. It has since been suggested that a sense of foreboding had grown in the minds of those around him. Rahman, like Lewis aware that they would be fighting 5,200ft above sea level, had arrived a month in advance.Īt the start of fight week, in one of his media commitments Lewis declared “I’m way ahead of schedule” and yet, in a pre-fight interview from his dressing room, he confirmed that had Tyson or Klitschko been his opponent that night he would have arrived earlier to adjust. Lewis and his team were also presented with the logistical difficulties of, for security reasons, never taking the same route between destinations, and of the fact that they would be fighting at 6am, and therefore running at 2am, training at 3am and sleeping during the day. When they eventually arrived 11 days before he was due to fight, Lewis, still lacking focus, attended a memorial service at Ellis Park in Johannesburg for the 43 football supporters who had died days earlier in a crush during the fixture between the local rivals Kaiser Chiefs and Orlando Pirates, and sought to console the victims’ relatives and friends.Ĥ No one was expecting Rahman to beat Lewis, but he managed it in the fifth round Credit: getty A collective sense of camp fever even manifested itself in heated confrontations between the often-serene Lewis and Scott DeMercado, his friend. The unity that existed among Lewis and those closest to him in the Poconos had been undermined by them being divided between rented houses. His training camp, unusually, was also somewhat tense. Where he was typically content preparing to fight in peace and relative isolation in the Poconos mountains in Pennsylvania, his commitment to Ocean’s Eleven contributed to him training in the desert city of Las Vegas.Īlready short of time to fly to South Africa and adjust to the altitude ahead of fight night, the filming of his scene had been postponed. Lewis had also agreed to a cameo role in Ocean’s Eleven, in which he would play the world heavyweight champion in a fictional fight against Wladimir Klitschko. ![]() A child once full of admiration for the great Muhammad Ali, he was also heartened by the prospect of fighting in front of impoverished Africans as Ali and George Foreman once had in The Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire. With Tyson continuing to unravel and the complex conflict of interests surrounding both fighters threatening to prevent them from ever fighting, the fight with Rahman was another occasion for which Lewis would be handsomely paid. 4 Lewis almost lost the chance to fight Tyson when he was KO'd by Rahman Credit: Getty
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