A GOODBYE OR A SEE YA LATER?

The very best aspect of the welcome news to me that Lennox Claudius Lewis was retiring as reigning heavyweight champion of the world was a phone call, just a few days later, from his influential boxing business manager, Adrian Ogun to tell me that Lennox was to be the American promoter of South African contender Corrie Sanders in a bid for the now vacant World Boxing Council title.

“Get yourself something to do, dear”, a line from the old musical Salad Days, is the very best advice one could give to any sportsman retiring at the top. Especially boxers who tend to lack further education or job skills following years of endless training camps, physically and sometimes mentally bruising battles and waterfalls of sudden cash disguising the rocks of subsequent taxation.

Ogun, a fellow south Londoner, is the executive director of the Sport, Entertainment and Media group which he first joined in June 2001, the same year that he was introduced to Lennox by my former sports editor at the Evening Standard, Brian Alexander.

A graduate of the London School of Economics, who worked for Price Waterhouse and Shell International, as well as commentating on boxing for Wire TV (“I quit because it nearly broke my heart the night when Lennox lost to Oliver McCall”), the genial Ogun says: “Having suggested Lennox became a director of SEM, I’m going to make sure he attends all meetings. He’s got an enormous amount to offer and it will be good for him to be involved.”

My feeling, having attended Lewis’s retirement announcement at the Grosvenor House, Park Lane, where so many great fighters, including Sugar Ray Robinson, made celebrity dinner appearances, is that he quit for good. Moving, too, since I interviewed them both, to hear him invoke the names of Gene Tunney and Rocky Marciano as the only heavyweight champs who stayed retired.

Even as a youngster, Lewis always had respect for the giants of the sport. “I’d dream about moving in and out against some champion, maybe outboxing him or even knocking him down. But I never put Muhammad Ali in that frame — he was too special.

“On the other hand I studied what eventually happened to some of the great heavyweights, like Ali and Joe Louis, and so many lesser fighters who are left, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, sadly thinking about what might have been. I was determined to leave boxing with my finances secure and my brains intact. What dragged some of the greatest down were drugs and drink, bad managers and hangers-on. None of that was going to happen to me.”

At the time of his eloquent and sometimes emotional farewell, Lennox explained: “It was a long and hard decision but then again it was an easy one because I’d been looking at retirement a couple of fights ago. I was still thinking: ‘Shall I go back in there and have one last fight?’ This is the drug of the sport — always somebody out there to fight. But if I wasn’t hungry then I definitely shouldn’t box any more.”

Asked if, in six months time, what he’d do if he was offered “silly money” to fight again, the response was: “I’d just look at it as silly … You know I used to be a great basketball player. Then I stopped for a while and when I tried to play again, all of a sudden I couldn’t dribble; the things I used to do weren’t there. It always surprised me when people take time out of the ring and then try to come back. Just makes it so hard.”

According to last year’s Sunday Times Rich List, the 38-year-old Lewis, who earned around £15.5 million for beating up Mike Tyson, could be worth £100 million. In the same week as Lewis bowed out, it was reported that 37-year-old Tyson had filed papers for bankruptcy in New York claiming that, from career earnings of around £250 million, he was now down to his last £3,000.

Boredom, warned 42-year-old Frank Bruno, could still be Lewis’s biggest challenge. “My trainer George Francis warned me long ago that my toughest fight was going to be in retirement. Now I understand how giving up the discipline and training leaves you with a big gap to fill. But if he’s getting married maybe Lennox Lewis will find something more to occupy him.”

Proudly introducing his fiancée, the lovely Violet Chung, to the media by raising her arm as if he she had just won a fight, Lewis pointed to a large diamond on her left hand and announced: “That is an engagement ring — definitely.” But apart from a happy marriage and the prospect of parenthood for a man who grew up without the presence of a father, Lewis genuinely seems to be looking forward to being involved in the promotion of young boxers and other sportsmen.

I first saw him box in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games, in Los Angeles and Seoul, as well as the Commonwealth Games of 1986 in Edinburgh. Of course we thought of him as a Canadian fighter and I can remember making a sports trivia note that he was Canada’s first Olympic boxing gold medallist since Horace “Lefty” Gwyne, a 19-year-old jockey who won the bantamweight title at Los Angeles in 1932 and never made more than a few dollars fighting as a pro.

As a professional himself, Lennox was invariably a pleasure to work with from the moment in Las Vegas, there to cover Lloyd Honeyghan and Frank Bruno in fights, little Frank Maloney phoned me to come to his room “because there’s someone I want you to meet — he was born in London so it’s a good story for the Standard”. The softly spoken young giant must have been primed, because he was at pain to say he had followed West Ham and regularly gone to Upton Park with big brother Dennis.

Turning pro at the Royal Albert Hall, against Al Malcolm in June 1989 with a second-round knockout, Lewis was never, in my view, a natural in the ring but a slowly developing craftsman, always ready to learn. His careful apprenticeship, with a range of trainers until the final vital touches by Emanuel Steward, is surely why his record embraces a remarkable 11 years of world title fights from the 1992 second-round stoppage of Razor Ruddock for the WBC belt, discarded by Riddick Bowe, to the June 2003 bloody, bitter sixth-round win over Vitali Klitschko.

Lennox amiably granted me several one on one interviews in his rise to the top — one around midnight in his hotel bedroom with only loyal school friend Courtney Shand discreetly meditating in the background of the lamplight. I thought then and do now, that Lewis is one of the most reflective heroes in sport I have ever met.

Lewis was snoozily thoughtful another evening, in Sacramento, California, in May 1995, when he was preparing to fight Lionel Butler, in his “come-back” following the disastrous two-round title losing stoppage by fast countering McCall.

Possibly subconsciously recalling a sneer about Lennox’s gentle manner from an anti-British American, I asked him: “Would you agree that, in the best way, you are a complete mama’s boy?” The big man responded instantly: “Absolutely. My mother has done everything for me, working in a factory in Canada for 17 years to give me a good life until I made her stop.” At Lewis’s retirement speech in London he departed from his text to bring tears to some eyes as he called out to Violet Lewis: “I love you, Mum.”

Ask me where I would rate Lennox Lewis in the all time pantheon of heavyweight kings and my reply is first that it would depend not only on whom he was fighting in dream time match making and what was their and his mental, as well as physical, condition at the time.

Certainly I cannot see him beating Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis or, maybe, Larry Holmes. And though Lennox is rightly proud of having thrashed Mike Tyson in June 2002, that was certainly far from the Tyson I saw destroy fear-filled Michael Spinks, conqueror of Holmes, in June 1988.

Lennox Lewis, who better, summed up his aspirations so admirably in November 1999 after he outpointed Evander Holyfield for the three most significant titles of the alphabet soup of boxing.

“All I can do is give myself. I can’t give what Muhammad Ali did, or Holyfield or Tyson. We’re all different. I like to think I can give the people something they expect in a champion of the world. I won’t let them down. If some kid can remember me in 20 years’ time I’ll be very proud.”

This grandfather hasn’t got 20 years to spare. So thanks right now, Lennox, for gracing an occasionally disgraceful business and never, ever come back. Life is for living.

NEIL ALLEN is former boxing correspondent of The Times and London Evening Standard and a contributor to the New York Times.