Boxing: Lewis confirms dominance with taming of Tyson

British world champion reinforces heavyweight credentials after comprehensively beating fighter formerly known as Iron Mike

The moment you knew that Lennox Lewis would finally be accepted as a heavyweight of the ages – and that the story of Mike Tyson was over beyond any desperate rummaging among the dissipated remnants of his career and his life – was as stark as any in the history of their brutal game.

It came in the break between the seventh and eighth rounds, a time when Tyson was recoiling from the kind of beating which strips from a man everything but the last impulses of his courage, when trainer Ronnie Shields asked for one last attempt to produce the punch that might change everything.

Tyson, his right eye closed and blood streaming from his nose, shook his head and said: "I'm done. I can't do it."

He knew he was adrift in a private hell. But he did do it. He did drag himself to his feet and he did go again into the flight path of Lewis's heavy, relentless punching, and the result was as inevitable as the sunrise over the Mississippi beside whose banks The Pyramid Arena became the last significant milestone of Tyson's career.

Lewis twice forced a count on Tyson, the first a standing one, in that eighth round, and on the second occasion no courage or superhuman resilience could have possibly prolonged the action.

The first crisis for Tyson came from a powerful left hook, the second was the result of a perfectly measured right cross. Lewis said later: "I noticed he was lowering his head to my right. I knew it was a matter of time before I got him." It was over two minutes, 25 seconds into the round, and the pitiable condition of Tyson, daubed in blood and half blind, inevitably complicated the acclaim, so long withheld on both sides of the Atlantic, that was now pouring over the World Boxing Council and International Boxing Federation champion, who was remarkably involved in his 13th straight title fight.

George Foreman, as reported elsewhere, was particularly effusive, saying that the victory which came in the small hours of yesterday morning made Lewis the best heavyweight of all time. That was an absurd affront to the achievements of men like Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, and, when you thought about it, Foreman himself. What Lewis did here was merely reinforce the quality he has long displayed as the dominant heavyweight of his generation and, rather than heaping excessive praise on his merciless cracking of the shell of Tyson, the boxing establishment would be much better employed looking back with great shame on its past treatment of a man who has never been less than a decent and, but for two lapses which were promptly wiped away, superbly dedicated presence in and out of the ring.

Those of us who have always rated highly the innate talent and the great power of the former Olympic champion would surely rush to exchange his comprehensive beatings of the last of Tyson, and Evander Holyfield, for the opportunity to have seen such fights when all three were around their prime, and with some confidence in Lewis's ability to have produced the recent results at a time when they would have shone more irresistibly in the eternal ratings game Foreman played so unthinkingly in the wake of Tyson's destruction.

In the circumstances, though, Lewis's admirers can only be thankful that here he has so thoroughly exposed the fallacy so widespread before the fight that Tyson had any more chance against Lewis in 2002 than the classic one of a genuine puncher's resurrection of one moment of mayhem.

The final odds here in America of 5-8 on Lewis were made to look so generous they might have been cooked up in a Salvation Army canteen rather than the sports books of Las Vegas.

After the victory that was built on a barrage of jabs, hooks, right crosses, and uppercuts that flowed seamlessly after the first round which Tyson narrowly won without ever beginning to inflict the early, destabilising hurt that was always the basis of his one realistic chance of turning fight logic upside down, Lewis made a speech that would have perfectly dovetailed with a retirement announcement.

Such a decision, which will clearly come only after exhaustive examination of possible further relatively low-risk, and hugely lucrative, excursions into the ring, would certainly have been a natural extension of Lewis's question: "What more can you ask me to do?

"A lot of people doubted that I would win. But I live in the realistic world, and I knew that the old Tyson was long gone. It's been a hard, long road, and I've finally completed what I wanted to do. Manny [Steward, Lewis's trainer] wanted me to take him out in the fourth, but he didn't realise I'd hurt my hand. I decided to give it a rest for a couple of rounds. I was never less than certain I would win. It was the defining fight of my legacy."

Perhaps not, because there was always a limit to the possibilities of Lewis's work that was beyond his control. Lewis's true legacy will be that he was a fighter who operated in one of boxing's most cynically unabashed epochs with the spirit of a sportsman rather than a compliant vehicle for the manipulations of promoters. He was angered that Riddick Bowe, who he beat in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, was allowed to run away from him without any great clamour of protest. He was frustrated when Don King was permitted to pilot, with the compliance of the ranking authorities, the return of Tyson to a world championship, when he came out of the Indiana Youth Centre prison after serving three years for rape, without any insistence that he put his eroded skills under proper examination. He was outraged when, after utterly outboxing Holyfield in New York in 1999, he was handed a draw.

The turmoil such caperings would surely have induced in a less balanced -personality, however, were conspicuously, and predictably, absent here when he set out on the task of exposing Tyson, a challenge which was, not to the total surprise of some, hindered by the eagerness of New Jersey referee Eddie Cotton to grant every possible assistance to his opponent.

Outrageously, Cotton warned Lewis twice for offences which were not plainly visible even close up at ringside, or with the help of television replays later, and then deducted a point for what all available evidence insisted was a clean knock-down in the fourth round.

Lewis's composure and power relegated to irrelevance the behaviour of an official which would have generated more than a whiff of scandal if it had occurred in something more closely resembling a genuine contest. As it was, Cotton was merely an irritant, and Lewis sailed beyond the referee's influence. "There didn't seem any point in arguing with the referee," he said. "I knew the job was going to be done soon enough anyway."

In the second round Lewis delivered an uppercut which seemed to drain most of Tyson's belief that he might somehow strike on a route to dominance. Subsequent events simply compounded Lewis's authority. The champion broke up Tyson with ever increasing accuracy and by the sixth round the only question concerned the moment of termination. Tyson became a more pitiful figure each time he slumped back into his corner and long before the end he was looking into the bleakest assignment of his sport. He had to take his beating. That he did it so gamely, and without any reversion to the crazed, foul tactics which had so disfigured his fights with Holyfield and Francois Botha, was his only redemption. He said: "There was never a chance that I would use dirty tactics against Lewis. He doesn't fight that way. The Holyfield and Botha fights were different."

So Tyson, it appears, was somewhat purified by both the decency and the power of Lennox Lewis. At least he suggested this was so when he made his bruised and battered exit from The Pyramid. "Don't worry about me, I'm a street man, I may be heading for oblivion," he said. "Tonight I faced a great champion." That he did so at such a late hour said that not even Lennox Lewis can give himself enough time to extend his cleansing operation across the whole face of his sport.

But that should not limit the pride, along with the $30-odd million (£20m), he takes from the night he put an end to Mike Tyson as boxing's big draw. It was a job that somebody had to do, and there could have been no one better suited to the challenge. Under a little coaxing, he said he had done it for the Queen.

The reality, of course, was that he had done it for himself – and the game he has always enhanced. The hope, though, must be that he does not go on long enough to hint that he is attempting his own own Jubilee. He surely owes himself a less painful abdication than the one he brought to the fighter formerly known as Iron Mike.