Boxing: Rahman street-talk has Lewis rattled

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Slimmer, sleeker and ready for the action

When Hasim Rahman was 14 years old he was a veteran street fighter in west Baltimore. "At that time I saw him take down three grown men, one after the other," recalls a friend.

Recently the world heavyweight champion took a camera crew to the old ghetto and as they filmed on a street corner he casually informed them: "Right here I was crossing the street and some guys came running towards me and I saw them shot. They were killed right in front of my eyes.

"It was a place where so many drug deals went down we called it The Store. I saw thousands of dollars change hands. It was just routine. A lot of my friends died or went off to prison. You had to be alert to stay alive."

When set against the background of such a grooming, the self-possession Rahman is displaying here as he prepares to defend his World Boxing Council and International Boxing Federation titles against Lennox Lewis tomorrow night should perhaps not to be too surprising. When you had cause to celebrate the achievement of reaching your 20th birthday when 500 stitches were required to put back half of your face after a car smash that killed one of your friends instantly, any preoccupation with the terrors of life tends to dwindle.

Even so, Rahman's performance in winning a series of propaganda battles, whatever their eventual significance, over his vastly more experienced opponent can still only be described as remarkable.

When Lewis, already twice provoked into physical reaction to Rahman's taunting, walked away from an invitation to pose for the traditional pre-fight picture at the final press conference in a ballroom of the Mandalay Bay Resort, there was certainly circumstantial evidence that the psychological war of the champion was being successfully waged.

Rahman jeered: "If Lennox loses the script, he can't handle a situation. Me, I've been trash talking all my life." Trash talk never won a fight, however, and there is a counter-argument that the sight of a fully fit, indeed superbly defined, Lewis in place of the unfamiliar, flabby figure who showed up late and breathing hard in the altitude of Johannesburg for the first fight last April may have provoked a show of confidence from the champion that could just prove to be overstated.

Lewis hinted at this when, before yielding the floor to Rahman, he said: "There has been enough talking. Now it is time to fight." But then Rahman has always had an appetite for fighting. The man who took him in from the streets, the 87-year-old trainer Mack Lewis, says: "Nothing he has achieved has surprised me ­ I always thought that he had the determination to be a good fighter, and maybe even a world champion. He was always willing to learn and he always did the work."

He was recommended to the old trainer by a former pro fighter, Lou Butler, who challenged Rahman to a "body-punching" fight in a ghetto parking lot. Butler remembers it vividly. "I digged the kid so hard, but then he just digged me back and I knew he had the makings. I told Mack Lewis: 'This kid could be a pro fighter ­ either that or he's going to be killed.' He had already had bullets removed from his stomach." One of Rahman's friends recalls the fight. "Man, it was like buildings shaking. We called Hasim 'The Rock'. He was so hard ­ and he was always anxious to be somebody."

Now, for two days more at least, he rejoices in that status. "The Lewis camp talk about me being not fit to be one of Lennox Lewis's sparring partners. They're right about that, I'm nobody's sparring partner, and least of all Lennox's. I hear about old champions like Louis and Ali and I say, man, I'm in that lineage. I want to shout out: 'I'm the world champion'." He has being doing so quite frequently this week, and the effect has been to wear down Lewis from his usual loftily withdrawn position above the workaday hype.

Potentially more significant, though, are the reports of Rahman's ferocious gym work in the final stages of his preparation in his training camp on Big Bear mountain in California. "We came down here," says Rahman's manager Stan Hoffman, "happy in the knowledge that Rock had surely worked as hard and as well as any world heavyweight champion going into a fight. I cannot tell you how many times we had to pull him off a sparring partner. He is ready, and deeply confident."

Much of that confidence, argues Rahman, flows from his belief that the punch that knocked out Lewis in the fifth round still thunders through his opponent's mind. "It's natural when you get knocked out to think about it a lot, and ask: 'What happened to me, that's not supposed to happen.' However much Lennox tries to push it to the back of his mind, it will surface again ­ and it will be right there when I tag him for the first time on Saturday night.

"No doubt he's better prepared than the guy who showed up at the first fight, but there's no surprise for me. I always knew he would work harder, but that doesn't make any difference. I'm prepared for one of two Lennoxes. He could come out like a wrecking ball, or a guy who wants to jab his way to victory. Either way, he loses."

Such talk is bringing a beam to the face of the promoter Don King, who seems almost as thrilled by Rahman's flair for hype as the basic intrigue of the fight. Thus King declares: "Hasim Rahman is a great American story of someone who has fought his way through all of life's difficulties, and who has reached the mountain top." King, who is in such a benevolent mood he said of his undercard protégé, Christy Martin, "she is voluptuous, curvaceous, sensual and intoxicating ­ and she can fight", naturally had Rahman swiftly transferred to a penthouse suite when the champion complained that his hotel quarters were inferior to those of Lewis.

Rahman may not achieve such instant gratification tomorrow night, but for the moment at least there can be no doubt that the street-fighting kid has become persuasive enough as a man who should be given his way.