The great Lennox Lewis is on record as saying Ray Mercer, who Lewis won a close decision over in a great action fight in May of 1996, is the man who have him THE hardest fight of his career. No wonder. When we look back at this fight and watch it again (a YouTube fave as it is) we see how hard “Merciless” pushed Lewis for all ten rounds. With his relentless pressure and his granite chin, Mercer was all wrong for Lennox.
It is to Lewis’ credit that he hung tough and won the fight via majority decision, the scores being 95-95, 96-95, 96-94. Interestingly, HBO’s unofficial judge Harold Lederman scored the fight a draw at 95-95. To this day, Mercer not only feels he won the fight, he also says that Lewis told him as much to his face. A rematch would have been a great idea, yet it never happened.
Speaking with Slater’s Boxing YouTube channel, 62 year old Mercer recalled the Lewis fight along with some of his other notable ring battles.
On the Lewis fight:
“Yeah, I won that fight, man. He admitted it to me. He knows – a fighter knows. I won that fight. He said to me, he said, ‘I know you won.’ I told him, ‘where’s my half of your cheque!’ He said okay. Every time I see him, I tell him I’m still wishing! They were setting him up to fight [Mike] Tyson. So that’s what happened, that’s why they gave him the victory.”
On wanting to fight Tyson himself:
“It would’ve been a good fight, I’ll tell you that. It wouldn’t have been no knockout like some of the people he hit hard – I wouldn’t have gone down like that. That’s the fight I needed for my career, to define me. But I didn’t get it. Let me tell you something, when he lost, me and my wife, my fiancé at the time, we were sat watching it, and I said they were setting me up to be the one who knocked him out. And when Buster Douglas knocked him out, man, I was almost crying! I was supposed to be that guy.”
On his brutal KO of Tommy Morrison:
“That fight, and the fact that I had beaten him already (in the amateurs), I was pissed that I was only getting $50,000 more than him. My manager told me, and he told me to call Bob Arum and ask him why. I was upset about that, so I did [call him]. I said, ‘Bob, I’m the champion, why am I only getting $50,000 more than Tommy Morrison?’ He [Arum] was honest with me, and he told me, ‘because he’s white.’ I understood and I said okay. I’m nowhere near racist, I can get along with everybody, no matter the colour, whatever. But back then, at that time, that [pay issue] enraged me a little bit.
“When it came down to the fight, we trained hard, and we weighed-in at Times Square in New York, outside. I had the strongest man in the world with me……he won The Strongest Man in the World tournament twice, over in Germany, he was in the army with me, O.D. Wilson. And he told me, when he saw Tommy Morrison take his shirt off, he seen all the blackheads on his back. And he told me, he said, ‘All you got to do, Ray, is make him work for five rounds, because he’s on old-base steroids.’ I didn’t know what that was, but it changed my game up. So, I made him work to get him tired, that’s why he was hitting me like he did, I was getting him tired. And it finally worked that night. He [Wilson] said it’d be five rounds, but he gave out and gassed in three. At the end of the third round, that’s when I woke up and went to work. My trainers were mad at me, they were like, ‘man, what are you doing!’ You know, because I let him hit me and they said I knew better than that. I took a lot of punches off him, and it freaked him out, too, that he hit me like he did and I was still standing there.”
On who wins, Tyson Fury or Oleksandr Usyk?
“I think Tyson Fury. I think he’ll [Usyk] get knocked out. That guy [Fury] he can box, too. He can really box, you’ve got to really put all your skills together to beat that guy. I really like Tyson Fury. He’s got power and he’s got skills, that’s what I like about him.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq6M0kg1eXc&pp=ygUNbGVubm94IG1lcmNlcg%3D%3D