25.02.07 – By Ricardo Lois/Boxingconfidential.com – Even if you are underwater, you don’t see the whole iceberg. So it may be for the reported comeback by 41-year-old former world heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis. In Hollywood, when a movie comes out and does real box office business, the phrase used is that it has “legs.”
The LL Comeback saga, as written by veteran Daily Mail (UK) columnist Jeff Powell, is starting to look as if it has legs, meaning that the story is far from being over.
Boxingconfidential.com has learned exclusively that Monday’s edition of the national tabloid will carry a massive piece, extensively quoting Lewis about his personal mental debate about returning to the ring and the familial reasons (two Violets, his beloved Mum and his lovely wife) why he is not going to comeback now. The piece, written by boxing and soccer expert Powell, goes into excruciating detail about Lewis’ dilema, how he got the urge to fight again and how he will shortly start actual training under the watchful eye of Emmanuel Steward.
Adding more meat to the bones of Powell’s initial report is Lewis’ revelation that he actually met with Vitali Klitschko and spoke about giving Vitali a rematch if he does return to the sport that enriched him. Lewis tells Powell the comeback idea took flight in conversations on or around his 41st birthday last September when he was in Ontario. Lewis and his longtime amateur coach Adrian Teoderescu debated the whys and why nots of a Lewis comeback in 2007.
In Canada and elsewhere, Lewis actually did some hitting and punching and other boxing exercises. The results of that light training made him realize “I can’t do at 41 the things I did at 21.”
But Lewis makes it clear to Powell that he will keep making daily visits to a boxing gym.
Though Lewis said he is marking 2007 “as year for exercise and not a ring comeback,” it makes me think of the old Alcoholics Anonymous saying about why those working the 12-step program should not hang out where demon rum is served.
“If you hang out in a barbershop, you will wind up getting a haircut,” the AA veterans often say.
So it is with a topflight boxer going through his paces in a boxing gym with his former trainer. How much more does it take to spark an actual comeback?
No wonder the redoubtable Mr. Steward has been so strangely silent. Ka-ching, ka-ching, the Goldfather may hear that special ring!
(mlcmarley@aol.com)