THE MORalist.(boxer Lennox Lewis)

From distant shores, it is hard to figure out why so few Britons have proved supreme in the prize ring since the passing of the Regency era and the advent of the padded glove. An age of futility has followed William Hazlitt's patriotic contention that "the noble science of boxing is all our own." England has certainly not lost its taste for the fight--there are still would-bes sparring in gyms from Merseyside to Brixton--and yet most of the British moderns, especially the heavyweights, pale, bony men like Henry Cooper, have been notable mainly for a stoutness of soul that is inevitably undermined by a propensity to bleed.

Until now, the last British champion among the heavies was Robert Prometheus Fitzsimmons, who won his title in Carson City, Nevada, in 1897 (a blow to the solar plexus doubled up "Gentleman Jim" Corbett), and lost it two years later to James Jeffries at Coney Island. Fitzsimmons was not a champion of the first rank. Nor was he an impressive specimen. He was spindly, knock-kneed, and rapidly losing his carrot-colored hair. "Stripped for action he looked like an elderly red pelican," O. F. Snelling, the estimable boxing historian, wrote. To make things worse for loyal Britons, Fitzsimmons was an inconstant national. He and his family had left England for New Zealand when he was nine, and he died, in 1917, in Chicago--a citizen of the United States.

Lennox Lewis, the current heavyweight champion, is a legit Brit. He is thirty-six and was born in England; he spent his childhood in the East End. But the story grows motley from there. Lennox was an adolescent in Kitchener, Ontario, won an Olympic gold medal for Canada, in 1988, and, since his parents are Jamaican, is, by his own description, "part Rasta man." Lewis speaks in what might be called High Plains-Cockney-Bob Marley, an accent rounded off by the influence of the high-rent precincts he now inhabits in Hertfordshire and Miami, to say nothing of the Concorde waiting lounge. Lewis, in other words, is a man of the fluid modern world. This is not something the English customarily appreciate: to leave London and make a success elsewhere is ordinarily a mark of betrayal. And yet at Lewis's fights, wherever they may be, his most ardent fans, his most reliable supporters, are British. When Lewis fought Evander Holyfield at the Garden three years ago and the judges robbed him of a decision--they called it, preposterously, a draw after Lennox had pummelled Evander all night--Eighth Avenue was suddenly awash in men in Union Jack T-shirts and Bob Hoskins sharkskins, who improvised pleasantly obscene chants limning their outrage and their undying affection for Lewis.

It is no fault of Lewis's, but the heavyweight championship, like the British throne, is an ever more marginal office. Just as Elizabeth II struggles to dampen the News of the World impression of her unruly clan, Lewis has, for years, been haunted by his own tabloid ghost, Mike Tyson. No matter that Tyson has not been himself as an athlete since his incarceration, in the early nineties, for raping a beauty queen in Indianapolis. Somehow the legacy of Tyson's youthful ferocity--his string of one- and two-round knockouts when he was barely out of his teens--coupled with his penchant for theatrically toxic behavior and interviews scripted by a hip-hop Jean Genet, grabbed whatever little cultural fascination was left to the fight game. Lewis was justly convinced that he would not be acknowledged a "supreme sweet scientist" (he loves the Regency terminology) until he had defeated Tyson.

On January 22nd, the fighters and their myriad seconds gathered at the Hudson Theatre, on West Forty-fourth Street, to announce that the fight would take place in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, Tyson decided to act up, and he walked toward his opponent in what Lewis described to me as "a most provocative fashion." Suddenly, the two fighters and their seconds were on the floor in a tumbling scrum, and somewhere in the pile, unseen by the cameras, Tyson bit Lewis on the thigh, a poetic echo of his double chomp of Evander Holyfield's ear, in 1997. Lewis wisely kept the crescent-shaped wound to himself; to have revealed it before the fight was safely rescheduled would have been to risk a fight he yearned for, to say nothing of a purse of at least seventeen million dollars. Tyson declared himself contrite (he allowed that he was no angel, but no mass murderer, either). Nevada could not bring itself to understand, but Memphis, ...