Get Her Off the Pitch! Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be cranked up a bit now, to be frank, most people wouldn’t complain.
    Although I felt guilty about it, I had begun to see what people moaned about in Lewis’s fighting style, and why his trainer got so short-tempered with that travelling chess set of his. Even when in control, you see, Lewis had the air of someone manifestly thinking , pondering his options,eyes narrowed, as if deliberating whether the Budapest Gambit would leave him too exposed, eight moves down the line, to the classic Schleswig-Holstein Defence. Holyfield, by contrast, with his head forward and sweat pouring off him, seemed to be simply more engaged in a bout of fisticuffs (as seemed fitting in the circumstances). Finding himself on the back foot in the more explosive third round, Lewis did stop calculating for a little while - Holyfield had charged out of his corner at the bell and started throwing serious blows, including two solid rights to the side of Lewis’s head. But a temporary shifting of Lewis’s rock-like centre of gravity was all that Holyfield had achieved by the end of a heroic and exhausting three minutes, and Holyfield walked back to his corner with his shoulders down, and his head down, too - or, at least, his head bent forward as far as it would go, given how firmly his prodigious neck muscles are attached like splints to the back of it. Was it all over for Holyfield? Lewis seemed to have been shaken, though, because the fourth was quite even. Only in the fifth did Lewis look back in control again.
    Obviously, I’ve watched this fight again recently. By an absolute fluke, while I was researching and making notes for this book, I ransacked the house for my video of Raging Bull , and found at the back of a drawer a forgotten tape with ‘Lewis fight’ written on it in small letters. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was in among my Jeff Bridges collection, behind such unforgettable classics as Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). I turned it over in my hands, wiped off a layer of dust, and thought, this is exactly the sort of invaluable resourcethat usually turns up just after you’ve finished your book, or just after it’s gone to press. So what a miracle. The week after my return from New York, it turns out, Sky Sports had re-shown the fight, in full, with in-studio analysis, and I’d recorded it (and then, for whatever reason, hidden it to be found after my death by the house-clearers). If I had found this tape at any other moment in the intervening eight years, by the way, I would undoubtedly have recorded University Challenge , Pet Rescue or an even lesser-known Jeff Bridges film on top of it. I still can’t get over this domestic miracle, as you can tell.
    What I had remembered from the fateful night was that Lewis had a good fifth round and that thereafter he seemed to be coasting, confident of winning on points. What the tape showed was that the first half of the fifth round had some terrific boxing from Lewis, but that old fight hands (including Lewis’s animated trainer) were in despair that he didn’t finish off Holyfield there and then. Later, Don King would say, ‘When you have a man on the ropes, you’re supposed to finish him, not play chess with him.’ Lewis would reply, as always, that there was no sense in exposing himself unnecessarily to counter-attack, which is a perfectly defensible point of view. As far as Lewis was concerned, he was winning this fight and doing it his own way, by anticipating and frustrating Holyfield’s moves, while landing a huge number of blows. Holyfield was bruised, puffy and in manifest need of a long lie-down (with his trousers on). My own impression at the time was that, ‘While working Holyfield relentlessly with the famous left jab and openly dominating him, Lewis was like an angler teasing a fish on his line. Just because he didn’t bangthe fish on the head with a mallet