Boxing: Conspiracy rumours incite unrest but Lewis will fight on

There has never been a two-bit, tank-town fight without rumours and so when you stage the richest one in history they naturally breed like mosquitos here on the Mississippi.

The big, fat dive-bomber speculation that has gripped town in the last 24 hours is that Lennox Lewis, despite a demeanour so sunny it makes Mike Tyson look ever more like a violent nervous breakdown waiting to happen, is about to pack his bags and walk out on the upside of $17.5 (£12.5m). Lewis assures us he will not go. He says all his achievements have been dominated by the myth of Tyson, and that here at the Pyramid tomorrow night he finally becomes his own man and his own world heavyweight champion by dismissing the challenge of someone he believes has been living on a worn-out reputation for 10 years. "All my life I've been climbing the hill," says Lewis, "and now I've reached the nipple."

But the big rumour was not just dreamed up over too many Southern Comforts. Main Events, Lewis's American promoters, has just had a civil war and it appears the loser is Gary Shaw, its chief operating officer. After the fight he is expected to go on his own as a promoter, and the word is that he will work closely with Shelly Finkel.

Finkel is Tyson's manager but has long supplied many of the marquee names that have made Main Events a giant in the business ­ Evander Holyfield, Pernell Whitaker, Mark Breland, and Meldrick Taylor. Now who would be the most spectacular property of a new promotional alliance between Shaw and Finkel? A victorious Tyson. Undiluted, sinister speculation, maybe ­ but you cannot have a viable rumour without a measure of circumstantial evidence. There is no shortage of that.

One indisputable fact is that Lewis has no liking for Shaw, a pugnacious character from New Jersey. "Lennox thinks he's a grandstander," says his trainer Emanuel Steward. Where the leap of innuendo kicks in is that Shaw was the Main Events official responsible for agreeing to the appointment of the fight officials, including referee Eddie Cotton, and that when Lewis heard of his impending break with his promoters he went on full alert ­ and made the threat to leave.

Cotton is also from New Jersey, and worked for Shaw at the state boxing commission. Now what if Cotton, who up to now has avoided controversy, was to lean somewhat in the direction of Tyson? What if he was quick to stop the fight in the event of a Lewis "wobble"? What if Tyson was given a little leeway in his often wild interpretation of the rules of boxing?

It is in the nature of this sport that if such suspicions were aroused on Saturday the cries of "fix" would be as loud as they were three years ago when Lewis was, to the overwhelming majority, jobbed out of the decision after outboxing Holyfield at Madison Square Garden.

This week Lewis ­ who last night weighed in at 17st 11^1/4lb, 3^1/4lb heavier than he was against Hasim Rahman last November ­ told me: "I do worry that something could happen... something like the fan man [the aerial intruder in Riddick Bowe's title fight with Holyfield]... something crazy." But he said he had no worries about the foreign judges. He mentioned only the judges. Then, when asked if he was happy with the referee, he said with what seemed a slightly odd deliberation: "Yes."

"Crazies" tend to swarm around the wildest rumours, but, interestingly, one of American boxing's most respected commentators, Larry Merchant of Home Box Office television, admits to a tug of unease. He says: "If people are shifting behind the scenes I would be suspicious. Lennox has reason to be concerned. Questionable things have happened in the past, and in Lennox's past."

Things like Lewis's knock-out by Oliver McCall eight years ago, when he had argued fiercely that he had been in a position to fight on when the referee waved off the contest. Things like Tyson's victory over Donovan Ruddock in 1991, when referee Richard Steele stepped in and stopped the fight after a flurry of Tyson punches, which came after a period of Ruddock ascendancy.

Such events feed doubt, even neurosis, and in boxing there is always a reminder of the old truth that just because you are paranoid it does not mean they are not out to get you.

If Lewis is privately suffering from the condition, however, his public persona could scarcely be more serene. This week he played chess ­ and lost ­ to a local, wide-eyed schoolboy, and talked about his moment of destiny. "If Tyson isn't scared of me, he should be. But, no, I believe he is scared. Scared bad. His people are trying to protect him, keep him under cover, because they know he is in trouble. He's a troubled puppy.

"What's happening here, with Tyson being kept out of press conferences, reminds me of when I fought McCall a second time. He was a troubled man and Don King tried to keep him away from sight before the fight. You could see how much trouble he was in when he came into the ring." McCall walked tearfully around the ring, talking to himself. Now Lewis floats the disturbing possibility of the kind of breakdown which came to Tyson six years ago when he bit the ears of Holyfield. Tyson raged around the ring after he had been disqualified. He raged at the night and the world, said that he was fighting for his children.

Tyson was chewing gum, rather aggressively, when he weighed in three hours after Lewis. He scaled 16st 10^1/2lb, 5lb less than when he fought the unthreatening Brian Nielsen in Copenhagen last October ­ but 12lb heavier than his mark against Andrew Golota a year earlier. It was not the most encouraging of signals but Tyson's trainer, Ronnie Shields, insisted the scales were weighting inaccurately heavy, by as much as 5lb. Certainly his fighter looked in good condition, as did Lewis.

"Tyson comes into this fight without any background," says Lewis. "He looked bad against Brian Nielsen in his last fight in Copenhagen eight months ago, and that was against an opponent HBO wouldn't allow me to fight a few years ago."

At Lewis's shoulder, trainer Steward nods, saying: "There's no doubt Tyson is in a mental situation. After his last fight, he said he needed two more fights before meeting Lennox. That was right, sure, but time has run out on him and now he is desperately short of confidence. That's why they are handling him as they are. He's fragile. He needs someone like Carlos "Panama" Lewis [the notorious trainer Tyson has called to his camp] just to prop him up."

After his chess game, Lewis worked out to a reggae beat. If he had had a storm of doubt it had certainly passed, for the moment at least. But this is a fight which, like no other before it, carries the baggage of suspicion. It will be removed only when the fighters enter the ring and resolve their business in a brutal, uncomplicated way. Meanwhile, the rumours will continue to buzz. It just happens, by pure coincidence, to be a particularly bad year for mosquitos.