Boxing: Young lions queue for taste of washed-up Tyson

Audley Harrison announces his next opponent shortly. It won't be Mike Tyson, but in two years' time it might be. And Lennox Lewis could be promoting it. It may be in London, more likely in Las Vegas, which banned Tyson from fighting Lewis there but must now feel after last week's mugging in Memphis that he has paid his dues. And like him it needs the money.

After being rumbled on the river by a punch-perfect champion who knew the one way to beat a bully was to be a bigger bully, Tyson, clobbered, cut up and counted out, is destined to go the way of most fighting flesh, fed as fodder to tyros who aspire to the crown he once held.

There is a long line of opponents eager to use him as a trial horse, and some might leave him even more bloodied than Lewis did. There's Samoan David Tua, the Ukrainian Klitschko brothers, Vladimir and Vitaly, Kirk Johnson of Canada, Puerto Rican John Ruiz, Evander Holyfield (again), and ultimately Harrison. Tyson won't be short of work. It's his marbles he should worry about.

He will probably be ready for Harrison by this time in 2004. The Olympic champion versus the clapped-out former world champion as a prelude to Harrison's promised assault on the heavyweight title. Let's get ready to ruuuumble!

When he cuddled gay rights protester Peter Tatchell in the week before the fight instead of punching him, we should have guessed that Iron Mike had lost his mettle.

He may have looked good until the bell sounded but you cannot re-dedicate yourself to boxing in just a few weeks after a decade of dissipation. Lewis achieved the impossible. He made some of us feel sorry for Tyson.

Lionheart Lennox fought the perfect fight in what had seemed the perfect match but it turned out to be against a sadly imperfect opponent. He beat a shot fighter who should never be allowed in the ring again, for his own sake.

Tyson discovered he had more on his plate than ear of Evander or leg of Lennox. He was force-fed a large slice of humble pie. The biter was bit.

There were a lot of smirking faces as Tyson apologised to Lewis, wiped his own blood from his opponent's face and kissed Lennox's mum after getting the brutal beating his lifestyle probably deserved. But at least he went out on his shield, taking his lumps like a man, and, who knows, it might even make him a better person.

He will be 36 a fortnight from today, and he is already looking 10 years older. The probability is that he'll still be fighting when he's 40 – if he is still with us. Some years ago, in an interview with Playboy, Tyson grimly prophesied his own fate. "One of these days some mother-f***** will grab a gun and shoot me dead."

So there may have been a little irony, as well as a tinge of relief, in his post-fight observation that he was lucky to emerge from this fight with his life. But what Lewis's eighth-round KO victory has probably killed is the heavyweight division; and it surely brought down the curtain on boxing's mega-bucks production numbers.

There is no one of real consequence left for him to fight. The likelihood is that there will be one valedictory performance, possibly a defence against humdrum southpaw Chris Byrd or a more attractive, but riskier, one against the better of the Klitschko brothers, Vladimir, before he spends more time with his mum and his company, Lion Promotions.

The prospect is that he will retire some time after his 37th birthday in September and link up with his good pal Harrison as his adviser and promoter.

But Tyson has to carry on punching, because that's all he can do, and he's still broke.

When he has paid his back taxes, reimbursed Showtime, his TV backers, settled his divorce and his lawsuit with Don King, they reckon he will be left with $1 million (£680,000) out of his $17.5m purse. Not enough to keep him in lap dancers, let alone Lamborghinis. So I fear we'll see him end up as a washed-up, beaten-up old punchbag for contenders rather than the great young champion he once was. Just another loser.

Meanwhile the eulogies for Lewis continue to roll in, all of them deserved but some rather overstated. George Foreman, who should know better, proclaimed to anyone who would listen that Lewis was now the greatest of all time, better than himself, better than Joe Frazier, better than Larry Holmes, better than Sonny Liston, better than Joe Louis, better even than Muhammad Ali.

"There's never been a heavyweight that good," he said, with Jose Sulaiman, president of the World Boxing Council, who provided one of the three belts Lewis had strapped around his waist, nodding in agreement and adding his own endorsement: "I've never seen such a masterful performance."

Lennox Claudius better than Cassius Marcellus? No way, Jose. He may have beaten every man he has ever met but he has twice been knocked out (Ali never was) and the quality of his opponents hardly compares with those of Ali in his heyday.

Lewis has terrific technique and a cracking jab but he lacks Ali's fleet-footedness, his repertoire of punches and his chin. A great heavyweight, certainly, but not The Greatest.