LONDON, 6 June 2003 — World heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis says Mike Tyson is scared of him and there is no chance of a rematch between the pair. “I won’t ever fight Tyson again,” Lewis told British newspapers yesterday from his training camp in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. “That’s over. He’s seriously scared of me and his time has passed,” added the Briton, who will fight for the first time in more than a year when he takes on Canadian Kirk Johnson, 30, in Los Angeles on June 21. “He (Tyson) must have had bad dreams about the beating I gave him in Memphis last June.”
Lewis, 37, is widely accepted as the heavyweight champion after his eight-round demolition of former title-holder Tyson last year, although boxing politics means there are several versions of the crown held by different fighters. The World Boxing Council may not sanction the fight with Johnson due to objections from German-based Ukrainian Vitali Klitschko.
Lewis said he had banished thoughts of quitting the ring and believed he had two or three more meaningful fights left in him. “I have been having thoughts about retirement,” he told British newspapers. “A lot of different things happened to me in my year out of the ring. Most definitely I’ve been thinking about retiring on a last big super-fight — it could be Vitali Klitschko or Roy Jones.”
