Did Tyson really duck Lewis in 96?

Don doesn’t go in front of the press with the contract and say ‘here, read all the options’ or otherwise announce them. But every fighter his guys ever voluntarily faced had to give him options and you want us to believe Lewis was the exception?

How about this: Show me video of Don King going over every caveat and detail of the contract offer. Produce that and show me him explaining it page by page each one and if there are no options. I believe you.

Otherwise, we have to assume Don approached this same as every other fight where he had the edge, which included options.

 

So, basically you want to reverse the burden of the proof whereas I have already proved each of my arguments with quotes from both sides, something you completely ignored to suit your biased narrative.

The two sources I provided described the same thing, that the challenger side wanted to dictate the terms to the champion. The A-side agreed but even then, the challenger side backed out at least two times.

Tyson didn't have to wait until Lewis wanted to fight him, this is why he pursued other fights.

 

No, I want you to use common sense.

Tell me when Don King ever publicly mentioned including options in an offer before. Does that mean he never asked for, demanded or got options? Of course not, but you want to say ‘well unless Don said it at a press conference it didn’t happen.’

He never said he didn’t ask for options, did he? He asked for options on every other fighter he ever promoted, didn’t he? Do you really think he just forgot about it in Lennox’s case, lol?

What you’re calling the ‘challenger side’ is the mandatory — it’s mandated that to keep your title, you have to fight him. If you can’t work out an agreement, then it goes to purse bids with the percentages predetermined.

Lennox actually gave them a price and said ‘pay this and we will fight — anywhere, on any network.’ And King would not meet that price. So what he was dictating was ‘pay me this or we go to purse bids’ … he was ‘dictating’ the WBC’s rules.

Lewis is the one who didn’t have to wait. We’ve got links here saying ‘Don King just wanted him to sit out while Mike fought THREE OTHER FIGHTS and if Mike won them, then he would fight Lewis.’ That’s saying ‘wait your turn’ to the mandatory challenger — and the court agreed that per WBC rules, his turn was NEXT.

Again, this is very simple:

Did Mike Tyson give up a belt rather than fight Lennox Lewis? Yes, he did.

Quack quack.

 

No, I want a quote from Lewis' side or from medias reports.
You have brought no source about that, whereas I had :
« Many people close to Lewis and his fellow heavyweights involved in this mess have corroborated the essence of King’s claims. “King has tried to make this happen,” one Lewis associate said. “He’s holding all the cards but he offered a fair deal. The problem is Lennox signed that new deal with HBO before the (Ray) Mercer fight and it binds him forever, for all practical purposes. ».

Another extract :
« Sources on both sides of the negotiation acknowledge the deal was offered and that Lewis’ manager, Panos Eliades, accepted, only to be told by Abraham that HBO held a contract that bound Lewis to the cable network and that he would not allow Lewis to fight on rival Showtime unless King agreed to four concessions. »

King was willing to offer more than a fair price and you have nothing on the other side that prove the contrary.

 

“More than fair price,” is the joke here. King was willing to offer to keep it from going to purse bids because he knew someone (the HBO/Lewis side) would come in with a bigger offer or drive the price up beyond King’s ability to make a mint off it given that he couldn’t cut the purses he had contracted since the money would have had to go into escrow and he wouldn’t have a say-so on its distribution after that.

Do you have a source saying King didn’t want options? Of course not. Why? Because people don’t talk about those things openly when they’re negotiating, or in general. It gets brought up later in court when King steals every last dime from his fighters.

And it DOES NOT MATTER what King offered, why Lewis didn’t take it — it matters that Mike Tyson was WBC champ and would have remained so (until he lost the belt) had he fought his mandatory challenger Lennox Lewis … and he gave up the title instead.

Tyson and King can offer the moon, the stars and the planets in the universe but that isn’t the same as going to purse bids (where King might lose or have to pay more than he thinks is “fair”).

King wanted Lewis to let Tyson fight two more fights before facing Lewis and wanted Lewis to take step-aside money. Kick the can down the road and then almost certainly walk away from the promise to face Lewis at that point.

Did Tyson give up a belt rather than face Lennox Lewis? Yes, he did.

Quack quack.

 

Rest assured I've enjoyed some of it, and chuckled at other bits. The popcorn was good too

 

I'm sorry but no one helped me. I'm trying again:
Can someone who claims that Tyson avoided Holyfield explain to me how they were afraid of him in 1996 when Lewis was the guy who had just been knocked out by sparring partner Mike, a man who couldn't beat old Ray Mercer and was considered much worse than in 2002 and in 2002 he stopped being afraid of him, even though he himself was a wreck of a man whose fights were getting worse and worse, he had to take psychotropic drugs. Smoke weed before fights to relax? Was it the drugs and weed that made Mike decide to fight Lewis in a much better period of his career than in 1996, under much worse conditions for himself, and then he took terrible punishment for 8 rounds without doing anything at all? Isn't it an insult to reason? where is the logic here? what is the difference between a duck duck for Lewis and a duck duck for Ruiz, Byrd, Klitschko

 

You really don’t know how the business of boxing works.

The circumstances of each are different. The promoter of a challenger can’t demand options on the champion. In a unification each side has his promoter and they work together.

So when Lennox defended against a Don King fighter, he could just say ‘ok I’ll fight someone else’ if King made any demands.

However, Don King when promoting a champion can demand options UNLESS IT GOES TO PURSE BIDS, in which case he can’t demand anything. He has to give Lennox a certain percentage of the total bid, in escrow (so payment in full is guaranteed if the fight takes place) and that’s that.

If, as you keep insisting, Lennox wasn’t worth more than $13.5M, why wouldn’t King just let it go to bids and bid lower to save money and maximize his profit? Ask yourself that question. The answers are very obvious:

1) King was going to have to pay more for the fight than he wanted if it went to bids (HBO would back Lewis’ promoter’s bid).

2) He wouldn’t be able to demand any options.

3) He couldn’t cheat either fighter by saying ‘yuk yuk, sorry, but I’m not going to be able to come through with that money I contracted to pay you, here’s what you’re getting,’ which he did to Mike Tyson, Larry Holmes, JC Chavez and every other fighter he ever promoted.

Yet you want us to believe King was trustworthy, that he wanted no options on Lewis (even though he routinely demanded them of every other fighter who fought his champions in circumstances that he would do so) and that Lewis just should have taken whatever King decided it was worth because, of course, he’s a kind soul who had everyone’s best interests at heart and just wanted to be fair, lol.

 

Things like this are about business, Tyson gets beat in 96 by Lewis he is done as a big money maker and Lewis continues if Tyson KO's Lewis then a rematch is a moneymaker possibly a trilogy.

Tyson wasn't going to beat Lewis in 96 his team knew the odds were against it. Tyson was still formidable and dangerous but not Lewis level anymore. Tyson was making lots of money no matter who he was fighting, so why not wait until Tyson was ready to call it quits which is what they did

 

Sources saying: Lewis turned down step-aside money that Tyson/King wanted him to take to wait for Mike to fight two more fights before getting around to his mandatory, lol? Chick.

Sources saying Lewis turned down Don King and wanted it instead to go to purse bids? Check.

It always comes down to one simple question:

Did Mike Tyson give up a world championship belt rather than fight Lennox Lewis?

Answer: Yes.

You can line up all the excuses you want, you can say ‘well he should have taken what King offered,’ but he didn’t have to because he was the mandatory challenger and the rules say it goes to purse bids if he doesn’t accept that offer … and Tyson gave up the belt rather than go to purse bids.

Quack quack.

 

You are a liar.
We posted countless of times how different offers at different times were made. King offered the original Seldon date BEFORE the step-aside deal. Lewis refused to fight on July of 1996.
You have no proof that King demanded options but we have sources about the contrary.
HBO wanted the golden goose (Tyson) without being the A-side. The B-side wanted to impose his conditions (fight on HBO) on the champion and boxing biggest draw. The champion refused.
Simple as that.

 

Tyson was superstitious and wanted to follow the same plan of unifying the belts that he did 10 years earlier. Win the WBC belt, win the WBA belt, defend against a solid challenger then win the IBF belt and unify.

Bowe and Lewis would've been bigger fights down the line after unifying. I think even Foreman would've taken the place of Larry Holmes after Tyson unifying. Then you have Bowe taking Michael Spinks' place as the SuperFight. Lewis fits in there somewhere.

That was the plan.

 

The whole idea of the mandatory is they don’t have to play A-side/B-side.

The fight is put on the open market for any promoter to bid on it, and the highest bid wins. That’s exactly setting fair market value. King didn’t want to do that for reasons I’ve enumerated multiple times.

A judge said: Fight him, Mike Tyson (under WBC rules, with a purse bid if no agreement could be made), or lose your title.

Tyson chose the latter.

That’s still the essential fact and you can’t get around it: Mike Tyson gave up a world championship belt rather than fight Lennox Lewis. All the rest is just window dressing.