A MATTER OF TRUST
IT’S apparent when watching the excellent new documentary, Lennox: The Untold Story, that Lennox Lewis’ steely mindset was his greatest friend. He learned from an early age to believe in himself, to trust himself, and in turn who to believe in.
Lewis was a stickler for loyalty. Though he changed his trainer (or ‘captain’, as he called them) three times during his professional career, the rest of his team remained pretty much the same from the start. It was a team that Lewis carefully selected himself but to gain entry, one first had to gain Lennox’s trust.
With an Olympic gold medal around his neck, there was no shortage of characters auditioning for work with the talented young heavyweight.
“There were a lot of people in boxing when I was thinking about turning professional that would do a lot of talking and tell a lot of porky-pies,” Lewis tells Boxing News. “A lot of them said the right things, they were believable but I wanted people I could really trust.”
John Davenport was Lewis’ first professional ‘captain’ (he would be replaced by Pepe Correa in 1992 before Lennox joined forces with the legendary Emanuel Steward in 1995). Beneath Davenport was Harold Knight, the former fighter who
