LAS VEGAS -- Evander Holyfield thinks he wasn't aggressive enough to win his first fight against Lennox Lewis, but neither was Lewis.

The fight ended in a draw, but most observers thought Lewis was a clear winner of the match for the undisputed heavyweight title March 13 in Madison Square Garden.

A CompuBox punch-count credited Lewis with landing 348 punches, 187 of them jabs, to Holyfield's 130, 52 of them jabs.

Holyfield believes those figures are deceiving.

"The heart of the game is punches that count," he said. "Everybody knows if you knock a guy down with one punch, you win the round."

As for his performance, the 37-year-old Holyfield said, "I've been fighting since I was 8 years old and I've made mistakes all my life. The most important thing is to correct the mistakes."

"This fight I will redeem myself," said the WBA-IBF heavyweight champion, who fights Lewis, the 34-year-old WBC champion from Britain, Saturday night in the Thomas & Mack Center.

The fight will be one of four title matches on a TVKO pay-per-view telecast. The main event is expected to start about midnight ET.

"This may be one of my greatest fights ever," Holyfield said. "In the first fight, I wasn't aggressive enough."

This week Holyfield said the leg cramps he felt during the fight weren't an excuse, but he often has talked about how they limited his movement.

A lot of people in boxing thought that while Lewis won, he was too cautious, a claim that rankles Lewis.

"At some point in time you have to take a chance to be a winner," Holyfield said. "He didn't take that chance because he was afraid he might get caught."

"If I feel I hurt someone sufficiently, I'll go after him," Lewis said. "In the first fight I was a bit cautious. The first fight with me he couldn't figure out what was happening. I don't think he'll figure me out the second time either."

Holyfield thinks he can win by fighting outside, but that would appear to be wishful thinking. At 6-foot-5, Lewis has advantages in height and reach over the 6-2½ Holyfield.

Lewis weighed in officially Thursday at 242 pounds, while Holyfield weighed 217 pounds. In the first fight, Lewis weighed 246 pounds, and Holyfield 215.

In the first fight, Holyfield predicted he would score a third-round knockout.

"The prediction was a mistake I made," Holyfield said. "I didn't want to admit that I did it out of anger. I let myself get angry from some of the things he said."

Before the fight, it was revealed that Holyfield, who quotes from the Bible and enters the ring to gospel music, had fathered nine illegitimate children, and Lewis hit a nerve by calling Holyfield a hypocrite.

Holyfield, an optimist, even uses the legs cramps to put a positive spin on his performance in the first fight.

"I'd never been in a fight where a guy could control me with a doggone jab," he said. "I recognized about the fifth or sixth round, 'I'm not moving, what's wrong?' I prayed, 'Lord give the strength not to quit.' I endured and you know what -- I got a draw. For me to go through that, how I was feeling, was a victory in itself."

To Lewis, Holyfield is rationalizing because he can't bring himself to admit he was beaten.

"He has a tremendous ego, and that's going to be his downfall," Lewis said.

Holyfield (36-3-1, 25 knockouts) could become undisputed heavyweight champion for the second time. He won the undisputed title by knocking out Buster Douglas in 1990 and held it until he was outpointed by Riddick Bowe in 1992. He regained the WBA-IBF titles by outpointing Bowe in the Fan Man Fight in 1993, then lost them on points to Michael Moorer the next year.

He was without a championship until stopping Mike Tyson in 1996 for the WBA title, and he added the IBF title by stopping Michael Moorer in 1997.

Lewis (34-1, 27 knockouts) was recognized as the WBC champion in 1992 after Bowe relinquished the title. He lost it when he was knocked out by Oliver McCall in 1994, and regained it in 1997 when McCall refused to fight in the fifth round.