"This will remind you of an execution, a murder," Emanuel Steward had warned. And so it did, the end coming with 35 seconds left in the eighth round after a right fist crashed into a bloody face whose eyes, nearly shut, had long since lost their fire.

Lennox Lewis bounced so many shots off Mike Tyson's head that you began to admire Mike for taking them when he had no answer. Tyson stayed in after knowing he couldn't get off, the way 38-year-old Ali stayed in against Larry Holmes in 1980. All the honor they had left was going out on their shields.

	Hey, Mike. Weren't you supposed to crush his skull?

The beginning of the end had come five rounds earlier, when Tyson caught Lewis with one left hook, and Lewis shook it off. After that, school was out. "By the third, we had him," said Steward, Lewis' trainer. "He was done." The skin around Tyson's eyes was cut and puffing up by then. Lewis could've ended it sooner -- Steward yelling at him between rounds from the fourth on to do just that -- but he hurt his right hand bouncing it so often off Tyson's dome. It wasn't very pretty. Fighting rarely is.

The crushing defeat was oddly redemptive for Tyson. Many of the 15,327 in The Pyramid, from the rafters down to the $2,400 ringside seats -- along with most of the million-plus watching at home for $55-60 a pop -- believed in Mike's crueler enchantments, even if they didn't like him. The press, while reviling Tyson, somehow still had wanted to believe in his once-terrifying skills. There was crepe hung after the fight. The wake made Tyson seem almost human again.

On the other hand, when a man gets knocked out, he doesn't usually ask for a rematch so fast, so often. Tyson did, peppering his requests with praise: "Lennox is a prolific, magnificent fighter, a splendid masterful boxer, too big, too strong. I could never beat him. But if he'd give me one more chance, I think I could beat him."

Lewis got payback: "When he bit my leg in New York, that was first blood. I drew second blood tonight." But the fight was no challenge at all for Lewis, so it couldn't make him a legend, nor earn him an exalted seat in boxing's pantheon. He needs another foil for that.

What's the future for heavyweight boxing now that Tyson's an aging ex-champ? Somebody out there may be ready to give Lewis a fight. All we know is it isn't Tyson.

Neither Lennox Lewis nor Mike Tyson invented all the troubles in River City, but maybe they could help solve some of them. That was the thinking when Memphis and two nearby casino-hotels ponied up $12 million to bring Lewis and Tyson to Elvis' hometown. Many -- well, some -- wanted to know why Memphis would put up with a match starring the Convicted Rapist, when even Vegas passed on it. Well, when you're known mostly as the home of Elvis, who went out sick-puppy style in a drug-addled puddle of his own puke, and/or the place where Martin Luther King was killed, you're a little less picky about means of redemption. Good barbecue goes only so far.

Though the joints did steady custom, feeding the likes of Magic Johnson as well as limo-loads of high rollers, packs of wishful females and platoons of hip-hop wannabe hoods cruised up and down Second, Third, Main and Beale. There were enough Cadillac Escalades in town to make a pontoon bridge across the mighty Mississippi.

On hand were ballers Gary Payton, Charles Woodson, Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo. Oscar-winner Denzel Washington. Rap mogul Russell Simmons. Morgan Freeman. Brad Pitt. Local siren Cybill Shepherd.

The semiexotic feel of the location added to the mystique of there being no happy endings here, not in boxing.

	Lewis humbled Tyson and diminished the former champ's place in boxing history.

Tyson's status is similar to Jack Johnson's in the first quarter of the last century. As Convicted Rapist is Tyson's nom de voyage, Johnson put a blackjack in the crotch of his shorts during workouts he knew the press would attend. As Tyson did time for his crime, Johnson lived in exile after a felony conviction under the Mann Act. (His crime: crossing a state line with a white woman.) Johnson's feral golden smile was similar to Tyson's. And like Mike on The Pyramid's canvas, Johnson ended up on his back, shielding his eyes from the sun in Havana.

They'll do it again. However bad things looked after those minutes of hell, guess what? A rematch was set before the fight started. These two will toe the mark again. Guaranteed. The heat of Tyson and the cool of Lewis were made for each other. Did their brief collision satisfy us? Which way would you bet on that?

See y'all. Wouldn't want to be y'all.

This article appears in the June 24 issue of ESPN The Magazine.