MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- In a way, it was a moral victory for both men.

Lennox Lewis defeated Mike Tyson, while the former champ who has been on a downward spiral for the better part of the prior decade fought a clean fight and took his beating with honor.

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

Lewis won in dominating fashion, the way all the experts expected him to, and all the Tyson fans prayed he wouldn't.

Does this mean the undisputed champ will finally get the respect he deserves? Hell no! Americans will never fully embrace the worldly Brit who also has citizenship in Canada and Jamaica. His legacy will be that he was the man to finally crush the mystique of Mike Tyson.

That's Tyson's "mystique", not the man himself. Tyson's fans will say Lewis beat a mere shell of the real Iron Mike.

Lewis' legacy will be that he retired from boxing with millions of dollars in the bank and his faculties intact, something only a handful of former heavyweight champs have accomplished -- Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Larry Holmes and George Foreman come to mind.

However, fair or unfair, most fans, historians and "experts" will not rank Lewis among those four men, along with Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Joe Fraizer and Evander Holyfield among the top heavyweight champs of all time. Maybe they'll say Lewis ranks at number 11.

Had Tyson won Saturday night, many would have placed the Brooklyn brawler behind only Ali and Louis. How fair is that? In reality, even if Tyson did pull out a miracle victory, he wouldn't have deserved that high an all-time ranking based on his accomplishments, but that was how strong the Tyson mystique was before Lewis trashed it over eight rounds.

Even after losses to Buster Douglas and Holyfield, the mystique was strong enough for the majority of the pay-per-view buying public to either pick Tyson to win, or at the very least, pull for him -- never mind the so-called experts or the fact that Tyson has degenerated into a raving lunatic over the past six years.

That was how much of an impact Tyson made on the sports world during his first championship run in the late '80s. That was how much the young Tyson captivated the worldwide sports-watching public. That Tyson was the epitome of a warrior (unlike the calculating Lewis). Back then, he was intensity personified (unlike the often-lackadaisical current heavyweight champ). It's part of the reason Tyson, and not Lewis, was the story leading into this fight. He's going to be the story in the weeks after the fight, too.

Sorry Lennox.

Chalk it up to mystique. In terms of mystique, Tyson does rank just behind Ali and Louis. And just like The Greatest and the beloved Brown Bomber, it took a brutal, one-sided stoppage loss to finally convince the public that Tyson is done. Ali was pummeled for 11 rounds by Holmes in 1980. Louis was battered for eight rounds by Rocky Marciano in '51.

But Tyson was never truly in the class of Ali, Louis, Holmes or Marciano. Those men fought back when faced with adversity. Those men had more than pride holding them up when the heat was put on them. They were courageous. Holyfield was cut from their mold.

Tyson tried to win Saturday's fight for about a round and a half. Then he ran out of ideas. Pride kept him upright for the next six rounds, but lacking true championship character, he was no longer trying to win. Holyfield would have been trying to win for every minute that he was conscious. After absorbing the brutal uppercuts and overhand right smashes that Tyson passively absorbed in rounds six through eight, Holyfield, hurt and dazed, would have fired back.

That's not Tyson. Iron Mike, one of the great front-runners in boxing history. He either crushes his opponents -- mentally or physically -- in the first round or two, or he crumbles. But it should be noted he was enough of a bad-ass to defeat 49 pretty good heavyweights, 43 by knockout, in his 17-year career.

Tyson may still go down as one of the all-time greats, and if he does he probably will be placed in the company of the men that he himself stated that he was "cut from the same cloth" (after the Lou Savarese fight) -- Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey and Sonny Liston. They were tough guys. Mavericks. Renegades. Bad dudes, no doubt.

But they also were heavyweight champs who came into boxing with a roar, and left the fight game with a whimper.

In his era, the turn of the last century, Johnson was even more controversial than Tyson (and the Galveston Giant would probably still command headlines today for his out-of-the ring lifestyle). The first African-American heavyweight champ won the richest prize in sports by humiliating little Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, in 1908. Two years later, Johnson solidified his dominance by destroying the "Great White Hope" James J. Jefferies in 15 rounds. But his career ended controversially, as many believe he took a dive against Jess Willard in Havana, Cuba, in 1915.

Dempsey beat the man who beat the man the way Tyson used to tear into the likes of Pinklon Thomas and Tony Tubbs, crushing Willard in three rounds in 1919. He followed that performance with the classic two-round war of knockdowns with Luis Angel Firpo in '23, a fight in which he was knocked out of the ring and climbed back in (with the help of some sportswriters) to drop his Argentine foe seven times before it was stopped.

But Dempsey's controlled aggression was nullified by the stick and move style of Gene Tunney. Despite the storied "long count," Tunney did the same thing in the rematch.

In the late 1950s, Liston cleaned out the heavyweight division before he even got a chance at the title that was held by Floyd Patterson (who, like Tyson, was trained by Cus D'Amato). When Liston finally got his shot he made short work of the D'Amato protégé, stomping the smaller man in one round. He did the same thing in the rematch, prompting writers of the day to a hail him as invincible. In the same one-sided fashion as Lewis humbled Tyson, Cassius Clay dominated Liston over seven rounds. Liston was probably less brave than Tyson, as he elected to stay on his stool after the seventh round, rather than get beat down and counted out in the eighth.

In the rematch, Liston went down in the first round by the infamous "phantom punch." It's not out of the realm of possibility that if Tyson gets a rematch with Lewis, that he, too, will go out in one.

No boxing fan under 30 will ever forget how invincible Tyson looked when he won the title against Trevor Berbick in 1986, or when he systematically destroyed big men like Tyrell Biggs and Pinklon Thomas in '87, or when he annihilated Michael Spinks and Holmes in '88. But those were his last great fights.

It's been downhill ever since, and Lewis put the period at the end of what was a wild ride.

It's over for Tyson. He knows it. Now, surely even his diehard supporters know it.

Of course, Tyson will continue to fight, just like Johnson, Dempsey and Liston did. He needs the money. But like those great renegades of the past after their humiliating, mystique-crushing defeats, he will never again fight for the title.

The question now is whether Tyson will continue to deteriorate outside of the ring. His former trainer Tommy Brooks told Kevin Iole of the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he feared Tyson would wind up like Johnson (who died in a car wreck) and Liston (who died mysteriously, presumably of a drug overdose).

Here's hoping his post-fight demeanor against Lewis, surprisingly gracious, is an indication of better things to come. Maybe he can wind up like his idol Dempsey and retire with the kind of dignity befitting a former great champ.