Lennox Lewis Quotes

I learned very early on once I started boxing as a kid that if you go into the ring emotionally charged you make mistakes. It's a mental game, it's a chess match, you've got to think, you've got to strategise and make tactical decisions.

Decisions need to be made in milliseconds out on the field, and you need to almost know what the other guy is thinking and exactly what he's going to do.

Chess is similar to boxing. You need to develop a strategy, and you need to think two or three steps ahead about what your opponent is doing. You have to be smart. But what’s the difference between chess and boxing? In chess, nobody is an expert, but everybody plays. In boxing everybody is an expert, but nobody fights.

Chess makes man wiser and clear-sighted.

All the time he's boxing, he's thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him.

If you fight angry, you make a lot of mistakes, and when you fight a sharp, witty fighter like me, you can't make mistakes.

Sport doesn't work on knee-jerk reactions.

I have to be smarter than my opponents. I have to figure out their styles in the ring. I have to be three or four steps ahead of them. So my mind has to be sharp.

I've been able to not only be a fighter, but a thinking fighter, where I can use my insight into the business and politics of the sport to make my decisions.

That's boxing - one punch can win a fight.

Writing is sort of like chess for me. You have to think carefully before you move, thinking, planning.

I've lost fights before where I'm landing more punches and I'm moving away from the guy. So, the way that they score things at the end doesn't seem very consistent to me.

I understand the psychology of the sport, especially inside the ring.

I have a dream fight - boxing fight - and I am for sure gonna fight a boxing fight.

Life is a kind of chess.

Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.

I don't feel that no fighter has the mental or physical agility to match Floyd Mayweather.

Boxing and chess are similar. It’s about the choice of means. Sometimes I need a pawn, a bishop or a knight to defeat my opponent. It’s about finding the best way. A good boxer has to be variable. He doesn’t just need to know how to punch. He must also know how to protect himself, how to defend, how to avoid the opponent’s punches. Only a complete fighter can become champion.

Football is like chess, only without the dice.

I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it.

Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.

Earlier in my career, I never thought of boxing as a chess game, but I confirm that they are, in fact, very similar. You can plan your fights and strategy just like you would in chess.

Everybody thinks this is a tough man's sport. This is not a tough man's sport. This is a thinking man's sport. A tough man is gonna get hurt real bad in this sport.

As a boxer I took the liberty of using not only my fists, but also my head.

Chess is like body-building. If you train every day, you stay in top shape. It is the same with your brain - chess is a matter of daily training.