From Guyana to Brooklyn, Fighter Aims High
By IRA BERKOW
The boxer living in Brooklyn dialed the number in Georgetown, Guyana. "Hi, Mom," he said, over the long- distance line. "Hi, Six Heads," she said, "how's my son?" "Great, Mom." "Are you working hard and not chasing the girls and staying away from the bad influences on the street?" He assured her that his head was on straight. Singular head, that is, even though everybody calls Andrew Lewis Six Heads, or Six for short, even his mother. Six Heads' mom wanted to know if he was training properly, listening to his manager and trainer. In less than two weeks he will be attempting to win a world championship, an honor that no Guyanese fighter has ever captured, even though nine have fought for 13 world titles. Six Heads Lewis, the No. 1 welterweight contender in the World Boxing Association's rankings, will fight James Page for the vacant W.B.A. title on Feb. 17 at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. Lewis is undefeated in 20 professional fights and has knocked out 18 of his opponents. Actually, it is 19 of 20, since one of the fighters he flattened in a bout in Guyana fell forward like a board and hit the canvas, opening a huge bloody gash in his forehead. The referee stopped the fight and ruled it a victory, but the next day the Guyanese boxing commission called it a technical draw, presumably deciding that the canvas had knocked out the fighter. But that's the thing with Six Heads. He hits people so hard they do or observe strange things. Which is how he obtained the nickname Six Heads. It happened in an amateur tournament in Georgetown when he was 7. "I knocked the other boy down twice in the first round and two more times in the second round," Lewis recalled, in his quick Caribbean cadence. "When he got up, the referee asked if he wanted to continue. He said: `I'm fighting no more. I see six heads in front of me.' That's how I got the name Six Heads. And the name stuck." His mother can ease her concern about whether he is doing his work, since Lewis, a 5-foot-8 1/2, 147-pound left-hander, looks superbly conditioned. When stripped to the white silk boxing trunks with red fringes and the name "6 Heads" across the front that he wears even when sparring, he could model for a muscle magazine. He is, however, also 30 years old old, these days, for a fighter to be getting his first crack at a championship. But Lewis, to be sure, is not your run-of-the-mill top-flight fighter. For one thing, opponents have often ducked him, said his manager, Nelson Fernandez. Or as Lewis said, "I had trouble getting fights in my country." For another, his promoter when he came to the United States in 1996 was Don King. "He was my promoter but he didn't promote me," Lewis said. "I was frustrated. It was time to take a walk in the park." Fernandez agreed. "Don had Fιlix Trinidad and Sharmba Mitchell and Evander Holyfield and James Page, among others, as champion," he said. "It always seemed that Six was the ugly sister under Don's umbrella." So fighter and trainer, after a tussle, switched promoters it is always a tussle with Don King to Top Rank and Bob Arum. "We're happy now," Fernandez said. "We're fighting for the biggest purse we've ever had, $200,000. I told Six that he can make a minimum of $12 million before his career is over. He has the talent." Lewis's first scheduled bout with Page last June was for Page's W.B.A. welterweight title, but it was postponed when Holyfield, fighting in the main event, was injured. For Lewis's rescheduled championship bout in August against Page, the champ did not show up for the weigh-in. He had vanished. Fernandez wonders if Page was trying to duck his fighter. But Page, who was stripped of his title, contends that he was simply trying to get out of a contract with King. Six Heads, meanwhile, has kept busy, first knocking out Sebastian Valdez on Nov. 17 and then proceeding to train for the Page bout. On a recent afternoon in Paterson, N.J., as he does several times a week, Lewis climbed the garbage-strewn steps to the Joe Grier Boxing Academy on the third floor of a brick building that looked abandoned from the outside. It is on a street that looked abandoned from any perspective. In their inelegant profession, boxers must often ignore niceties. Six Heads, who lives in Crown Heights, has specific motivations. "It is my dream to go back to Guyana with the championship belt," Lewis said as he sat in the Grier gym while an associate taped his gloves before a recent sparring session. "I live in the ghetto, and it's rough. I want to move." He said he'd like to earn enough money to buy a house "someplace nice like Canarsie." "People where I live know you're a fighter, they think you have money," he said. "They are jealous. They want to rob you, steal your chains, your rings." He lives relatively frugally, while taking responsibility for his 3-month- old son, Andrew Jr., who lives with his companion, Georgia Reed. He does not own a car. "First I buy a house," he said. "A car goes inside the house." For the six weeks of training before the fight, Fernandez has moved Lewis to a resort in the Poconos, away from any kind of trouble that might find his fighter in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Lewis and his three trainers do road work in the mountains and then drive the 60 miles to Paterson for sparring sessions in the Grier gym. The gymnasium was freshly painted blue and white and kept as neat as a doll's house other, that is, than for the faded and flop-earred fight pictures and posters taped to the walls. In the ring, the squeak of sneakers on canvas and the thud of leather punches offered by Six Heads and his three sparring partners in their thick black gloves and black headgear was the music they danced to. "Work him bend the knees give me some angles off the jab," Angel DeJesus, Lewis's trainer, shouted to his fighter. He was standing on the ring apron, in dark sweats and baseball cap, leaning on the top rope. Six Heads, his arms gleaming with perspiration, his eyes glaring inside the headgear, followed instructions. There was a furious give and take with the husky spar mate, Antoine Barrett, who is 11-6-1 as a professional supermiddleweight. "He's right there in front of you. Bring it! Bring it!" Fernandez, observing the exchanges from a short distance from the ring, was saying that when he first saw Lewis, in Guyana, he was "rough around the edges." "A friend of mine in Guyana, Keith Barsilio, had touted me on this young fighter," Fernandez said. "He said, `Six Heads is a great prospect can punch like a mule kicks.' Well, you hear this all the time, but I decided to go down there and see for myself. "He'd always be going for the kill. He counted on brute strength, didn't set up anything with the jab. But he could punch like a mule kicks. If he would listen, I thought he would have a chance to be a champion. And he does listen. He really wants to make something of himself." As for being 30, Lewis has said that he feels 20. "I haven't taken a lot of shots," he said, "so my body is young. I'm in my prime." Lewis had an impressive amateur record of 47-3, with one of his losses coming in the first round of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. He lost a controversial decision to Andreas Otto of Germany, the second-ranked fighter in the competition. "It was close," Lewis said, "but everybody said I was robbed." The Los Angeles Times reported: "Otto narrowly escaped an embarrassing elimination, in an 8-7 decision. Lewis was in the bout at the end and when the score was posted, whistles and boos erupted from the crowd." Lewis turned pro after the Olympics and remained in Guyana until he hooked up with Fernandez and came to America in 1996. "Lewis is a good fighter," said Bert Sugar, the longtime boxing analyst and historian. "I don't know if he's in the top 100 fighters, but he can fight, which in today's boxing world is a plus. He had an outstanding record compiled mostly in Guyana. But Guyana is hardly a hotbed of boxing." Yet 13 of Lewis's 18 knockouts have occurred in the first or second rounds. Only two got as far as the sixth before taking the count. His lone decision, a lopsided one, came against Teddy Reid, on Dec. 5, 1998, in Atlantic City. It earned Lewis the World Boxing Association North American title. Perhaps Lewis's most important victory was over Terrence Alli, who was a contender in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Lewis knocked Alli out in the second round, in Georgetown in 1996. "Alli was a very good fighter," Sugar said, "but way over the hill when Lewis beat him." After Barrett finished the first four rounds of sparring with Lewis, he sat on a stool, toweling down. "He's got the whole package," Barrett said of Lewis. "He's a good kid. He's got the speed, the defense, the power. Has a nice punch with him. And he's really conditioned. I was hitting him but I wasn't really landing nothin' flush. After you throw a punch, he's gone. Quick like that." After 10 rounds of boxing, Lewis climbed out of the ring, his breathing hard but not labored. How did he feel? "Could go for some more rounds," he said. The smile he flashed seemed to underscore the remark. Shortly after, Six Heads put a call in to his mother to tell her of his progress. Besides his parents his father, also named Andrew, was once a local fighter his five brothers and one sister, many of those living in the Albouiston section of Georgetown eagerly await his fight for the title. In fact, Lewis said proudly, in the middle of one marketplace there stands a 6-foot tall cardboard cutout of him. With how many heads, he was asked. "Just one," he said. He shrugged and smiled. "But if I win the title, maybe they'll add some."  Follow the goings-on in Guyana
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