Lennox Lewis yesterday blamed a conspiracy for the decision to call his heavyweight unification bout with American rival Evander Holyfield a draw.
"I think everything should be looked into - there was definitely something going on, some kind of conspiracy we don't know about," Lewis told a news conference on his arrival back in London.
Meanwhile, in the United States investigations have began into Saturday's fight when Lewis risked his World Boxing Council version of the title, while Holyfield was fighting to retain the International Boxing Federation and World Boxing Association belts.
The New York State Attorney General has instigated a Grand Jury investigation to determine if any criminal charge should be pressed from the circumstances surrounding the drawn verdict which received widespread condemnation. Promoters, TV executives, judges and the two fighters are among those subpoenaed to offer evidence.
As the issue continues to provoke headlines worldwide, it has been revealed that Eugenia Williams, the New Jersey accountants clerk who most shockingly scored the fight to Holyfield, petitioned for bankruptcy six weeks before the contest took place. She will be asked to explain her scoring, 115113 to Holyfield, along with the South African Stanley Christodoulou who scored the contest 116-113 in favour of Lewis and the British judge Larry O'Connell who made it a 115-115 draw.
O'Connell yesterday refused to go to New York to answer the DA's questions, citing abusive phone calls to his wife, who he is unwilling to leave by herself. "My wife has been through hell because of this. I need to be with her right now, there's no way I could go to New York."
Lewis told reporters after arriving at Heathrow that the judges had been "incompetent".
Don King, who promoted the first event and who has been the target for widespread vilification, could be frozen out of the second fight according to Lewis's promoter Panos Eliades who claimed: "The TV station HBO had to put up bankers' letters of credit so the fighters could be paid. Don King refused and the fight would not have happened without HBO. There is no way they will put up with that again, and we are saying Don King should be kept out of any rematch."
However, although Lewis has no contractual ties with King, Holyfield's career remains bound to the flamboyant 67-year-old promoter, whose hold on the title does not seem able to be ended until Holyfield is defeated.
The venue of any rematch remains undecided, with New York and Las Vegas in the United States and Cardiff and London's Wembley stadium in Britain being considered.
Eliades said South African President Nelson Mandela had also offered to stage the fight in South Africa but the President's office yesterday denied reports that he had offered to stage the fight. "The reports are absolutely false," Mandela's spokeswoman Priscilla Naidoo said.
