Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson finally met in Memphis in June 2002, and Lewis settled one of boxing’s longest-running arguments by stopping Tyson in the eighth round. The fight had spent years as a promise, a warning and, for many fans, a frustration.

That frustration was easy to understand. By the time the bell rang, the matchup had already lived through nearly two decades of buildup, changing champions and blown chances. Lewis, who had been invited to train at Cus D’Amato’s home in 1983 and sparred with Tyson before either man became a heavyweight champion, later said D’Amato had once predicted they would meet in a major fight. It was the kind of memory that made the June 2002 meeting feel less like a new event than a delayed ending.

Lewis had won Olympic gold in 1988 and Tyson had become the youngest heavyweight champion in history, so their paths looked destined to cross long before they actually did. Tyson’s imprisonment in the early 1990s pushed the possibility away, and later he paid Lewis a step-aside fee to pursue Bruce Seldon instead. By 2000, the fight seemed inevitable again, especially after Tyson knocked out Lou Savarese and called out the heavyweight champion in the ring.

Then the matchup nearly slipped away again. Lewis suffered a shocking knockout loss to Hasim Rahman in 2001, only to reclaim his title later that year, and the fight still had to survive licensing issues, network disputes and Tyson’s own controversies. A New York press conference turned into a mass brawl after Tyson charged Lewis and bit him on the leg, a scene that captured how far the rivalry had drifted from sport into spectacle.

Tyson kept stoking that edge during the buildup, repeating that he was going to kill Lewis, while Lewis answered by casting himself as boxing’s counterweight to the chaos around his opponent. He called himself the knight in shining armor and said Tyson was the reason the sport had a bad name. In the ring, that contrast mattered less than Lewis’s jab, which broke Tyson down before the knockout finished the job in Memphis.

The fight remains one of boxing’s defining events because it finally delivered two heavyweight icons who had been circling each other for 17 years. What it did not settle was the bigger mystery that had hung over the matchup from the start: how many different turns, deals and delays had to line up before a bout everyone thought should have happened years earlier could finally be made real.