One right hand at Wembley Arena

The build-up had been about someone else. Lennox Lewis was 25–0, the WBC heavyweight champion, and the fight everyone wanted was Lewis against Riddick Bowe. Oliver McCall, 24–5 and from Chicago, was the man to be cleared out of the way first. The bookmakers had him at 5–1.

Lewis's trainer, Pepe Correa, did not hide what he thought of him. Earlier in fight week he had told McCall, "That's the only belt you'll get to wear this week." On the night, at Wembley Arena in front of around 7,000 people, his instruction to his fighter was just as blunt: "Go out and knock the bum out."

The punch

Early in the second round Lewis threw a right hand with his lead hand hanging out and his chin up. McCall threw his own right over the top of it.

Lewis went down. He got up at six, but his legs were not doing what he asked of them. The referee, José Guadalupe García, looked at him and waved it off. The title had changed hands in the second round.

Lewis protested that the stoppage was premature,, and his camp complained afterwards. Glynn Leach, the editor of Boxing Monthly, took the opposite view. Lewis, he wrote, "only seemed to recover his senses once the fight was waved off", and "the decision was correct".

What it changed

The cost was immediate. The Bowe fight was gone. Lewis offered McCall $10 million for a rematch; McCall said no, and instead beat Larry Holmes on points in April 1995 before losing the title to Frank Bruno.

The more important change was in Lewis's corner. Correa was sacked. In his place Lewis hired Emanuel Steward.

The two men did meet again, in 1997, for the WBC title Mike Tyson had given up. It was one of the strangest nights in heavyweight history. McCall refused to fight in the fourth and fifth rounds, and at one point he was crying in the ring. Lewis won in the fifth. The defeat at Wembley was avenged, but not in a way anyone could enjoy.

Why it lasts

Heavyweight upsets are usually remembered for the loser. This one belongs to both men. For McCall it was the night of his career: a 5–1 outsider who took the title with a single counter-punch in a champion's home city. For Lewis it was the only time in his first 26 fights that anyone had beaten him, and it cost him a trainer, a payday and three years before he could put it right.