“It was almost like he wanted to get knocked out,” Mr. Lane said after the fight. “He wasn’t putting up any semblance of defense so I thought that was it.”
He also disqualified Henry Akinwande in a fight that year against Lewis for excessive clinch and holding.
And in 1998, Mr Lane accidentally pushed middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins through the ropes when he tried to break a headlock that Robert Allen was holding Hopkins in. Hopkins was injured and the fight was declared a no contest.
“It was just one of those things that happens,” Mr. Lane said after the fight, one of his last.
Mills Bee Lane III was born on November 12, 1937 in Savannah, Georgia. His father, Remer, moved his family after World War II to a plantation in South Carolina, where he raised cattle. His mother, Louise (Harris) Lane, was a homemaker. Remer had opted out of the family business, Citizens and Southern Bank, and Mills later declined as well.
Boxing became his passion. He listened to it on the radio and, after graduating from boarding school, learned to box in the Marines, which he had joined in 1956. While stationed in Okinawa, he won the championship of the Far East welterweights of the Marines. Determined to continue as a boxer, he enrolled at the University of Nevada, Reno, and won the 1960 NCAA welterweight title.
Although he failed to make the 1960 Olympic team, Mr. Lane quickly turned professional. He lost his first fight but won the next 10 (one of which avenged his defeat) before retiring in 1967, knowing he did not have enough talent to be champion.
By then, he had graduated from the University of Nevada, in 1963, with a business degree and had started refereeing. He received his law degree from the University of Utah in 1970.
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