The author Nelson Algren enunciated his credo of life in dispensing his immortal advice: "Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And never sleep with a woman who has more problems than you do."

To which he might have added: "Never back a heavyweight named Francois."

Although the Fleet Street press seems determined to whip up the fervour for Lennox Lewis' first London fight in half-a-dozen years, the plain truth is that Francois "The White Buffalo" Botha, who challenges the heavyweight champion at the Docklands Arena Saturday night, has even less chance against Lewis than Lou Savarese had of upending Mike Tyson in Glasgow three weeks back. That said, his manager Sterling McPherson ought to be named Boxing Executive of the Year.

They are strange bedfellows, a white South African and a streetwise black American; but in the past two years McPherson has shrewdly managed to manoeuvre Botha into big-money fights against Tyson, Shannon Briggs and now Lewis. Botha, who by almost any standard should by now reside in boxing's scrap heap, is being paid a reported £1.5 million sterling for what figures to be a brief exercise.

McPherson himself had a fling as a lightweight. He came up in an era when Don King was signing almost anyone who could properly lace on a pair of gloves, mainly to keep them out of the clutches of his rival promoters. McPherson languished for several years, seldom fighting but building up a record of 11-0.

Although he never enjoyed life inside the ring, McPherson was a clever lad, and obviously paid attention to what was going on around him. He was able to cut through the obfuscating and often contradictory details to understand the complex machinations of how the boxing world really worked, and when he announced his decision to retire, King welcomed him into the fold - although in retrospect it might have been a case of inviting the fox into the henhouse.

McPherson's first job entailed serving as a straw manager for several of King's fighters. Most US states have laws against collecting both a promoter's fee and a manager's share from a boxer's purse. It was thus handy to have a loyal employee like McPherson around to put his name on the managerial papers.

McPherson eventually showed himself to be a shrewd fellow. During the 1990s, when it appeared Don King might be headed for prison, his name arose as a possible regent to run the empire while King was behind bars, but when the promoter was acquitted in his federal insurance fraud case, McPherson quietly dropped back into the shadows.

It was McPherson who played Ribbentrop to broker the uneasy alliance between King and Frank Warren, and when that arrangement inevitably fell apart, he threw in with Warren. If he is not a full partner, McPherson is clearly the British promoter's American representative.

In the meantime, McPherson had maintained his role as Botha's manager. King, recognising the fiscal importance of a white heavyweight who could fight just a little bit, had invested several years in building up the man he christened "The White Buffalo", feeding him a steady diet of anonymous stumblebums.

Prior to one such meeting, it should be noted, Botha was to face a tomato can named Brian Sargent on a St Patrick's Day card in Massachusetts. In the principal attraction that night, Peter McNeeley was meeting another inept heavyweight, Danny Wofford, in the grooming process for McNeeley's role as Mike Tyson's get-out-of-jail present.

At a press conference a few days before the bout, Botha said something that annoyed McNeeley, and McNeeley, who had not yet become a national laughingstock, responded by belting him, with an open hand, in front of a hundred witnesses. It is difficult to imagine a more humiliating experience for a would-be boxer than being bitch-slapped by Peter McNeeley, but Botha just stood there, blinking back tears, as his cheek reddened.

We concluded on that day that in addition to lacking boxing skills, Botha also lacked the stones to go very far in this business. We were marginally off the mark in the first assumption, and dead wrong in the second.

All right, Botha proved more courageous than previously suspected when he lasted into the 12th round before being stopped by Michael Moorer in their 1996 IBF title fight. A year earlier, in a fight that didn't prove much, Botha had outpointed an undistinguished German named Axel Schulz to win the vacant title. The German crowd was so displeased with the verdict, a split decision for Botha, that they showered the ring with empty beer bottles and full glasses, which led one leading scribe to describe the occasion as "Kristallnacht". Botha subsequently tested positive for steroids, a development most insiders reckoned could have come only if they'd mixed up his urine sample with Schulz's.

In any case, Botha subsequently got the role as Tyson's foil in his first fight back after the ban for eating Evander Holyfield's ears, and gave a good account of himself right up until the moment he was knocked out and left for dead in the fifth round.

McPherson's head bobbles energetically from an elongated neck, and engaging him in conversation could give one the illusion he could be talking to Kermit the Frog. Botha, who affects a wispy goatee and closely-cropped fair hair, has the appearance of a well-fed storm trooper.

The Las Vegas sports books make Lewis a 13 to 1 on favourite, and the odds should probably be longer than that. Botha's slim chances rest on two far-fetched hopes: the possibility that Lewis may have been distracted by all the Tyson talk which has dominated the run-up to Saturday night's homecoming, and the memory of Lewis' last London fight six years ago, when Oliver McCall caught the heavyweight champion napping at Wembley and knocked him silly.

The suspicion here is Lewis could knock out Botha even if Tyson were in the ring with them, and apparently enough British fans agree that barely half the 12,000 tickets had been sold by yesterday morning. Still, one must give credit where credit is due here, and when McPherson and the White Buffalo leave for America after the bout, they can gleefully count their money all the way across the Atlantic. What more could a man ask of his manager than that?