Becoming Holyfield (19 page)

My upset of Mike stunned the world, but to me there was no “upset” involved. I call it that only because that's what it's called when everyone thinks you're going to lose and instead you win. To me it wasn't an upset at all, because I knew I was going to win. I've never gotten into a ring without thinking I was going to win. Once in a while I'm wrong, but that doesn't matter.

The usual carping began right on schedule. Tyson hadn't trained enough, I head-butted him and opened a cut over his eye, I was still just a blown-up cruiserweight…

What did I have to do to get some respect? I was supposed to have
died
in that ring, and instead I won. I was heavyweight champ of the world and had beaten three former champions on the way to getting there. Everybody I'd fought was bigger than me and I beat them thirty-four out of thirty-six times anyway.

As for this “blown-up cruiserweight” business, didn't anybody realize what a compliment they were paying me when they said that? How does a guy who belongs down in the 190-pound weight class wind up knocking out all those heavyweights? Fighters don't try to fight above their class. They practically kill themselves trying to make weight to stay down in the lower ones so they don't get creamed. Here I am, the smallest heavyweight in the business, barely a ham sandwich above the 200-pound line, and I keep winning. So how is “blown-up cruiserweight” a criticism?

The media coverage started getting interesting at this point. Not too many people were saying, “Wow, he's the world champ! What a great fighter!” And it wasn't just because that kind of thing is so boring. It's also because if they did that, all of those sportswriters would be admitting that they'd been wrong. And not just some of them but all of them, with the single exception of Ron Borges of the
Boston Globe,
the only one who predicted I'd win. How do you write a bunch of columns predicting a massacre and calling for someone's retirement (“for his own good,” of course) and then turn around and tell your readers he's really a great fighter after all? There had to be some other reason why I won other than that I was the better fighter and the writer simply blew it. Which brings me back to that steroid test Mike's camp had demanded.

Jim Thomas had been asking why I didn't want Mike's guys to see the results of the steroid test until after the fight, and now that it was all over I explained my thinking.

“Cheaters can't stand for other people to cheat,” I told him. If they wanted to believe that I was on the juice, that was fine with me. That way, when I started pushing Mike all over the ring, maybe he'd assume I cheated and that he couldn't beat me, and that would give him a good excuse for losing. Once it was shown I'd been on steroids, I'd be disqualified and he'd be declared the winner.

After the fight that was one noisy camp, all excited to see the results because they were sure I just had to be on the stuff. When the results were revealed and were, of course, completely negative, you never saw a bunch of guys quiet down so fast.

The negative results also removed another possibility for why all of those writers might have been wrong. Even so, what I was still hearing was, “Fight Tyson again and prove it was for real.” At least when they weren't calling for me to retire.

That was fine by me. I beat Mike once, and I knew I could do it again.

By the way, I haven't even gotten to the weird part yet.

M
y cut for a rematch had been preset at $20 million. Now, $20 million is plenty of money, and I wasn't one to turn my nose up at a sum like that, but I wasn't interested in the number so much as in being treated fairly. By this time everyone knew that the rematch was going to be far and away the richest prizefight ever, and a lot of people were going to make an awful lot of money on it, in part because the deals had all been set up before the first fight.

But the reason it was going to be so lucrative was that I'd won, contrary to all expectations, and everyone wanted to know if it was just a fluke. It didn't seem right to me that fans were prepared to pay sky-high ticket prices to see me get my head beaten in and yet other people were going to make more money on the fight than I was. I wanted to fight Mike, sure, but I wasn't half as bothered by the skeptics who were calling for a rematch as you might think. It was annoying, but no more than that, and I didn't run my life according to what other people told me I should do. If we couldn't negotiate a fair deal, I wouldn't fight Mike and that would be that, as far as I was concerned. I didn't have to prove anything.

Jim Thomas understood that but said there was a legal problem. “You already agreed to the $20 million number,” he pointed out. “It was right there in the first contract.” Jim knew that there was no way I'd violate an agreement, written or otherwise.

I told him I understood that. “But you tell Don King that if he doesn't renegotiate the deal, I'm going to retire.”

Jim smiled. He'd written that piece of the contract himself. It said that I had the right to retire any time I wanted to without any negative financial consequences. When Don heard that, he blew his stack and started screaming at the top of his lungs. But by that time I'd come to understand him a lot better and knew that it was just his way of saying, “Okay, let's roll up our sleeves and figure this thing out.”

Which is just what we did. Jim and I got together with Don and a couple of Showtime people and we all made the best cases we could. Jim ran down a full set of detailed financial projections for a rematch and proved conclusively that Don would make enough money to buy the planet Mars. Don pulled out his own projections and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would be penniless and homeless and that his kids would starve if he paid us what we were asking. And who said accounting wasn't an art?

As the evening wore on we gradually worked our way to the middle and agreed on a package of about $34 million in cash plus $1 million worth of other stuff. Jim did a little research and said that it was the largest amount ever paid for a single performance of anything in any field anywhere on earth. That sounded pretty fair to me.

The fight was scheduled for the following April, but Mike suffered another training injury and we had to push it back to June. It would be back at the MGM Grand once again. I didn't need any special motivation to get up for this fight, but I got some anyway. The oddsmakers had made Mike the heavy favorite, and the sportswriters were lining up the same way. They said Mike had underestimated me and hadn't trained properly, and that he wouldn't make that mistake again. They'd seen him in camp and reported that he was training as hard as he ever had in his life, and when it comes to Mike Tyson, that's saying a lot. Think what you want about him, but when Mike put his mind to it, nobody trained harder. He could work himself into exhaustion day after day and it showed in the ring.

As hard as it was to imagine, Las Vegas was even more crowded and crazy than it had been for the first fight. There were reporters there from countries I never even heard of, and hundreds of them had shown up without credentials for the fight. I don't know how they thought they were going to get in. A lot of extra security people were put on to keep the peace.

Mike looked pensive during the prefight ring ceremonies, pacing rapidly, like he couldn't wait for the formalities to be over. He looked a lot fitter than he had the last time. There was a lightness to his step and his occasional shadowboxing flurries were so fast his gloves blurred under the bright overhead lights. The MGM Grand arena is huge, and was packed to the rafters—the gate broke the previous record set by our first fight—but if Mike noticed any of it, it didn't show. The swagger he'd had back then was also completely gone now and in its place was seriousness and resolve. There was fear, too, or at least worry, and I think that anxiety might have been contributing to his impatience. But whatever it was, this man had come to fight, not posture, and he was all business.

Mills Lane was the referee. He wasn't scheduled to be originally, but in what looked to be another mind game just like the demand for a drug test in the first fight, Mike's camp had insisted on a change of refs at the last minute. They got no argument from me. Mills Lane in the ring meant one less thing for me to worry about.

When the bell rang to start the first round, Mike wasted no time. He came to the middle and threw a hard right. I deflected it and threw one of my own. His hands moved faster than I've ever seen them move and his body movements were quick, too. He seemed to snap back and forth like a plucked string and his reflexes were tuned to the max. On the other hand, I sensed that there was something timid and tentative in him that I hadn't seen before.

As I danced around and threw some jabs and straight rights, he was moving to anticipate my punches and at the same time feinting with his shoulders to throw me off. At one point in the first round we faced each other twitching and faking and not throwing a single punch for almost ten seconds, looking for the right opening or waiting for the other guy to go first. When it was clear neither of us was going to fall for anything, we started throwing again.

I felt I had Mike's measure now and began to get aggressive. My jab was working and I used it to set up some rights and a few uppercuts. Mike was throwing some solid punches as well, but I barely felt them and I could tell that was worrying him. I was also backing him up a lot, something he swore he wasn't going to let happen, but there wasn't much he could do about it. He wasn't hurting me so I kept stepping into him and pushing him around the ring.

His defense was to clinch more often than he was used to, and our arms kept getting tangled up. Lane was having a tough time prying us apart, and it only got more difficult as we started retaliating against each other by hanging on much more than we should have, clamping our arms down on each other like some kind of interlocking puzzle. To me this was just tactics, and I tried to figure out how to deal with it. Mike, on the other hand, was quickly growing frustrated, and he started abandoning his fundamentals in an effort to just sock me, not as part of an overall strategy but because he was irked. It didn't help when my head banged into his eye during a particularly aggressive clinch. It wasn't a head-butt, just an inadvertent collision, but when it opened a cut over his eye, he started pointing to it and complaining to the ref. A cut not caused by a punch is pretty good evidence of a head-butt, and Mike's eye was bleeding, but I knew something Mills Lane probably didn't, and that is that Mike had cut his eye in practice, while sparring. That was the injury that had delayed this fight for six weeks, and what he had now wasn't a new cut from colliding with my skull. It was the old cut reopened when my head rubbed against it as he held me in the clinch. Blame his sparring partner, not me.

Back in the corner, my guys were confident that I'd taken the first round, and I was, too. I was forcing Mike to fight my style, not his, and I was landing more and better punches than he was and controlling the action. The second round was much the same. Mike complained about head-butting again, and also about something else, but I couldn't tell what it was. When Lane didn't react, Mike threw a low blow at me but it did no harm and I just let it go. I wanted a victory, not revenge, and wasn't about to get distracted just because Mike was getting exasperated. I won the second round, too, and started thinking about how I was going to knock Mike out. I wasn't interested in winning a decision.

The third round was a different story. Mike was so rattled that he came out of his corner without his mouthpiece and had to go back for it, but his corner men must have had some words with him because he hunkered down and came at me hard, throwing a lot of solid shots and getting out of the way of a lot of mine. Using all of his speed, power and wiles and staying in control of himself, he was getting the upper hand. I had to step up my own game to meet the onslaught, but Mike was ferocious, especially with his left. Two minutes in, I thought he was winning the round, and when we clinched I wrapped my right arm around his left to keep him from launching another bomb at me. After we broke I got some solid punches in, and while he was slightly off balance I threw a hard right and followed it up with a left. It was supposed to be an uppercut starting way down low but Mike saw it coming and dropped his forearm to deflect it. My fist slid off his arm and landed on his trunks below his right hip. It was a clearly inadvertent low blow but a few seconds later Mike retaliated with one of his own anyway.

We were both fighting well, and even though neither of us seemed to be gaining much of a points advantage, I thought Mike's aggression could win him this round unless I scored some decisive shots or knocked him down. That he had finally found his rhythm made what happened next even more mysterious.

With about forty seconds left in the round, we clinched again. Mike's face was at the side of my head and he started doing something odd, kind of working himself around until his mouth was close to my ear. He didn't seem interested in getting in a few rib shots while we were waltzing around, just in maneuvering his face to the side of my head.

At just about the time I was starting to wonder if this wasn't something I should pay a little attention to, I felt a pain like someone had just stuck a red-hot poker into the side of my head.

Now let me tell you, I've felt my fair share of pain in the ring. I've had my nose smashed, my shoulder muscles ripped, my kidneys nearly destroyed and my chin crunched by some of the hardest-hitting guys alive. I was well familiar with every type of pain you could possibly experience during a fight, but this—this was different. For one thing, I didn't know it was coming, so there was surprise and shock thrown in. For another, I didn't know right away what had happened. All I knew was that one of the sharpest pains I'd ever felt was lancing into me from the vicinity of my right ear. I spun away from Mike and jumped high into the air, looking like a cat that had just stepped onto the third rail. I was in agony, and as I danced around trying to deal with the pain, I noticed that there was blood streaming down my face and shoulders. What the heck had happened? Did I get shot by a sniper? I hadn't heard any guns being fired.

“He bit him!” someone was shouting, a note of hysteria in his voice. “He bit him!” I touched a glove to my ear but it was like putting a blowtorch to it. I pulled my hand away quickly and blood flew from my glove.

Meanwhile, Lane had made a T of his hands, suspending the fight. While he was trying to figure out what to do, I walked to one side of the ring and tried to touch my ear again. But Mike wasn't finished. With my back to him and before Lane had a chance to stop him, he ran at me and with both hands gave me a hard shove, throwing me into the ropes and almost knocking me off my feet. Had the fight been restarted? I immediately turned and saw him on the other side of the ring. If the fight was back on, why had he run away? I didn't care. I sprinted across the ring to get at him, but Lane jumped in front of me and confirmed that the fight was still suspended.

I didn't need to complain to him about Mike hitting me from behind while we were on hold. He'd obviously seen it. Once he determined that Mike was going to stay put this time, he came over to see me. It's the only time I've ever seen Mills Lane look like he wasn't sure what to do. Then he said, “I'm going to disqualify him.”

“Don't do that!” I pleaded. That would be a lousy way to end this fight.

Lane thought about it for a second, then put his hand up on my neck and turned me so he could have a look for himself. He didn't like what he saw and walked over to the other side of the ring where he motioned for the doctor and the boxing commissioner to come in.

The doctor, Flip Homansky, turned my head to look at my ear, then pulled back in surprise when he got a good look. “You okay to fight, Evander?” he asked.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Your ear,” he said, pointing to it.

It hurt. So what? “Let me fight,” I said. “I'm gonna knock him out.” I had no idea yet that Mike had actually bitten part of my ear off, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

While Homansky looked me over, Lane spoke with the commissioner, Marc Ratner, and the microphones picked it up.

“He's disqualified!” Lane told Ratner. “He bit his ear! He's out!”

Ratner, the same boxing executive who'd passed on the news that Mike's camp had demanded a steroid test from me, asked him if he was sure.

“He bit his ear!” Lane grabbed his own ear to demonstrate. “I can see the bite marks!”

“So you
are
disqualifying him?” Ratner wasn't arguing with Lane. He just knew that there was a lot involved here and wanted him to be sure.

“Well, let me ask the doc,” Lane said, and turned to Homansky, who'd finished examining me. “He bit his ear—can he go on?”