Becoming Holyfield (2 page)

I
don't think there's a harder job than being a poor, black, single mom raising a large family in the rural Deep South. And I don't know anyone who did it better than my mother, Annie Laura Holyfield.

I was the last of nine kids, eight of them living. (A brother, Jimmy, died of pneumonia shortly after childbirth before I was born.) So Mama had a lot of practice before I came along. There wasn't a trick she hadn't seen or an excuse she hadn't heard. She'd also already seen how various ways of dealing with kids worked out later in their lives, so by the time she got to me, she had her philosophy pretty well worked out: Discipline, consistency and a lot of attention were things a parent owed a child. It was the responsibility you took on when you had children, and there was no choice involved. If you believed in God as strong as Mama did, raising your kids right wasn't just a promise you made to them; it was a promise you made to Him, too.

But those things were worthless if you didn't slather an ocean of love over all of it. No matter what you did to make your kid straighten up and fly right, the most important thing was to make sure he had no doubt that he was loved. That had to be at the foundation or the rest of the structure would rest on shaky ground, ready to collapse at the first of the many difficult tests that every life brings.

I saw a lot of tough parents in the neighborhoods where I grew up. I saw plenty of kids getting whupped upside the head all the time. But what I saw coming from many of those parents was anger and impatience. It wasn't discipline; it was punishment, for things those kids did to their parents, like distracting them from something they were doing or wasting their time or embarrassing them or just plain annoying them. That kind of thing only makes a kid fearful and resentful.

Mama whupped me plenty, probably more than the rest of my sisters and brothers put together. But it wasn't because she'd come to the end of her rope after bringing up the others; it was because I needed it. I was willful and rambunctious and had more energy than I knew what to do with. I got into trouble all the time, not because I was a bad kid but because I liked to push the boundaries and see what I could get away with.

But unlike a lot of the parents of those other kids I saw, Mama never disciplined me because she was annoyed or impatient. Every whupping came with an explanation. “When I say be home at five, you be home at five.” If I asked her why I had to be home at five, she'd say something like, “You don't ask me that after you're already late. You gonna do that to people when you're all grown up, break your word and then try to talk your way out of it?” There was a lesson every time, and she was never unfair. Strict, for sure, but not unfair. She was predictable, too. I can't remember a time I got a whupping that I didn't know for sure it was coming. So I pretty much learned early on about making choices and controlling my own life. Don't want a whupping? Don't play in that abandoned house when she told you not to. Very simple.

But, as I said, most important of all was the love. Growing up I never once doubted that my mother loved me, not for a second, even if I was mad at her or she at me. I never once felt that I had to perform or accomplish anything to “earn” her love. It was just there, always. I might do things that made her angry or sad or proud or happy, but nothing I did could affect how much she loved me. It was that, more than anything, that shaped who I eventually became and how I try to treat my own kids.

I learned a lot of lessons from Mama, about perseverance and keeping your eye on the big picture, about letting go of resentment that could drown you if you let it, and about picking your battles carefully. I learned not to nurse grudges, but to just do what needed to get done and move on. Having goals and working to achieve them wasn't just some tired cliché Mama read in a magazine somewhere. It was a way of life. Nothing got her dander up worse than hearing excuses for not accomplishing something. That was a lesson that would go to the very heart of how I behaved when I became a boxer. I've had more than my fair share of bad calls and bad luck, like being denied an Olympic gold medal and having a piece of my ear bitten off during a fight, but I like to think that I didn't dwell on them, that I didn't go crazy and complain, that I figured out how to get past them and move on. It was pretty much always the right way to have done it.

Sometimes later in life I'd have cause to wonder if maybe I should have been more forthcoming about a setback, like the time I lost a fight because my shoulders were badly injured. But there would have been no way to do it without it sounding like an excuse, so I just let it go. That caused me a lot of problems, including having my boxing license taken away, but you know what? Eventually, it turned out that keeping it to myself was the exact right thing to do, even though it didn't seem that way at the time. Without Mama having driven all those lessons home, I probably would have given in to the temptation to rant and rave about the unfairness of it all, and not only not accomplished anything by it but made it harder to correct the situation.

I'll give you the best example of how strongly Mama stuck to her principles, even when it cost her something to do it. Like I said, I started boxing when I was eight, and she hated it right from the start. She didn't like the idea of people beating each other up, no matter how controlled and “legitimate” it was. In the environment she'd grown up in, fighting was never a good thing. And what mother can stand the idea of somebody else trying to beat up on her kid? But she didn't stop me from doing it.

I didn't lose a fight until I was eleven, but when I did, to a kid named Cecil Collins, it devastated me. I came home and told Mama I was quitting the sport.

Big mistake. “You go on back in that ring and beat that boy!” she said. This from a woman who didn't want me boxing to begin with. “You don't quit until you do what you set out to do!”

So I went back and fought Cecil again. And again I lost. “Go back and fight him again!” Mama said.

I did, and this time I beat him. It felt wonderful, like I'd just climbed Mt. Everest or hit the winning home run in the World Series.

“Well, there you go!” Mama said, beaming.
“Now
you can quit!”

I didn't quit—there were some things even my wise mama didn't understand—but you get the point. If I hadn't gone back in there and tried again and again, I probably would have spent a large part of my life regretting it. But Mama knew how I'd feel once I won, all proud and happy. Her attitude wasn't, “See? I was right.” It was, “Don't you feel good having finished what you started?” It was that feeling that shaped my later approach to life, not the fact that I'd done what Mama asked, and that's why the lesson was so valuable. It really came from me; Mama just pushed me to get there.

She had more to do with who I am than any other single person. Carter Morgan ran a close second, but by the time he got to me, my mother had already gotten the train headed down the track.

Mama was born Annie Laura Riggen in July 1928 in Atlanta. Her grandmother had a very large family that stuck together through the years, so even though Mama only had one brother and no sisters, there were always a lot of kids of various ages running around. It wasn't until her grandmother passed that Annie Laura realized that one of her sisters was really her aunt. They were the same age and nobody had bothered to explain things.

Mama got married to Joseph Holyfield when she was fifteen. She took his last name, and after they split up in 1953, she kept it. Shortly after that she moved the family to Atmore, Alabama, to take care of her mother, who'd had a mild stroke. Atmore, a mill town about forty miles northeast of Mobile and two miles from the Florida border, is where she met Isom Coley, a lumberjack who was a gentle man despite being incredibly strong physically. He and Mama made plans to marry, but somehow never got around to it. So when they had me in 1962, her last name was still Holyfield, and that's the name she passed on to me. Isom and Mama had a falling out before I was born so I grew up without him around, but later on he would come to all my fights and never had a problem with me having a name different from his.

As for a first name, Mama hadn't given it much thought before I was born. A friend of hers suggested “Evander” because she'd just read something somewhere about a hero of that name in Roman mythology. He was the son of Mercury, born in Greece with the name Euandros, which means “good man.” He went to what is now Italy and founded a new city on the site where Rome would eventually rise, and became its king, Evander.

I hated both my names when I was little. They were unusual, and other kids were always cracking wise about them. One of my mother's girlfriends was called “Chubby,” which my siblings thought was pretty hysterical. Some of them started calling me that because I was as skinny as a pencil. You'd think that “Chubby” was about the rottenest name you could hang on a little kid, but I didn't mind it at all. It sure beat “Evander.” When I got to school I even insisted the teachers call me Chubby, and most of them did. It still comes back to haunt me once in a while: When I fought my first title bout as a professional, someone scrawled “Nail him, Chubby” on a blackboard in my locker room, and when the ABC cameras showed me warming up, there it was on national television, big as life. I had to explain it during the postfight interview.

Later in life I came to appreciate my real names more and more, especially as I began to discover my spiritual side. Evander might be an unusual name in the United States, but when I went to the Olympics in Greece in 2004, people loved to open up baby name books and show it to me. I also once visited Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, which was named for a prominent New York educator.

Our house at 81 King Street in Atmore is still standing today. It amazes me now to see it. When I was very young it seemed huge and fine, but that just shows you how oblivious a kid can be to hardship, because it was a run-down little nothing of a bungalow. But all my memories of the place are fond ones, at least if you don't count my dog getting shot.

My brother Bernard and I were the babies of the family, so while everyone else was either in school or working, we got to roam around the quiet neighborhood playing with other kids. This came with a small measure of guilt, though, because our older brothers and sisters didn't have time for that. They all worked, and worked hard, even the ones in school. Mama didn't plan for us to live in a shack forever and just accept whatever life handed us. She was a devout Christian who tried to live by the teachings of the Bible, and what that meant to her was that you had a duty to work hard and try to better yourself. It didn't matter what you did—Mama cooked in a restaurant—but as long as you were doing it, you had to do it well and with an eye toward making things better and better.

Grandma Pearlie Beatrice Hatton was confined to a wheelchair and wasn't able to work, but she had plenty of energy and found ways to burn it off. Most of the ways usually had something to do with disciplining Bernard and me, which she did often and with a lot of enthusiasm. She also did it with a lot of old-time religion. I didn't mind the whuppings so much; hardly a day went by that I didn't get scratched and bruised playing sports in empty lots so I got used to dealing with pain pretty early, and Grandma's idea of a “whupping” was usually just a sharp pinch on the arm. It was the religious lectures that drove me nuts, because while she was quoting from the Bible, I could hear other kids outside laughing and having a great time. Once in a while, without thinking, I'd say, “Couldn't you just go ahead and pinch me already so I can go back outside?” That usually backfired, because she'd say, “No!” and realize I really wasn't paying attention, which only brought on more fire and brimstone and sometimes the switch, which that “frail” little lady used like she'd trained for it. It got even worse after Bernard and I saw someone in the house late at night and Grandma decided that it was an angel come to bestow God's blessing on us. Once that happened, she got even more zealous about making sure we turned out right. But, just as with Mama, we knew Grandma loved us, and we loved her right back. Later in life I'd come to think a lot about those Bible lessons, too. I wonder if Grandma knew at the time that, even though a lot of what she tried to teach us had no immediate effect, it would pay great dividends later.

Mama moved all of us, including Grandma, back to Atlanta when I was four. We stayed with my eldest sister JoAnn for the first few months. She lived in her mother-in-law's house, and when all of us were added in, there were fourteen of us under one roof, but I don't have a recollection of anyone minding very much. By the time I went to kindergarten at E. P. Johnson Elementary School, we'd moved into our own place.

Bernard and I figured to pretty much pick up where we'd left off in Atmore and roam around the new neighborhood looking for any kind of games we could get into. But Grandma got real protective now that we were in the “big city” and subject to all kinds of new dangers and bad influences. The reins were on pretty tight and that meant even more disciplining from her, because when the choice came down to sticking to the front yard or risking getting our arms pinched if we wandered off, it was a pretty easy decision. Adding disobedience to our list of sins made Grandma even more zealous, which made her more protective and tightened the apron strings even further, which made Bernard and me even bigger sinners when we disobeyed her, and…you get the picture.