Becoming Holyfield (27 page)

Man, if that's what they call love, give me respect instead.

In December of 2004, Dale Gentry, a prophet from Fort Worth, Texas, predicted that I would make a major comeback. Given everything that was going on, it seemed pretty ridiculous on its face. I'd lost three fights in a row, my shoulders were a mess, I'd looked so bad in the ring that my license had been suspended indefinitely…. I'd been written off by the boxing world and Gentry's prediction made no sense to anybody.

Except me. I took it as a prophecy, because Gentry was only confirming what I believed the Holy Spirit had already made known to me. Sure enough, it turned out to be a blessing that my license had been lifted because my shoulders got a much-needed twenty-one-month rest while I negotiated my way out of the contract with Don King. They were completely healed and I could throw every punch in the book again. I was fit and healthy top to bottom, and while some of my skills had gotten a bit rusty from nonuse, a little time in the gym and they were coming right back. Sure, I was forty-three, and that's old for a fighter, but George Foreman became heavyweight champion of the world when he was forty-five and was still champ when he was forty-seven. Age is just a number; what counts is the shape you're in. I know twenty-five-year-olds who can't make it up a flight of stairs, but on the day Jack LaLanne turned seventy he swam a mile and a half pulling seventy boats behind him while handcuffed and shackled.

Needless to say, I was as motivated as I'd ever been. I trained like I would for a title bout, and when fight week rolled around, I felt like I could go fifteen rounds against anybody.

The first opponent in my comeback was Jeremy Bates, a tough, hard-hitting journeyman with a record of 21-11-1. Eighteen of those wins were by knockout, and he'd lost only one of his last fifteen fights before retiring the year before. What I found especially interesting was that his only loss in that run wasn't his last fight but his next-to-last. After losing by decision, he came back, won one more fight and
then
retired, going out a winner.

We held a press conference at the Texas Motor Speedway. The place was packed and we had a lot of fun. There was none of that snarly, mean-spirited psyche-out stuff. Jeremy told the reporters how he'd gotten inspired to get into boxing when he saw me fight at the 1984 Olympics. Since then I'd been his hero, so when he got the call to come and fight me, he was out of the office and into the gym in a heartbeat. This was his
Rocky
moment, a day in the sun like he'd never gotten during his years as a professional. He'd been training his brains out for eight solid weeks and was ready to rock.

I may have been Jeremy's hero, but that didn't mean he planned to show me any mercy. He knew there was only one way to demonstrate his respect for me, and that was to try as hard as he could to knock me into the bleachers. He was much shorter than me but outweighed me by ten pounds and was built like a safe. People kept sidling up to me at the press conference saying things like, “Uh, Evander? This guy looks like a grenade wouldn't even hurt him. You sure you know what you're doing?”

Yeah, I knew what I was doing. If I was going to announce my return, I had to do it by fighting someone who wouldn't be seen as a human punching bag but would give me a true test. That wasn't just for the fans or the press, either, or for my trainer Ronnie Shields and Tim Hallmark and the people who were giving me their backing, including the Fox Sports Network. I had to know myself. Sure, I was confident, but I wasn't naïve. As Mike Tyson once put it so well, “You don't know anything until that first punch comes your way.”

A lot of the training I did for this fight was much the same as it would have been for any other fight, but Ronnie made some adjustments based on his analysis of both my abilities and the strengths and weaknesses of my opponent.

Ronnie had been one of my trainers in the early 1990s. When he and I got back together in 2004 before the Larry Donald fight, I wasn't the same boxer he'd trained twelve years before, because of my shoulders. Before the surgeries they hurt all the time, and I found myself doing a lot of things to protect them, like not moving my head the way I used to. To compensate I had to twist around in funny ways to avoid punches. That made my back hurt, which made it hard to bend my legs, and so on and so on. It was a ripple effect that gradually threw my whole body out of whack. There were a lot of times that I had to call off sparring in the middle of a session because it was doing more harm than good, and neither of us was very happy about it.

Even after I finally had surgery to correct the shoulder problems, the effects of all that time I'd spent fighting “around” the injured muscles lingered. I unconsciously expected stabs of pain that never came, and it took a surprisingly long time to get over that and learn to trust my body again. But eventually I started getting back on track, and the more I did, the better I felt and the faster I improved. By the time we got the Bates fight lined up, I felt terrific. Sparring sessions became productive again, because I was able to concentrate on practicing the strategy Ronnie had devised for the fight instead of worrying about whether my next punch would hurt me worse than it would my sparring partner.

Ronnie's take on Jeremy was that he was more a brawler, like Tyson, than a boxer, like me. He felt that if I were twenty-five years old again I might be able to go toe-to-toe but, at forty-three, if I tried to outmuscle Jeremy I'd be giving him too many opportunities to land the big haymaker and put me down. In any event, there was no reason to fight like that. My strength was always in boxing, not brawling, and now that my shoulders had healed, I had a lot of my agility and speed back. I was dancing and moving again, and I had plenty of conditioning to keep that up for a long time. Ronnie's plan for the bout was to make sure that I fought my own way and not get drawn into Jeremy's. At least in the beginning.

“We're gonna fight him at some point,” Ronnie said. All trainers talk like that, saying
we,
just like golf caddies do. “Just not in the early rounds. Why do that if we don't have to?”

Ronnie was nothing if not honest. “Jeremy thinks you're done,” he told me straight out. “He thinks you're over the hill. So he's gonna come out and try to put a lot of pressure on you, try to make you fight instead of box. He loves to go toe-to-toe, and he can do it all day, so that's the last thing we want to do.”

Ronnie and I both respected Jeremy. He was strong and had all the fundamentals down pat, along with a lot of savvy and guts in the ring. He could take a punch, too.

“We're gonna spend the first three or four rounds boxing,” Ronnie said. “Dancing, moving all around the ring, throwing lots of jabs, avoiding punches.”

The idea was for me to fight in the style I was most comfortable with, from the outside, reaching in with the jab and staying away from his punches at the same time. I'd throw a lot of combinations, too, since those are one of my best assets. Not only would this allow me to get a lot of good shots in, it would also wear Jeremy down. There's nothing like being taken out of your style to tire a fighter out. If I could keep dancing and moving, flicking out good jabs and throwing effective combinations, relying more on finesse than muscle, Jeremy would have to do more moving than he was used to and spend a lot of energy and concentration trying to keep out of the way of my punches.

“Three, four rounds of that,” Ronnie said, “then we go in there and fight him.”

If everything went according to plan, by Round Five or so I'd still be fresh and Jeremy would have used himself up trying to respond to me. He'd be vulnerable enough—worn down and taken well out of his comfort zone—for me to move inside and start finding opportunities to throw big power punches. Ronnie figured I'd knock him out in the seventh or eighth.

A good deal of Ronnie's training plan in support of that strategy was to get me to establish my jab. He felt that I'd been standing up too straight and just fighting. He was right. Because of all of the effects from my bad shoulders, I'd gotten away from the style that had brought me so much success back when Ronnie was training me from 1988 to 1992. Part of that style also included counterpunching, which means answering an opponent's shot with two or three better ones of your own. If he throws a jab, you might come back immediately with a right, a hook, and an uppercut or a double jab. If he throws two jabs, you come back with three. It's “offense plus,” not just answering, but answering better. One of the reasons counterpunching is so effective is that the other guy is usually a little off balance after his own punch, so he can't defend himself as well as he normally might. Of course, counterpunching isn't easy, because it comes on the tail end of defending yourself from one of
his
shots. It takes a lot of skill and practice, and Ronnie had me working hard on it.

Tim Hallmark loved the whole concept, because counterpunching demands tremendous balance and he considers balance a critical part of any athletic endeavor. If you watch a lot of different boxers, you'll see that the best ones are like the best golfers. No matter how big and powerful a swing a great golfer makes, he always stays “within the shot.” But look at a lousy golfer and you'll often see him sway to one side and then practically fall over on his follow through, because he comes “out of the shot.” It's the same with boxers. No matter how big a punch you throw and how much body you put into it, you want to stay balanced throughout. If you start to fall over at the end, you leave yourself wide open for a counterpunch. Tim had me doing a lot of plyometrics to improve that part of my game.

My sparring partner for this fight was a big, strong twenty-five-year-old named Adam Richards, from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Nicknamed “Swamp Donkey,” Adam wasn't some washed-up club fighter we were paying to get beaten up, but a talented, up-and-coming heavyweight with a budding career of his own. A few years back he'd badly fractured the top rib on his left side during his third pro fight and made the wise decision to let it fully heal before resuming his career. That's when he'd come to Ronnie to train him. Since then he'd racked up eleven more fights and was sitting on an enviable record of 14-1, with eleven of those wins coming by knockout. He was strong as a bull, worked like one, too, and talk about being motivated? Adam had a fight of his own coming up the week after mine, so he was in intense training mode himself and never gave me a moment's rest.

Best of all, he absorbed ring knowledge like a sponge. After every sparring session he and I debriefed in the gym. I'd give him a detailed critique of his performance, and absolutely nothing got past him. If I pointed out that my jabs were getting through his defenses, I knew that I could pretty much kiss those jabs good-bye from then on. He was getting the kind of boxing education you couldn't buy and he wasn't squandering any of it. The more we sparred, the better he got, so the better I had to be. He wasn't intimidated in the ring with me, either, like a lot of guys are. I told him from the very start, “Forget who I am. Just get in there and fight like you know how.” Boy, did he ever. On the Saturday two weeks before the fight, Ronnie had us go six hard rounds, and that kid didn't let up for a second. In the fourth round he slammed me into the ropes and almost knocked me out of the ring. It was the best session I'd had in years, and I doubted that fighting against Bates could be any harder than mixing it up with Adam.

Sparring was fun again, too. It had become a burden for me, a painful necessity that I didn't at all enjoy. It was round after round of agony in my shoulders and my back, and the frustration of fighting in a style that wasn't comfortable. But since my shoulders had healed, and under Ronnie's expert guidance, sparring became less and less of a chore and more and more enjoyable. By the time I began working out with Adam, I was back to my old form and primed to be tested by a young, aggressive pro.

That Saturday session was the toughest one Ronnie had planned for me. It was a simulation of the fight strategy, with a lot of dancing and jabbing in the first four rounds, close-in punching in the fifth, and back outside in the sixth just to make sure I could switch styles at the drop of a hat in case I needed to make that adjustment. I took a lot of hard shots but I gave a lot, too.

When it was over, Ronnie shot me a sly smile as he took off my gloves and I knew exactly what he was thinking:
We are ready!

We made the right choice in putting the fight on in Dallas. Everyone told us that it was a lousy fight market, but the whole city seemed delighted to have us there, and I was greeted warmly wherever I went. That helped, because the press got even more merciless as the event approached.

Down in the locker room before the fight, we went through our usual routine. One of the last things I do before heading upstairs is hit the hand pads, practicing punches and getting the timing down. It's not much different from a basketball player shooting baskets before a game. You don't want the first shots you throw in the ring to be the first ones you've thrown all day.

I felt wonderful, snapping my punches and really slamming those pads. Even Ronnie was working up a sweat. I was throwing one-two combinations—a jab followed by a straight right—and following it up with another right. Ronnie looked a little surprised at how hard I was hitting, and a few minutes later as we were walking out, he said, “Follow the plan: jab, jab, jab,” like he'd been doing all along, then he stepped closer to me and added, “but if you hurt him with that right, don't hold back. Go for it.” I had to smile. It was like a fighter pilot being told to go ahead and light the afterburners or a baserunner getting the sign to steal if he felt like it.