Becoming Holyfield (28 page)

Stepping out into the arena, it was like old times. We were in the American Airlines Center, where the Dallas Mavericks play, and the place was packed and jumping. When I came out of the tunnel and headed for the ring, the crowd erupted in cheers and tingles ran up and down my spine. Seven former world boxing champions were there, including Roberto Duran, and they came into the ring to be introduced to the crowd. Deion Sanders took the mike for a few words, as did former NBA star John Sally, who was one of the on-air commentators for Fox, which was broadcasting the fight live. I'd always fought on pay-per-view, which is a huge source of revenue, but I wanted to do this one for free so I wouldn't have to commit to a multifight deal before demonstrating my drawing power. I figured that once I proved myself in this fight, we could strike much better deals than if I jumped early.

The ring was full of people and it took a while to get through all the pomp and ceremony, but eventually there came that lonely moment when only three people are left in the ring, the fighters and the ref. Ronnie and I had talked about the opening moments of the bout and how they were likely to go. Jeremy would probably assume that I was a creaky old man and come at me like a freight train, unleashing everything he had in hopes of an early knockout before I got a chance to get my feet under me. And that's exactly what he tried to do, storming immediately to the center of the ring and throwing a big shot.

I was ready for it, and easily stayed out of the way of his punches while getting in a lot of my own. I wasn't being cagey, feeling him out and staying back or any of that stuff. I kept my hands going all the time, deflecting and counterpunching everything he threw. I could see the surprise in his eyes at how much and how hard he was getting hit while landing hardly any solid punches himself. I was following the plan, too, setting everything up with jabs.

It had been nearly two years since I'd been in the ring, and I hadn't felt that good in a lot more than that. I had everything going and it was all working. Toward the end of the first round I backed Jeremy into the ropes and was machine-gunning so many hard shots he was totally unable to respond. While most guys would have gone down under that kind of all-out attack, Jeremy stayed on his feet and took it. Despite that incredible display of guts and durability, he wasn't really defending himself adequately, so I thought the ref was going to stop the fight. But with less than a second left Jeremy dodged a bullet. I'd just driven a right hook into the side of his head and he started falling over. I stepped forward, all set up for a knockout punch, but Jeremy was so off balance that, when he grabbed the ropes to stop his fall, his momentum bounced him sideways and away from me. Just as I started to go after him, the bell rang to end the round.

In the corner, Ronnie was ecstatic. He'd had every confidence in me, and camp had been going really well, but you just never know, especially with someone who hasn't been fighting. Now, though, any uncertainty he might have been keeping to himself was gone, and he tried to keep his enthusiasm in check so I would stay focused and not get carried away.

“He's hurt,” Ronnie said as he splashed some water on my face and Tim wiped me down, “but he's not done, so don't take any chances running into his right hand. Stick with the game plan, use the jab, and when he gets close, throw combinations, use a lot of hands.
A lot of hands!
You're hitting him with the right any time you want, so if you see an opening, go for it. But set it up with the jab. Always the jab.”

That's exactly what I did. Jeremy was looking a little worried, but he didn't slow down a bit. As he'd promised before the fight, he kept coming at me, backing me up. I think he knew that he was in trouble and that if he didn't make something happen pretty soon, he was finished. He got a lot more aggressive about halfway through the round, and with a minute to go he launched a huge right at my chin. I saw it coming and managed to get a glove up so that it didn't catch me flush, but it rocked me pretty good anyway. Still, even while my head was snapping to the right, I threw a hard left that got him off balance just enough to make him take an extra step and give me time to cover up against his follow-up left. That shot didn't hurt me, and even though I was now vulnerable to a right, he was too out of position to throw it. Instead, he had no choice but to clinch to stop me from coming at him before he could set back up. Later, Tim would tell me that the left I threw even as Jeremy's right was coming off my chin was when he knew for certain I was back.

The clinch let me regain my footing, and as soon as the ref broke us apart I started peppering Jeremy with jabs again and following up with combinations. He was tiring visibly now, but showed a ton of heart and courage. Jeremy is one of those guys who prides himself on always moving forward, never backing away, and he kept on coming at me with whatever he had left. But I was overwhelming him, and with about half a minute to go in the round I had him up against the ropes and was raining blows down on him so fast and so hard he wasn't able to hit back at all. He was just covering up and trying not to go down. My footing wasn't as firm as it could have been, and I would like to have shifted my position just a touch to get a little more balanced so I could hit even harder, but I didn't want to risk easing up for even a fraction of a second and giving him a chance to escape. So I just kept on swinging. The ref let it go on for a few more seconds to give Jeremy an opportunity to get himself off the ropes and out of harm's way. But when it became obvious that he could no longer defend himself, much less go back on the offensive, the ref dove in between us and waved his hand in the air: Fight over. I'd won by TKO at 2:56 into the second round.

Jeremy was so disoriented I'm not sure he knew right away what had just happened. He had this stunned look on his face as the ref continued to hold him against the ropes and the crowd got more and more delirious. But then he shook it off and went back to his corner as the ring filled with people.

My heart was soaring. All that work, all that bad press, all those doubters—it wasn't just that I'd won. It was that I felt so good. I had barely broken a sweat and wasn't even breathing hard. I'd just thrown more quality punches in two rounds than I'd thrown in my last two fights and I felt like I could go twelve more against a world champ.

Jeremy pulled himself back together in a hurry and came back to give me a hug and some nice words. He also charmed the crowd as we were interviewed in the ring. When Sean O'Grady asked him what he thought when he'd hit me with that right in the second round, he said, “I thought, oh my God! I just hit Evander Holyfield!” It got a big laugh and Jeremy was a great sport about the whole thing.

I threw on some clothes and went to sit down with the Fox Sports guys for a live interview. Chris Byrd had been reporting the fight along with John Sally and Chris Rose. Byrd had won a decision against me in 2002 and was now the seventh-ranked heavyweight in the world. He was also a keen observer of the sport and a well-spoken commentator. Apparently he'd said earlier on the air that he thought I should fight one or two more times before taking on a top-ten contender, because when Rose brought it up with me sitting there (“I'm not gonna put you on the spot, Chris, but your answer was…?”), Byrd got really flustered. I didn't have a problem with what he said—it was a perfectly sensible opinion—but everybody was getting such a kick out of how rattled he was, I just gave him a dirty look while he stammered his way out of it. It got a good laugh.

Later, at the postfight press conference, there were a lot of questions about what was next for me. It had been my plan to use the press conference to announce that I'd be fighting Sinan Samil Sam in November. Sinan was ranked fifth in the world, and if I beat him, it would vault me right up into contention for a title shot, but it wasn't clear we could make a deal with him. So we dropped some hints and then left it at that for the time being. Instead, I took the opportunity to introduce my father and my kids. They were all there except Evander Jr., who was getting ready to go on a trip.

Over the next few days I got a lot of questions about my next move, but I still hadn't announced anything. It didn't look like the Sam fight was going to happen. Ronnie and I were going to be in Mississippi for the weekend to watch Adam Richards fight, and we had a lot of time to talk about who my next opponent should be.

The sportswriters had kind of surprised me. I thought sure they were going to say that Jeremy was a bum and my beating him didn't prove anything. There was some talk like that but, for the most part, a lot of positive things were said, especially by people who really understood boxing and had watched the fight carefully. Was it possible I'd reached some kind of turning point with the press?

Nope. When we couldn't make a deal with Sam we decided to set up a fight with Fres Oquendo of Puerto Rico. He was a lot more dangerous than Sam, and had won the WBO Latino heavyweight title earlier in the year. When we announced the fight, it was the same old story all over again, a call for me to hang up the gloves. I'd come back, won one more fight, could retire as a winner and call it a career, but no way, no how, should I climb into the ring with a 23-3 heavyweight eleven years my junior who had sixteen knockouts to his credit and had just won a title. And if I didn't have enough sense to see that for myself, then the boxing authorities should make the call and not let me fight.

You know—for my own good.

I
love winning; I love being the best. I love it when my hard work pays off.

But when it doesn't, I don't go off and sulk and think I'm less of a person for it. I'm disappointed, and I wonder what I could have done different, but then I just go work a little harder and try again, because you only really lose when you quit.

I'm not tied up in myself about being a boxer. It's not who I am—it's what I do. And if I can't do it anymore, I'll do something else. I've done plenty of things to get ready for that already.

That's one of the reasons why I find it hard to deal with people who wonder why I want to fight again. My last few fights before the latest comeback were tough, and I lost. People think that if I fight again, I'm going to lose, and then I'll hate myself for having tried when I could have gone out on top.

They don't get it. There's a reason why I want to fight again, but if I lose, I'm not going to go to pieces. Far from it. I've been the heavyweight champion of the world four times and I don't have anything left to prove in the ring to anybody, least of all myself. I
want
to fight again, and if I win, I won't think I'm any better than I was before, and if I lose, I won't think I'm any worse.

There's a difference between quitting and stopping. Quitting is what you do when you can't handle a setback and leave a goal unfulfilled. Stopping is what you do after you've passed the test and are ready to move on to something else, or when circumstances beyond your control make it impossible to continue.

A popular fighter on the back end of a career can always expect people to start calling for his retirement. Every interview eventually gets around to when you're going to quit. Lose a couple of fights and everyone thinks you don't belong in the game anymore.

That's nothing new. Since the modern era of boxing began in 1892, fans and the general public have always clamored for champion fighters to retire, because they don't want to see them get hurt.

Let's be honest. People really don't get all that upset when athletes get hurt. Football players break bones all the time, pitchers ruin their shoulders, hockey players get concussions, and even when a career is ended by injury, we just think it's part of the game. Sad, sure, but they knew what they were getting into and it was their choice. Few people say, “See what happened? You shouldn't have played.”

But when it comes to boxing, it's a different story, because the general public isn't worried about broken legs or missing teeth. What scares them is brain damage. The term “punch drunk” came from the boxing world, and now there's even a formal medical name for it: pugilistic dementia. Like I said, there's nothing new about fans and writers trying to get guys out of the ring before it's too late.

What
is
new is the intensity, and there's no mystery about why. It used to be, “You're going to wind up punch drunk.”

Now, it's, “You're going to wind up like Ali.”

Muhammad Ali was the most popular athlete of the last half of the twentieth century. As Yogi Berra himself might have put it, even people who didn't like him liked him. You couldn't help it, no matter what your politics were. Ali was an endless source of entertainment: brash, creative, quick-witted, good-looking and a better showman than P. T. Barnum. And unlike a lot of modern celebrities who are famous just for being famous, Ali had the real goods. He was one of the best heavyweight fighters ever. Even people who don't know a boxing glove from a baseball glove have heard of the “Thrilla in Manila” and the “Rumble in the Jungle” and saw him light the Olympic flame at the Atlanta Games of 1996.

His immense popularity added to the tragedy of his physical downfall, because we all got to see it played out in the media over a period of years. That's the thing about being so famous: You can't just switch it off when things turn sour. We watched as he began to shuffle, listened as his speech began to slur. The worse off he got, the more love we felt for him, and that made us even sadder as he continued to decline. We were still there watching when it got to the point where he could hardly walk or speak at all.

There were a lot of calls to ban the sport of boxing altogether, but those efforts were doomed from the start. There are several reasons, but most of them boil down to money. There's just too much of it to be made. That's why we'll never get rid of football, either, even though it's wildly violent and players get seriously injured all the time.

While efforts to ban boxing failed, it didn't stop people from trying to get boxers to quit. “You'll wind up like Ali,” goes the standard song, and it's sung by a lot of well-meaning people. But one thing about well-meaning people is that they often don't stop to think before they try to influence events.

Life is about balance and trade-offs. For example, it's not hard to figure out how to prevent airline hijackings. Just don't let anybody on board, ever. That's ridiculous, so what we try to do is find some balance, a place in the middle. We figure out how to let people fly from here to there by balancing security against inconvenience. We don't always get it right, so we make adjustments, and we don't expect guarantees.

It's like that with boxing. One thing we can do is ban it altogether, and that would solve all the health problems. I don't think we should do that, because it's unfair to rob fighters and fans of a sport they love unless we also ban rodeo riding, parachute jumping and football, all of which are far more dangerous than boxing. On the other hand, we also don't want to go back to the old days, when two guys climbed into the ring with bare fists, few rules and no clock. The right way to do it is somewhere in the middle, with padded gloves, a thick book of rules and a skilled referee supervising the action.

“But what if they wind up like Ali?” you might ask.

To which I answer: That's their business. As long as a fighter has his wits about him and can pass the medical exams, he should be allowed to fight as long as he wants to. And I think other people, especially sportswriters with large followings, should be careful before starting campaigns to pressure someone into quitting.

A lot of people do a lot of things a lot dumber than boxing. They smoke cigarettes, they eat junk food until they blow up like blimps or become diabetic, they drink themselves into a stupor day after day. All of those things will kill you, and they're all legal. So if we really want to improve some lives, we should ban cigarettes, junk food and alcohol, which hundreds of millions of people abuse, before worrying about something like boxing, which has only a few thousand participants.

People have been telling me to retire almost since the day I won my first title. They say things like, “You already have plenty of money, so what's the point?” Or, “You're the world champion, so what more do you want?”

Those things are reflections of their own personal priorities, and they assume that mine must be the same. It's amazing how many people give me advice without first bothering to find out what's important to me. It's like me insisting that you drive this little tiny car because it gets forty miles to the gallon without bothering to find out that you've got six kids and two dogs. Maybe having a bunch of money is all some people need to feel they've had a great career. Maybe it sounds to some others like grabbing a world title is all any athlete could hope for. Or maybe they think that a professional fighter's life is all about trying to get a little something and then getting out before he gets hurt.

None of those things applies to me. It's not about the money or how many championships I've already won or what records I've set. My career goal from the very beginning was to retire as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. Mama told me over and over, you can't choose how you start, but you can choose how you finish. I've already chosen how I want to finish, and it's not something I made up last week. My mama didn't like the idea of me boxing, but what she didn't like even more was the idea of quitting. She had a lot of common sense and knew that there were times when you
had
to quit, because to do otherwise wouldn't make any sense, like the time I retired when I thought I had a bad heart. But she knew an excuse when she saw one and wouldn't tolerate it. She made me march right back and fight eleven-year-old Cecil Collins again and again until I finally beat him. Now it's my decision to retire as undisputed champion of the world and I'm still not looking for excuses. That's not the way I was brought up.

I've come close a few times. I was the undisputed champ at one point, but I'd only turned twenty-eight a few days before that and hadn't even reached my prime yet, so I kept fighting. I held on to that title for two years before losing it, then thought I had it again the following year when I beat Riddick Bowe, but by a crazy turn of events he had only two of the three belts. I won world titles two more times after that but never all three at the same time again. So as far as I'm concerned, I haven't yet finished what I started.

I should also mention something else, in case it isn't obvious by now. I love boxing. I love the training, the conditioning, the characters who populate the sport, and most of all I love the competition. “Yeah, but you might get hurt.” Of course I might get hurt—it's
fighting,
not bowling. But as long as all my faculties are intact and I pass all the required medical tests, how much risk to take versus what personal satisfaction might be gained is my business.

Incidentally, everybody assumes that it was Ali's time in the ring that caused the Parkinson's he's suffering from now. It seems so obvious. But people get Parkinson's all the time. Thousands suffer from it and very few of them were prizefighters. And there are an awful lot of ex-fighters around who don't have Parkinson's. The simple fact is, nobody knows what brought on Ali's illness, including his doctors.

But even if it was fighting, you know what? That was his business. Just like smoking cigarettes, eating too much, getting drunk every day or bungee jumping are somebody else's.

I wonder sometimes why people think they know better than I do what's best for me. The Bible says I should love myself, and I do. I've always taken care of my body. I eat healthy, hardly ever drink any alcohol, I've never smoked or done illegal drugs or touched a steroid, and I stay fit with the help of a professional conditioning trainer. So why is it that so many people are ready to jump to the conclusion that I'm thoughtlessly risking serious injury or dementia by continuing to fight? Do they think I'm so obsessed or desperate or just plain crazy that I would throw a lifetime of healthy living down the drain?

I'm not obsessed. Having goals and working hard to fulfill them doesn't mean you're obsessive. And if I don't regain the world title it doesn't mean that I'm going to get depressed and slit my wrists. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen, and I'll find peace with that. But I won't find peace if I don't at least try while I'm able.

I'm not desperate, either. A lot of athletes who start out poor and suddenly find themselves wealthy think they're set for life but end up destitute because of bad financial management. I took great pains to protect my assets from the very beginning, and my family is well provided for even if I never make another nickel. I've got several thriving businesses going, including boxing promotion. I handle my own fights now and I'm starting to do it for other boxers as well.

Maybe I'm crazy for trying a comeback. It's a possibility, but I don't think so. I'm pretty sure I'll know when it's time to hang it up, which will happen when I feel I can no longer be competitive in the ring. I may have made a real mistake by not disclosing the injuries I had during my dismal fights in 2004. I didn't want to talk about my torn-up shoulders because it would have sounded like I was making excuses and it would have been disrespectful to the guys who beat me. I chose to fight hurt, they beat me fair and square, and they deserved to have the full benefit of their victories. My injuries weren't their responsibility.

Problem was, everybody thought that I was over the hill after those fights, my skills and power and speed all gone. I even lost my license because I looked so bad in the ring.

Then I had two shoulder surgeries and a lot of rest. I wanted to get back in line but the rest of the world wanted me to retire because they thought I was too old and too shot. I tried to explain that I wasn't old for real, I'd just been hurt, but nobody wanted to hear it. Or else they thought I was making it up so they'd let me fight again. Maybe they figured I was already too punch drunk to make rational decisions, so somebody else had to make them for me.

That's not fair. I surrounded myself with experts to be by my side as I trained, to observe me and test me and let me know if I was kidding myself about attempting a comeback. These are longtime friends who would lock me in a closet if they thought I was making a mistake or being reckless. They all started out skeptical but after watching me work, they decided that I still had what it takes to be a competitive fighter. I arranged a test fight against Jeremy Bates to show the boxing world that I deserved a comeback opportunity. All my skills were on display and I knocked him out. Even then, the editorials and the campaigns for me to retire didn't stop. No matter how rational I was and how good I looked in the ring and how many respected experts I had checking me out, sportswriters were still telling the world I was deluded and needed to be protected from myself.