Becoming Holyfield (3 page)

Before any of this could get out of hand, something happened, a little thing, that would change my life forever. It was one of those incidents that really gets you to wondering about things like destiny and fate and whether anything that happens to you can truly be called an accident.

Bernard and I were playing ball with a new friend in the neighborhood when he suddenly said he had to leave. We hadn't heard his mother call him, and it wasn't getting dark. Who leaves in the middle of playing ball? So I asked him where he was going.

“Boys Club,” he said, and ran off down the street. Bernard figured that it was probably one of those clubs that kids form that has a grand total of four guys in it and a life span of about a week. But the next day when we met up with him again, he said, No, this was a real club, with a building and everything.

“What do you do there?” I asked him.

“Just stuff,” he answered.

“What kind of stuff?”

“You know, like baseball, football, basketball, swimming, Ping Pong, handball…”

My eyes must have been popping out of my head, because he stopped after a while and asked if we'd want to go there.

Would I want to go to Disneyland and Heaven all rolled into one?

But it cost money. I don't remember the exact amount but it was only something like twenty-five cents a year. Still, as hard as everybody in the family was working and trying to save, it might not make for an easy sell at home.

It didn't, but not for the reason I thought. “Club?” Mama said, all suspicious. “What kind of club? I don't like the sound of that.”

“It's where kids play ball,” I insisted.

“Where is it?”

“I don't know.”

“How do you get there?”

“Bus comes and picks you up.”

“Who's watching?” Grandma wanted to know. “Who's making sure you little troublemakers aren't tempted by the devil?”

Good question. I had no idea, so I just started making stuff up. All the kids in the neighborhood belonged, it was the safest place in the whole country, there were ten adults in charge for every kid who walked through the door…if they'd let me go on I probably would have said that Jesus Christ himself had started the organization two thousand years ago. But I didn't get that far, because Mama and Grandma must have planted a chip in my brain when I was born that sent “He's lying” signals right to their radar. I'd barely gotten into my speech when I knew the jig was up.

Strangely, neither Mama or Grandma went off on me for making up such a load of trash, maybe because they thought there was something worth having a look at here or just because I was being so outrageous that nobody could take me seriously. Either way, Mama said she'd check around and see what's what.

I didn't wait for her to get around to it. I got the phone number of the Warren Memorial Boys Club, I brought our friend home to tell her about it, and I even got his mother on the phone and handed the receiver to Mama. She asked a lot of questions but still wasn't convinced, and neither was Grandma. This was turning into a major catastrophe, and a really cruel one, too. What was God thinking? How could he dangle something like that in front of two sports-crazy kids and then snatch it away like that? We maybe got into a lot of trouble, but come on: We weren't
that
bad.

The same day Mama talked to our friend's mother on the phone, he came by the house to see if we were going to the club with him that afternoon. Our faces must have told the whole story. He sat down on the porch and got glum with us, and then Grandma rolled up to the door in her wheelchair.

“What do you kids really do in that place?” she demanded, trying to give our friend a hard time.

“Depends on which days,” he said.

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Well,” he said, “on Saturdays we have Bible classes.”

Man, you'd have thought Grandma had just seen the Burning Bush right there on the porch. Her jaw dropped open, her eyes went wide and she stayed that way so long I thought maybe she was having another stroke.

Then she found her voice. “Annie Laura!” she rasped, calling my mother. “Annie Laura!”

Mama came running. “What's the matter?”

Grandma pointed to our friend with a rolled-up magazine that shook in her hand. “This boy here, he says they got
Bible classes
down at that club!”

“Bible classes!” Mama exclaimed.

After making good and sure the startled kid wasn't just making it up, Mama told us we could give it a try. That afternoon Bernard and I went to the corner an hour before the bus was supposed to come and hopped around impatiently until it finally arrived.

You know how a lot of times in life you build something up in your mind so big and for so long it can't help but be a disappointment when it actually arrives? Well, this was just the opposite. When that bus pulled up in front of the Boys Club, it was all Bernard and I could do not to jump out the windows before it came to a stop. There were kids all over the place doing just what our friend had told us. There was football and baseball underway outside, and when we went through the front door there were more activities going on than our eyes could drink in: shuffleboard, pinball, pool, boys playing musical instruments, working on woodcraft projects…and none of it was cut-down kiddie stuff, either. The indoor swimming pool was a full twenty-five-meter job and the baseball diamond outside was also regulation and so was the football field. The basketball court was, too, but I noticed that one whole end of the gym was fenced off. At first I didn't pay much attention to it, but that would change later.

Bernard and I were so over the moon at all this stuff we didn't know where to start, so we signed up for everything. But before we were allowed to do anything, we got read the riot act. The Boys Club wasn't just a recreational free-for-all; it had rules. Hundreds of them, and the adults running the place were serious about all of them. Step out of line and there were a couple of ladies standing by who were ready to explain things to you all over again, in ways you couldn't help but understand. It was kind of like living with Grandma, except with much better toys.

My brother and I tried it all, but it didn't take me long to find myself getting drawn to football more and more. It was not only fun to play; I seemed to have a knack for it. I was very small for my age but, despite my size, I would win a bunch of MVP trophies over the next few years.

It wasn't just natural. I worked harder at the game than the other kids. There were men there who knew football inside and out, and knew how to teach it, too. Once they realized how eager I was to learn, they spent a lot of time with me, on things like fundamental skills and playmaking. I got double-and triple-covered by the opposing teams a lot so I often had to fight my way through bigger kids and try to be creative in how I was going to get the ball down the field. I didn't always win the MVP award, but I always got the “Most Hustle” trophy.

There were two reasons I was willing to work that hard. The first had to do with growing up without a father. The few times I asked Mama about my father, all she would say was, “You don't need to know. Just pray for him.” So I did, every time I said my prayers.

Being the last of eight kids with no father and only one mother to go around, I must not have gotten as much attention as I needed because I found myself doing things to win approval from other dads. I always worked hard at whatever I did, and those other dads liked that. They used to say to their own sons, “How come you don't work as hard as Evander?” And the more they approved of me, the harder I worked. I liked that kind of attention. I thought that a lot of those fathers wished I was their son and that made me feel pretty good. As I got older, though, and started to accomplish some things that weren't dependent on anyone else's approval, I stopped going after it and I also pretty much forgot about my father, too.

The other reason for all that hard work was that I'd decided that I wanted to be a professional football player. Not just for any team, either, but the Atlanta Falcons. Mama was real big on having long-term goals and working to achieve them. She wasn't much impressed by hard work if all it did was get you through the day. You had to be headed somewhere, and I was. I took a lot of ribbing about my size at first—I only weighed sixty-five pounds when I joined the Boys Club—but that stopped pretty quick. Even young kids have enough street smarts to know that it's not very cool making fun of someone who just ran over you on the way to a touchdown. I was the club leader in sacks and solo tackles and was averaging over three hundred yards and four touch-downs a game. I had plenty of time to grow and put on weight.

One of the interesting things about the Boys Club is that a lot of the kids were black and poor, and nearly all of the adults who ran the place and put time and money into it were white and middle class. I didn't take much notice of that while I was there, but I'd have occasion to think about it later. There was a lot of racism in the South in the late 1960s, and a rising wave of black self-assertion as well. So there were white southerners who thought it shameful that other white people were investing so much in black kids, and there were black southerners who thought that black kids shouldn't be getting so much direction from whites. But because the club was such a sheltered, self-contained environment, I didn't have any interaction with people who were critical of its racial mix. I probably wouldn't have cared much anyway—I was just a kid having too much fun.

Thing is, white people have helped me all my life. A lot of black people have, too, of course, but because of how Mama raised me and because of the Boys Club, I never learned to make those distinctions, or religious ones, either. I've had a manager named Finkel, a promoter named Muhammad, a trainer named Duva, and everything in between. Makes no difference to me. All I want to know about somebody is, can he do the job and can I trust him. I've gotten some flak about that philosophy, which I'll tell you about later, but I ignored it all.

T
he people who ran the Boys Club were very demanding. It wasn't enough for them that what we now call “at risk” kids were simply off the streets and out of trouble for a few hours a day. They cared deeply about the boys, and about their futures, and what mattered was that the kids came out of the place better than when they went in. Preparing boys to be men wasn't some empty piety to those people; it was very important in their lives.

There was no running in the hallways, no swearing and no fighting. You called the adults “sir” and “ma'am” and you never gave them back-talk. Those were all important things, but the most important, the first commandment, was good sportsmanship. When you won, you didn't razz the other team; you gave them a cheer. When you lost, you didn't complain about the referees. You showed respect to everybody on the field, even the scrawniest, weakest kid who couldn't catch a ball if you handed it to him. There were no second stringers. Everybody played. If there were too many kids for one team, another team was formed.

The worst punishment possible for a transgression was sitting out a game. I would rather have been beaten to a pulp than not be able to play. I literally dreamed about upcoming games. I'd visualize every play over and over, trying to imagine what the opposition might do and what I'd do to counter it, and what they'd do in return and what I'd do to answer it. After all of that, not to play on game day was the worst torture imaginable, so I learned, fast, never to let that happen. I had a lot of smart aleck in me and the temptation to give the ref or an opponent some sass was strong. But it wasn't as strong as wanting to play, so I got into the habit of holding my tongue. That was part of how I learned to focus on the big picture and not get distracted by the small stuff.

As long as you followed the rules, you pretty much had the run of the Boys Club. Anybody could sign up for anything, so you were free to try it all until you found something that really grabbed you. There were always new kids roaming around watching what was going on, because you could wander wherever you felt like.

Except for one place: that fenced-off end of the gym I'd noticed on the first day. It was off-limits to anybody who didn't have business there. There were small round bags hooked underneath circles of wood, big leather bags like brown oil drums hanging from the ceiling, a huge mirror mounted along one wall and, in the center of it all, a square platform raised up off the ground and enclosed by ropes.

It was the boxing area, and very little talking was going on in there. Everywhere else in the club, at least in those places where sports were played, it was pure bedlam, kids laughing and yelling and generally carrying on. At the far end of the gym, though, it was quieter, almost solemn. All I could hear was the sound of leather hitting leather, some grunting here and there, the soft swishing of somebody jumping rope. Somehow all that quiet made the activity seem more intense. More important.

I was fascinated by the place. That probably had more to do with its being forbidden than anything else, but the more I watched, the more drawn to it I got. The rest of the gym was available to everybody, so nobody stopped me from watching, but once in a while when I'd wander too close, some kid on his way in or out would startle me by yelling, “Hey!” Then he'd jerk a thumb or nod his head toward the other end of the gym and say, “Git on outta here!” Not mean, necessarily, but hard. Confident, too, like he had the right and didn't need to overdo it to make his point. Who were these guys? What made them so special?

They sure were serious, and they worked harder than I'd ever seen kids working, including me. The whole operation seemed to be run by one guy, Carter Morgan, a white man about fifty years old with a deeply lined face that made him look like he'd seen his share of the world. Mr. Morgan didn't say much, but when he did, those kids listened. And once in a while when he'd nod in approval or pat one of them on the back, the effect was electric, like the kid had just scored a touchdown in the final game of the season.

For about a week, whenever football was over for the day, I went over to the gym and watched, without getting too close to the fence. When I went home I tried to duplicate the moves I'd seen, but had no way of knowing if I was doing them right.

One day when Mr. Morgan was on his way in, I pointed to the fenced-off area, and said, “Can I go in there?”

“No,” he said without stopping.

I watched some more, and learned a few more moves. Or thought I did. After about another week I went up to Mr. Morgan again. “How come I can't go in there!” I demanded.

This time he stopped. “Young 'un,” he said, looking at me but pointing toward the boxing area, “that there is for serious boys. Boys who're willing to work hard. You know anything about hard work?”

“Yeah,” I told him.

“Uh-huh.” He looked me over, all sixty-five pounds and eight years old of me, shook his head, and then walked away.

Now I was mad. I went back, but this time I pressed my face right up against the metal meshwork of the fence. I'd watch for a while, then hit the air while the other kids hit the bags, then watch some more. After a few days of that I marched into the fenced-off area after the last kid had left for the day. Before Mr. Morgan could throw me out, I said, “Let me hit the bag!”

“No!”

“Just once! Let me hit it once!”

He looked at me for a long moment, then held up a finger. “Once,” he said.

I ran over to one of those little round bags hanging up in the air before he could change his mind, but before I got there I heard him yell, “Hey!” and stopped. When I turned he said, “Not the speed bag,” and pointed toward one of those big drumlike things. So I went over there, hauled off and punched it as hard as I could.

I don't know what I was expecting—maybe that I was going to knock it right off its chain and into the wall—but that bag didn't go anywhere. I'm not even sure I started it rocking. It was like hitting a brick wall, and for a few seconds of shocking pain, I thought I'd broken my wrist.

I heard Mr. Morgan sigh behind me, then the sound of his footsteps as he walked over. I didn't turn around. My one shot to show him I was worthy of joining his exclusive little club within a club and I'd blown it completely. I tried not to rub my wrist.

“Young 'un,” he said—he was to call me that until the day he died—“you wanna be a fighter, you gotta be tough.” Then he turned around and walked off.

But he didn't throw me out.

I kept bugging the heck out of that poor man. I guess he got really annoyed seeing me hanging on that fence all day, because eventually he let me come inside and fool around on the speed bag. They had to put a stool under it so I could reach the thing, and some of the other boys snickered at me, but one stern look from Coach Morgan put a stop to that. It must have been painful for him to watch how badly I hit the bag, so when he had time he'd show me a few things: how to position my hands, how to anticipate the way the bag was going to bounce so I'd be ready to hit it again at the exact right moment.

Pretty soon he let me at the heavy bag again, this time showing me the right way to hit it so that I wouldn't hurt myself. After a few days of that we got into how to hit it harder, and how to stay balanced while doing it. We got into conditioning, too. I began doing calisthenics, skipping rope and running.

I discovered early on how those kids felt when they'd nudged a little approval out of Coach Carter. He wasn't one of those self-esteem dispensers bent on making you feel good even when you haven't accomplished anything. When he gave you a compliment, it meant you'd earned it. Maybe that's why those kids were working so hard, because it sure had an effect on me. I thought I was putting in a lot of effort on football, but it was nothing compared to what I was doing here. No matter what I did in the boxing area, I did it to the point of exhaustion. It paid off, too. When the coach let me start sparring, I was astonished at how quickly it could tire you out. It didn't look that hard when I'd watched other kids do it. Many years later a young woman would say the same thing to me at a charity function. So I bet her a hundred bucks to ten she couldn't punch the air hard and nonstop for one minute. She got going and when she was good and sweated up she gasped, “How long so far?” and I said, “Fifteen seconds.” I won the bet.

The more attention I paid to conditioning, the longer I was able to last in the ring. As it happened, after I started fighting real matches, that wasn't very long, because I ended most of my bouts early. Once I got the taste of victory, my arm held high in the air, it was a sweeter feeling than even an approving nod from Coach Morgan. I won my very first match. The next one, too, and the next. I started boxing when I was eight and didn't lose a fight for three years.

There were a lot of lessons to be learned other than technique and fitness. In the beginning I felt sorry for my opponents, because some of them cried when they lost or got hit too hard. So I tended to ease up on them. Coach Morgan saw me doing that, and asked me what was going on, so I told him. He didn't say anything at first, just waited until a fight in which he knew I wasn't giving my all. In between rounds he knelt in front of me and said, “Why aren't you finishing him off?”

I said, “I don't want him to cry.”

Coach stepped aside and pointed to the other corner. I leaned over to see around the opposing coach and there was my opponent, looking at me and laughing. It was a perfect setup, like that scene in
The Color of Money
where Paul Newman shows Tom Cruise what happens when you make the mistake of feeling sorry for the other guy. It wasn't like someone had twisted my opponent's arm to get him into the ring, and he wasn't about to ease up on me. The point was to win, and that was your job.

Once I started participating in matches against other clubs, there was no longer any need to worry about making my opponents cry. At that early age you get matched up according to how old you are, not what you weigh. Because I was so small for my age, I found myself fighting kids who were a whole lot taller and heavier and didn't cry. I still beat them, but it took a lot more effort.

About the time I entered high school we moved into the Jonesboro North Projects. Even though it was government-subsidized housing, it wasn't free, so we had some new financial pressures on us. Everybody old enough to work found whatever jobs they could, everything from waitressing to warehouse stocking, factory work and cleaning. Bernard and I wanted to do our bit, too, so we fixed up a little wagon and spent hours scrounging in vacant lots and construction sites for empty bottles to turn in for the deposits. Like most kids who were dirt poor, though, we didn't really know it. We never went hungry, always had clean clothes, and slept in the same beds every night, even if those beds had to be shared.

The move put us into a different school district, too, and because of a new set of antisegregation laws, Bernard and I had to go to a school where white kids were being bused in from outlying locations. We were warned to expect trouble, because a lot of white people weren't happy about that, but I didn't get it at first. Down at the Boys Club we had every kind of color and ethnicity playing sports together, and I had a hard time understanding why it would be any different at this new school. Well, it was. Kids tended to stick with their own kind, and maybe that's why we never had any trouble there. The law could tell you where to go to school but it couldn't do much about who you hung around with once you got there.

In any event, school wasn't the center of my life. The Boys Club was. Very gradually, Coach Morgan was beginning to play a fatherly role in my life. That was fine with me, because I'd never even met my real father. It was also fine with Mama. She looked pretty skeptically on this boxing business, and didn't like it at all, but she liked Carter Morgan and the influence he was having on me. My relationship with Morgan became even more important later, when I got into high school. I went out for football, and was so small I almost didn't make it, but my tenacity and willingness to work hard squeaked me through. Still, I didn't get to play, just warm a bench. I wanted to quit, because what was the point of staying on the team if I didn't get to play? But Mama wouldn't let me. She told me to keep working hard, so I'd be ready if I ever got the chance.

It didn't come all season. Finally, during the last game I begged the coach to put me in, and he did. I weighed all of 110 pounds but proceeded to stop every opposing player who came near me, even if he weighed 190. Nobody got past me, and pretty soon they quit coming my way and I had to go chase them down. The crowd roared its approval and the coach looked at me with renewed interest, but it was the end of the season. I'd spent the whole year working hard, and for what?

I wasn't actually all that concerned about high school football. My real ambition was to play for the Atlanta Falcons. But it was starting to become obvious that I was just too small, and no amount of heart or will or determination was going to convince anybody to give me a shot at playing pro ball. I believed in myself, but there's no virtue in being unrealistic.

Fortunately, I had boxing to fall back on. I didn't have to convince anybody to let me into the ring. I only had to be convincing once I got there. But I needed a big, giant ambition to keep me motivated, just as the thought of wearing a Falcons jersey had kept me going in football. I got just such an ambition, at the exact right time, and it came courtesy of Coach Carter.