Becoming Holyfield (17 page)

“Why?” I asked him. “That's my brother.”

“That's why,” he answered. He was afraid I'd get all crazy and go after Michael, even though they had him in custody and had already removed him from the scene. I wouldn't have done anything like that, but the police officer didn't know me well enough to know that.

A few minutes later two men came out carrying a body bag on a stretcher. “At least let me see him,” I said to the officer as they put the stretcher in an ambulance. He nodded, and one of the guys zipped open the bag so I could see my brother's face. Bo's eyes were open, and there was no damage above his neck, so it looked like he was alive. It was hard to convince myself that he was gone. After the ambulance left they let me inside the house. It was an awful scene. Somebody had come for the kids, but Renee was still there, still in shock, my brother's blood soaking into the carpet, flashing red lights bouncing off the walls and mirrors.

Willie died just eight weeks before I ran headlong into a brick wall called Riddick Bowe. He was far and away the biggest, toughest, strongest fighter I'd ever met in the ring, outweighing me by thirty pounds. When the camera was at certain angles, you couldn't even see me standing behind him. I had to start training while my brother's funeral arrangements were still being made. It was hard; I was so used to having Bo around, it was like this big emptiness was following me around where he used to be. It didn't help that Riddick's last name was “Bowe,” and every time I heard it, I was reminded of my brother.

It was the first time I ever lost my cool during a fight. I'd taken a lot of criticism for not knocking out Holmes or Foreman, even though I'd beaten them both. Some writers had dismissed the two former world champs as washed up and not worthy of title shots, and I thought that was unfair to me and, more important, to them. They'd gotten back into contention by beating the best fighters of the day, and I'd fought them the way I thought I needed to in order to win. Knock out George Foreman? The guy was 254 pounds of power and guts and if he didn't want to go down, he wasn't going down. I had to box him for the points, not fight him for the knockout, and that's how I won.

I have to admit that the criticism had gotten to me. Still, as much as I wanted to knock Bowe out, for the first two rounds I stuck to my plan and boxed him from the outside. Then, toward the end of the second round, we clinched, and after the ref told us to break, Bowe hit me. It didn't do any damage, but it was a cheap shot and I guess I was ripe to be aggravated. I made up my mind to knock him out and did about the dumbest thing you can do against a guy who is bigger, stronger and younger than you and outweighs you by thirty pounds: I moved inside and tried to outpunch him.

From that point on, the bout evolved into an epic battle that is still shown on television as a classic. We each dished out enough punishment to fuel a dozen fights. Just about everyone who was there or saw the video says the same thing: It wasn't a boxing match. It was all-out war.

The climax came in the tenth round. Bowe hit me harder than I'd ever been hit in my life, an uppercut right smack on the chin. I saw stars, and I mean that literally. They were dancing all around my head, like in one of those old cartoons when somebody gets hit on the noggin with a frying pan. When I finally pulled myself back together, I turned the tables on Bowe and served up some mayhem of my own. When the bell sounded to end the round, we got a standing ovation like I'd never experienced before except at the end of a fight. It would come to be regarded as one of the greatest rounds ever fought.

I managed to go all twelve rounds but took a bigger beating than I ever had before. The Qawi fight in 1986 had been a death march that almost killed me, but that had mostly to do with exhaustion and extreme dehydration. He hadn't hurt me very much. Bowe, on the other hand, hurt me a lot. I wasn't surprised when the decision was announced and Bowe was declared the winner.

It was my first loss as a professional, and much has been written about this fight coming on the heels of my brother's death, and how that must have affected me. Many writers said it was why I lost. But it's not true. I trained hard, I fought hard, and the simple truth is that Riddick was better than me that night. To lay it off to some excuse on my part is to unfairly shortchange a truly great heavyweight.

Either way, though, I was no longer champion of the world.

Losing isn't the dirty word most fans—and a lot of athletes—think it is. Losing is an important part of a competitive life. And while nobody enjoys losing, the trick isn't to be 100 percent perfect all the time. It's to deal with the occasional loss in ways that make it less painful and less counterproductive.

Losing can often be turned into something positive, if you come at it the right way. For one thing, it takes some pressure off. Think back to when you may have seen a baseball player or a golfer on a hot streak. When newspaper and television reporters are swarming all over them, do they look happy and satisfied? Are they absolutely delighted at what's going on?

Not often. They might be enjoying some of the attention but they're usually half-crazy with anxiety, terrified of what's going to happen when the streak, as it eventually has to, ends. When it does, everybody's disappointed, the spotlights go dark, it's like some kind of great tragedy has occurred. Somehow it seems like the guy is worse off than he was before. What is it about human nature that causes that?

Sometimes streaks can even distract you from more important things. Whacking more home runs in a season than Babe Ruth may get a lot of attention, but if you become more interested in belting them out of the park than getting safely on base, you can hurt your team.

I've spoken with a lot of guys in a lot of sports who've had big streaks end, and you know what? Almost every one of them says the same thing, at least in private: “Man, I'm so relieved that's over! I couldn't stand it anymore!” And you can take this one to the bank: A lot of them, consciously or otherwise, ended it on purpose, or at least stopped trying so hard, because it just wasn't worth the stress. They wanted to get back to business and stop trying to fulfill everybody's unrealistic expectations for them.

The great tennis player Chris Evert won 125 consecutive matches on clay, including 24 tournaments, over a six-year period starting in 1973. When she finally lost one, the press was all over her, asking if she was going to retire now that she was washed up. I don't remember her exact words but I remember basically what she said, that losing a match now and again didn't mean she wasn't a champion, and she still had a lot of big wins left in her.

Losing doesn't make you a loser. Only a losing attitude does. Being a great golfer doesn't mean you never hit a bad shot. It means that, when you do, you stay calm and figure out what you're going to do to get out of it.

How you deal with a loss brings out your true colors. You can only show great sportsmanship when you lose, because anybody can be a good sport when he wins.

Losses are especially tough when you think you've been dealt an unfair hand. This happens a lot in judgment sports. If you're bowling or playing darts or pool, you pretty much have only yourself to blame if you lose. The results speak for themselves. But if you're a competitive figure skater and a judge has it in for you or was bribed, or if you're a basketball player and some guy keeps stomping on your toes when the ref's not looking, then when you lose there's a great temptation to go nuts and make sure the world knows it wasn't your fault.

Something that happens that sports fans are less aware of is an athlete setting himself up to lose, usually without realizing it. You'll read about a guy who went out drinking the night before a ski race or pulled a muscle playing touch football before a big game and then lost. You wonder how somebody can be that crazy stupid, especially when everybody knew that he had it in the bag, that all he had to do to win was stay upright. Why would a guy throw it all away like that?

Hard to say, but when I see something like that happen, the first thing that pops into my mind is that the guy was so terrified of losing he went out and manufactured an excuse in advance. “Yeah, it was stupid, but my head hurt and I was dizzy and that's why I lost.” Not because he just didn't have the right stuff or the other guy was better. It was because he was hung over or his arm hurt too much. That way he thinks everybody will assume he's still the best and only lost because of this one dumb thing he did.

That is a losing attitude. When you act out of fear rather than strength, when you make up reasons to fail, you might as well get out of the game.

One thing about champions, they always want the ball. In the last minute of the last game of an NBA Final, a guy like Magic Johnson or Larry Byrd will put himself right in the coach's face and beg for the ball. They're not afraid of missing the last shot or looking like idiots or getting blamed for blowing the championship. None of that matters.

And neither does losing, at least not when you keep the bigger picture in mind. Besides, my own thing is that setbacks pave the way for comebacks.

At the same time that reporters were writing about my heart and courage, they were also calling for my retirement. This was the first time I ran into the phrase “For his own good” and I was to get mighty tired of it over the coming years. I was too small to be fighting heavyweights, a big guy like Bowe was going to kill me someday, I'd already been undisputed champion of the world so what did I have left to prove, my title win and three successful defenses had been lucky or the challengers weren't adequate, yada yada yada.

When asked what I was going to do after losing to Riddick, I said, “I'm going to get back in line.” And that's what I did. A year later I fought Bowe again. The sporting press went nuts when that fight was set up. Since beating me in our first match, they said, Bowe had gotten bigger, faster and stronger, while all I'd done was win a twelve-round decision over Alex Stewart to get myself in contention for another title bout. I wasn't just going to get whupped, I was going to get killed.

I was bothered by the mistakes I'd made in the first bout. I watched the fight film many times and was convinced that, had I stuck firmly to my plan and not blown my cool, I could have beaten Bowe. So I wanted to fight him again and this time do it my own way. I did, and beat him, and I was the world champion again, only the third time in history anyone had ever gotten the heavyweight title back after losing it. (The other two were Floyd Patterson and Muhammad Ali. George Foreman would later become the fourth.) Unfortunately, not too many people were talking about what an historic fight it had been, because they were too busy talking about something else that had happened.

It was during the seventh round. I'd been dominating the fight since the opening bell, and now had Riddick against the ropes. I heard this weird sound from somewhere up above, like a vacuum cleaner or something. I tried to stay focused, but then noticed that the crowd had gone a little quiet, and I glanced over to see that a lot of people were looking up in the air. I had no idea what the heck was going on, so I shoved Riddick away and stepped back to separate us, then looked up just in time to see something floating down into the ring. It was a parachute, except that instead of hanging from it with his feet dangling, this guy was sitting in some kind of contraption that looked like a seat in front of a big house fan. The chute snagged on the massive rigging holding the overhead lights, and the first thing I thought of was lights just like them collapsing onto the stage during a Curtis Mayfield concert, hitting the popular singer and leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. I jumped to the other side of the ring just as the parachutist hit one of the ring posts. A bunch of people in the crowd dragged him down and started beating him, and kept it up until a squad of security guys swarmed in and got him out of there. I thought he'd gotten roughed up pretty good, but he was released from the hospital that same night. Turned out his name was James Miller but he'd forever after be known as “Fan Man.”

The fight was stopped, and it took more than twenty minutes to get it going again. I was annoyed because all the momentum had been on my side, and Riddick now had a chance to get rested up. It was getting chilly, too—the arena had been set up outside to accommodate the enormous crowd—and I was worried that my muscles would start to tighten. Another thing was that I gradually began to notice some aches and pains. I knew that the adrenaline of a bout protects you until it's all over and things start to sink in, but I didn't realize how important that was until I had to stand down for a while before a fight was over. With every minute that passed I felt less and less ready to get going again. My shoulders were especially achy. Riddick was huge and heavy, and sometimes when we clinched and he leaned his full weight on me, it bent my arm back. It was kind of like when you high-five somebody who's much bigger than you and you feel like your shoulder wants to come out of its socket. You can get little muscle tears when you do that and that's what I was feeling. Then again, Riddick had to be hurting, too.

When we finally got the go-ahead to resume, I fell back into the groove pretty quickly. Riddick made me go all twelve rounds, but I got the decision and had my world title back. Then Michael Moorer took it away in a twelve-round decision during which I tore a bunch of ligaments in my shoulder. While I was in the hospital for that, they also diagnosed a heart defect, and I was forced to retire. But then I unretired (I'll tell you about that later), got back in line, and won a decision over Ray Mercer. Then I fought Riddick Bowe for a third time while also fighting hepatitis. The illness knocked me out in the third round and Bowe finished me off in the eighth, and all the noise started up again: Holyfield has to retire, for his own good. That one was my own fault. I stayed quiet about being sick because I didn't want to take anything away from Bowe's victory and I didn't want to make excuses. Maybe if I'd disclosed that I'd had hepatitis, the sportswriters would have cut me a little slack. Unlike being over the hill, you can recover from being sick.