Becoming Holyfield (18 page)

I got back in line. In May of 1996 I beat Bobby Czyz, which put me in contention for another title shot, and that's when the real fun began, because Mike Tyson had been released from prison the year before. He began his comeback by knocking out Peter McNeeley eighty-nine seconds into the first round. In March of 1996 he knocked out Frank Bruno and won the WBC crown, and in September he KO'd Bruce Seldon in the first round to win the WBA title.

So in the fall of 1996, five years after my original bout with Mike had been canceled, he was the world champ and I was the number-one contender. It was like the planets had purposely lined themselves up to bring about this situation. What nobody could know at the time was that it would lead to one of the most bizarre sporting incidents of the last half of the twentieth century.

A
lot of people thought it a crime that Mike Tyson had even been allowed back into the sport. Boxing already had enough of an unsavory reputation in a lot of circles, and a convicted felon sitting at the top of the pinnacle wasn't doing much to improve it.

I didn't feel that way. Whatever Mike had done, he'd paid the price that a judge had determined was appropriate for his crime. That's why we have the law instead of mob rule. After all the emotions are played out, it's the courts that make the final decision about how to deal with the situation. So it seemed to me that, once the price was paid, the debt was cleared. You didn't have to like the guy. You didn't even have to agree that the sentence was appropriate. What you think and feel is a personal choice. But once the “official” decision was made, once the law of the land had spoken about how Mike was to be treated from a legal point of view, there was no reason not to let him get on with his life and career.

As Lou Duva had said after I won the world title the first time, we weren't going to sit around waiting for Mike Tyson. Instead, I moved on, lost the world championship, won it back, lost it again and was now ready to try to win it for a third time.

The clamor for me to quit the game had grown deafening. Since being released from prison, Mike had scored four KOs in less than eight rounds of fighting. If anything, he was even more devastating than before, and for sure he was a lot hungrier. Add to that some questions about whether I had a heart problem, and the sportswriters were near unanimous: If I was dumb and deluded enough to get into a ring with the Baddest Man on the Planet, I wasn't going to make it out of the first round any other way than feetfirst.

And was it worth the risk? Because it wasn't like beating him would make me undisputed champ. Mike held only one belt at the time. The reason for that goes back to this crazy business of three separate governing bodies.

When I fought Riddick Bowe in Las Vegas for the first time, I held all three belts and was the undisputed champion. That title passed to Bowe when he beat me. The next guy in line for a title shot, according to the WBC, was Lennox Lewis. The press reported that there was a lot of bad blood between Bowe and Lewis, and in fact there was plenty of swaggering talk about a match, but when it came down to setting up the fight, Bowe wouldn't do it. He claimed that Lennox wasn't a worthy opponent, and he also said that the WBC sanctioning fees were too high, but nobody believed him. For one thing, Lennox had beaten Bowe at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, and for another, the WBC fees weren't even a rounding error compared to what he'd make on the fight. The feeling in the boxing community was that Bowe was simply afraid of losing to Lewis.

I don't think any of that was true. Riddick is a friend of mine, and let me tell you right off, Riddick Bowe isn't afraid of anything. The problem wasn't him. It was his manager.

After Riddick beat me, he and I had a long talk and I gave him some advice based on my experience. I remember exactly what I said to him at the beginning of the conversation: “Don't take any fights for less than $15 million. You're the champion of the world now and you don't have to.” I explained that if you didn't set the bar high right at the beginning, it would be very hard to climb back up there later. I used the $15 million figure because I knew he could get that for fighting Lewis. And even if he lost, the payday for a rematch would be huge. “Just like it's gonna be when I fight a rematch against you!” I told him. We had a good laugh over that and he appreciated my advice.

His manager, however, had other ideas. He thought that losing would be the worst thing in the world and he wasn't willing to risk it, so he talked Riddick into taking easier fights at a fraction of what he could have earned fighting Lennox Lewis.

But Lewis had the right to contend for the title, so the WBC threatened to strip Bowe of the crown if he didn't take the fight. Bowe beat them to the punch. In a display of pure showmanship, his manager called a press conference and had Riddick literally throw the WBC belt into a trash can. That meant that the title was now vacant. Lewis would later pull the belt out of the trash when he beat Tony Tucker.

All of that not only robbed Bowe of the serious money he could have made fighting Lewis, it robbed me of my chance to become undisputed champ again with one fight. Even though I fought Bowe again and beat him this time, he only had the WBA and IBF titles, so that's what I won.

I lost them to Michael Moorer, who lost them to George Foreman, who lost the IBF belt when he refused to fight Axel Schultz in a rematch of a controversial fight. In a really convoluted series of oddball events, the belt eventually ended up right back where I'd left it, in Michael Moorer's hands.

Meanwhile, the WBC belt eventually worked its way around to Mike Tyson. He was obligated to defend it against Lennox Lewis, but even though he was offered an astounding $45 million, Mike wouldn't do it. In response to a court order to fight Lewis or lose the WBC title, he surrendered the belt on the same night he won the WBA title.

Did you follow all of that? Doesn't matter. The point is that the titles were no longer unified, but were in three separate hands. Were I to fight Mike Tyson, the only belt up for grabs in that bout would be the WBA. If I wanted to be undisputed champ again, I'd have to fight and beat three different guys.

Well, you have to start somewhere, and I wanted to start by fighting Mike. Turns out I'd have to fight some other people first, including the Nevada Athletic Commission. We wanted to put the fight on at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, one of the greatest boxing venues in the world and one of the few that could hold an event of this size. But the NAC had doubts about my health and demanded that I go through a series of tests at the Mayo Clinic before they'd renew my license. When one of my guys looked at the list, which filled several pages, he threw it down and said, “An astronaut couldn't pass these!”

But I took them anyway. One of the doctors at Mayo confirmed that I had an “abnormal” heart: “It's so strong we weren't even able to test its limits,” he said, and gladly signed a letter stating that I was fit to fight.

There was only one obstacle left, and that was negotiating with Don King. Since the original fight with Mike had been canceled, he'd had a lot of opportunities to see me fight. He watched me beat George Foreman and Larry Holmes, then lose the world championship to Riddick Bowe, then win the rematch and regain the title, then lose it again and just keep on going. So while the rest of the world thought Tyson was going to pulverize me, and Don did, too, he was savvy enough to know that it was far from certain. That left him with a problem: Mike was the prime thoroughbred in his stable, and if he lost, Don would be left without a heavyweight champion.

So Don let the complex and heated negotiations go right to the wire before he sprang his final condition. “If your guy beats my guy,” he said to my attorney, “he has to come fight for me, at least as long as he stays the champ.” That kind of thing is done all the time in boxing. It's a way for a promoter to ensure good bouts for his fighters and protect himself at the same time.

I agreed to the condition and the fight was set.

We got to Las Vegas two weeks before the fight, which the promoters had named “Finally!” A week later the town began filling up, and I'd never seen that kind of media frenzy in my life. The big running joke among reporters greeting each other was “Are you here for the funeral, too?” meaning that they'd come to see me get killed.
Newsweek
ran a headline, N
ICE MAN, NASTY BUSINESS: WILL
E
VANDER
H
OLYFIELD'S BEST QUALITIES—COURAGE AND FAITH—GET HIM BEATEN TO A PULP BY
M
IKE
T
YSON
? The conclusion the writer reached was that, Yes, I would be beaten to a pulp

I asked a reporter whom I'd known for a while, “If you're all so sure I'm going to lose, how come there's so many of you here?”

“Because,” he answered, “we figure you're going to go down in style.”

It was a good thing I don't pay much attention to what people write or say about me, because the press really was treating this like a suicide mission. I didn't want to get distracted doing interviews, but every time one of my guys predicted a win for me, reporters would look at each other funny or just laugh right out loud. The question wasn't
if
I would lose, but in which round, and nobody was taking bets beyond the third. Officially, the line against me was 17–1, just like for the Douglas fight. Which had to make you wonder why Vegas was crammed to the rafters with people who were willing to pay thousands to scalpers for a single ticket to the fight. What was the point of paying that kind of money just to watch two or three rounds of some has-been getting his head handed to him? Yet high rollers continued to pour into town all week. The ramps at the airport were so jammed with private jets they had to be towed to overflow areas.

My team stayed at Caesars Palace instead of the Grand because we'd heard that Mike's guys liked to do things like bang on his opponent's door at all hours so he couldn't get a decent night's sleep. They did everything they could to intimidate me, even to the point of having someone I'd never seen before scream threats at me during a press conference, telling me all the barbaric things Mike was going to do to me during the fight. That one backfired on them, though, because every time he opened his mouth I started laughing. I didn't do it on purpose; I just thought the guy was half nuts. The reason it backfired was that he turned out to be a professional motivator they'd hired for Mike. Why he would need a professional motivator to get himself pumped for the fight was beyond me, but it couldn't have helped to have the opponent crack up every time the guy started talking.

I wasn't affected by any of that trash talk. I kept telling myself that eventually it was just going to be the two of us in the ring and all the talking would end. At one point I even grabbed a mike from one of their guys and said that to Tyson, too.

But that didn't stop the mind games. Right after the weigh-in, somebody in Mike's camp told the Nevada Athletic Commission that Mike wouldn't fight unless I took a steroid test. The implication was that I'd juiced myself up to become a heavyweight and then stayed juiced in order to outmuscle bigger and stronger fighters.

It seems that this same professional motivator had been at our press conference months before when the fight was announced in New York. I hadn't trained that day and when I haven't been working my muscles, I look a whole lot smaller than when I have. Before the weigh-in in Las Vegas, I had a long, tough training session, including a lot of weight work. I was pumped up like a bodybuilder, and when Mike and I took off our shirts before stepping onto the scales, it showed. Mike especially couldn't seem to take his eyes off me. He'd seen me shirtless back at the Olympic Trials in 1984 but since then I'd gained a lot of muscle, and it didn't come out of some bottle, either. It came from endless hours of hard work under the direction of my conditioning trainer, Tim Hallmark. But Tyson's on-staff motivator convinced him that I couldn't be stronger than him unless I'd cheated.

My guys went nuts at the demand that I take a drug test, especially Tim, who is one of those health buffs who believes the body is a holy temple and knows I feel the same. I would no more put a steroid or any other illegal substance into my veins than put poison in my mouth. Regardless, Mike's camp had no right to demand such a test, and my team was ready to march right into his camp and explain that to him in very straightforward terms. I'd never seen them so hopping mad.

Me, I hardly ever get mad. There's rarely much percentage in it. Instead, I try to stay calm and consider the larger picture. How can I turn the situation to my advantage? While my guys fussed and sputtered and stormed around the room, I got an idea. “What are you smiling about?” my attorney at the time, Jim Thomas, fumed at me.

I pointed to the phone. “Call back and tell Tyson's people I'll take the steroid test.”

Jim didn't reach for the phone. He knew there was more coming.

“But Mike doesn't get the results until after the fight,” I added.

The big night, when it finally arrived, was very big indeed. Paid attendance was over sixteen thousand people, making it the highest-grossing gate in Nevada's history at more than $14 million. And that was just the people who bought their own tickets.

There were so many celebrities in the audience—actors, athletes, writers, politicians, you name it—that it looked more like the Academy Awards than a prizefight. The jewelry in view could have financed a small country for a year. It was a great event for everybody, and still holds the record for the biggest pay-per-view audience of all time.

As of eight o'clock that night only one fighter in heavyweight history had ever won the world championship for a third time, and that was Muhammad Ali. At eight-forty-five I became the second when I TKO'd Mike in the eleventh round.

If I thought the postfight hysteria in Las Vegas was through the roof, it was nothing compared to what went on in my hometown of Atlanta. Mayor Maynard Jackson proclaimed November “Evander Holyfield Month” and threw a huge parade for me. It ended in a park where a stage had been constructed. My friend Magic Johnson got up to introduce me and said some very flattering things that somebody other than me will have to tell you about. When it was my turn to speak, I first gave thanks to God, as I always do after a fight, win or lose, and then found myself talking about my mother, reminiscing about the many lessons she'd taught me.