Becoming Holyfield (21 page)

I don't know how I made it to the end of that fight, but it went all twelve rounds. When that final bell sounded my shoulder was on fire. The last of whatever adrenaline had allowed me to go the distance drained away completely and all I was left with, all I could think about, was how bad the pain was. I hardly cared if I won or lost. I just wanted to get out of that ring and away from those lights and the noise and do something to lessen the agony.

The split decision went to Michael, by the narrowest margin possible, a single point on one judge's scorecard because he hadn't credited me for the knockdown in the second round. As Michael's corner was celebrating the new world champion—and the first lefty ever to hold the title—and after I congratulated him with as much sportsmanship as I could summon up, I begged Tim and Mike Weaver to get me away from there as soon as possible. Down in the locker room I was met by Ronald Stephens, the same doc who'd taken care of me after the Qawi fight. He hustled me into an ambulance and over to the hospital, where they gave me morphine for the pain and saline IVs to get me rehydrated.

As the morphine kicked in and dulled the pain at least enough for me to think straight, I talked to Tim and Doc Stephens about what was likely wrong with my shoulder. None of us knew as we chatted quietly in the emergency room that the shoulder was about to be the least of my problems.

E
vander had a heart attack in the ring.”

Dr. Stephens had his back to me and was talking to Tim and Mike, like I was already dead or something. They still had the morphine going, so maybe I just hadn't heard him right.

Tim looked over at me with a scared expression, but Mike was still looking at the doc and said, “He had a
what?”

“I don't know exactly when,” Stephens said, “and I don't know precisely what the nature of the episode was, but he was fighting in a state of heart failure.”

Mike had a little trouble absorbing the news. “How did he fight twelve rounds with a heart attack!”

Stephens shook his head. “I don't know. But one thing I do know.” He folded his arms across his chest. “That he went twelve rounds in his condition is nothing short of an absolute miracle.” By then a reporter from the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
had arrived. He overheard that comment and it appeared in the paper the next morning.

Tim was still looking down at me so I pointed toward the doctor and wiggled my finger. Tim got his attention, and when he finally turned to me, I asked him the only question I cared about. “What do I do? To fix it?”

He started in trying to explain it to me, and said something about a “stiff heart” and an “atrial septal defect.” I asked him what that meant, and he did a pretty good job of describing the condition in simple terms. The part I remember best is him telling me I had a little hole in my heart. When he was done, I said I understood and asked him again, “What do we do?”

“First thing we do, we're going to airlift you out of here,” he said. “Get you to Emory as quickly as possible.”

“And then…?”

He frowned and looked around.

“He wants to know how soon he can fight again,” Tim said.

“Fight?”

“Yeah, fight,” I said. “When can I go back in the ring?”

This very confident doctor all of a sudden didn't look so confident. “Evander,” he said, “we have to wait for all the tests, naturally, but—you're not going back into the ring. Not ever.”

Flying to Emory in Atlanta with tubes still in my arm was like traveling to my own funeral. I spent half the flight trying to deal with my career being over and the other half trying to come up with reasons why this doctor was off his rocker, like I could talk my way out of his diagnosis or something. And behind all of that was the idea that there was this broken thing in my chest and if I sneezed or turned my head the wrong way, it would just up and kill me. The thought I finally settled on was that if Dr. Stephens had been real sure, he wouldn't have been flying me to one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country.

He said one interesting thing to me before we left. “Do you realize how lucky you are?”

Lucky? My career was over and I'm lucky?

“If you hadn't hurt your shoulder,” he said, “you never would've come here. We wouldn't have done a routine EKG and you wouldn't have known about this problem. But now that you do, you can take steps to get it treated and stay alive.” He smiled at that point. “Somebody must be watching over you.”

It was a good point, and it made me think. It also gave me comfort. If my fight career really was over, maybe this was God's way of making sure I didn't foolishly try to continue it or waste a lot of time in denial. Just
wham,
that's it, get over it and move on.

The staff at Emory was waiting for me when I arrived. They reviewed all the tests that had been done in Las Vegas and the diagnosis was confirmed. The good news was that I could live a fairly normal life with only a few precautions, but the bad news didn't change. I was finished in boxing, and there was no choice about it. Even if I wanted to take a chance, no state would license me.

I didn't need to hear that last part. I may be obstinate, but I'm not an idiot and I'm not selfish. I had kids who loved me and depended on me, a girlfriend I cared about deeply and wanted to marry, a mother and brothers and sisters who would be saddened if I left this world before my time—and a God who I thought was trying to send me a clear message. If the experts said I could die in the ring, then that was that.

Like I said, setbacks pave the way for comebacks. After I had surgery for the rotator cuff I'd torn in the Moorer fight, I was determined to get on with whatever God had in store for me, with the same determination that had guided my fighting career. I didn't have to think hard about what that direction would be, either.

The first thing that guided me was my faith in God. It was the anchor of my life and influenced everything I did, and had never let me down, not even once. Sometimes it took a bit of time for the overall plan to make itself apparent to me, but it always did, and my faith kept growing stronger. That didn't mean I was perfect, but I was sure trying. Later on I would take a lot of heat for having kids out of wedlock, and I didn't mind that because I was wrong and I deserved it, but it did bother me a little when people called me a hypocrite. I never once told people how they should live their own lives and I never once made the claim that I was living mine well or tried to make it out that I was better than I was. All I ever did was publicly give thanks for all the gifts God bestowed on me and proclaim the Word to anybody who chose to listen. I may have sinned and been weak, but that doesn't make me a hypocrite.

The second thing driving me was that, from the very first day that I had more than two pennies to rub together, I looked for ways to use it to help people. It started with my mother and the rest of my family, and soon after I was giving money to organizations and people I believed in. There's a principle in Christianity I believe in and practice called
tithing
, which means giving 10 percent of whatever you make to the church.

The third factor was that I felt very strongly about children. I love kids and think that it's impossible to do too much for them. Everybody only has one childhood, and it sets you up for life. If a child isn't nurtured and supported in the right way, then as an adult he isn't going to have the tools needed to deal with a tough, demanding world. Sometimes parents aren't in a position to bring their kids up right, maybe because they don't have the means, or more likely because they themselves came into adulthood without the right tools. Lord knows my mama didn't have the means—we lived in the projects and everybody had to work just so we could stay together and have any kind of life—yet she brought me up as good as any kid could ever hope for. Even so, if it hadn't been for the Boys Club and the generosity of a lot of other people, I might have grown up much different than I did. So I knew firsthand the value of reaching out to less fortunate kids and lending a hand. That was hard for me to do one on one, though. My first priority was my own kids, and between them and my career, there was simply no time. Besides, I was just one man and could only do so much, but I had enough money to support people and organizations who could put it to good use.

When I considered all of these things, it was natural that the best way to combine my faith, my love of children and my wish to use my wealth to do some good in the world was to get involved in a ministry. I didn't know exactly how to do that, or what form it might take, but I wasn't ready to make those decisions. The first thing I had to do was get myself straight with the Lord. Until I had a better understanding of what my place was in the greater scheme of things, how could I help kids to find theirs? I was also concerned about my home life. I wanted badly to be married, to have the kind of stable family I'd always envisioned. That my first marriage hadn't worked out weighed on me heavily, and I blamed no one but myself for it. I never blamed anybody for anything that happened to me. If it looked to the outside world like someone had done me wrong, that's not how I saw it. To me, the problem was that I had let them do it. Most people can't help the way they are, or don't care to change things in themselves that need improving, but it's up to me to not allow a situation to develop that would hurt me.

As much as I wanted to be married, I knew that it was important to think a lot more carefully about it than I had the first time. I had a girlfriend at the time, Sandy, whom I was very much in love with. Marriage was in the wind, but all these things that had happened to me were like a warning that I needed to hold off on major decisions until I got myself squared away. I also didn't think it was fair to Sandy to marry her before the matter of my heart condition got resolved. I still didn't know exactly what the long-term outlook was or what I needed to do to stay healthy.

It was a confusing time, and I needed some help to sort it all out. Most of all, I wanted to hear from the Lord before I took the next step. A friend who was working with me suggested that I might want to talk to evangelist Benny Hinn. I asked my pastor about it and he said that Hinn was an anointed man and that I should seriously consider going to meet him. The idea of a man of God helping me was very appealing, so I went to Hinn's Philadelphia Miracle Crusade.

After the service began Hinn called me up on the stage and said, “I heard you had a problem fighting.”

But I hadn't come about that, and I'd never mentioned anything about my heart condition to him. I'd already put my boxing career behind me and was ready to move on. “No,” I answered. “I just need to hear from the Lord.”

I stayed up on the stage during the service, and toward the end Hinn said to me, “You said you want to get close to God.” He put his hand out and reached for my head, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground.

I had no idea how I got there. I looked around and didn't see anybody who might have hit me. I came to my feet and got into a boxing stance, to make sure I didn't get blindsided again. This time when Hinn raised his hand I was balanced and alert and ready.

“You are healed,” he said.

Wham!
Down I went again.

Lying on the floor, I couldn't figure out what had happened. I'd been heavyweight champion of the world twice and somebody at a prayer meeting had decked me?

I got to my feet again. “How long was I down?” I asked. I figured maybe five or ten seconds.

“Thirty-five minutes,” someone answered.

I couldn't believe it. It was only when I saw film of the incident that it really sank in that I'd been slain in the spirit, something that happens when you personally encounter the power and glory of God. It was only the first of several surprises that night.

“You're worried because you want to be married,” Hinn said when I'd gotten back to my feet and pulled myself together. He turned me toward the audience and waved his hand toward them. “Evander,” he said over the PA system, “your wife-to-be is sitting in this very meeting, getting the Word of the Lord just like you are.”

I looked out over the vast crowd, as though a ray of light was going to shine down on the Chosen One or something. Nothing like that happened, of course, but I did notice one thing. Hinn had a large entourage consisting of musicians, singers and assorted staff members. There were about fifty or sixty of them seated in the section closest to the stage. It was a sea of white faces except for two black men and one smallish black woman about three rows back. Me being black, I felt a kind of connection and somehow felt it appropriate that I should at least say hello to them at some point.

Before the service ended I told Hinn about my heart condition. I explained to him that my boxing career was over because of it, but that I'd made my peace.

“There's nothing wrong with your heart, Evander,” he said confidently, with the whole audience listening. “You go back to those doctors,” he insisted, “the very ones who told you that your heart was bad. You tell them your heart has been healed, and let them run as many tests as they want.”

I kind of wish Hinn had told me about my future wife privately instead of announcing it. Once I left the stage, about three dozen women came up to me at various times during the rest of the meeting. They were smiling brightly and making all kinds of meaningless small talk, all of it by way of saying, “He meant me. I'm the one.” A lot of them said that God had told them this was so.

There was a private reception after the main meeting. I spotted the black female staffer I'd seen earlier. She was sitting by herself and I went over to introduce myself. Her name was Janice Itson and she was very intelligent and accomplished and a bit shy. She was a physician and had gotten her medical degree from the prestigious University of Chicago. She wasn't a singer and didn't seem to be bustling about like a lot of the other people on Hinn's staff, so I asked her what she did.

“I examine people who claim to be healed,” she said. “To make sure there's no trickery.”

Now that was interesting. You see these charismatic evangelists “healing” people and it's often pretty obvious that there are some shenanigans going on. What Janice would do was make sure people had the infirmities they claimed to have before they went onstage, and then check to make sure they were really gone after they were healed. As shy as she was, once we started talking about the Bible she seemed to turn into a different person. I couldn't believe how knowledgeable she was, and how well she understood the meanings of passages that had puzzled me. She may have been a doctor by profession, but her first love was teaching the Bible, and she was very good at it. Some girls I'd dated would go to church with me, but it was usually just to make sure I didn't meet up with any other girls. Janice went on her own.