Becoming Holyfield (24 page)

When I saw him up there, my heart almost jumped out of my chest, it started pounding so hard. I didn't know until that very moment he was even going to be there, much less light the Olympic flame. The Games hadn't even started yet and already one of its most exciting moments was underway. It was doubly exciting for me personally. Not only were there
two
fighters carrying the torch to prove the sporting press wrong, but one of them had the high honor of lighting the Olympic flame.

It was one of the greatest nights of my life.

As soon as the Games left town and I started training for the Tyson fight, Janice flew out from Chicago and moved into the house. It worked out even better than I'd hoped. She got involved with the children's schoolwork and discovered something that I hadn't been aware of, that my kids weren't doing quite as well in school as I thought they were. They were getting high grades all right, but Janice thought that those grades were out of line with how hard they were working and how up on their subjects they were. So she went to the school to see what was going on, and figured out that the good grades had more to do with their last name than with their studies. She explained to the teachers how important it was to me for my kids to achieve their own successes and not ride through life on mine. I wasn't paying for private school so that they could get some useless piece of paper at the end and not be equipped to go out into the world. I wanted them to be pushed and tested, hard. They got the message, and so did my kids.

It was just another in a series of signs to me of Janice's worth. Despite all the attention I paid to the kids, I'd missed this one, and might have kept on missing it if it hadn't been for her. I spoke with her frequently by phone, and our conversations were still long and fulfilling. But it was the same old story: When I'd come home on the weekends and see her before she flew out, the deeper feelings just weren't there.

I was working as hard at training as I ever had. Aside from the fact that I wanted to win this fight, I was being paid a lot of money—$10 million—and I felt I owed it to the promoters and the fans to be as ready as humanly possible. I tried to stay focused, but this concern about the women in my life kept circling around and wouldn't go away. I knew I had to do something.

I thought about it and I prayed and I tried to look far into the future. Ten or twenty years down the road, how was I likely to feel about whatever decision I made? All these different scenarios whirled around in my head and ultimately it all boiled down to one thing: I simply couldn't envision ever thinking that giving Janice up was the right thing to do, not for me and not for my kids and, for all I knew, not for God, either. There's a great old story about a guy who drowns during a flood because he was so convinced God was going to save him he'd refused to get into a car, a boat, or a helicopter. When he gets to heaven he demands that God tell him why He'd allowed it to happen. God says, “What do you want from me? I sent you a car, a boat, a helicopter, and you refused them all!”

Is that what I was doing, waiting for God to give me a sign? He'd sent this woman who was steeped in the Word, provided counsel to my former girlfriend, was invaluable to my kids, and was living right there in my own house. Did I need the skies to open up and an angel to call down, “She's the one”?

I decided to quit running away and do what I thought was right regardless of how I felt about it. I said to God, “Lord, I'm going to step out on faith,” and decided I'd learn to love Janice later. I called her on the phone, because I knew I wouldn't be able to do it in person, and told her that I was going to come home and marry her, right away. She agreed without hesitation, and that's just what happened. We got married on October 4, 1996, in a private courtroom ceremony. My firstborn, Evander Jr., was my best man.

I'd made a mistake, and I knew it almost instantly. I'd married a woman I didn't love, and in the process I'd given up someone I did love. Just as bad, Janice knew I didn't love her but married me anyway. “Give it time,” she said, and I vowed that I would. But it was not to be.

I hadn't even told Sandy yet, and was planning to do that the next day, although I had no idea how. As it happened, she found out before I had a chance to tell her, and I was sick in my heart at how broken up she became. I knew she would be, but I'd felt that it was part of the price for doing what I thought God wanted. But when I saw how it affected her, it tore me up. It just wasn't possible that this was what God wanted.

I went back to camp feeling horrible. I couldn't do anything right in the gym. I was listless, distracted, my shoulder hurt and I was getting beaten up by my sparring partners. But I got on the phone with Janice and it was like old times. We prayed together and the next day my sparring partners thought they'd gotten into the ring with two guys instead of just one.

A perfect example of how back-and-forth my feelings toward Janice were came just two weeks later, on the day of my first fight against Mike Tyson. I was pacing around my suite at Caesars Palace, nervous and feeling bad. I rarely got tense before a fight, so this wasn't a good sign at all. Janice came in and saw right away that something was wrong. “I don't know what to do,” I told her.

“You need to dance,” she said.

I told her she was crazy, but she ignored me and put some gospel music on. Then she took hold of me and started waltzing me around. I resisted at first—I was supposed to be resting—but pretty soon I fell into the groove and we danced all around the place, and kept dancing until someone knocked and told me it was time to go. And then I went and whupped the Baddest Man on the Planet and was world champion again. It was one of the highest highs of my life, but as soon as the celebrating was over, I had to go back home to face one of the lowest lows.

As soon as we got back to Atlanta, we went to counseling. I just had to fall in love with Janice. Everything about her was right. When I was troubled in my mind she put me at peace, and I was starting to believe there had to be something wrong with me because I didn't love her.

I thought back to the time Janice told me God wanted me to marry her. I would never question anything that God said, but what I eventually came to realize is that I'd missed something important, and that is that God may have spoken to Janice, but He hadn't spoken to me. Not having heard from God myself, I chose to simply believe her when what I should have done is trust myself more. I'd convinced myself that God had planted all of these unmistakable signs. I'd been overwhelmed by how much Janice knew about the Bible and the interest she'd taken in my kids. I was completely honest in letting her know I didn't love her, but she was certain I eventually would and that God wanted us to be married.

All of those signs seemed so clear and yet I'd ignored the biggest, brightest sign of all, which was right there in my own heart telling me that marrying Janice was wrong, for the simple reason that I didn't love her. God may not have spoken directly to me, but He gave me enough common sense to know that without love nothing can grow, including a family. I tried to build a marriage based on what I thought was right for my kids but it was bound to fail, because love is the most important thing and we didn't have it.

My trust in God wasn't shaken one bit. I knew that when He lets you get hit on the head with a rock, it's to stop you from getting hit with a boulder. It's why mistakes don't bother me too much. At least I was out there trying, and somehow some good would come of it.

But that would be later. At the time, there was no doubt in my mind that our marriage would never work. I think Janice knew it, too, but she squelched any talk of separating. “We'll make it work,” she insisted. I didn't think we could, and to be honest, I didn't want us to. It was just plain wrong.

I told Janice that I thought we should get a divorce, but she refused and begged me to give it a year. I still wanted to love her, because it would be so much better that way. Her good qualities hadn't changed, and I still believed that she was basically a good person. So I agreed, and we began counseling again, and I pleaded with God to let me love her.

The following June was my second fight against Mike Tyson, and five months after that I settled accounts with Michael Moorer, knocking him out in the eighth round and adding the IBF world championship belt to my growing collection. Three months later I beat Vaughn Bean, but there was more to that fight than just retaining my WBA and IBF world titles.

A reporter from the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
interviewed me about the fight and mentioned my seven children. I corrected him and told him I had nine kids. He said he didn't need to print that, that he was writing only about the fight, but could I give him some details anyway. Of course I did, and every one of them was in the story that ran the next day, which wasn't about the fight at all. The wires picked it up and that was the end of any privacy I might have enjoyed about my personal life.

The following March I was going to fight Lennox Lewis to try to win the WBC belt and become undisputed heavyweight champ of the world for the second time. It was big news because that had only been done by two other fighters, Floyd Patterson and Muhammad Ali. (Ali did it a third time, too.) Not only that, it was the first time in seven years that the undisputed heavyweight crown was up for grabs, so this was a huge fight commercially. Publicity was spearheaded by undisputed heavyweight hype champion of the world Don King.

In the packed press conference before the fight, Lewis surprised me by calling me a hypocrite and following it up with a vicious crack. “I'm not questioning Holyfield's faith,” he said, “but he breaks a commandment every other day.”

It's a point of honor with me never to engage in the kind of empty bluster that some fighters go in for, and I try never to get mad at my opponents. To me it's an athletic competition and there's no need for anger, and I don't think that insulting the other guy has any place in the sport at all. So when I heard Lewis say that, I boiled up before I could stop myself and blurted out that I was going to knock him out in the third round. There was some stunned silence in the room, because everyone knew I never make predictions like that, and then reporters began firing questions at me all at once. There was no taking that rash statement back, but I tried not to make a big deal of it.

The fact is, I said it, so there was no reason for them not to write that I did. But one guy reported that I'd claimed God had told me I'd knock Lewis out in the third round. Given the nature of Lewis's nasty remark, that story got picked up and became the next day's headline. It was repeated whenever anything was written about the fight, and still is.

You might be asking yourself, given the tormented year I'd just spent trying to understand whether God had spoken to Janice, how could I turn right around and say something like that myself?

I didn't say it. Not that or anything remotely like it. I admit to the knockout prediction, which was just foolishness in a moment of anger, but it would take a lot more than a careless and cruel remark by an opponent to get me to falsely claim I'd gotten a message from the Almighty. Again, though, I did nothing to correct the story. It would work itself out.

I didn't correct anything in the ring, either. The fight took place in Madison Square Garden, probably the single most prestigious boxing venue in the world. It went twelve tough rounds in which Lewis and I both fought as hard as we could. I thought I'd won, and when the decision was announced that we'd ended in a draw, I was disappointed. But I didn't react, and I didn't say anything about it. Anyone who's been in this business for any length of time knows that fight decisions are a lot like jury decisions: hard to predict, and even harder to know what was going through people's minds when they cast their votes. My thinking was that Lennox and I would just fight again to take care of unfinished business.

Lennox, on the other hand, started screaming and hollering about how unfair the decision was because he'd really won the fight. HBO, which had his contract, joined in and yelled foul at the decision, even taking the matter to court. There was talk that the judging was fixed to ensure a draw, because that would lead to an enormously lucrative rematch. (That last part would turn out to be true.) Sports reporters fell all over themselves trying to prove that the judge's decision had been the worst one since the Boston Red Sox decided to sell Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Charges were getting thrown around all over the place, and when testimony before a New York State Senate committee indicated that two of the judges had financial problems, implying that they might have been open to a bribe, things really started spinning out of control. I had to testify before the New York Senate Investigations Committee, which had already given evidence of possible criminal conduct to the Manhattan district attorney. He then convened a grand jury, which turned around and asked the Nevada Gaming Control Board to launch an investigation into betting patterns before the fight. Other reviews were undertaken by the New York State attorney general and the Athletic Commission. A federal grand jury in New Jersey was already investigating whether the IBF sold rankings and arranged fights in return for kickbacks, and now other law enforcement authorities decided to dive into it as well.

I've watched tapes of the fight a number of times, and you know what? I have to admit it was a bad decision. But it wasn't
that
bad. While there's a good case to be made that Lennox should have won, there's also a reasonable case to be made that I should have, especially if you take aggressiveness into account in the scoring. I think Lennox won six rounds for sure and I won three, with the other three up for grabs. So while it probably should have gone to him, it wasn't like it was the worst call in the history of Western civilization.