Becoming Holyfield (25 page)

It simply shouldn't have been the big deal everyone was making it out to be. Questionable decisions happen all the time. Maybe the loser gets hot and blows off a little steam, which is only human, but at some point you let it go and take the next step, like fighting a rematch. I also thought that an overload of publicity like this fight was getting would only lead to more bad decisions in the future, because once you make judges fearful of public reaction, you compromise their objectivity. They start worrying too much about what people will say rather than what they themselves are being paid and trusted to think.

Through it all, I held my tongue. I've had my own share of bad-call disappointments, and not just the one at the Olympics. I fought Sherman Griffin at the Golden Gloves the year before the Olympic Trials. He was ranked number one in the world and I was an absolute nobody, but in the first round I knocked him down. The ref let the fight continue, and I decked Sherman again in the second. He was shocked and panting as he took an eight count, and in the last round I knocked him to the canvas yet again. I was all over him the entire fight and hadn't hit the floor once myself. When it was over there were only two people in that entire arena who thought Sherman had won. Unfortunately, they were both judges, and I lost the split decision. I stood there and I swallowed it, thinking, “I'll get him next time.” I did, too, on my way to getting an Olympic slot.

I didn't think anything nasty had happened under the table to bring about the draw decision in my fight against Lennox. It was just poor judgment, and I thought the best way to settle it was in the ring, with a rematch. I'd congratulated Lennox on a great fight and hadn't told him that I thought I should have won, although he kept insisting that he was the real winner. When I wouldn't rise to the bait at a postfight press conference, Lennox looked at me and said, “What about your KO prediction in the third round?”

I said, “I was wrong. So what?” Lennox then told the reporters I wouldn't dare fight him again, to which I responded, “Let's fix a date right now.”

Because of the draw, I retained the WBA and IBF titles and Lennox kept the WBC. We fought again in November, went the distance again, it was close again, and again I thought I'd won. But this time the decision went to Lewis, who became undisputed champ. I congratulated him, and that was the end of that fight, which still holds the record for the richest gate in Vegas history.

In the press conference the old song started up: “Evander, what are you going to do now?”

I said, “I'm going to get back in line. I want to be undisputed champ.”

Meanwhile, as the millennium drew to a close, I was left without any world titles at all.

A
ll that counseling with Janice didn't work, and I finally decided to file for divorce after the Lennox Lewis fight. I'd made over $90 million in the short time we'd been married and, as things all too often do, it came down to money, because we didn't have a prenuptial agreement. I didn't believe in them, and I still don't. It never entered my mind that there would ever be a divorce, even though I'd already had one. When I look back on my first marriage and all the lessons that were there to be learned, I'm amazed at what a lousy student I was. Experience is a hard teacher—she gives you the test before she gives you the lesson—but even after I'd had one good lesson I still didn't pay attention, and now I was paying for it.

When we were in counseling and I told the counselor that I'd been thinking about a divorce, he said, “Do you realize that'd cost you about $35 million?” I told him I didn't care. I'd write out a check for $35 million on the spot if it would just make this situation go away. Some of my kids spent a lot of time around Janice and me, and I didn't want my sons or my daughters growing up thinking that this was the way married people were supposed to behave, that there was no intimacy and all the conversations were always about business. I also thought back to when I tried to pressure my sisters into marrying certain men because they were very successful without giving enough thought to whether they were loving and would be good to them. Now that I'd seen the flip side, it really hit home how powerful and important love was, and I thanked God they hadn't listened to me. I was also able to get my kids to understand some things that they might find valuable later in their lives. If it cost me a lot of money to give them the benefit of the hard lessons I learned, it would be worth every penny.

The divorce became official in July of 2000. The details of the final settlement were sealed by the court and nobody who was involved is permitted to talk about it. I got on with my life, and it turned out Janice had been right about one thing: I did get better. There were to be no more kids out of wedlock.

I have a lot of friends, and a lot of friends I trust. But I have very few friends I trust with everything. There's this sort of modern philosophy that says trust is a good and wonderful thing, and that the more you trust, the better a person you are, and if you don't put great trust in people, there's something wrong with you.

I don't buy all of that. I do think that it's a wonderful thing to be able to trust people, but to trust them when it isn't deserved or earned is just plain crazy. Of course, if you don't have anything to lose, you can be trusting as all get out and think you're pretty swell. But if you have a lot to lose, one of the quickest ways to lose it is by trusting people before you get a chance to figure out if that's a smart thing to do. And trust me on this: The more you have to lose, the harder you better work at figuring out who to trust.

Having grown up poor, I learned early on the importance of managing money. We were even on welfare at one point, but everyone in the family still worked hard, at whatever kind of jobs we could get. When those nickels and dimes came in, every one of us knew just how valuable they were because of how hard we'd worked to get them. So we were careful not to fritter them away or allow ourselves to get scammed out of them.

I've made more money in the ring than any other fighter ever, and I'm proud to say that I managed my finances carefully. I learned a lot along the way, not just from my own experiences but from watching what happened to others. You know who some of them are, because you've read the news stories. Maybe you wondered, How can a guy who made $50 or $60 million as a professional athlete end up dead broke at the age of forty? Worse than broke, sometimes, because when you lose sums like that, you're probably in debt, too. How is a thing like that possible? How is it that somebody with that kind of money doesn't take a million or two and stick it in a personal bank account or under a mattress so no matter what happens, there's something to fall back on?

Too many talented young athletes today are being thrown into big-league sports and major-league money without enough education. I'm not talking about college education—I only graduated high school, and where I went to school, that was about a ninth-grade education at best—but about how to behave, how to react to and deal with adversity, how not to be an obnoxious, whiny brat when things don't go your way and how to show a little grace and humility when they do. Money is an especially bad problem, because some of these kids see a few million dollars and think they have it made for life. They rush out and buy closets full of fancy and expensive clothes, exotic cars, a lot of jewelry—just to show off, as if to say to the world, “Look how great I am, because I have all this great stuff.”

Kids who grow up in middle-or upper-class environments have a huge advantage when it comes to money. Not just because they have it, but because they know how to manage it, or at least know that it needs to be managed. They watched their parents buy stocks, put money into retirement accounts and college funds, set up things like living wills. They've heard them on the phone with brokers or accountants or friends talking about the best places to invest. Planning for the future becomes second nature to them, and even if they don't understand all the details, they know that there are people out there who are experts and can help.

But take a kid who had to run around the neighborhood collecting bottles for a month in order to buy himself a pair of sneakers. He's lucky if he had two parents in the house and there was food on the table. He's never been inside a bank, the only savings he knows about is a tin can in the cupboard and the scariest days were when the rent collector came around because he never knew if there was going to be enough money to pay him. But the kid is a tremendous athlete and he gets drafted by the NBA right out of high school and some team sticks $10 million in his hand.

Kids like that think that $10 million is all the money in the world and there's no way they could possibly spend it fast enough to make it run out. They don't stop to consider that the first thing that's going to happen is that the government is going to slice off a whopping percentage of everything they think they're earning. They don't stop to consider that people supposedly on their side—managers, agents, publicists, accountants, lawyers, promoters, coaches, trainers—can work that huge pile of money down in less time than they'd think possible. And that's if everybody's honest. If they're not, if the kid hasn't learned how not to get taken advantage of, he's not only going to wind up with nothing, he's going to have a mountain of debt he can't possibly pay off.

Money isn't everything. I know that. But in this world it's more important than we like to admit. For me it's not about being able to buy stuff; it's about being able to live the life I want and to be in control of that life. Whether you're a boxer or a doctor or a steelworker or just about anything else, the more money you have, the less people can push you around. When I was negotiating to try to get the right fights to move my career along, my financial situation played a big part in what kind of bargaining position I was in. If I needed money, like I did in the beginning, I had to take what promoters were willing to give me, even if I thought I was fighting the wrong guys or the percentages were unfair. What else was I going to do? If I walked away I might never get a fight.

But once I had money I could be tougher. I could tell a promoter that the fight he was offering wasn't right, and that I had plenty of time to find another one with another promoter because I wasn't hurting financially and had enough in reserve to tide me over.

The other good thing about having money is that you can give it away. One of the things I care most about is trying to give as many kids as possible the same kind of opportunities I had. I obviously can't do that one-on-one but because I have money I can fund people and organizations that are good at doing things like that, like the Boys Club that was so important in my life. I also started my own organization, the Evander Holyfield Foundation, to make sure that the money I was donating got where it was supposed to go and was being used effectively.

Even when these fresh-out-of-school superstars read about an athlete who ended up deep in debt after making millions, it doesn't register, because nobody sat them down and explained, in a way that they would hear, that a giant wad of money comes with a giant wad of responsibilities and it has to be
managed.
It's easy to get expert help, but you have to know to ask. And what's the biggest reason they don't ask? Either nobody taught them to or they were too full of themselves to think it was necessary.

Which brings us back to trust. I've had an awful lot of different people working for me over the years. You wouldn't believe how much support it takes to be a world champion professional athlete in an individual sport like boxing. If you're a member of a large organization, such as a Major-League Baseball or an NBA basketball team, much of that support is provided for you. You don't have to worry about airline arrangements, hotel bookings, transportation, uniforms, equipment or laundry. The team determines when and where you're going to play, how you're going to get there, where you're going to stay and a ton of other such matters. They also provide coaches and trainers, massage therapists, workout facilities, even physicians and accountants.

But if you're a professional fighter, you're on your own for everything. There's no organization in place to arrange your fights or negotiate the deals. Nobody provides trainers or transportation or medical services. In order to get all of those things done, you have to create your own organization, and you have to pay for it all out of your own pocket. That costs a lot of money, especially if you're fighting at the championship level. You're going to have a couple of full-time employees, mostly to manage the other resources, and a whole lot of part-timers or “as needed” specialists on call. If a fighter does everything right and has good people, he can devote most of his time to doing what he's supposed to do, which is to train for the next bout.

There's a lot that can go wrong in this type of setup. There are few guidelines and no professional organizations to set the rules, like lawyers and doctors and accountants have. The trick is to have smart, competent and reputable people. You have to be as specific as possible about what you expect and what the boundaries are, what people can do on their own and what you need to be consulted about. If you have great people working for you, you find yourself delegating more and more as time goes by. It's nice when that happens, and much of the burden is lifted from your shoulders, but there's risk as well.

I know very few world champion athletes who haven't been bitterly disappointed at least a time or two in their careers by people they thought they could trust. You read about these kinds of things all the time: agents get fired, managers get sued, financial managers get indicted. Most painful of all is when the athlete gets into a tiff with a family member who was part of the staff. Talk about problems with trust. You only have to get burned once by a brother or a sister or a parent or an in-law to really have your whole perspective about people change.

Hard to believe, isn't it, that a parent and a child or a brother and a sister could sue each other? But it happens all the time among celebrities. Money can make people do some pretty crazy things.

The temptation to take advantage of someone you're supposed to be helping must be pretty powerful, because I've seen it overwhelm people I wouldn't have thought in a million years would ever go over to the “dark side.” First of all, the dollar amounts involved can be dizzying. Second, some of the people making all that money aren't always equipped to pay attention. A crafty and unscrupulous accountant or lawyer or manager can siphon off millions without the athlete ever realizing what's going on until he's left penniless and in debt and everyone around him disappears.

It's not necessarily out-and-out theft, either. It can just be taking unfair advantage. “My cut is 25 percent. Trust me that's standard.” Or, “Sacrifice some up-front money and you'll make a fortune on the back end. Trust me. I've been doing this a long time.” Or, “Put everything in this pork belly tax shelter. You can't lose.” Things like that.

I've learned a few things over the years that have helped me manage my affairs. Even if you're not a professional prizefighter, some of these lessons might be useful to you, too.

First, I'm careful about who I trust, and I don't trust everything to one person. I divvy up the pie and try never to put more of it in one place than I can stand to lose.

Second, I never assume that someone working for me or on my behalf is incorruptible. Even if you believe deep in your heart that someone has a good soul, there are times when things like drugs, gambling or insurmountable family problems can bring the best of us to our knees.

Third, I break the second rule whenever I can. There are a couple of people I trust with my very life, like my wife and Tim Hallmark and a few others. If they ever turned on me, I'd be so disappointed I wouldn't care what I lost.

Fourth, I try to have people stick to what they're good at. I lost a lot of money when I let one lawyer negotiate some deals for me. He was one of the best litigators in the business. In the courtroom, it was like he owned the place and could do no wrong. But when he started getting into things he was less good at, all of that self-confidence betrayed him. He wouldn't go to his colleagues for help when he needed it, because he saw that as a sign of weakness. So he muddled through things as best he could, and a couple of times, it just wasn't good enough. The sad thing is, once you go down that path, it's very hard to pull back. I couldn't just say to this guy, “You're not so hot at this stuff, so let's get someone else in here.” Why? Because he should have recognized it himself, just like Ken Sanders did when he brought Shelly Finkel on as my co-manager. It was my lawyer's job to watch out for me. If he wasn't willing to yell for help when he needed it, then I couldn't trust him to do it in the future.