Becoming Holyfield (26 page)

That last one is a special problem for celebrities in particular. There are so many people trying to get close to you and be seen with you, it's hard to know who really has your best interests at heart and who's just blowing smoke. This is the part where I'm supposed to say that's why I value my family and my old friends so dearly, the ones who knew me when. But real life isn't that simple. In real life, money changes everything. Coming into a lot of money doesn't mean you find yourself relying on your true friends. Rather, it's when you find out who your true friends are. At least for the time being. Things change over time, and you have to stay alert.

One of the things I've learned is to be wary of people who try to protect me too much and make a big show of it. Too many times, it's turned out that the reason they were so tuned in to people trying to take advantage of me is that
they
were trying to take advantage of me. Takes one to know one, I guess.

I don't have any of those cute little tricks some people like to play to test loyalty. I also don't expect people I deal with to be saintly or to make sacrifices for the privilege of being in my corner. What I do expect is for people to be honest about their self-interest. If someone says to me, “Oh, I want to come work for you because you're so great and I want to devote my whole life to you!” I turn and run the other way. There's nothing in all of that for me to rely on. Once they figure out I'm just human, their motivation is gone.

But if someone says to me something like, “There's a service I can provide for you, and I'm very good at it, and if you give me the chance, I'll make a bunch of dough for both of us,” now I have something I can hang my hat on. This guy is offering a fair business deal, and there's something in it for him as well as me. As long as he does what he says he's going to do, and does it well, I hope he gets rich and has a great time doing it. If he winds up getting more business for himself because of his association with me, more power to him. I'm all for it and happy to help him out, as long as the job I'm paying him to do is getting done.

In the end, I tend to put my faith in God and rely on my own feelings about people, because I rarely have five or ten years to really test how things are going to turn out. I've often been a little too trusting and have been disappointed more often than I would have liked, but you know what? Usually all it's cost me is money, and there are far worse things to lose than that. I figure if I can come out of a bad situation with nothing more than a monetary loss, I'm still way ahead of the game.

As it happens, I have very few complaints about how my life has gone.

D
espite losing to Lennox Lewis, I wasn't done. I still had plenty of gas in the tank, so on August 12, 2000, I fought John Ruiz, who'd won the WBA title from Lennox. When the ref raised my hand in victory, a place was set for me in boxing history: I was the only heavyweight to become world champion four times, a distinction I still hold.

It's funny how life works out. If I'd gotten all three belts after the Moorer fight, there's a good chance I would have retired, having accomplished what I'd set out to accomplish. Same thing with Lennox Lewis. Had I beaten him, I would have retired as the undisputed champ. But, as so often happens in life, something good came out of something bad. I've always said that setbacks pave the way for comebacks, and this was a great example. Because of those two disappointments, I was able to achieve something with greater historical significance than retiring as the undisputed champ.

But Lennox wasn't through giving me a hard time. While the rest of the world was congratulating me on an unprecedented achievement, he started complaining about the unfairness of it all. Back when Lennox beat me, he became the undisputed champion, and John Ruiz was next in line to fight him. But Lennox refused the fight, saying Ruiz wasn't good enough for a title shot. The WBA insisted that Lennox follow the rules, and when he continued to refuse, they took his belt away and gave it to Ruiz. When I fought Ruiz and beat him, it became mine.

Lennox was unimpressed with my unprecedented fourth world title. “That ain't no real belt!” he howled. “Holyfield got that belt out of the trash can!” He felt that Ruiz hadn't earned it, and as a matter of fact he was right, because Ruiz hadn't done anything to earn it except be in the right place at the right time. To me it didn't matter that Ruiz hadn't fought for it. Lennox hadn't fought to keep it, either, as he was required to do.

But there was something Lennox seemed to have forgotten about. He'd gotten his own WBC belt “out of the trash,” because that's where Riddick Bowe had literally thrown it. I was painfully aware of that because when I beat Bowe, he had only the WBA and IBF titles. Lennox got the trashed WBC belt by fighting Tony Tucker for the vacant title.

And Lennox's second belt? It had been stripped from Mike Tyson and given to Lennox. He never fought for it, just as Ruiz hadn't fought for his. When I reminded him of that, he got quiet, and I asked him why he wanted to change the rules only when they didn't suit him. Anybody who refuses to fight a mandatory fight gets stripped. That's it. Those are the rules we all agreed to going in.

It was all great theater, and the fact is, I like Lennox Lewis a lot. He was a truly gifted fighter and a great showman, and at least in part because of his antics following our draw, our second fight in 1999 became the largest-grossing gate in Nevada history and hasn't been topped since. (Numbers two and three were my two fights against Mike Tyson.) There are also some sides to Lennox that most people aren't aware of. For one thing he's a dedicated supporter of educational opportunities for disadvantaged kids. In 1995 he started Lennox Lewis College as a pilot program to keep troubled British kids in school, and right after our second fight in 1999 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of North London for his efforts. He's an avid chess player, too, and sponsors the Oakhaven Lennox Lewis Chess Team, made up of kids from disadvantaged families. In 2003 they won the U.S. Chess Federation's National Elementary Championships.

John Ruiz and I fought again. This time he beat me and got the WBA belt back. Our bout had a funny side, which is rare in boxing. John kept banging his head into my leg and tried to get the ref to rule that I was hitting him with my knee. It didn't work. Then I hit him a good one in the solar plexus and he went down. His corner men started yelling that I'd hit him with a low blow. Except—John was down on his stomach. That's the last thing you do if you get hit in the chops. When John heard his guys yelling “Low blow! Low blow!” he quickly rolled over onto his back, but then he grabbed his chest, which is where I'd actually hit him. As soon as he realized what he was doing, he finally dropped his hands down to his crotch. It was really great showmanship, like when an NBA player gets brushed by an opponent and then hits the floor like he'd been struck with a mortar shell. Meanwhile, John's corner is yelling for him to stay down and claim the foul. It was an Oscar-caliber acting job because the ref dinged me for a low blow even though he'd never seen it. Then, as soon as we got going again, John hit
me
with a low blow, a real one this time.

The third time we fought it was a draw and John retained the title. When reporters asked me what I was going to do now, I told them the same thing I'd said the last three times I'd lost the world title: “I'm going to get back in line.”

My shoulders were acting up again, and instead of following my doctor's advice and giving them a chance to heal, I kept fighting. In June of 2002 I beat Hasim Rahman, but it took its toll, and I had to have surgery on both shoulders. Too impatient to let them heal, I took a bout against Chris Byrd and lost a twelve-round decision. For somebody who'd started his pro career by rarely going past the sixth round, I sure seemed to be fighting a lot of long bouts. Before the Rahman fight I'd gone the full distance six times in a row.

A few weeks after 9/11 I was in an airport in Arkansas on my way back home after a meeting. The air traffic system was still a mess and the terminal was crowded with people trying to get on flights or waiting around during long delays, and I was signing a lot of autographs. One young lady caught my eye, and it happened that we were on the same flight. Once on board I beckoned to her and she came over. Her name was Candi Calvana Smith. “I apologize for doing that,” I told her, and explained that everybody was watching me so I couldn't just go over to her and say hello. She laughed and said it was all right. We talked for a few minutes and then she had to go back to her seat.

I got off the plane first and went to the bathroom. When I came out she was standing nearby and I heard her humming to herself. Even in that noisy space I could tell she had a beautiful voice. When she began walking off, I caught up with her and asked her if she did a lot of singing. When she said she did, I said, “I have a record label.” She rolled her eyes, and said, “You don't have to have a record company to talk to me,” and I said, “I'm not kidding. I really do.”

She was on her way to Miami to visit some friends, and I convinced her to come to the studio for an audition on her way back through Atlanta. Everyone in the studio was blown away by her singing. I had a chance to find out a little about her: She was born in the Cayman Islands, went to college in Wales and was now in nursing school in Arkansas. We started seeing each other, and she began visiting the studio occasionally to lay down some tracks with an eye toward cutting an album. The following summer I invited her to stay in my house in Atlanta so she could work on the album seriously and arranged for her to transfer to Emory to continue her studies.

One time when her guardians from the Cayman Islands came to visit, they saw how well she got on with my kids, especially Evette, and thought she was working for me as a nanny. They told her—and me—that they didn't approve of this arrangement, and that it wasn't right that she was living in my house. I thought they were right, and said so, because if my daughter was in that situation, I'd think the same thing. So I said, “We should get married,” and she said, “You mean, now?” That's exactly what I meant, and that's what we did. She was still wearing her nursing scrubs when we took our vows on her birthday, July 1, 2003.

We had Eli Ethan a year later and Eve Elizabeth a year after that, so Candi never did go to work as a nurse. But she's getting ready to go back into the studio so she can use the gifts that God gave her and finish off that album she started.

My next fight was against James Toney. Frankly, I never should have stepped into the ring. But I was over forty years old and didn't think I could afford to take the time to let my shoulders heal properly, so I ignored what my doctors and my body were telling me and went for it anyway. After James TKO'd me in the ninth, I still didn't wise up. My original contract with Don King had expired, but I signed another one because I thought he was in the best position to get me more fights. He set up a bout against Larry Donald, and I went the full twelve rounds, but it wasn't pretty. One of my shoulders was on fire and I essentially fought the guy with one hand. This time any decisions about further fights were taken out of my hands. After the judges awarded the fight to Larry, the New York State Boxing Commission lifted my license owing to “diminished skills and poor performance.”

Although I wasn't happy about that, one good thing came out of it. My shoulders finally got the time they needed to heal completely. But even though I was getting healthier by the day and wanted to get my license back, Don King didn't seem interested in getting me another fight, and I had no other options because he wouldn't let me out of the contract. He figured I was washed up so what was the point of getting me a bout? I said, if I'm so washed up, why do you want me under contract? As time passed, the boxing world pretty much wrote me off and assumed my career was now only about
Dancing with the Stars
. It took a bit of tussling to get myself out of a deal that wasn't doing either Don or me any good, but eventually he let me go. This time, rather than find a new promoter, I decided to become one myself. I started Real Deal Events and the first fighter in my stable was me.

The title of this chapter is what we decided to call my comeback, “Holyfield V: The Final Chapter,” the “V” referring to a fifth world title, “chapter” meaning just that, the last chapter in the book that was my career as a boxer.

As soon as I was free of Don, I applied to the state of Texas for a boxing license and they granted it. When I announced that I would fight again, you would have thought I was planning to jump off the Eiffel Tower without a parachute. Sportswriters started burning up the wires, and I'll tell you without exaggeration, I don't think there was one single story supporting my decision and they were all singing the same song: Holyfield is too old, too burned out and too weak to step into a ring. This fight never should have been allowed to happen. If he's too addled to know he should retire, somebody should make that decision for him, for his own good.

For his own good…

I don't care if people criticize my skills. I don't care if they predict I'm going to go down in the first round. I don't care if they say I'm a broken-down palooka who couldn't beat their grandmother. I don't mind any of that because none of it matters. The fight will speak for itself.

What I do mind is people trying to make decisions for me. I mind when people think I'm not capable of directing my own life, so they feel obligated to step in and do it for me, “for my own good.” One writer even went so far as to say in his syndicated column that if you love Evander Holyfield as much he does, don't attend this fight, don't even watch it on television. His argument was that, if I got my brains beat in, I'd no longer be able to do the kinds of charitable work I'd been doing, and I owed it to the community not to take that chance. And if I was determined to fight anyway, then the community should line up and boycott me. You know—to show how much they love me.

He calls that love?

I appreciated the sentiment, but it seems to me that, if you're going to claim you love somebody, the least you can do is try to get all the facts before you start urging people to interfere with his life. Didn't any of these guys think it might be a good idea to talk to me first?

That's what bothered me so much about the New York State Boxing Commission's decision to yank my license. They felt that my skills had deteriorated so badly that I needed to be protected from myself. Maybe they thought my brain had rotted and I didn't have the judgment to recognize my awful condition. Or maybe they thought I did know it but I was just too stubborn or glory-hungry to quit. Both of those were reasonable assumptions. I understood that.

Except—I never got a chance to present another side, because they were so busy halting my career “for my own good,” they never got around to talking to me before pulling my ticket. That's how you treat a six-year-old, not a grown man. If they'd only asked me, I could have told them that my shoulders were shot, that I was in agony. I fought Larry Donald with only one hand from the second round on. Of course I looked awful. I should have been wearing a sling, not boxing gloves.

In other words, they were looking at an injured fighter, not a brain-damaged relic. Now, I'm ready and willing to acknowledge that I shouldn't have gone into the Larry Donald fight. That was bad judgment, me thinking I could take on a top-ranked heavyweight contender with one hand, literally. My bad and I admit it. And you know what? I got pummeled and learned my lesson. 'Nuff said, right?

Wrong. I never got a chance to make that case. I might not have won the argument, but I should have been given the opportunity.

And now, here it was all over again, all these experts telling me I had no business going back into the ring. They didn't come to see me in training camp. They didn't talk to me about why I felt this was the right thing for me to do and why I thought I had a reasonable shot at a comeback. They just said I shouldn't fight, “for my own good,” because they loved me so much.