Becoming Holyfield (4 page)

It happened during a junior division event. It was one of the toughest matches I'd had since I started in the sport. My opponent was a big, strong, talented fighter who had every move in the book, including some I'd never seen before. It seemed like I was making a new adjustment every twenty seconds just to try to stay even with him. Eventually I fell into a smoother rhythm and started figuring out how to draw him into my game instead of getting sucked into his, and I ended up winning the match.

All the other Warren Memorial fighters poured into the ring to congratulate me, and the spectators gave me a standing ovation. It was a great moment, except…Coach Morgan was sitting quietly out of the ring, just staring. That was unusual. He was always the first guy to get to me, tell me well done and review the bout round by round. But there he was, looking across the room and tapping at his lower lip.

When all the brouhaha finally died down and my gloves were unlaced, I went over to him. Maybe he thought I'd fought a lousy fight, even though I'd won? No, that couldn't be it. By then I knew him well enough to be able to anticipate all his critiques. I knew when I fought well and when I didn't, and this was one of my best ever.

As I approached, he looked up at me, still not saying anything. I sat down next to him and waited.

“Young 'un,” he said, taking his hand away from his face and turning to me, “one'a these days you're gonna be the champion of the world.”

You hear that kind of thing all the time when you're a young boxer and winning a lot. The guys yell it out to each other, people call it from the stands. But I'd never heard it from Coach Carter before. I searched his face for some kind of sign that he was just being glib or kidding around, but it wasn't there. He was deadly serious. I remember the moment to this day, just like I remember the day men walked on the moon. It was the moment my ambition to be a pro football player began to give way to a different dream.

Carter suffered from emphysema and was in very poor health. He'd have these wracking fits of coughing that were so bad I wasn't sure he'd live through them. Sometimes it happened when he was driving some of us to fights and we thought for sure we were going to go right off the road and into a tree. But as bad off as he was, he worked with me right up to the day he died, when I was sixteen. I would have felt lost after that but his son, Ted, took over and trained me until it was time for me to leave home and take the next big step in my career.

T
he Boys Club was essentially zero cost and somebody was always paying my way to events, so I sort of always just assumed that boxing was free. After I graduated high school, though, I was too old for the Boys Club. Not only that, the cost of fighting was going up. Getting on a bus to nearby towns and cities was one thing. Traveling to places like Venezuela for the PanAm Games or Las Vegas for the Olympic trials was going to be a lot more costly, and amateurs didn't get paid to box. If I wanted to keep fighting, I was going to need a way to pay for it. The best way was to find a sponsor, because then I'd be able to train and fight full time instead of work at a job.

Getting that kind of help wasn't too difficult for a figure skater or a gymnast. Most of the athletes in high-visibility sports like those came from middle-class backgrounds with money of their own had good connections. But when you're poor and black and competing in a controversial sport that's perceived as “violent,” it's a different matter. There are people who don't even think boxing belongs in the Olympics. Mostly that's people who don't understand the sport, but that doesn't stop them from speaking out about it.

My high school math teacher, John Smith, understood the pickle I was in. He was convinced I had a future as a boxer and wanted to help out. He picked me up one day and drove me all over town introducing me to local businessmen, trying to get them to consider sponsoring me. We visited restaurants, plumbing companies, pharmacies, construction outfits, you name it. Everybody was very nice and friendly, but Atlanta just wasn't much of a boxing town. Those people who did know a little something about boxing thought I was too small, too quiet, and too “unassertive” to be a successful fighter. They thought it took an out-sized personality like Ali's to make it in that game. John tried as hard as he could, but we got nowhere, so I needed to find a job.

Once again the Boys Club helped me out. They had a program to get jobs for the older kids who were leaving the club. They hooked me up with Epps Aviation, an outfit at the airport that provided services for private airplanes. I started off as a gofer (“Go fer this, go fer that…”), running errands, doing janitorial work and stuff like that. After about a year, I got moved up to the line crew where I refueled airplanes and towed them to and from hangars and parking areas. Some of the guys I worked with said I should be a pilot, but even then I knew I didn't want to spend my life flying other people around. I wanted to be the guy who got flown around by other people. My ticket to that goal was boxing, not flying, and I wasn't willing to devote time to anything that would distract me from it.

On the other hand, without a sponsor I had to support myself. My salary at Epps when I started was $2.65 an hour, which wasn't enough, so I also worked as a lifeguard at a public pool and sold peanuts and popcorn at the stadium in Atlanta during Braves and Falcons games. With three jobs, it seemed like all I did was work, and it was hard to get any training in. I fought a lot of bouts bone tired and on little sleep, but I was still winning nearly all of them.

With everything that was going on, I had no time for girls. But sometimes things demand your attention whether you have time or not. One day when I was working at the pool a beautiful girl I'd never seen before walked in. You could tell right away that she wasn't from the projects like just about everyone else at the pool. My first thought was that she was way out of my league. All the lifeguards were angling and maneuvering to get near her and draw her attention, but I hung back. I didn't have the budget for girls like that, and most of them wouldn't even talk to “ghetto boys” like me.

A buddy of mine named Red couldn't take his eyes off her. Then he noticed that a friend of ours, a girl named Jackie who was also a lifeguard, seemed to know her. Red had enough assertiveness for both of us and came up with an idea. “I'm gonna go tell Jackie to ask her which one of us she likes best,” he said.

“Which one of who?”

“You and me,” he answered, and was off before I could stop him.

A few minutes later Jackie came over. “She said she likes the dark one.” That was me!

Just then I heard some kids yell, “Mr. Holyfield! Mr. Holyfield! That girl's on the board!” I turned to see the new girl standing on the diving board and all these guys telling her to jump in. I blew my whistle at her, because she wasn't supposed to be on the board until she demonstrated to the lifeguards that she knew how to swim.

When she looked over at me I yelled, “Hey, you! Get off the board!”

She shrugged, said, “Okay,” and jumped in. I went to get a rescue hook and kept an eye on her as she kind of splashed her way over to the side of the pool, just managing to keep her head above water.

When I got back she was climbing out. “You can't use the diving board until you prove you can swim,” I informed her in my best official voice.

“Prove it to who?” she wanted to know.

“Me. You gotta take a swim test.”

“When?”

“Right now, if you want.” I told her to swim along the side of the pool and I'd follow her with the hook.

She shrugged again, then jumped back into the water and started swimming. Like a dolphin. I couldn't believe how good she swam. All that splashing around under the dive board had been a gag.

Her name was Paulette Bowens and I was right: She wasn't from the projects. Her family had their own house in a nice neighborhood, but we started seeing each other anyway. It started off slowly, because I had no experience with girls and it was all new to me. To both of us, really. It wasn't a normal kind of dating experience because of all the hours I was working while still trying to get all my training in. We found ourselves grabbing precious moments whenever they became available. Sometimes I'd only be able to see her at two or three in the morning, and afterward I'd sleep in my car until it was time to go to work. I also didn't have two nickels to rub together after meeting fight expenses, so we usually shared one cheeseburger and a soda, but I don't recall either of us ever minding or even commenting on it.

In 1983 the U.S. Olympic Committee staged its Sports Festival event in Colorado Springs, where they'd built a new sports center with six gyms and seating for three thousand. I won my division and became the number-one-ranked amateur in the United States. I'll tell you about that a little later, but the important thing for now is, it got me a slot in the PanAm Games and I was invited to train with the U.S. Olympic team in Colorado. That meant even more time away from Paulette, so when I did manage to get home for a day or two, those were pretty frantic hours.

Late in the summer of that year, I got a call from Paulette telling me she was pregnant. I was so shocked I could hardly speak. When I finally found my voice I heard myself uttering the classic idiot line, “How did that happen?” and got the standard joke in response: “The usual way.” But I was serious; neither of us was stupid or frivolous and Paulette had been taking precautions. We'd talked about it on many occasions.

It's kind of interesting that one of the first things I worried about was how to tell Mama. It wasn't like her sensibilities were going to be offended. She'd had kids out of wedlock herself, so that wasn't it. The problem was that Mama had been determined to break what she called the “generational curse.” By that she meant that each generation repeats the mistakes of the previous one, and she wanted to end that vicious cycle. Having kids out of wedlock was one of those mistakes, and here it was all over again. I was so concerned over how disappointed she was going to be that I called my sister Eloise and said, “You tell Mama. I can't.”

Mama called me after they spoke. “How can she be pregnant!” she fumed. “You don't even have sex yet!”

Oh boy. Could my wise mother really be that naïve? “Sure I have,” I told her, then quickly added, “but never in your house.”

That was important to her, and it was true, but she was still pretty upset. As I said before, she'd had kids out of wedlock herself, including me, so you wouldn't think it was that big a deal, but she'd wanted to break that generational curse and I'd disappointed her. “You were supposed to be better!” she said at one point, and that hit me pretty hard.

Paulette and I didn't talk seriously about getting married yet. My own thing is, I
wanted
to be married. It's something I've always felt strongly about. I wanted to take care of somebody, to have a soulmate, to have a bunch of kids that I could bring up right, the way I was brought up. But I was at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado and Paulette was living at home in Atlanta with her parents. She didn't get along with them very well and wanted to move out as soon as she could, but once the baby came she'd have no choice because she'd need help taking care of the baby and wouldn't be working. I'd given up my apartment in the projects when I went to Colorado, and we couldn't set up our own house on what I was making. I wouldn't have any real money until I turned pro, and even then nothing was certain: I had all the confidence in the world, but I was also a realist. A lot could happen between now and then, like getting hurt with a career-ending injury before I even had my first pro fight.

Evander Jr. was born on April 3, 1984. This was a critical time for me, as I was about to try to earn entry into the Olympics. I'd found a job loading trucks at a Budweiser plant near the training center, and the people at Epps Aviation let me work a few hours here and there whenever I came home, but money was still tight. Now I had a new baby to support as well. A blessing came in the form of a gift from Texas oil heiress Josephine Abercrombie, who wanted to get into the fight promotion business and was also trying to revive interest in boxing by creating the Houston Boxing Association. She knew I was going to turn professional someday and was hoping I'd consider signing with her, so after I won the Golden Gloves in St. Louis she gave me two thousand dollars without any strings other than “Remember me when the time comes.” She had interests in oil, real estate, cattle and thoroughbred horses, so when she decided to get into boxing, she had the money and influence to back it up.

Just as I was thinking how best to use the money, Paulette called to tell me that my old 1968 Dodge Dart was wheezing its last. It ran so bad and needed so much work, she didn't want to put the baby in it to go to the doctor. I had to do something before the thing decided to just blow up and leave her stranded somewhere. On my next trip home I went looking to see what two thousand dollars would buy. I found a 1982 Buick that seemed to be a perfect fit for us, but the price was twice what I had. A salesman saw me looking at it and swooped right in on me, then started to swoop away when I told him I'd put two thousand down and give him the rest in a couple of months. I told him to go check my credit.

He came back and said, “You don't have any credit.”

I said, “Well, I don't have any
bad
credit,” but that didn't seem to matter. He looked like he was through with me, so before he walked away I asked to speak to the man in charge. I had no idea what I was going to say to him, but that's what you do when things aren't going your way: You speak to the top guy.

A few minutes later the salesman pointed me toward an inside doorway that led to an office. As I walked in, the man behind the desk said, “So what can I do for you?”

I read the name plate on his desk. “Mr. Sanders, I'd like to buy that Buick. I'll pay for half the car now, and the rest later.”

“Later when?” he asked.

“When I get back from the Olympics.”

Up until that point he'd been polite. Now he was interested. I was to learn that Ken Sanders was a big sports fan. He said, “You're going to the Olympics?” I said yeah, and he said, “In what?”

“Boxing.”

“Who are you?” I told him, and he said, “I've heard of Michael Grogan. Never heard of you.” Grogan was the number-one champ for four straight years in the 165-pound division, and also an Atlanta native.

“Promise me you won't sell that car in the next hour,” I said to him. Then I went home, got my book of clippings and brought it back to the dealership.

I opened it to a picture of Grogan and me together at the Sports Festival holding up our medals. “See?” I said to Sanders. “I won gold, too.”

Sanders looked at the picture, looked at me, looked at the picture again, and then said, “Okay. I'm going to cosign the loan for you.” He also told me he was going to give me a monthly stipend to help with expenses.

“Just like that?” I asked him. “What do you get out of it?”

“Bragging rights. I just want to be able to tell people I put you in a Buick and I'm supporting you.”

Ken was a Georgia Bulldogs supporter and was used to being around jocks. He would help out scholarship athletes, get them cars and things like that. He loved sports and athletes and didn't ask for anything for himself other than to be a part of things. He was just a good-hearted, sincere guy, and we got along real well. In addition to cosigning the auto loan, he gave me three hundred dollars a month to help get me through the trials and the Olympics, and he was smart enough to do that through the Georgia Amateur Boxing Association so it wouldn't hurt my amateur standing.