Becoming Holyfield (7 page)

It was me being catapulted back in time to 1978, to my bout with Stevie Kirwood. It was me standing in the middle of a boxing ring, a place I'd come to think of as home, but once again finding myself a stranger. I'd overcome poverty and racism in the most poverty-stricken and racist corner of the country, convinced that I'd left injustice far behind, but in less time than it takes to walk across a ring I'd somehow fallen down a mountain and back into the pit. When you get rocked that hard and disoriented that badly, you don't sit around and plan your response. Conditioning kicks in, like an autopilot, and my conditioning said
Behave yourself!
I didn't know what else to do anyway, because in my limited experience there was no precedent for this. I was center stage in what was supposed to be the most honorable, unsoiled arena on earth, an Olympic boxing ring. There were hundreds of pages of detailed rules to ensure fairness, dozens of officials charged with enforcing them and the whole world watching it all. Something like this wasn't supposed to happen. It
couldn't
happen.

But it had, and in all my mental preparation, all my endless visualizations of every possible outcome, nothing like this had ever entered my imagination. So after nearly two weeks of Olympic excitement and ceremony and speeches and endless talk about high ideals and the glory of pure competition, I found myself in just another smelly little gym in another smelly little city, and me just another fighter who got too close to the sun and was brought crashing back to earth. So I reacted just the way I had when the ref raised Stevie Kirwood's hand instead of mine: I stood there and I took it and I behaved myself.

Why? It wasn't because I was a wimp or a house slave who didn't want to stir up trouble.

It was because everything I'd come to believe about life, everything I'd learned from Mama and Carter Morgan about how to be a man, told me that there was absolutely nothing to be gained by making a public spectacle of myself. They could take my victory and my medal but nobody on earth could rob me of my dignity unless I let them, and I wasn't about to let them. That's the way Mama wanted me to behave and that's the way Carter Morgan insisted it be, and it had worked pretty good up until then, so that's the way I was.

But it wasn't like I was going to quietly drift away without a fight. It was just that I would fight according to the rules, same as I would inside the ring. There were procedures for handling a grievance, and I had plenty of people to fight right along with me, people with brains and clout who appreciated my situation and didn't like it any better than I did.

My approach to that setback would eventually pay off, in more ways than I could have imagined at the time.

Well after the fight ended, the crowd in the Olympic arena had still not finished venting its outrage, although they'd at least stopped throwing stuff and the ring had been cleared of junk. Olympic officials decided to get the next bout started, probably thinking that the fans would settle down out of respect for the two guys fighting for a medal. It worked.

Jim Fox, executive director of USA Boxing, wasn't around to see it, though, because he was already off filing a formal complaint on my behalf. He was so anxious to get the process started he didn't bother having it typed or even put on an official form. He just scribbled it down on a piece of paper right there at ringside and personally handed it to Anwar Chowdhry, secretary general of the International Amateur Boxing Association, along with the hundred-dollar filing fee Jim had taken out of his own wallet.

Meanwhile, I got marched out of the ring and straight to an interview with Howard Cosell. I'd never seen him that angry, before or since. “Never in my career have I seen a decision this bad,” he said on camera, practically sputtering into his microphone. “This is so bizarre!” He explained to the audience that a protest was under way—I have no idea how he'd gotten that information so fast—but after the cameras finally clicked off and the lights were lowered in the studio, he put his hand on my arm and said, real sadlike, “Don't get your hopes up, Evander. I've never seen a ref's decision reversed.” He looked like he felt as bad as I did.

Back at the Olympic Village it seemed like everybody knew what had happened. A few people avoided me, like you avoid someone with a fatal disease because you don't know the right thing to say. Some athletes who hadn't completed their competitions yet also stayed away, like they didn't want any bad vibes or jinxes from hanging around a guy who'd just lost.

But most people went out of their way to be nice. “Hey, now you can load up on ice cream!” a few said to me. “You don't have to get up at five in the morning for a workout,” some others said, pretending to be jealous. “You can stay out after ten!”

They just didn't get it. I
wanted
someone jabbing me in the ribs at dawn to go to practice. I
wanted
Coach Nappy yelling at me to stay the heck away from the dessert line and keep off my feet. I
wanted
somebody warning me to be back in the dorm by curfew. I wanted all those things, desperately, and a dozen other annoying restrictions and rules. Instead, I was completely free to have anything I wanted and to do whatever I wanted and I didn't want to have or do anything.

What was kind of interesting was that there was still a formal hearing pending, and if the protest was upheld, I'd be fighting Anton Josipovic the following day. Just in case, shouldn't people still have been all over me to keep following the rules and stay sharp? Was this their way of telling me that we were going to lose the appeal, just like Cosell said?

Those were the kinds of things that were rattling around in my mind, and the more athletes I ran into—some of them wearing fresh gold medals around their necks—the worse it got. By the next day I couldn't stand it anymore and went to the beach in Santa Monica to walk around on the sand.

On the other side of town in a meeting room at the Sports Arena, Jim Fox and Loring Baker, president of USA Boxing, presented our side of the argument to the protest committee. They didn't press hard on whether I'd heard Novicic's command to stop. Instead, they argued that the ref was incompetent and had lost control of the fight, and that the bout would never have gotten that far if he'd been doing his job right because he would have disqualified Kevin earlier in the round on account of all of his fouls. Kevin had already received points deductions twice along with a bunch of cautions, so it wasn't like this was new news, and Baker argued that Novicic should have deducted points again, which would have resulted in a DQ for Kevin.

The committee reviewed videotape of the fight, and Jim and Loring agreed that both Kevin and I had hit after the command to stop. But they were harshly critical of Novicic and insisted that it was his failure to enforce the rules that allowed such an unfair conclusion.

Jim and Loring are a savvy couple of guys, and they figured out early in the meeting that the committee would never go so far as to declare me the winner of the bout. They also knew it was useless to try to argue for a rematch—all else aside, the rules were clear that Kevin couldn't fight for another four weeks because he'd gone down after a head shot—so they decided to put all their marbles into a single plea: Let Holyfield at least keep his bronze medal.

Neither Kevin nor I were called in to be interviewed and, even more disturbing to Jim and Loring, neither was the ref. The committee felt it had everything it needed to reach a fair judgment.

I was still walking on the beach when the scheduled time for the decision got near, so I found a restaurant with a television going and walked in. A couple of people recognized me, so when I asked for them to change the station, nobody argued. But they didn't know the details of what was going on or even that there was a hearing underway.

Cosell's face came on the screen. Howard looked hangdog even when he was happy but now he looked just awful. “There's good news and bad news for Evander Holyfield,” he said. I felt a catch in my throat: What could that possibly mean? “The good news is, his bronze medal won't be taken away. The bad news is, he won't be allowed to fight for the gold.”

I hardly remember hearing that first part, because the second part floored me so bad. Even though I'd prepared myself for that moment by imagining it over and over, it didn't help. Until then there had been hope, however slim, and now there was none at all. Somebody in the restaurant said, “Hey, you won an Olympic medal!” Somebody else offered to buy me a beer. Nobody understood, and I got out of there as fast as I could.

On my way back to the village, I got over the shock and started thinking. If the committee upheld the ref's decision that I'd made a late hit and therefore deserved to be disqualified, why on earth would they award me a bronze medal? How could Cosell's “good news and bad news” both be true at the same time? It made no sense to me at all.

Nor to a lot of other people. The decision had been announced in the Sports Arena, but none of the committee members attended the news conference and nobody could reach them for comment afterward. So the press concentrated all their attention on me and I got interview requests from just about everybody at the Games who had a press pass.

The only people happy with the decision were the Yugoslavians who'd been worried about Anton Josipovic facing me in the finals. They got an early Christmas present: Their man was going to get the gold without having to fight me in the finals, or Kevin Barry, either, because of the four-week rule, so there were no finals at all. Kevin got the silver medal, Josipovic got the gold in a “walkover,” and that was it for the light heavyweight division at the '84 Olympics.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, thousands of articles were written about this incident, and I doubt that there's been much written about me since that didn't at least mention it. A couple of writers tried to set the episode in the context of the political situation at the time. The Soviet Union, America's traditional fierce rival, wasn't at the Games. The Russians said it was because of poor security, but it was really them getting back at us for President Carter's boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There was talk that, with the Games on U.S. soil and no Russians or East Germans to contend with, American athletes were getting preferential treatment on their way to vacuuming up every medal in sight. So after the American boxing team had steamrollered its way through most of its matches to the point where it looked like we were going to capture all twelve gold medals, people started wondering whether the decision against me was some kind of backlash against Yankee arrogance, a signal that America wouldn't be allowed to throw its weight around.

But it wasn't bias that tilted the competition toward the Americans. Not only were the Soviets and East Germans absent from the Games because of the boycott, so were the Cubans, and they were among the best fighters in the world (as I knew only too well: One of them had beaten me at the PanAms). It would be like the Japanese not showing up for judo and everybody wondering why South Korea got all the medals. Of course we were the heavy favorites.

I thought at the time that getting the bronze was worse than getting no medal at all, because it said to me that I deserved the gold but couldn't have it. As if to drive the point home, at the award ceremony Anton Josipovic, the gold medalist, pulled me up onto the highest tier and raised my arm into the air. It seemed like every time I turned around there was another reminder that an injustice had been done.

Now, however, I feel very differently about that bronze. Having an Olympic medal of any kind is an extraordinary honor. I cherish it and I've made my peace with what happened. It also helped that there are no villains in this tale, nobody to get mad at. And to top it all off, from a career point of view it's possible that I got a much more visible send-off into the professional boxing world than if I'd won a gold like ten other Americans.

But the important lesson here is this: I think that the single biggest factor in that committee awarding me the bronze medal was that I hadn't given them any reason not to. If I had carried on about how unfair it all was and accused the ref of bias and gotten on Kevin's case about how he'd fought me, if I'd refused to leave the ring after the decision or harassed the officials or leaped up onto the ropes and tried to incite a riot, I'm absolutely certain that the hearing would have lasted five minutes at the most and I'd have been sent home with nothing to show for my participation in the Olympics.

The best part of the whole thing wasn't the medal, either. The best part was when Mama said, “Son, I'm proud of how you handled yourself.”

After the Games the American gold medalists went on a nationwide tour. I hadn't won a gold but was invited to tour with them anyway, and I did. It was an incredible experience, and one of the best parts was that I kept getting seated next to Mary Lou Retton at various dinners. She's every bit as wonderful in person as she is on television and I enjoyed talking to her.

Years later I ran into Gligorije Novicic at a European competition in which he was officiating. We were friendly to each other and talked a bit, and when the conversation got around to the Olympic semifinal bout, he said, “I'm sorry.”

I couldn't tell if he was apologizing for making a mistake or just saying he was sorry that the whole thing happened, but it didn't much matter. I bore him no ill will then and I don't now.