Becoming Holyfield (8 page)

It's just not my style.

The point of telling that story, and the one about my loss to Stevie Kirwood, is not to tell you about all these bad things that happened to me. Bad things happen to everyone. What's important is learning from them, and becoming better for them. You can spend your life being bitter or looking for revenge, or you can do what you can—or do nothing if there's nothing to be done—and move on and be stronger and not dwell on it. A lot more good things happened to me in life than bad, so there was no reason to get hung up on the bad. Everything was another lesson to absorb, or a mistake to be understood and corrected, not an insult or a grudge to be nursed, turning me into a bitter and resentful person.

What happened at the Olympics was terrible. It was as bad as I remember feeling about almost anything. But raising a public stink and acting like a spoiled brat wasn't going to help anything. I had good people going to bat for me and I had to trust that they knew what they were doing. And if they couldn't straighten it out, so be it. I had a whole professional career ahead of me and wasn't about to kick it off by being just another whiny athlete who got a raw deal. It wasn't the end of the world. It was just a rotten thing that happened, and I wouldn't let it overwhelm me, and I wouldn't allow it to make me behave in public in a way that would have brought shame to Mama, to Carter Morgan, or to any of the other people who had faith in the kind of person they believed I was.

My point in talking about bad things that happened to me isn't to make people feel sorry for poor Evander. I want them to learn from how I handled adversity. Try to think of a single athlete or any other well-known person who complained loud and long about something that went wrong and still had people think good things about them. I don't think you can do it. Everybody loves a winner, but nobody likes a whiner, even if the whiner has a good point. What people get excited about isn't how awful it was that something bad happened to you. What they care about is how you handled it. Did you stew in your own self-pity and blame others for your failures? Or did you pick yourself up and get on with it?

I remember a few years ago when Lance Armstrong was sent crashing to the ground in the Tour de France by some fan who'd gotten too close and tangled a bag he was carrying in Lance's handlebars. What impressed me was that Lance barely looked back to see what had happened. He didn't take out after the guy or complain about it later to reporters and moan about how unfair it was. He got back on that bicycle as quickly as he could and pedaled his heart out to get back to his place in the pack. Lance didn't want to make sure he had a good excuse for losing! He wanted to
win,
and he kept his eye on the prize and did win.

Somebody once said that no captain ever proved himself on calm seas, and it's true. A great champion isn't one who wins all the time and nails every shot and never messes up. A great champion is one who doesn't let setbacks defeat him. He's at his very best when things are at their very worst. Watching Tiger Woods hit the green from the middle of the fairway is nice. Watching him hit it from deep rough behind a tree after totally messing up his tee shot is mind-boggling. Guys like Armstrong and Woods don't have time to feel sorry for themselves when things go wrong. They don't want to be footnotes in the record with great excuses. They want to be at the top of the list, and you don't get to be the very best by taking your eye off the ball and letting things distract you, no matter how unjust they might be. Champions know how to capitalize on the good stuff and put the bad stuff aside quickly. There's just no other way to be the very best.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking when things go wrong. I don't sit there running through options and making conscious decisions about how I'm going to act, because how to act has been baked into me so deeply that there's no real choice.

And now you know why I behaved like I did when I got DQ'd at the Olympics. There was no point in coming unglued. I wasn't going to change the ref's mind. I wasn't going to get Olympic officials to overturn the decision right there in the ring. There was absolutely nothing I could do about the situation while standing there so I didn't try.

More important, it didn't mean my world had come to an end, although people watching on television might have thought it did. But they didn't know me. They saw a guy in a boxing ring at the most prestigious competitive arena in the world and assumed that my entire life had been focused on winning an Olympic medal and that nothing else mattered.

That wasn't close to being true. The Olympics were important to me. I wanted to win. People were counting on me and had gone to great lengths to get me there. But it wasn't my whole life. I was disappointed and frustrated and upset, but I wasn't crushed, like it was so awful I could never recover and I'd regret it for the rest of my life.

It was a defeat, and a lousy one. I'd had them before; I'd have them again. I'd do what I could to get it straightened out and, either way, I'd move on. What I wouldn't do is make a fool of myself. It's not the way I was brought up.

A note about Rickey Womack:

After he lost his chance at the Olympics to me, Rickey turned pro, signing a deal with Emanuel Steward and ESPN. Over the next year and a half he performed wonderfully in the ring, racking up an impressive 9-0 record.

Sometime during Christmas of 1985 he walked into a video store in the Detroit suburb of Redford carrying a nine-millimeter handgun that he used to beat the female clerk in the course of stealing money from the till and a handful of tapes. Two weeks later he tried to rob another video store in the same neighborhood, but a customer walked in while it was going on. Rickey shot him and then ran off, but he left behind the car Steward had given him. His wallet was inside and the police eventually tracked him down. The customer lived, but Rickey still had to do fifteen years in prison.

What kept him going while he was inside was the thought that he might return to boxing and become a champion. After his release, a former world champion heavyweight tracked him down and helped him get back into the ring. He had four successful fights, then won a unanimous decision against Willie Chapman. Despite the important victory, the crowd booed him loudly because they thought he hadn't fought well. Rickey apparently thought so, too, and in the car driving away from the arena with his manager, he was inconsolable.

It was the last psychological straw for Rickey, and he couldn't get past it. Two months later, after an all-night fight with his wife, he threatened her with a borrowed gun, then turned it on himself and took his own life in front of her.

The former world champ who tracked Rickey down after his release from prison and tried to help him get his life back was Mike Tyson, his roommate from the Olympic Trials.

W
hen I got back from the Olympic Games, my mother announced that she was taking me to Atmore to see my father. I was surprised because by that time I'd just assumed he was dead. I told her I didn't want to go. What did I need a daddy for? I was twenty-one, I had just signed a big contract, I was on my own and didn't need anyone telling me what to do, especially a father I'd never met. I told Mama all I needed was her, because she was the one who'd been there for me before all of this stuff started to happen for me, when I didn't have a thing. “Why do I have to go see him?”

“Because I said so,” was all she would tell me. I had a pretty good idea what it was really about: She wanted to kind of stick it to him a little, show him the kind of boy she was able to raise all on her own.

We drove the whole way, and I spent most of the trip wondering what I was going to say to this man who was supposed to be my father. We went to his brother Sam's house first because Mama knew where he lived but not where my father lived. When Sam came out, the first thing he said was, “He sure looks like Isom.” And Mama said, “Well, it's his son, so why don't you tell us where he lives.”

He did, and when we got there, Isom Coley was out in the back chopping wood and his son Mike answered the door of their trailer. As soon as he opened it his eyes grew wide and he yelled back into the trailer. “Hey! It's Holyfield!” I wondered how he knew that, and I soon found out: They knew who Evander Holyfield was and that he was from Atmore because they'd watched the Olympics, but it was only when Mike said, “What're you doing here?” that I realized they didn't know we were related.

“I'm your brother,” I told him and the two other boys who'd shown up by then. They couldn't believe it but about that time Isom heard the commotion and came around the front. Seeing me there with Mama he knew right away who I was, and the strong physical resemblance between the two of us convinced his other sons as well.

It was an awkward moment. Isom was a very quiet and reserved man and wasn't much given to a lot of talking, and I hadn't come up with anything to say to him. But it ended quickly, because my step-brothers, who actually lived with their mother but were visiting Isom for the day, were so anxious to take me around town and show me off that I was out of there a few minutes later, leaving Mama behind to catch up with Isom.

I'd left Atmore when I was only about four so nobody remembered knowing me, but they all knew who I was from the Olympics. My brothers took me all over the place introducing me to everybody and exercising their newfound bragging rights. This wasn't the first time for them, though, because their older brother, Ray, played football for the St. Louis Rams. But I guess there was something extra special about an Olympic medalist, especially soon after the Games, because they sure made a big deal of it.

Everybody we met remarked on how much I looked like Isom, and then they'd launch into all of these stories about him. He couldn't read or write but he was about the strongest man they'd ever met. He used to make money taking bets on whether he could lift the front end of a car clear off the ground, and he never lost. He was a lumberjack by trade and had the reputation of being the hardest-working one around. I started to see that he was a highly respected man in Atmore. Everybody praised him to the heavens and I felt good about that, because I saw that I'd come from pretty solid stock. I knew I got a lot of my spirit from Mama, but now I saw that my work ethic and physical attributes, and maybe some of my reserve, came from Isom.

I didn't ever sit down and talk with him on that trip but it was Father's Day when we left so I called my sister Eloise and said, “I want to buy Isom a truck” and would she do that for me. She asked me why I just didn't do it myself and I said I didn't want Mama to know about it. I knew it would make her mad, that she would say he didn't deserve it because he wasn't around for me. Four years later—on Father's Day again—I had a house built for him in place of that trailer on his property. Again I had Eloise arrange it but this time Mama found out because of all of Isom's bragging about his son building him a house. Just like I thought, she got all upset. “He doesn't deserve it!” she insisted. “He never did anything for you!” But it wasn't a question of deserving it or not. My own thing is, who was to say that I deserved all that I now had? God just saw fit to give it to me, and I saw fit to give Isom a new truck and a new house and that's what I did.

I also reminded her that she'd told me to pray for him. As much as I loved her I knew she had her bad points so I assumed Isom had his good ones. As far as him not being with us, it may have been for the best, because I don't think he and Mama would have lasted if they'd lived together. Mama was high-spirited and strong-minded and Isom was easygoing and serene, the kind of man who was tough as nails but never got into trouble. They would have been like gasoline and matches.

Over the years, Isom and I found some common ground. The Bible teaches that a good tree can't bear bad fruit, and I assumed Isom was a good person because I felt that I was a good person. We started talking, a little at first and then more and more. My kids got to know him, too, and slowly grew to love him. I started bringing him to my fights around the time I became undisputed world champion and he came to every one right up until he passed in January 2007.

I
f I thought things were busy before the Olympics, it was nothing compared to afterward. Winning a bronze instead of a gold didn't seem to put much of a dent in my commercial appeal, probably because the people who really knew boxing understood that coming in third had nothing to do with my skills. It wasn't the medal they cared about. All they wanted to know was if I had championship potential.

I had a lot of offers, but the decision about who to sign up with eventually boiled down to two possibilities. The first was Josephine Abercrombie, the lady who gave me the $2,000 I used to buy that Buick from Ken Sanders. Ken was with me when she sat me down and said, “If you sign with me, I'll write you a check for half a million dollars before the ink even dries on your signature. For your first fight you'll get another $400,000.”

While I tried to keep from falling over, Ken just nodded thoughtfully and said, “That's a very generous offer.”

Generous? That $2,000 she'd given me after the Golden Gloves was the most money I'd every seen at one time in my whole life. I was making $8,000
a year
working forty hours a week at Epps Aviation. Here she was telling me I'd have $900,000 after my first fight, so it wasn't generous, it was colossal, and I only hoped I could hold the pen steady when I signed the contract.

But I couldn't sign, because before the meeting Ken made me swear that I wouldn't jump at an offer even if a truck full of money was sitting in the driveway with my name on it. “Listen to all the offers first,” he said, “and then make a decision, because it isn't going to be about just dollars.”

So I told Mrs. Abercrombie how much I appreciated her faith in me, but I couldn't make a big decision like that without having all the facts in my hand. Her face kind of clouded over a little and she said, “I'm not negotiating, Evander. Those are the numbers I'm offering, and they won't change.”

That surprised me a little. I wasn't maneuvering, I was just stating a fact. It was pretty much how I would handle all my negotiations in the coming years, without all the usual posturing and mind games. Once people figured that out about me, it saved a lot of time and made things go much smoother. On several occasions I had to walk away from huge deals because I'd already gone on record saying I wouldn't accept them as offered, but in the long run it worked in my favor. Of course, most of the time there were people who negotiated on my behalf, but the final decision was always mine.

Right now, Mrs. Abercrombie didn't know any of that about me—neither did I, yet—so she saw my hesitation as some kind of ploy. I assured her it wasn't, and she seemed to believe me. She wasn't happy, but she believed me.

The other key player was Main Events, which was owned by Lou Duva and his son Dan. Lou was one of the all-time legendary trainers and managers. He'd begun instructing fighters while stationed at Camp Hood in Texas during World War II. He kept doing it after he was discharged, but had a number of other businesses besides. In 1978 he started staging fights in New Jersey, and he'd do all kinds of crazy things to build some buzz for his events, like getting a truck driver friend of his to pose as a prince from Zaire. Three years later Main Events promoted the first bout between Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns, which set a record of $40 million for the largest gross for a nonheavyweight bout.

Nineteen-eighty-four was a good year for Lou. He'd already signed my Olympic teammates Mark Breland, Pernell Whitaker, Meldrick Taylor and Tyrell Biggs, although I was hearing rumors that Mark had switched to Josephine Abercrombie's Houston Boxing Association. Middleweight gold medalist Frank Tate had gone with her as well.

Lou only offered me $250,000 to sign, and said I'd probably make $1.2 million over the next two years, which was less than what I could make with Abercrombie. To me that was the end of the decision-making process, but Ken said I should give it some more thought. I asked him why.

“Because you need to take a hard look at what's important to you,” he said. “I want you to understand that there's more to this decision than you might think.”

I asked him what he meant.

“If what you want is to get as much money as you can up front,” he said, “then go with Mrs. Abercrombie. But if you believe that you could be the champion, and if that's what's important to you, then go with the Duvas. Because Mrs. Abercrombie can dump a lot of money on you, but she doesn't have any champions and never has. She's too new in the business.”

He went on to tell me that it was kind of a crapshoot. If it turned out I didn't really have championship potential, I'd be better off going for the early big bucks. Nobody could really say either way, so I had to roll those dice myself, based on my own feelings about how good I could be. “If you do become champion, you'll make more money than you ever dreamed of,” he said, “but if you don't…”

There was something else, too. Abercrombie wanted to both manage and promote me, which meant Ken would be out of the picture if I signed with her. “So what I'm going to do,” he said, “I'm going to get as much for you out of her as I possibly can up front.” He thought he should go to her right away and find out what that deal might look like, because until we did, I wouldn't have all the information I needed to make a good decision. I reminded him that Mrs. Abercrombie had said her first offer was her final offer, but it didn't concern him. “I'm not going to ask her for more,” he said. “Just different.”

Ken went back and suggested to her that she offer me a seven-year, $7 million deal. She thought that was reasonable, but Bob Spagnola, assistant director of her Houston Boxing Association, was there advising her and started shaking his head. “Don't do it!” he warned. “That kid'll be like just like the rest of them. You'll see. As soon as he gets that money he won't work hard anymore, he'll get lazy,” and things like that. He wouldn't let it go, and eventually talked her out of it.

Ken wasn't disappointed. He thought I'd make so much money with Main Events that all of this I was thinking about now would be chicken feed. It would just take some time. “The Duvas make champions,” he said, “and champions make money.”

There was another problem with Abercrombie being both my promoter and my manager. There's a built-in conflict of interest in that arrangement, because as my manager she was supposed to try to get as much money for me as possible, but as a promoter she'd want to pay me as little as she could get away with. It would be like a baseball player whose agent was also the owner of the ball club he played for. It didn't make sense, even though in the boxing world it was surprisingly common. Don King spent his whole career promoting fights for the same guys he managed.

I trusted Ken and believed that he was thinking only of me. I believe it still. One of the first things he did when I decided to turn pro was get some help, because while he was a good businessman, he didn't know enough about the fight game and wasn't willing to risk making mistakes that could hurt me. So he sought out one of the best managers in the business, Shelly Finkel, and brought him on as co-manager even though it meant cutting his own commissions in half.

I took Ken's advice and went with Main Events, which of course turned out to be a great decision. As soon as I signed the contract, my amateur career was over. In the years following I'd see Josephine Abercrombie often at fights all over Houston, and we stayed good friends. She'd always come up to me and pretend to cry over having lost me. She did go on to produce three champions, including Frank Tate, but she could have had four.

I made my professional debut at a special “Night of Gold” at Madison Square Garden. They called it that because every fighter on the card had won Olympic gold in the 1984 Games just three months before. Everyone except me, anyway, but Lou Duva was running the show and he put me on the ticket. Just before the first fight of the night, Lou outdid Yogi Berra when he told a reporter, “Tonight is a new day.”

A manager has to strike a careful balance when setting up a fighter's first professional bout. On the one hand, he doesn't want his guy walking into a buzzsaw and having his confidence so badly shaken that he's ruined forever. On the other, he doesn't want to face him off against a pushover so that everybody thinks the new guy can't hack it with a real fighter. What he wants is a serious fight with plenty of challenge so that when his guy wins—and he's supposed to win—the world sits up and takes notice. It's a tricky proposition, and when the manager can't find the perfect opponent, he errs on the side of going easy on his guy.

Mine was the first bout of the night, and Lou must have worn himself out setting up all of the other matchups by the time he got around to arranging my fight. The guy facing me from the opposite corner was Lionel Byarm, light heavyweight champion of Pennsylvania, and he wasn't about to let himself become a bit player in the story of my career. Before we were two minutes into the first round the crowd knew that something unusual was going on. I'd knocked out everybody I'd faced since hitting the national scene as an amateur, but as hard as I was pounding Lionel, he wasn't hitting the deck. He stunned me with a thunderous right, too, and what was supposed to be my coming-out party was turning into a very serious brawl.

We were scheduled for six rounds, twice the amateur duration, so when the sixth round started I was deep into brand-new territory. I'd never gone anywhere near that long before, and Lionel knew it. He'd been hitting me hard and fast since the start of the fight, but hadn't really gone for the big knockout punch. He was biding his time until I was worn down and vulnerable, thinking he could then pick his moment and put me away for good.

He couldn't, but that last round was as ferocious a battle as I'd ever been in. All my trademark finesse and dancing was out the window as we went toe-to-toe punching furiously. I'd never thrown that many hard punches in one fight, but I couldn't put Lionel away. I'd never eaten that many punches, either, and I have to believe Lionel was just as surprised that
I
wasn't going down. Part of the reason for all that intensity was that neither of us was confident that we had a decision in the bag, so we needed to either score a knockout or rack up a lot of points trying.

There was no knockout, but I won the decision and my pro career was officially underway.

Paulette became pregnant again early in 1985. I won my second fight at about the same time, and then two more in quick succession. That put some real money in my pocket so it seemed like the right time to get married. We'd have a place to live, too. The first thing I did when I got all that signing money from the Duvas was put myself right into debt by buying a condo for Paulette and me and a house for Mama. But the money from my first four pro fights made those mortgages a lot less painful than they were at first.

I had a few misgivings about getting married because there were one or two things that made me wonder whether Paulette and I were really compatible. But it was tough to figure out how important they were because we hadn't had a lot of experience sharing a household. That's not all that unusual, but a lot of times when I'd mention things and want to talk about them, Paulette would snap, “We're not married and you're not my father, so you can't tell me what to do!” Reminding me that I wasn't her father was something I should have paid more attention to, because Paulette didn't always get along well with her folks, and I wondered how that would affect our relationship with our own kids. I wanted to make sure we set good examples, starting with how Paulette and I behaved and treated each other. But, again, any time I tried to suggest something, she reminded me that I didn't have the right because we weren't married.

I let it pass, and took her at her word that, once we were married, she'd change in ways I thought would be good for our family. I wanted to believe her because I wanted to be married. It meant a lot to me. I couldn't imagine my kids calling anybody else “Daddy” and I wanted the chance to bring them up the way Mama had brought me up. I was well aware of the “absentee dad” problem—I grew up without a father myself—and I was fully committed to breaking that particular curse. I also worried about how I'd look in God's eyes, already having had one child out of wedlock. I didn't want to do that anymore, and the clock was ticking because our second child was already on the way. So, despite the uncertainties that nagged at me, Paulette and I tied the knot on May 17, 1985. I'd have cause later to look back on how I'd arrived at that decision and, while I'd like to be able to tell you that I learned a hard lesson and learned it well, I guess I should have paid more attention in class.

It didn't take me long to realize how naïve I'd been. Three days after the wedding we had an argument about how some financial matters were being handled. When we'd both said what we had to say and started winding down, Paulette suddenly said. “I want an annulment.”

She didn't use the word “divorce.” There's a difference. I said, “You mean, make it like the marriage never happened?” Yes, that's exactly what she meant.

That cut me right to the core. I'd wanted to marry Paulette, and I badly wanted for it to work, and now she was telling me she wished we'd never gotten married at all.

I was too devastated to think straight and felt like my whole world had just tilted to one side. I'd looked forward to getting married and getting our lives kicked off right, and just like that it had all gone south. There was nothing left to say, so I left the house.