Becoming Holyfield (12 page)

The sweat was still flying off both of us and soaking the canvas. I slipped again, and even though I didn't go down this time, the ref was concerned enough to stop the fight for a few seconds to try to get some of it wiped away, but it was pretty useless. Qawi had to be thinking just what I was thinking, which was that there were only a couple of minutes remaining and there was no reason to save anything. Drawing on his own reserves, he found some hard punches left in his bag and pounded me a few times. The ref gave him a warning, but I couldn't tell for what, and neither could Qawi. He held out his hands, asking what the warning was for, but there was no answer and we kept on going. Then he motioned for the ref to warn me about holding his head. It was a last-ditch, desperate effort to shift the points in his favor, but the ref didn't buy it. Qawi flew at me, hitting me with surprising power this late in the game. I got away from him and, with my back nearly in the corner, saw a perfect opening. I stepped into what was going to be a terrific head shot—and slipped again, hitting the canvas hard. Qawi was right there, both hands poised to wallop me, but when he realized I'd slipped he dropped his hands and screwed up his face in frustration while I got to my feet. The ref, knowing it was a slip, grabbed my gloves, putting himself between Qawi and me while he made sure I was steady before allowing us to continue.

I figured there couldn't be more than twenty seconds left in this fight. I bit down hard on my mouthpiece and got ready to give it everything I had. Qawi, as I expected, was heading right for me, but he looked different now, not just physically tired but mentally spent as well. As soon as he got to me I put my hand on his head and he barely resisted, so I let fly with the fastest flurry of punches I could possibly muster. I didn't bother with fancy combinations or try to fake him out. I just machine-gunned blows to the sides of his head with both hands, so fast he couldn't do anything but duck down, put his gloves up and wait for it to stop. As soon as it did, he picked up his head and I hit him again, a hard right to his face, and then I bounced back and forth three or four times, trying to mix him up, like a basketball player yoyoing up and down so the defender has no idea when he's actually going to shoot, watching his eyes to see when he was totally lost…

And then Qawi did something he hadn't done once since the opening bell. He backed off. He dropped his shoulder and actually took a step backward. I was so stunned I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. Had the ref stopped the action? Had the bell gone off? But the crowd was screaming and yelling hysterically. They knew what was happening before I did, that Qawi was done, finished, not another ounce of fight left in him.

I finally came to my senses. There were only seconds left in the round, but the rules for this bout said you couldn't be “saved by the bell.” If I could get in there while he was stunned and exhausted and hit him with one last piledriver of a punch, I could put him down and get the knockout after all. The crowd sensed the same thing and cranked up the volume even louder as I moved in for the kill.

I should have known better. Qawi hadn't taken a single step backward in almost fifteen rounds. Why did I think he was going to lie down now?

He'd pulled a last-minute fake and drawn me into a trap. As soon as I reached him and jabbed for his head, he detonated like a hand grenade, shooting out a left I just managed to deflect and following up immediately with a tremendous right that I was able to get away from only because I'd already started moving backward from the previous punch. From that point on he was a man possessed, throwing huge shots and flying into me with such determination that I backed up along one edge of the ring, got to the corner and then backed up along another edge. There was no sense hitting him back because he was so wired I don't think he would have felt a howitzer hitting him.

By the time we'd moved another whole length of the ring and reached a corner again, I could feel him losing energy, so I stood still and he just kind of leaned against me, trying to catch his breath, and then he tried to hit me a few mores times. But there was no strength in it, and no heart, and I didn't do much about it and then the final bell rang and it was over.

There's a concept familiar to endurance athletes like marathon runners and triathletes, that no matter what the distance is or how hilly the course or what the weather conditions are, you've got just enough to get to the finish line and not a drop more. It's why you see a runner in a dead sprint for the finish, going at full speed, and as soon as he crosses the line he falls in a heap and can't even lift his head. Exactly the same thing would happen if the race was a mile longer or a mile shorter. It's a purely mental thing, your mind figuring out how to get you just far enough and no farther.

It's a little like that in boxing, too, with one big difference: You don't know the distance in advance. If you score an early knockout, you might have plenty of juice left, which is why you'll sometimes see guys jump around like rabbits after they've won, hopping up onto the ropes, dancing all over the place and even lifting their corner men into the air.

But when you've fought all the scheduled rounds, you're just like that marathon runner. You gave it everything you had and there aren't five seconds of energy left. The bell goes off and it's like someone opened the drain valve in your gas tank, and it's all you can do to walk back to your corner.

When the fight ended, I managed a weak smile at Qawi and mumbled something nice to him as best I could around my mouthpiece. I was trying to tell him that he'd fought a magnificent fight, that I had tremendous respect for him, that he was truly a warrior of the highest rank. He nodded back his own acknowledgment of me, but I could see in his eyes that he was worried. He was the champ trying to retain his belt, and even though, all else being equal, the win will go to the champ rather than the challenger, he knew that it had been far from equal. The only question in my mind was whether the judges would see it differently and let him keep his title.

As we walked back to our corners, our people did what they're supposed to do, which is to show tremendous support for their fighter. Whenever there's a decision pending, your guys act as though it's the biggest no-brainer in the world, and why even bother to add up the scores? Just give us the belt and let the partying begin.

As soon as the bell rang, both Qawi's people and mine threw their hands in the air, smiling and laughing and high-fiving in a joyous celebration of victory. One of his guys picked him up, and trainer Tom Brooks picked me up at the same time. Qawi's arms hung limp at his sides, but I managed to pump a fist into the air and raise my arms over my head. Contrary to what the critics had predicted, I turned out to be the better conditioned of the two of us. You could see it in Qawi's stricken expression, how all the people who'd told him he could outlast me had been dead wrong. As tired as I was, he was more so. As sore as my body was, his was worse. Where I'd surprised everyone and myself by being able to fight hard through all fifteen rounds, he was stunned that a twenty-three-year-old with only eleven pro fights could go toe-to-toe for seven rounds more than he'd ever fought before. To this day I haven't finished thanking Tim Hallmark for putting me through those six weeks of torture that got me through sixty minutes of hell. (Tim would sell his gym two years later to join my team full-time, and he's been with me ever since.)

I was glad when I was finally set back down on the canvas. It was just too much effort to be held high like that, and it was hard to breathe, too. Lou went over and gave Qawi a hug, and there was a lot of backslapping and handshaking between our sides. How could there not be? We'd just fought what
The Ring
magazine would call the best cruiserweight bout of the decade, and it would also top the “Fight of the Year” lists of a whole string of publications. No matter which of us won, everybody in that arena, including the crowd that couldn't stop screaming, knew that something very special had just happened.

There were over fifty people jammed into the ring when a voice came onto the PA and said, “We have a majority decision.” A lot of faces turned anxious at that. The decision wasn't unanimous, so at least one of the three judges had called the fight for me, and at least one had called it for Qawi. It would all boil down to the third judge.

The announcer gave the first judge's tally: “144–140—Holyfield!” A tremendous cheer went up, and the guys around me huddled closer. The more wily veterans put a hand on me, as if to hold me up in case things went south, because they knew that the score just announced was meaningless. Of course there was a judge who'd gone for me. It was a majority decision so there had to be at least one.

The second score was announced; “143–141—Qawi!” Again, no surprise there, but the score spread was smaller. A good sign? No way to tell.

The announcer said the third judge “scores the fight 147–138, for the winner…”

Time itself seemed to freeze. Every one of the dozen hands on me tightened in anticipation.

“…and the new…”

My corner exploded with joy. I got hoisted into the air again and people were yelling in my ear so loud I couldn't hear anything the announcer was saying. I didn't need to hear it because there could only be one “new” champion—Qawi would have been “still” the champion—and that was me. It was hard to believe that that arena full of people could have gotten any more crazy than they'd already been, but they did. I was high in the air on a couple of shoulders, and wanted to show my appreciation to everybody for their loud and lusty support, and of course I was elated beyond measure, but I was so wasted I literally couldn't sit up straight. Hands kept shooting out to push me back up every time I threatened to fall over,

Eventually I was set back down, and Alex Wallau of ABC fought his way through the throng to interview me. Before he got his first question out I thanked the Lord for everything, and never meant it more sincerely. Alex pointed out that I'd seemed to give out in the fifth and sixth rounds before getting my wind back. I told him that I'd felt myself starting to give in to the “old Holyfield,” the one with the reputation of only having enough stamina for a handful of rounds, but then I'd reminded myself of what I had on the line, and that God was behind me. We talked for about another minute and then I think he realized that I was fading. He mercifully cut it short and let me go.

The rest is a blur. I remember the Olympic champions, and Lou Duva and my other corner guys and a bunch of friends and supporters. I remember noise and chaos and being unable to tell if the lightheadedness I was feeling was euphoria, fatigue, or bright camera lights shining in my eyes or forty guys trying to talk to me at once. What I remember very clearly is wanting to get out of there and back to the locker room where I could lie down. I'd been on my feet since the start of the fifteenth round and even after the final bell it still hadn't exactly been restful, and what I needed more than anything else was to just breathe quietly for a minute or two.

I didn't know it yet but this fight still wasn't over for me.

I have no idea how I got back to my hotel. My next memory was being in the shower and getting socked with a series of intensely painful cramps. Not just in my legs and back but my arms and even my neck. My head hurt, too, so bad I thought it was going to explode. I started to double over and grabbed a fistful of shower curtain to hold myself up. I managed to stay upright for a few seconds, but then another wave of spasms hit me and I went down, tearing the shower rod out of the wall. I hollered for Paulette, and a second later the bathroom door burst open and she ran in. It must have looked like the shower scene from
Psycho,
with me squirming around in the bathtub, but she didn't waste any time being scared. Ken Sanders and Shelly Finkel were staying in the same hotel, and she called them to come over. They helped her get me out of the shower and then put some clothes on me.

I knew right away that I was badly dehydrated. Something like this had happened to me four years before, when I was trying to get down to 156 pounds to make an amateur weight class. I'd been taken to the hospital then, and since this was much, much worse, I knew I had to go there now.

I have no recollection of how I got to Crawford Long Hospital, but my personal physician, Dr. Ron Stephens, was waiting for us when we got there. As luck would have it, he worked at Crawford Long, which was only six blocks from my hotel. One of the first things he did was weigh me. After he tweaked the little slider on the scale and got it balanced, he screwed up his face in confusion and said to me, “How much did you weigh going into the fight?”

“Are you serious?” Sanders said. Half of Atlanta knew what I weighed going into this fight.

“One eighty-six, wasn't it?” Stephens said to me, and I nodded.

“What's the problem?” Finkel asked him.

The doc looked back at the scale, like he was trying to make sure of something, then said, “Problem is, he weighs 171 now.”

Sanders did a quick mental calculation, then his eyes got wide. “You telling me he lost
fifteen pounds
during the fight?”

“What hurts, specifically?” the doc asked me.

I didn't know where to start. Everything hurt. Not only was I exhausted and dehydrated but I'd also just taken a thousand punches from a world champion fighter, which Stephens knew because he'd been at the fight. It was hard to sort out the “normal” pain from the kind that told you something else was wrong. But I'd just gone to the bathroom and there was something he probably needed to know about that. “I think I peed some blood,” I told him.