Becoming Holyfield (13 page)

That's not so unusual after a fight when you get hit in the kidneys a lot. Except…

“I didn't see you take any kidney shots tonight, Evander.”

The doc was right. I hadn't.

A few minutes later I was in a bed with an IV in my arm. When the first bag was empty, they slapped another one on the pole. Then another, and another. After a while I lost count. The doc came in several times to check on me. One of the things he told me was that it wasn't blood I'd seen in my urine.

“You ran out of all your reserves,” he said, “so you were burning up muscle toward the end. What you saw was the residue of that.” He also said my kidneys weren't working right, just from being so dried out, but that there wouldn't be any long-term effects.

Once I'd gotten stabilized and could think clearly, Ken and I talked quietly. I remember telling him, “Man, I don't know if I want to be the champion anymore. It's too hard!”

He nodded, but made me promise not to make any big decisions while I was still laid up. It was good advice. We talked for a few more minutes, and soon after I fell asleep.

Ken was there when I woke up the next morning. “You hungry?” he asked.

I hadn't taken in any solid food since a few hours before the fight. I was starving. “Forget this hospital food,” he said, standing up. “What do you want to eat?”

I knew exactly what I wanted: A Burger King Whopper with cheese, a ton of fries and a strawberry shake. I must have fallen back asleep because it seemed like only a few seconds before Sanders had it all laid out on one of those little rolling tables that slides over the bed. I stared at it for a while.

“What're you gonna do?” Ken said after a minute or two. “Just look at it?”

That's all I could do. I was hungry but couldn't bring myself to take a bite. “You eat it,” I said to him, and he did.

Later that day they pulled the IV out and weighed me again: 195 pounds. One of the nurses said they put over two gallons of saline solution into me to replace what I'd lost. When I was discharged later that day, I still hadn't made up my mind if I wanted to keep fighting. But when I got home, the first person I saw was Evander Jr. and that was all it took for me to decide that I would. After all the lessons I'd tried to impart to my son, what was I going to tell him when he got older—that his old man had been a quitter? “When I stop fighting,” I was to tell him later, “it'll be because the time is right and because I want to. Not before.”

In 2004, Dwight Muhammad Qawi was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame. An interviewer mentioned that I'd said he was the toughest opponent I'd ever fought. Qawi said, “Yes. I put him in the hospital for two days.” It was only one day, but I don't mind. Qawi became a dedicated substance-abuse counselor, and I admire him for that, especially considering what a rough start his adulthood had. By the way, I fought him again the following year and knocked him out in the fourth round, on the same night that Ebonne (pronounced “Ebony”) was born to Sheryl and me.

I knocked out a lot more guys out after that, too, but that title fight against Muhammad Qawi was still my best.

A quick word about boxing titles. Unlike most pro sports—tennis, golf, skiing and the like—boxing has no single international sanctioning body. There are three separate organizations, the WBC (World Boxing Council), WBA (World Boxing Association) and the IBF (International Boxing Federation). They each have their own world titles, so there are three world championship belts up for grabs at any time, and they could be held by one, two, or three fighters. If one fighter holds all three, he has “unified” the title and is “undisputed” champion of the world. But just because you beat that guy in a title fight doesn't mean that you automatically inherit all three. Sanctioning fees have to be paid to each organization and prefight approval obtained before they consider it to be a title bout for their particular title. A unified title is a rarity, and highly coveted. Hold all three belts and you truly are the undisputed champ. (There are actually other organizations in addition to the big three. The World Boxing Organization in particular has come into its own and the WBO titleholder is now recognized as a legitimate world champ.)

Qawi was the WBA world champ when I fought him the first time, and that's the title that was on the line in that fight. Over the next two years I fought and beat the best fighters in the division, and when I defeated Carlos De Leon in April 1988, I became the first undisputed and undefeated cruiserweight champion of the world. There wouldn't be another for seventeen more years, and to this day all cruiserweight championship belts carry my likeness.

The bout against Carlos was my last in that division. I moved up to heavyweight for my fight against James Tillis three months later and have been one ever since.

The decision to move into the heavyweight division wasn't a hard one. There wasn't much else to accomplish as a cruiserweight and too few opponents who could face me and still give the fans a good fight. It was time to move on and give myself some really huge challenges.

Not everyone was in favor of it. A lot of sportswriters said that I would always be too small to take on the kinds of monsters who dominated the glamorous “big man's” class. They said I'd be nothing but a “blown-up cruiserweight” and wouldn't have a prayer of ever getting a title shot against the “real” heavyweights. That was just the kind of talk that got my blood pumping.

Young fighters often ask me what I did to become a heavyweight. Truth is, what I really did was stop trying so hard to stay a cruiserweight. The more I trained, the bigger I naturally got. It became a serious struggle not to grow out of cruiser. It got to the point where I was eating only one small meal a day and dehydrating myself to make weight. Average body fat for a healthy American male under thirty is around 15 to 18 percent, optimum is 10 to 15 percent, and an elite athlete's might be down in the 5 to 10 percent area, depending on the sport. Mine was 3 percent, and that was just downright unhealthy. There were times during training when I felt weak and dizzy from hunger.

So becoming a heavyweight wasn't much of an effort for me. Tim Hallmark designed a program to make sure I did it gradually and in a way that would contribute to my overall health. It consisted primarily of changing and intensifying my weight workouts and also modifying my nutrition. As Tim put it to me, “What you need is
more
nutrition.” He got me up to three squares a day and made sure I was getting some fat in my diet. Fat is generally a dirty word, and for most people it should be, but some fat is necessary and I didn't have nearly enough. To this day I eat very little for someone my size, but it sure was a relief not to go around hungry all the time.

Following Tim's regimen I eventually tipped the scales at a few ounces over 200 pounds, but the sportswriters were right about one thing: I was destined to always be the smallest guy in the ring. My first fight was at 201, my second at 202 and even twenty years later I was barely hitting 216. It wasn't unusual for my opponents to outweigh me by as much as forty pounds.

But I sure shed the “blown-up cruiserweight” label pretty quick when I beat my first ten heavyweight opponents, eight of them by knockout.

F
our months after I won my first cruiserweight world title, twenty-year-old Mike Tyson became the youngest world heavyweight champion in history. He spent the next three and a half years storming his way through the heavyweight division without a single loss. And he wasn't fighting pushovers, either. He defeated Tyrell Biggs, Larry Holmes and Michael Spinks before meeting James “Buster” Douglas in Tokyo in 1990.

I was in the audience for the Douglas fight. Since turning heavyweight I'd knocked out all six of my opponents and was the number-one contender in the world, so I was scheduled to fight Mike in June. It hadn't been easy setting that fight up. As badly as I wanted to fight him, it seemed that Don King just as badly didn't want me to. There were a couple of possibilities as to why, one of which had to do with the fact that King and Lou Duva weren't exactly bosom buddies. But I don't think that was the main reason. The main reason was that King was afraid I'd beat Mike. Or, to put it another way, he felt that I had a better chance of beating Mike than a lot of the other contenders. It wasn't so much that King thought I was a “better” fighter. It's that I was different.

Mike was a brawler. By that I mean that he liked to fight inside, standing toe-to-toe with an opponent and trading punches, relying on his power, his conditioning and his ability to absorb a lot of punishment. Also called a “fighter” (as opposed to a “boxer”), a brawler is looking to land a knockout punch as soon as the opening bell rings. It's the kind of style that Howard Cosell warned me not to pursue at the Olympics, because amateur fights are only three rounds long and victory is generally won on points, not knockouts. One thing about being a brawler is that you risk not racking up a lot of points, so if you don't get the knockout, you might lose the decision.

“Boxing,” on the other hand, is an outside style. You circle, dance and jab, staying out of the way of power punches and stepping inside only when you spot an opening or have your opponent worn down and properly set up. Boxing is a lot more technical than brawling, and takes a lot of concentration. It was also hard to do against Mike because he had a real knack for drawing you into his style. King knew that a skilled boxer who wasn't intimidated by Mike was a serious threat. He also knew that boxing was my strength and that I wasn't scared of anything.

So the negotiations with King hadn't gotten very far, until a couple of key dates began creeping up on him. Mike was obligated to fight the number-one contender in each of the three governing organizations within a year. Since I was the contender in two of those, the WBA and WBC, he had to fight me or he'd be stripped of those titles. Any hopes that King had that I might lose my number-one rank as the deadlines approached soon evaporated, and he had no choice. June would see “The Brawl For It All.”

The Douglas fight in Tokyo was a nothing bout for Mike, just an easy payday, and was such a mismatch that it had to be held in Japan because none of the big venues in Las Vegas, Atlantic City or New York wanted anything to do with it. The Vegas oddsmakers had Tyson as a 42–1 favorite, about the same as you'd get for Godzilla versus Winnie the Pooh.

The fight went as expected, all the way to the eighth round when Mike uncorked a massive uppercut. It sent Douglas sprawling and the count began. When the ref called out “Nine!” Douglas scrambled to his feet and Mike swooped in to finish him off, but the bell rang before he could do it. Douglas staggered back to his corner to try to regain his senses and I guess he did, because in the tenth round he launched a huge right uppercut of his own and this time it was Mike who hit the deck. Unlike Douglas, though, Mike didn't get back up in time.

It was one of the biggest upsets in history, but a bigger one came ten months later. My fight with Mike was off because he was no longer the champion, so I fought Douglas instead. Everybody had assumed Mike was going to wallop the daylights out of me, so they naturally thought my fight against the guy who'd beaten him wouldn't last thirty seconds past “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen…” It was a reasonable assumption, so an awful lot of money changed hands in Vegas when I knocked Douglas out with one punch in the third round and became the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. “A fluke,” some writers said. “A lucky punch.” Over the next few months I guess my “luck” held up, because I successfully defended the undisputed crown by beating former world champions George Foreman and Larry Holmes and knocking out a third challenger for good measure.

But I still wanted Mike Tyson.

A lot of sportswriters thought it pretty remarkable that I'd beaten the man who'd beaten Tyson, but if they'd had any idea what had been going on in the weeks leading up to the fight, they would have thought it downright miraculous. While I was getting ready to fight the bout of my life, I was also in the process of losing both my manager and my wife.

There had always been conflict between Ken Sanders and Main Events. Uncomfortable as it became at times, I put up with it because that kind of tension can be a good thing, competing interests keeping everybody honest. But in recent years it had escalated to the point where the Duvas tried to get me to line up with them against Ken, and Ken tried to get me to line up with him against Main Events, each of whom wanted the other gone. I would come to realize later when I was running my own businesses that putting me in the middle of all of that was Bad Management 101 on both their parts. You don't put pressure and burden on the guy you're supposed to be shepherding to a world championship. One of their jobs was supposed to be keeping me away from distractions and handling them for me. I didn't know enough at the time to be able to recognize that, much less try to do something about it, so it was doomed to become a choice of one or the other of them sooner or later. It finally happened as the Douglas fight was approaching.

It wasn't easy for Ken to be my friend. He was a good old southern boy with a lot of good old southern boy buddies. While I was an amateur and he was a prominent local businessman, those friends didn't pay it much mind, but when I went pro and started winning all my fights, Ken became a bit of a big shot around town because he was my manager. Some of his “friends” became envious and started looking for ways to bring him down a notch, like giving him a hard time about me making more money than him. At first it was just kidding around, but at times it got vicious, some of his business associates even making nasty racist cracks. Ken stuck by me through all of it, but it cost him and it wore him down a little. It also made him feel that he needed to be seen as in control, and that's probably why things had to come to a head.

I broke training for a day to honor a speaking engagement, and ended up on the same plane as Ernest Evans. He'd just seen me fight and came over to introduce himself. You probably know Ernest better as “Chubby Checker,” a name he gave himself based on “Fats Domino.” Chubby had rocketed into the celebrity stratosphere in 1960 on the strength of the Twist, probably the most wildly popular dance craze of all time. But he'd just as quickly plummeted back into obscurity, having been bankrupted by managers not just once but twice.

We got to talking—the conversation started when I told him my childhood nickname had been “Chubby”—and at one point he asked me a few questions about my business affairs. He listened carefully, especially to my story about the auto dealership, and then said, “Evander, you're going down the same road I did.” When I asked him why he thought that, he held up his hand and counted off on his fingers. “You and your manager got the same attorney, same accountant, same banker, same everything.” He shook his head. “Don't do that, man. I'm tellin' you.”

That made me think, and in the next few weeks I sounded out some people about it. To a man they warned me that I shouldn't be using the same financial and legal professionals as my manager, that it was standard procedure not to do that. I didn't do anything about it at first. Then just a few months later I ran into Chubby on another flight. He asked me if I'd taken care of separating those services out, and I admitted I hadn't. I still trusted Ken, and I just didn't think I needed to do that.

“Got nothin' to do with trust,” Chubby said. “Guys I was with, I trusted them with my
life.
Didn't make any difference.” He ended the conversation a little later by saying, “Listen, do me and do yourself one favor, okay? At least have a different accountant.”

I knew he was right, and decided to make the switch. My first step was to call Ken and talk it over with him, but he got insulted and didn't handle it very well. I guess all of the pressure on him had been building for a while and I'd picked the worst possible time to bring up a subject like that. Even though it had no financial or other impact on him, he got really angry. I listened for a while, but when he cursed me, I hung up on him.

A few days later when I called him about something having to do with the upcoming Douglas fight, Ken said, “I thought we were over, you and me.” I told him no, we weren't. He was surprised, and explained that his feelings had been hurt, which was why he went off on me. I said I understood, then added, “But don't ever curse me again.” I was willing to work with him, but I couldn't forget the things he'd said. And that's when we agreed to part. I felt really bad about it, and when the Duvas told me they were happy that Ken was out of the picture, I felt even worse.

After that, and a short-lived stint with the rapper M.C. Hammer managing me, I didn't feel I needed a manager guiding my career, just business guys and lawyers to do negotiations and handle matters requiring special expertise. One of the problems I kept running into was that so-called “managers” assumed I was just going to do whatever they advised. But that's not how I looked at the role of managers. Their job was to give advice and counsel, but the decisions were mine, as were the consequences. Whatever I decided after listening to everybody, they needed to get behind it and support it, not feel insulted if I didn't do it exactly their way.

The Buster Douglas bout was the first fight of my pro career that Ken wasn't with me, but as soon as I got back to Atlanta I went to see him and handed him a check for $1.2 million, 15 percent of the $8 million I got for the fight.

“What's this for?” he asked. “I wasn't even there.”

I told him that it didn't matter that he hadn't been there. He'd been my manager through everything it took to get there, and had rightfully earned his cut. My own thing is never to let a rough moment or two wreck a valuable friendship, and I'm truly thankful that Ken and I are still very close friends. People are trying to get him back into the boxing game because he had such a nice way of handling fighters, and they're right. Once in a while he asks me to take a look at a young fighter and I'm always glad to do that for him. The sport can only benefit by Ken's presence.

The other thing that happened just before the Douglas fight—a week before, to be exact—was that Paulette filed for divorce. Her lawyers had suggested that bit of timing strategy, probably thinking that it would do maximum damage to my head and make me vulnerable in the negotiations. The whole thing felt like some kind of plot. Paulette didn't handle money well, and while I paid all the bills and rarely questioned anything she spent, she didn't have direct access to the accounts. A lawyer told her that if she divorced me she'd have half of everything all to herself. He also advised her to wait and hit me with all of this just before the Douglas fight. I wonder if he was also the one who told her not to let me know that she'd filed. I didn't find out about it until a reporter who was interviewing me said, “So what's with your wife filing for divorce?” I mumbled something vague, because I had no idea she'd done that.

My lawyer thought her lawyers were crazy and would have done better by their client if they'd waited a week. “Don't they know how much you're going to get paid for fighting Douglas?” he asked in amazement.

It didn't matter. I had no intention of negotiating. I told my lawyer to give Paulette anything she asked for, and that's what we did. Even when she demanded custody of the kids, I gave in. As painful as it was, I wasn't about to make my children the subject of a court fight, and I also didn't think it right to tear kids away from their mother. We ended the matter quickly and without the kind of bloodshed you see in a lot of divorces.

Not having the kids with me was every bit as awful as I'd thought it was going to be, but it didn't last long. A couple of things led me to believe that all wasn't going well and before too much time passed I sat Paulette down to talk about the kids. She didn't argue back when I told her I'd noticed signs that there were problems that could easily get out of hand. One of them was that the kids talked disrespectfully to her and weren't obedient. I told her that one of the surest indicators of how a kid was going to turn out was how he behaved toward his parents. Paulette's relationship with her own parents was strained, and she was smart enough to see the connection when our kids started to fall into the same patterns.

There were other things as well but there was no need to beat her over the head with them. My argument was a simple one: If she wanted the kids raised right, we both knew they'd be better off with me.

I had strong feelings about how I wanted my kids to be raised. I didn't want them to think that they were successful because I was successful, without having accomplished anything on their own. I didn't want them to get everything handed to them, because then there'd be no reason for them to strive to do things themselves. That's no kind of preparation for life. I wanted them to be ambitious, to have goals and to work hard to achieve those goals. That's the only way anyone ever feels good about himself. The easiest way to shortchange your kids is to give them everything they want but nothing that they really need, and that's one road I didn't want our children going down. They might be grateful for the moment when you give them stuff, but that shallow gratitude will turn to resentment as soon as bad things start happening to them that they're not equipped to handle. If you don't believe me, pick up a supermarket tabloid and read about the antics of rich, famous children of rich, famous parents who overindulged them and never taught them how to live. Those kids never accomplished anything on their own and became self-destructive because that's what happens when you have nothing to live for. And if you think those kids love their parents because of all that money they give them, I'm willing to bet you're wrong.