Becoming Holyfield (14 page)

“If you want those kids to grow up loving you,” I told Paulette, “let me bring them up. Let them come and live with me.”

When she resisted, I assured her that she could see them any time she wanted, with no restrictions, and then I said, “I'll continue to pay full child support, no questions asked. Just let me have them.” I wasn't trying to bribe Paulette; I was just trying to show her how serious I was, that the money didn't matter compared to making sure our children got their lives started off right. When she saw that, she became convinced. I give her a lot of credit for making that very difficult decision. It's a sign of how much she loved them that she let them come live with me. And it's not like I took them away from her. She saw them all the time and there were no hard feelings between us. Evander Jr., Ashley and Ewin have been with me ever since, and have been a never-ending source of joy, for Paulette and me both.

There are a lot of theories about what it takes to raise a kid right, like having a father around. The thinking is that if a boy doesn't have a father in the house, he's doomed.

I don't think it much matters whether it's a mother or a father or both or a grandmother or an uncle. What matters is that
someone
is there, all the time, and loves you and cares for you so much that they're willing to take the time to raise you, not just feed you. That old line about “a roof over your head and food on the table” just doesn't cut it with me. A kid needs a lot more than food and shelter to grow up right. He needs structure and discipline and a strong hand at the tiller to make sure he learns what he needs to know. It doesn't mean parents have to do it all themselves, but they need to be careful about who else has influence. I grew up with no father in the house, but I had Carter Morgan, and a mother who understood that you couldn't ask for a better man than Carter to take her son in hand. I had the Boys Club, one of the best things ever to happen to me, a place where good behavior was rewarded and it wasn't at all cool to have been in jail or have a gunshot wound. My childhood wasn't easy but I was blessed because Mama, Carter and the Boys Club gave me what every kid needs to grow up right: structure, discipline and love. Now I feel it's my obligation to provide the same for my own kids, and to support people and organizations who provide it for other kids.

About seven years after the kids came to live with me Ashley turned twelve. She came to me and said she wanted to change her name. I said, “Go ahead,” but she shook her head and said, “I mean for real.” When I asked her why she said, “'Cuz everybody's got an ‘E' except me!”

It had become a tradition in the family. All of Ashley's brothers and sisters had names beginning with E and she wanted to be part of it. I was really touched by that, so I went to court and made official the new name she'd picked out for herself: Evette.

God would eventually bless me with eleven incredible—and incredibly sweet—children and there's not a day goes by that I don't thank Him for the gift of Evander Jr., Ashley/Evette, Ebonne Esheal, Ewin Ezekiel, Emani Winter, Eden Eloise, Eleazar Evan, Elijah Esaias, Elijah Jedidiah, Eli Ethan and Eve Elizabeth.

Mike Tyson was far from finished after losing to Buster Douglas. Four months later he fought Henry Tillman, who'd taken his Olympic spot in 1984, and knocked him out in the first round. He did the same thing to Alex Stewart, then beat Donovan “Razor” Ruddock twice the following year. While I was busy defending my titles, he was doing everything he could to get a shot at taking them away from me.

And even though he was no longer world champion, he was still the man to beat. The thing about Mike isn't just that he was a good fighter, it's that people were absolutely terrified of him. You can see it when you watch tapes of his fights, how tentative his opponents were, almost like they were afraid to make him mad. The prefight interviews didn't help, either. Reporters were always asking scary questions: “Are you worried you're going to get hurt? Have you thought about whether you really want to do this? Do you realize it's only a matter of time until Tyson kills somebody in the ring?” By the time the opening bell rang, a lot of his opponents were already toast. He wasn't just respected as a fighter, he was feared, and that probably contributed to a lot of his wins.

So even after he lost the crown, Mike was still the guy you had to beat to prove you were the best. Even if you'd just won the fight of your life, it was always the same thing in the postfight press conferences: What about Tyson? When are you going to fight Tyson? Like it was more important than being champ. And in some ways, it was.

M
ike Tyson called himself the “Baddest Man on the Planet” but it's hard to know exactly what he thought that meant. In the 'hood,
bad
usually means
good,
like “Man, that movie was so bad, you just have to see it!” So was Mike saying he was the best man in the world? Or did he mean “bad” in the usual sense, like rotten or nasty? I think he liked the bad boy image, a guy from the projects who made good but never lost his inner-city roots. When we met for the world championship, he didn't enter the arena the way most fighters do, in the middle of a royal procession and wearing flowing silk robes. He kind of sauntered in, like he'd accidentally stumbled on the place but didn't care because he could whup anybody at a moment's notice anyway. Instead of a robe, he was wearing only a torn sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. Was that a clue to what he meant by “Baddest Man on the Planet”? My guess is that Mike himself hadn't given it as much thought as I just did. It just sounded right to him: tough, ornery and invincible.

Mike had a rough start in life. He lived in Brownsville, one of the meanest sections of Brooklyn, and by the time he was ten or eleven he was already creating chaos. He discovered boxing in reform school. Veteran trainer and fight commentator Teddy Atlas describes in his autobiography how he met the young future champion.

Bobby Stewart, a former Golden Gloves champ and Mike's counselor at the corrections facility, got him only so far in boxing and then knew he couldn't take him the rest of the way. So Stewart got in touch with Teddy, who was working in Cus D'Amato's camp in Catskill, New York, and asked him to have a look.

Mike arrived at D'Amato's in a prison van, and when he stepped out, Teddy's eyes almost bugged out of his head at the size of him. Mike was about five-nine and weighed 190 pounds.

“Just how old is this kid?” Teddy asked.

“Twelve,” Stewart replied, and pulled out a birth certificate to prove it.

Teddy agreed to take the kid on and see how it went, so every week for three months the prison van would pull up to D'Amato's and Tyson would spend the day training. He had a lot of behavioral problems and was a handful around the camp, but Teddy, who had himself done time in Riker's for violent crimes as a teenager, had overcome those same issues in his own life. That left him with a gift for seeing deep into the heart of kids who were like he used to be and knowing just what to do to get them back on track. Teddy took a stern but caring approach and Mike seemed to respond. After three months, Mike was released on parole under the condition that he stay at the camp under Teddy's supervision.

Teddy had a whole batch of troubled kids at the camp and was doing a remarkable job of straightening them out. His approach to them was very much like my mother's was to me, giving them goals to shoot for and letting them know that at least one person in the world cared about them, and it was working. On weekends he'd drive them down to New York City so they could compete against other fighters. The bouts were usually in seedy little gyms on streets you could hardly find, filled with thick tobacco smoke and bad smells and a crazy assortment of oddball characters betting on the fights. The kids were matched up by age, but nobody would believe for a second that Tyson was twelve, so Teddy had to put him up against kids as old as sixteen to get him fights. It didn't matter. Mike worked so hard in training and was so strong and talented that he knocked everybody out anyway.

By this time Cus D'Amato, who'd guided Floyd Patterson and Jose Torre to world championships, was getting on in years and had given the run of the camp over to Teddy. Cus would show up at the gym once in a while and give some advice, but was pretty much out of things.

Until he saw Mike Tyson. D'Amato's fight radar was as sharp as ever, and he soon realized that this kid had championship potential. He knew that Mike was troubled, but also saw that he was responding to the tough love he was getting from Teddy, who agreed that Mike could go all the way if handled right and given enough time. And that right there was one of those great turning points in life, those critical moments at which everything can change depending on which path you take.

The problem was that Cus didn't have time. He was getting old, and didn't know how many years he had left. If he was going to produce one last champion before he checked out, it had to happen soon.

So he threw himself into the middle of Mike's training, and that's where he started crossing swords with Teddy. Whenever Mike got into trouble, which was pretty often, Teddy would sit him down, give him a stern talking-to and not let him fight for a while. Every time that happened Cus would get upset, because he saw the clock ticking and didn't want Mike wasting a second of time being unproductive. So he started overriding Teddy, and not just in camp, either. If Mike got into trouble at school, Cus would go to the principal and try to smooth it over. Same thing with the local police, who knew and admired Cus. It didn't take long for Mike to figure out that he could get away with pretty much anything as long as he worked hard in the gym and kept knocking guys out. Cus looked the other way and made sure everybody else did, too, and if Teddy tried to interfere, well, Cus still owned the camp.

Mike knew that Teddy was still on his case, and since that was the only obstacle there was to his behaving any way he wanted to, it was the one he pushed on the hardest. It came to a head one day when Mike went way over the line and Teddy had to stick a gun in his ear to make his point. Mike got the message, but Cus didn't, and Teddy was no longer able to stand by and watch as Cus, intent on producing one last champion, insisted on indulging Mike's bad behavior. Teddy had simply had enough, and when he left the camp, he probably took with him Mike's best chance to become as good a man as he was a fighter.

It's amazing how those moments can affect an entire life. When I was little my mama worked twelve hours a day as a cook and when she came home she was so dog-tired she could hardly keep her eyes open, much less spend time with all her kids. But by the time I was six she'd worked herself into a heart attack and could no longer do her job. So for the rest of my youth I had her practically all to myself, and it's because of all that love and attention that I was able to accomplish all that I have. I sure hate to think of her heart problems as having been part of a divine plan for my benefit, but the plain truth is, maybe they were. We didn't have money but I had Mama, and without her there for me, who knows where I might have ended up?

Mike wasn't as fortunate. With Teddy gone he was left without someone who would love him for himself rather than for his accomplishments. He discovered that the world was his oyster as long as he kept winning. No matter how bad his behavior, he was still surrounded by adoring fans holding out autograph books and rich supporters holding out money. When he became the youngest world heavyweight champion in boxing history (ironically, without Cus, who'd died the year before), the adoration became so fevered that, as happens with so many big celebrities, Mike thought he could get away with just about anything. And he was mostly right. But given Mike's history of pushing the envelope, it was inevitable that there was going to come a time when he pushed too far.

But that was still a ways off. Before that, Mike was a big inspiration to me as a boxer. He may have been gigantic as a twelve-year-old, but as an adult heavyweight he was very small. I started watching him in 1986 and was impressed by what he was able to do in the ring. He had an arm length of seventy-four inches and was fighting guys with eighty-four inches. He weighed 215 pounds and was going up against fighters who weighed 235. He was short at five-nine but was taking on monsters who were six-four. And he was kicking the stuffing out of all of them.

I watched every one of his fights. I wanted to figure out how someone who was undersized like that could keep winning. How was he able to reach up high with those short arms and throw head shots at someone half a foot taller? How was he able to rock guys who outweighed him by over twenty pounds? I had to know because I would have the same issues if I ever became a heavyweight, and since Mike had a three-year head start in that division, I watched to see how he did it. Studying him carefully and comparing his skills to my own, I came to believe that I could do it, too.

I also came to believe that I could beat Mike himself. Even though our strength, speed and skills were fairly evenly matched, the attitudes we would bring into the ring with us were not. Those were created by how we were brought up. When it came down to the mental aspects of a fight, I felt sure I'd have the edge.

I wanted to fight Mike, but there was a situation underway that was making it difficult to set up a match. To explain it I have to touch on the business side of the boxing world, and that world is so bizarre there's almost no way to keep this simple, but I'll try. Just bear in mind that the whole story is about eight times more complicated than I'm going to make it sound.

Part of the problem is that the three major governing bodies—the WBA, WBC and IBF—all have different rules, as do the boxing or athletic commissions of all fifty states, and sometimes those rules are in conflict with one another. In this case, we were mostly concerned with the WBC, the World Boxing Council.

Every champion is obligated to defend his title within a certain amount of time. You generally have a year to face the number-one-rated contender, but for your first defense you can fight anybody in the top ten. After I beat Buster Douglas at the end of 1990 and won all three titles, Lou Duva set up a fight against George Foreman. George wasn't the number-one contender—Tyson was—but he was tremendously popular. The promoters thought there'd be so much money in a bout between the two of us that they offered me $20 million for the fight, the biggest payday in boxing history. If I won, which Lou was sure I would, I'd probably get even more to fight Tyson a few months later. He set the Foreman fight up for April 1991, and everything was looking rosy. I should have known better.

Since losing his world crown, Mike had fought four matches, won them all, and was ready to get his titles back. Looking around at the field, I guess he and Don King thought that Mike now had a better chance against me than against any of the other contenders. If I lost to one of those other guys in the coming months, Mike would have to fight him instead of me, and King wasn't willing to take that chance. So they wanted to fight me before I fought anyone else. Problem was, I was set up to face Foreman.

As badly as I wanted to go up against Mike, it didn't make any sense to do it as the very first defense of my new title. I was going to be paid a fortune for fighting Foreman, would probably beat him, and would then still be able to fight Mike. But if I fought Mike first, that would be a tougher match, and if I lost and never got the shot at Foreman, I'd be out $20 million. To me it was simple arithmetic, and a few extra months before fighting Mike was no big deal.

Don didn't see it that way. And when Don King doesn't see something “that way,” he doesn't just sit around. He, Mike and the WBC filed a lawsuit against me and everyone on my team to stop the Foreman fight.

You need a reason to file a lawsuit other than your own self-interest. There has to be some legal basis, and King had come up with a doozy. It had to do with Mike's loss to Buster Douglas in Tokyo back in February. Mike knocked Douglas down in the eighth, but Douglas beat the count in getting back to his feet and went on to win. According to the lawsuit, however, the ref had counted too slowly. By the time he called out “Nine!” he should have been way past ten, the suit said, and Mike should have been the winner by knockout.

Don had protested Buster's victory at the time of the fight, but it had been denied. (What made that especially interesting was that Don was not only promoting Tyson, he was promoting Buster, too!) Whether or not he had a valid point at the time, the supposed “long count” had happened months ago. Were they really trying to reverse the outcome of the fight?

No. They couldn't do that. Instead, they were using an obscure WBC rule that gave the council the power to order an immediate rematch if there was a “controversial or irregular” result. The WBC also had the power to order a rematch after an “intervening” bout. What that meant is that if the winner of the controversial bout gets beaten in the next match, then whoever beat him has to fight the guy he beat before he fights anybody else.

I can hardly follow that myself, so let's try it again. If the winner of the controversial bout (Douglas) gets beaten in the next match (which he did, by me), then whoever beat him (me) has to fight the guy he beat (Mike) before he fights anybody else (Foreman).

Bottom line: The WBC was ordering me to fight Mike before I fought Foreman, and the purpose of the lawsuit was to make me follow that order. Now, in America, you can't legally make anybody do anything. You can only make them
not
do things, or you can have things taken away from them. The WBC wanted the court to issue an injunction to stop the Foreman fight, and if I didn't then fight Mike they were going to take away my WBC belt.

They didn't get the injunction, so the Foreman fight was still on. But that didn't mean they couldn't still strip my title, so
we
got an injunction to stop the WBC from doing that until we had a chance to try to settle it. That wasn't going to happen overnight, though, so the judge suspended the case until after the Foreman fight.