Becoming Holyfield (22 page)

She lived in Chicago. When I got home a few days later I gave her a call and we got to talking. I didn't hang up until about eight hours later. It was mostly me listening and Janice talking about the Bible.

Somewhere along the line I told her about all those women who'd come up to me at Benny Hinn's reception, a lot of them saying, “God told me I'm going to marry you.” In order for that to be true I'd have to marry an awful lot of women and have them die so I could eventually marry them all. So all but one or maybe two had to be lying, and that disturbed me. By that time I was a good deal less naïve than I used to be, but it still rattled me when people looked me in the eye and lied. So it really blew my mind when all of these women who were participants in a Christian crusade could say things like that with straight faces. And it wasn't like they were just making up harmless stuff. They were claiming that God had spoken to them. I thought you had to be cursed or something to do a terrible thing like that. I said to Janice, “Do you think they were lying?” She said she didn't know. I asked her if she heard from God herself and she said yes, she did. So I asked her, “What did God tell you about me?” And she said, “That you're going to be my husband.”

That was the last thing I expected to hear. I find it almost impossible to lie, even though it's gotten me into some trouble, and so I was honest with Janice now. “Why would God allow you to keep yourself for Him all these years just so you could run into a guy who's got five kids with three different women and was only married to one of them?”

And I hadn't changed, either. I had a girlfriend I loved, but it wasn't a monogamous relationship. I was taking care of all my kids and I was close with their mothers, too, and still saw two of them occasionally. Sandy knew about it and said she had no problem with it, but I knew that if we got married it would create trouble. It wasn't like I was still adding to the problem, though. I'd known these women for years and cared for them deeply, and I just didn't know how to break things off. It's part of this thing I have when it comes to people I've been close to. No matter what they might do to me, if they came and asked me for forgiveness and wanted me back in their lives, I forgave them, even if maybe I shouldn't have. It took me a long time to figure out that forgiving people didn't mean that I had to continue associating with them and doing things for them just because they asked. I think that was because I came from a large and close family, and if somebody did something nasty to you, you didn't get rid of them. You found a way to accept them back, because that's what families do.

“So I have this problem,” I told Janice. “It's why I went to Benny Hinn, to get past that before becoming involved in a ministry.” Janice said it was okay, because she knew I was going to get better. But I wasn't yet, and that's why I wouldn't get married again. I knew how much it had hurt Paulette when I had a child out of wedlock, even though our marriage was on the rocks. I didn't ever want to put anyone through that again. It didn't matter that someone knew that about me up front, either. I knew that God was going to help me change, but I didn't know how or when, and I wasn't going to get married until I did.

Janice had no such doubts. She told me over and over that God loved me, that I'd had this great anointing in my life, that I was
chosen
and was going to do great things. She said, “All of this that you're going through, it's preparation for the person you're going to become. You're going to be delivering people
from
things like that because you've been through it.” That was pretty heady stuff for a believer like me, especially coming from someone as authoritative in these matters as Janice.

The question was, when? Whenever I started dating a woman, this need to take care of her popped up and I found myself doing things for her, and kept doing them even when we weren't dating anymore. Every time one of them got bent out of shape it ended up costing me a lot of money to take care of it, which is one of the problems you have when you have a lot of money. People think you can buy your way out of problems, and pretty often it's true. I was trying to please everybody and not hurt anybody and it was all getting to be too much.

Janice called it a “generational curse,” the same expression Mama used to use, and said I could break it. How? “Because you love your kids so much. And if you continue to be that way, your kids are going to be that way, too.”

I thought about my boys, and knew she was right. But before I even got a chance to say anything, she said, “I'm not talking about your boys. I'm talking about your girls.” She said that girls look at how their fathers behave, too. “Every time a boy messes around, he does it with a girl, right? Well, where do you think your daughters are going to learn how to behave?”

It's hard to believe, but that had never occurred to me before. I was always worried about being a bad role model for my boys, but as Janice spoke, a picture of my daughter Evette rose up in my head and I got sick at heart thinking that my behavior might affect her life in a negative way, because my whole thing with my kids was to do exactly the opposite. It was an awful feeling, and I think a whole chain of events got kicked off right then and there.

Once Janice and I would get to talking, we just kept on going, and we talked two or three times a week. I learned as much about the Bible from her in one conversation than I did in my regular Bible studies class in a month. Being a doctor, she was also able to explain to me in ordinary language what my heart condition was all about.

I decided to take Benny Hinn up on his suggestion that I go get my heart checked again. I went back to Emory, to the same doctors who'd seen me when I got off the plane after the Moorer fight. The first few tests they did came up completely negative. So they did some more, and those were negative, too. After about a week of this they finally said that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my heart. They couldn't explain it, but there was no doubt in their minds.

The state of Georgia reinstated my boxing license after they got the test results. Normally that would have been good enough for the Nevada Athletic Commission, too, but it wasn't. I don't know why, but it probably had something to do with the fact that it had only been a few weeks since I almost died in the ring. I gave them all the test results and they still didn't believe it. They said that if I wanted my license back I'd have to go to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota because it was the best medical facility on the planet. Whatever they said there, NAC would consider it final. I felt the same way.

To make a long story short—and it was a long story; I don't think a sitting president was ever put through more tests than I was that week—at my final meeting with the Mayo doctor who was coordinating everything I settled in for a long session because he had a stack of results about six inches thick on his desk. “So what's it all mean?” I asked. “What's really going on with my heart?”

The doctor stood up and stuck out his hand. “Nothing. Go home.”

I made no move to take his hand. “What do you mean, nothing?”

“I mean, nothing. Good-bye. Go home.”

I still didn't take his hand. “What do I do when I get home?”

“What you've been doing your whole life.”

“I've been boxing.”

“Well, there you go. Do that.”

Here was this guy telling me there was nothing wrong with my heart, so why was it pounding at about two hundred beats a minute? “Are you telling me to go back into the ring?”

“No. I'm a doctor, and people get hurt in the ring, so why would I tell you to do that?”

“Doc…”

He laughed and sat down, and that's when I knew he was toying with me, having a little fun while he told me some of the best news I'd ever heard.

“You're telling me I'm healed?”

He shook his head and leaned back. “I can't say that one way or the other. All I know is, there's not a thing wrong with you now. I can also tell you that, whatever was wrong with your heart, it wasn't anything you were born with.”

I orbited the earth a couple of times, and when I got back a few seconds later a million questions were bouncing around in my head, but I wanted to get one big one out of the way first. “Are you clearing me to fight again?”

“Yep.”

He gave me a second to let that sink in, then explained his conclusions. “It was tricky trying to piece the puzzle together,” he said, “but what we think is that it was the treatment you got after the fight that caused the problem.” Among the things I remember him saying was that I had received far too much saline and morphine. He also said that he would not have let me get on a plane. “I would have kept someone in your condition in the hospital. You could have gone into cardiac arrest.” He thought it was a miracle that I lived through it all.

So did Benny Hinn heal me? Was it a miracle?

No, Hinn didn't heal me. God healed me, working through Hinn.

All healing comes from God, just as everything does. But God heals in many different ways. Sometimes healing is done through surgery, sometimes through medicine, sometimes with only the passage of time. If we can see a direct connection, like a heart valve replaced by a surgeon, we don't think much of it. If the method isn't that obvious, we might consider it a miracle. It doesn't really matter to me what you call it, and it doesn't really matter to me who or what gets the credit, because the real credit goes to God, who works through people.

In my case, God chose to bring me together with Benny Hinn to complete a healing process that actually began way back in the emergency room in Las Vegas. I believe there was a reason for us being brought together, and the reason is that God wanted it that way, so that's the way it was. And as for a miracle, as far as I'm concerned, there was more than one involved. It was a miracle that I didn't die in the ER, a miracle that I didn't die on the plane and a miracle that my heart was healed and didn't show a single sign of the damage that had been done to it only six weeks before. One of the reasons I went back to fighting is that I knew that no one would believe my heart had been healed if I didn't. Once my license was restored and I was back in the ring, it put all doubts to rest.

But being slain in the spirit was about much more than finding out my heart was okay. When Hinn said “You are healed” he was referring to all of me, not just my heart. From that point on, my relationship with God deepened and my life got better. I began to learn how to benefit from past mistakes, how to correct my old ways and how to become a better person.

By the way, I also became world heavyweight champion two more times, and I give the credit to God for that, too.

People sometimes ask me how someone who calls himself a spiritual man, a Christian man, can be a professional prizefighter. Being a Christian doesn't mean that I belong to a specific church, but that I try to take Christ's life as an example of how to live my own. Put that way, it really does sound at odds with what I do for a living.

But there's no contradiction at all, for a couple of reasons. First of all, God gave me these gifts, and I believe he meant for me to use them, the same way he meant it for anybody else who chooses to be a fighter and has the skills and talent.

And speaking of “choosing” to fight, that's exactly what everyone who goes into the ring does: They
choose
to do it. It's not like boxers go around beating up people at random. Everyone I fight has made the conscious decision, of his own free will, to get into the ring with me.

I know that sounds self-serving, an obvious excuse. After all, when you get right down to it, I'm still standing there trying to smack someone silly, trying to hit him so hard he can't stand up. And even though he's trying to do the same thing to me, that might make it fair, but it doesn't necessarily make it
right.

So what would Jesus think? If He walked through the door right now, would He approve? Could I hold my head up and answer with pride if He asked how I earn my living? It's a great question, and in order to answer it, I'll tell you something about boxing that may be hard to understand if you're not close to the game.

When most people think about “fighting,” they picture two people who hate each other and want to cause each other pain. They think about anger and rage, big emotions that drive people to do irrational, inhuman things. One of the definitions of “fighting” is people trying to settle something using violence.

But that's not what boxing is about, at least not to boxers who have their heads screwed on right, which is most of them. When I box I don't hate my opponent, not by a long shot. I don't hate him any more than a pro tennis player hates her opponent or a chess player hates his. It's just competition, like any other sport, except a lot more physical because you throw punches instead of a baseball. If I see that George Foreman isn't keeping his left up, I might go to work hitting his arm as much as I can to weaken it even further, just like Michael Moorer did to me. I'm not trying to permanently maim him so he can never lift a fork again. I'm just trying to take away one of his offensive weapons, like a pitcher purposely walking the other team's best batter so he doesn't get the chance to hit a home run. And George understands that perfectly. If he sees that he's opened a cut over my eye, he'll go to work trying to make it worse so the ref stops the fight and he wins by TKO. I don't get mad at George for that. I expect it. It's fair and it's just, because each of us chose to play this game of our own free will, using a strict set of rules we both agreed to.