Becoming Holyfield (6 page)

Somehow, he stayed on his feet once again, and I could hardly believe it. The guy was really showing me some heart. He hadn't thrown a single punch since the last clinch but he'd taken an awful lot from me, and the man just refused to lay down.

But heart isn't enough to win fights. Kevin was clearly unable to either throw punches or defend himself and Novicic knew it, so as I got ready to lay into him again, the ref dove between us and waved us apart. He motioned me to a neutral corner, then turned to Kevin and started a standing eight count, watching him closely to see whether he could continue to fight. Kevin moved around and adjusted his gloves, trying to look casual, showing Novicic that he was okay so that the fight wouldn't be stopped. He was getting a little rest during the count, but two more of those standing eights and he'd lose the fight by technical knockout.

Novicic decided Kevin was okay and held out his hand palm up, the sign that we should continue. Kevin threw one punch and then wrapped his arms around me again. He wouldn't let go, and this was getting real old, real fast, so I spun him around and threw him through the ropes, causing a rope separator to come loose. Again he popped back up, and again got a chance to rest as the clock was stopped, this time so that the ref could repair the separator. I rocked Kevin a few more times after that but the round ended before I could do anything more serious.

Back in my corner Nappy sat me down quickly. “Be patient!” he ordered as he wiped sweat from my brow. He knew I was frustrated with Kevin's style. “Just keep doing what you're doing and we're in the finals.”

“Can't shake him off me,” I groused.

“Don't worry about it,” assistant coach Roosevelt Sanders said. “He keeps that up, ref's gonna warn him right out of the match.”

“How come he hasn't already?”

“'Cuz it's a lousy way to lose a fight,” Nappy answered. “Ref won't end it that way unless he has to.”

“You got it won,” Sanders insisted, and then repeated what Nappy had said. “Be patient!”

Nappy telling me to be patient…that was funny. Kind of reminded me of Carter Morgan telling me to keep control of myself. Both of those great coaches could go off like land mines when something didn't go right, but insisted that I behave myself. “Just trying to stop you from making the same mistakes I did,” Morgan always said to me.

There's this thing antelopes in Africa do when they're being chased by a lion. Every few seconds one of them will take a huge leap into the air. It's the antelope's way of saying to the lion, “Look how strong and fast I am,” so the lion will leave it alone and go after one of the weaker members of the herd.

When we came out for Round Two, Kevin was acting like an antelope for the judges, bouncing all over the place, showing that he had plenty of energy and fight left in him. As soon as the bell rang he threw a few enthusiastic lefts, but covered up immediately when I came right back to him, then started holding me again. Novicic gave him a caution, and a few seconds after that Kevin held me again and this time Novicic had us move away and wait while he made a few hand signals. The last one was a thumb pointed upward, which told the judges that he was issuing a warning and that they should deduct a point from Kevin on each of the five scorecards. You can only cut a guy so much slack, I guess, and then points start coming off. Assuming Kevin had any points to begin with, which was unlikely. Warnings are serious: Three of them and you're disqualified.

When we started up again I caught Kevin with a hard left hook and then threw another just as the ref yelled “Stop.” There was no way I could halt the punch in midflight, but Novicic gave me a caution anyway. The crowd started booing immediately but it wasn't that big a deal and I didn't think much about it. I got Kevin up against the ropes; he grabbed hold of me, as usual, then hit me in back of the head, and the ref yelled “Stop” again. Kevin hit me anyway, and the ref gave him a caution, but I couldn't tell if it was for hitting me in the back of the head or for hitting late. Cautions don't affect the scorecards; they're the ref's way of letting you know he saw a violation and that if you did it again there would be stiffer penalties.

Despite yet another caution, this time for a near-headlock, Kevin kept on holding me. But for some reason Novicic was giving him only cautions, not warnings or deductions. I saw Nappy and Sanders jumping up and down a little and figured they were raising some kind of fuss aimed at the ref, urging him to do what he was supposed to do and issue a warning. Sometimes coaches do that to let their fighter know they're supporting him, like a baseball coach going toe-to-toe with the ump even though there's no chance of getting a call changed. It also lets the fighter know that he shouldn't kick up a fuss himself, because somebody's already doing it for him and he should just stay focused on fighting. It worked, too, because even though no decent ref would ever pay attention to stuff like that, it was nice to know that somebody besides me was noticing.

At just about that point Kevin must have figured out that he was a goner unless he showed some fight, and he came up with a few decent punches. But he also got another caution, and the next time he held on to me Novicic had no choice but to order the judges to deduct another point. One more of those and Kevin was out.

This was starting to get silly. I could have gone out for a cheeseburger and still won on points. But that's the last thing in the world I wanted. I wanted to knock him out and now there was a real problem: If Kevin got another warning he'd be disqualified. I'd win all right, but by TKO, and that wasn't good enough for me.

It was time for me to let it all hang out. We were almost at the end of the second round and I didn't want it to go to a third. I needed to put Kevin down for good, and do it right now.

When the ref was finished issuing the warning and we started up again, I went after Kevin hard and, what do you know, he grabbed me again. This was like the opposite of that leaping antelope, Kevin practically shouting to the ref that he couldn't fight back. He had his arm clamped down tight over the ear hole on the right side of my headgear. I couldn't hear anything on that side and it was a little eerie, but I didn't have time to think about that and I also wasn't about to wait for Novicic to break us up for the thousandth time. This time I let Kevin hold me without trying to shove him away, but I kept my hands free and slammed him in the ribs with a right hook. The crowd saw it and also saw Kevin start to fall away. They started yelling, thinking maybe this was it, but Kevin managed to stay upright by hanging on to my neck. I pulled my body away and hauled off with another hook to the midsection, and this time Kevin surprised me by launching an uppercut at the exact same instant. Neither of us connected solidly but while he'd just thrown the one punch, mine was the first of a one-two combination. I'd been taught to always follow up a right with a left, and hardly ever threw just one punch. When I finished up the combination with a roundhouse left that caught him square on the jaw, it snapped his head to the side and his whole body went limp. No way was he coming back from that.

Just as I was throwing that last punch Kevin's arm finally left my head and uncovered my ear hole for the first time since he'd grabbed me some seconds before. I heard Novicic say something over the frenzied screaming coming from the crowd. It sounded like “Break!” and small wonder: Kevin had been hanging on to me like a bear cub to its mother. If he hadn't crumpled to the canvas after that last punch there would have been another points deduction. The guy was defenseless by then, and the knockdown was a mercy.

Novicic quickly jumped in between us and motioned me to a neutral corner. As I began walking away he started the count. Kevin sat up, looked around for a second and then got to his feet like a wobbly newborn deer and stumbled over to the other corner. I couldn't believe he was able to get up, and gave him credit for it, God bless his heart. He veered drunkenly but somehow managed to face the ref, as if to say “I'm not finished yet.” Novicic was holding up fingers to indicate the count, and when he was done he grabbed Kevin and moved him back to the corner. The New Zealander was done for and the crowd was in near-hysterics. I'd just made a contribution to the American boxing effort with a semifinal win, and a gold medal in the finals was all but assured.

It's not my style to celebrate openly. I don't do victory dances and I don't gloat, especially not when another guy is feeling like his whole world just caved in, and I didn't do it then. Celebration would come later, in private with my teammates, after I took care of the Yugoslavian in the finals and had that gold medal around my neck.

But there was another thought that I have to confess was running through my head, a very selfish one. I was thinking, “Don't stop the fight! Let him continue, don't stop the fight!” Because Kevin had gotten up before the end of the count, it wouldn't be scored as a knockout. It was the ref's decision to stop the fight because of Kevin's condition, so it would only be a TKO. I thought, “The guy's been hanging on to me practically nonstop and you didn't give him a third and final warning, so don't stop us now! Let me knock him out!”

But I saw that it was hopeless. As Kevin hung his head and headed back to the corner, Novicic held his hand toward the judges, palm down, telling them not to bother with any more scoring. Then he turned around and came toward me. As he got closer he waved his fingers at me and I started forward to meet him in the middle of the ring, expecting him to send me back to my own corner.

But he didn't do that. He started making hand signals at me, and said, “When I say stop, you stop,” or something close to that, like a schoolteacher scolding a child. What was the point of that? I just scored a decisive victory and I needed a shower, not a lecture. I had trouble catching all of it, especially with the crowd still screaming and clapping, and Novicic's English wasn't that good to begin with, but I did understand his last word before he turned away: “Disqualified!”

Disqualified? He couldn't possibly be serious. Had he actually expected me to reel back in a punch that was already on its way?

I remember exactly what I was thinking: “This is America. He can't do this. We'll get it straightened out.”

As I went back to my corner Novicic went ahead of me, leaned over the ropes and said something to the judges. Before he'd even gotten two words out, Coach Nappy realized what was going on and took off along the ropes like a ballistic missile, screaming at the ref all the way. Sanders had to go after him and pull him back, which was about the time I realized that we weren't going to get it straightened out, and it's also when the crowd caught on to what was happening. The cheers began turning to boos, and very soon the booing got ugly.

There are a lot of clichés for a moment like that—the wind going out of your sails, a pin popping your balloon, the rug getting pulled out from under you—and you know what? Every one of them is dead-on accurate. That's exactly what it feels like, all rolled into one. I felt physically ill, dizzy, and so blown away I couldn't think straight. The only thought I could hang on to was the same one I'd had earlier: “This is America. He can't do this.”

All those months of training and dreaming crashed into me like a multicar pileup. If somebody stronger, more talented and better conditioned had whupped me, all right then, I could live with that. I might not like it but at least it would make sense. I'd go back home, train harder and do better next time.

But what would I do now? I'd dominated this fight from the opening bell, knocked Kevin down, been ahead on all five cards and then dropped him altogether. How could I go back and do better next time?

Could this get any worse?

“It gets worse,” Nappy said as Sanders undid my helmet.

I looked at Nappy but he wouldn't meet my eyes. He looked down at my gloves instead. “You're not going to get your bronze medal,” he said without looking up.

I turned to Sanders.

“On account of you being disqualified,” the assistant coach explained. “It's in the rules.”

Buddy Davis was sitting ringside and had tears streaming down his cheeks. He knew the rules and had already figured out I wasn't going to get a medal. I had to look away to stop from crying myself, because as awful as I felt, I still had to go back to the center of the ring for the official announcement. I had to keep it together.

In the middle of the ring, Novicic took both our hands and the announcer said, “The winner, by disqualification…Kevin Barry!” The ref lifted Kevin's hand high into the air, turned us both around to face the other way, then walked away, leaving the two of us alone. Kevin immediately raised my arm and said “You won” into my ear, then walked me back to my corner and said the same thing to Nappy and Sanders.

The enraged crowd was on its feet, people yelling insults and profanities and shaking their fists and flashing thumbs down with both hands. Nappy raised his head slightly, pointing toward something behind me with his chin. “This doesn't look good,” he said. I turned and saw that Novicic was being escorted out of the arena by guards who surrounded him to stop anyone from getting their hands on him. A crumpled paper cup came flying into the ring, then a few with soda in them and then a couple with ice cubes.

With the crowd on the edge of a riot, I was one of the few people in the whole place who was staying calm, something that was noted in nearly every one of the hundreds of newspaper articles and television features that would follow in the next few days and months. Writers and commentators talked about my “grace under pressure” and what a level-headed guy I was and how my behavior should make all Americans proud. It was all very nice, and sure made my mother feel good, and also made the whole thing a better story—I was a more sympathetic character than if I'd gone off the deep end and carried on for the cameras—but there was more to it than just good manners.