Becoming Holyfield (9 page)

Although I felt betrayed and angry, that wasn't the biggest thing on my mind. It was my kids I couldn't stop thinking about. After all, the main reason I'd gotten married despite my misgivings was for their sake. I wanted them to have both a mother and a father, which I felt was an important part of making sure they had every opportunity to be whatever it is they were meant to be. And, just like that, it was falling apart even before one of them was born.

It didn't take me long to make the decision that, no matter what, I wasn't going to let my children end up in a negative situation. I had money now, and had kind of felt that I could buy my way out of a lot of problems, but this was about more than money. This was about me putting aside my hurt feelings and doing what was right for the kids.

Paulette could be very emotional and maybe she'd only blurted that out in the heat of the moment. It sure sounded like she'd meant it but I promised myself to give her the benefit of the doubt and try to make the best of it so that the kids could have a normal family life. None of this was their fault and they deserved my best shot. I also reminded myself that I wasn't a quitter, and not just in the ring. I wasn't going to quit on my marriage, either. I would do the very best I could despite whatever sense of betrayal I was feeling.

After about an hour I wandered into a club where I knew some of my friends would probably be. There was a woman with them named Sheryl whom I'd never seen before. She didn't know who I was, which I kind of liked, and we started talking. She was very easy to talk to, and before I knew it several hours had passed. When I told her I had to go she nodded, then said, “Listen…uh…” She was so well spoken it surprised me when she stammered, and for a second I thought she was about to ask me to go home with her. I wasn't going to do that but before I could work up a gentlemanly explanation, she said, “Would you like to come to church with me tomorrow?”

I could hardly believe it. Sheryl went to church, and not because she had to, either, but because she wanted to. I would learn later that she got along well with her parents, too, and that made a deep impression on me.

We weren't doing anything shady. Sheryl was just a nice person and there was nothing at all between us except for a few hours of conversation. That would eventually change, but it was a long ways off. Sheryl and I became good friends, but it was only when my marriage seemed beyond repair that it became something more serious.

At home I had some practical problems to attend to regardless of what else was going on. One of them was that bills were getting paid late, which bothered me a lot, but there was no way for me to stay on top of them myself because of all my traveling and training. Ken Sanders offered to have it all handled for me out of his office, but I was hesitant because I thought things like that should stay within the family. Ken assured me that it was standard operating procedure to have tedious details like that handled by a manager. Eventually I turned it all over to him. He had done everything so well for me, I knew this would get done right, too. It did, but I was more than a little embarrassed at how it had come about.

M
y introduction to Ken Sanders was one of many coincidences in my life that got me to thinking about whether there really is such a thing as a “coincidence” in the universe. He did so much for me, in ways both small and big, that there had to be more than chance behind our meeting.

Among the small things was the interest he took in how I dressed. He thought it was time I started looking like the professional I'd become instead of the amateur I'd been. Don King always used to say that you had to walk like you were already there in order to get somewhere, and Ken also believed that your appearance had a lot to do with how you were treated. There were things out there that people with money could do that I didn't even know about. As an example, I was broad in the shoulders and chest and very narrow in the waist and hips, so all my off-the-rack shirts were tight on the arms and chest and blousy around the waist. Ken told me that I could take shirts to the tailor and get them tapered. A small thing, I know, but wearing stuff that fit right made be feel better. He also hooked me up with his own accountant, who was very helpful in ways I wouldn't have known about on my own.

Then there were the big things. I was supposed to fight Tyrone Booze on ABC television in July 1985. I was twenty-two years old but still growing. I'd graduated high school weighing 147 pounds and now weighed 180. The problem was that I was fighting in the light heavyweight division and the upper limit was 177. I tried like crazy to make the weight—I ate next to nothing, drank water by the spoonful and ran myself half to death. I couldn't get the weight down because I was already as lean and dehydrated as I could possibly be. I wasn't fat; I was just growing. And the harder I tried to shave a few ounces, the worse I felt, to the point where I was practically in tears half the time.

I burbled it all out to Ken one day, and he said, “Leave it to me.” While I was standing there he called up Dan Duva and told him he had to move the weight up. When Dan asked him what he was talking about, Ken said, “Change the classification. Make it 180 pounds.”

Lou was on the phone by then and he and Dan both told Ken he was nuts. “You want Holyfield in this fight?” Ken asked them. “Then you'd better do something because there's no way he can make the weight unless he dies.”

The Duvas called ABC and had pretty much the same conversation, but Lou had an idea. “Why doesn't he move up to the cruiserweight division?”

The problem was, the fight with Tyrone Booze had already been set. The ABC rep said, “How's Tyrone supposed to feel about that?”

The Duvas reported that back to Ken. “How's Tyrone supposed to feel about that?” Dan repeated to him.

Ken replied, “Well, how should I know? Why don't you call him and ask him?”

After some more arguing, somebody finally did just that, and what do you know: Tyrone was thrilled, because he was having the same problem as me. He didn't want to fight weak and dehydrated either. So he and I both moved into the cruiserweight division, also known as junior heavyweight.

I beat him in eight rounds, and even though everything worked out, Main Events didn't like getting pushed around by Ken. A number of things happened like that, Ken going to bat on my behalf, which he was supposed to do, and Dan and Lou not liking it. When I was in training camp with Pernell Whitaker, Meldrick Taylor and a few other fighters, I compared notes with them and found out that there were some inconsistencies in how we were being charged certain expenses. I told Ken it wasn't fair, and he took it to the Duvas and made them change some accounting policies. They were unhappy with me, and thought I was a troublemaker, and they got angry at Ken, too. What they were really unhappy about was having anybody take a close look at the accounts. The thing is, they weren't consciously trying to put one over on us. They were just using “accepted business practices” like everybody else and hadn't ever given them any thought.

But that got me thinking about whether I ought to just sit back on other things as well. There are so many funny ways of doing business that a lot of them are simply accepted over time, and if you look too closely, people think you're cheap or distrustful or you “just don't get it.” I learned very quickly that if somebody tries to make you feel bad about asking perfectly innocent questions, there's usually one of two reason why: Either they don't understand it themselves and don't want to admit it, or they don't want you to know the answer. One thing I've come to believe is that people with nothing to hide rarely mind getting asked questions.

Main Events had me in camp at Grossinger's in New York. I didn't question it at first, because they had all their fighters at Grossinger's, and we all thought that's just the way it was. But one day when I was in kind of a grumpy mood I got to wondering and said to Ken, “Why do they have me all the way out here in the woods?” Ken asked the Duvas, and they said it was because a lot of their fighters were too tempted by things in the city.

Ken was laughing when he reported that back to me, and I had to laugh, too. The fighters in camp had enough money to bring in whatever they wanted, and not just from New York City, which was all of ninety minutes away, but from wherever they felt like it. But more to the point for me personally, I didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't gamble, didn't see other women…why did I need to be kept apart from things I didn't want in the first place, just because of what some other guys might do?

But the Duvas didn't want me moving, because what if all the other guys wanted to do the same thing? It was a good point. Problem was, it had nothing to do with me.

By the way, the reason I was grumpy that day had to do with Grossinger's itself. It wasn't because of the facilities, which were beautiful, and they took great care of us. It had to do with the food. They kept a strictly kosher kitchen, and while they cooked up some wonderful stuff, once in a while I felt like having a pork chop or something else nonkosher and they couldn't do that. Five grand a month and I couldn't get a cheeseburger?

Ken backed me up, because he felt I was right, but it cost him. Main Events got all upset and argued with him. “Everybody does it this way!” the Duvas argued, and Ken argued right back, “That doesn't mean it's right, and by the way, I don't like you taking advantage of my guy.” Whether or not, in a calmer moment later, Lou or Dan Duva thought I had a reasonable point, right then and there it was more bad blood between them and Ken. But it wasn't really personal, it was mostly a matter of economics. I was the golden goose, and the people around me felt they needed to establish control in order to protect their interests.

That was one of the first hints I got that having a bunch of money carried with it its own class of problems. I'd always thought that more money gave you more options, so how could it be bad? But that was incredibly naïve. Now when I hear stories about people who won the lottery and then had their lives fall apart, I have a pretty good notion of how that can happen.

After I became a heavyweight, Ken was spending nearly all his time on my behalf and decided to sell his car dealership. I'd already started thinking about securing a future for my family when I eventually quit boxing, and the dealership seemed like a good investment, so I offered to buy it from him. I didn't know how to run it, and didn't have the time anyway, so Ken set me up to meet some people he thought might be interested in partnering up with me. They'd run the business, and Ken promised to supervise things for me. The deal was sealed when I told them they'd be able to put my name out front.

It was a good business, and once my name went up in huge letters on a new sign, as well as on the license plate frames supplied with each car, it got even better. Pretty soon it was the number-one GM dealership in the region, even to the point where I heard some rumors that other dealers were complaining that we were being unfair to them. I was awfully impressed with the selling power of my name.

Until I got back from knocking out Buster Douglas in Las Vegas. As soon as I hit town, I got a call from one of my partners who told me that the dealership was about to go under and I needed to pony up $3 million to keep it going.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. How was it possible for such a thriving business to go south like that, and how come I didn't hear about it until it became a $3 million problem?

Before I met with my partners, I made an even more bizarre discovery. It turned out that all of those complaints I'd been hearing about were coming exclusively from black-owned dealerships. It didn't take me long to find out why.

Hartsfield, Atlanta's big airport, had a policy of trying to support minority-owned businesses. One of the ways they did that was to require car rental companies operating on airport property to buy a certain percentage of their fleets from local minority-owned businesses. As soon as my partners had their hands on the dealership, they applied to the city of Atlanta for recognition as a minority-owned business, based on the fact that I was black. According to the city's own rules, they had to grant it.

But it was ridiculous. Those policies were designed to give a leg up to black business people who might have had some tough going because of racial discrimination. For a multimillionaire pro boxer to exploit those good intentions was not only cynical and greedy, it was embarrassing. The dealership had been large and well entrenched to begin with. Once my partners had an open door to start selling fleet cars to Alamo and other rental companies under the Holyfield name, those other dealers didn't have a chance. No wonder they were put out with me. I didn't mind my partners exploiting my name. That was part of the deal. But I never told them they could exploit my race.

As annoyed as I was with what they'd done, I didn't have time to dwell on it because it left me even more confused about the state of the business. We were outselling every other dealership in the region on the retail side and placing fleet cars by the dozens, so how could we be on the verge of bankruptcy?

When I finally met with my partners, there was a lot of hemming and hawing and “It's kind of complicated” and “You have to understand the business to appreciate the predicament,” but their bottom line was clear: What difference did it make how we got there? I had to put the $3 million in or the business would go belly up. Why me? “Because you're the only one of us who has it.”

I told them I wouldn't do it. They said that my reputation would suffer because it was my name on the big sign out front. They were also being threatened with lawsuits for not paying money they owed, and for alleged shady business practices, and how would that look for a famous guy like me?

That same night a television reporter cornered Ken and asked him about the allegations that Evander Holyfield was involved in corrupt business dealings. Was it true that I was giving away free cars to women left and right and hiding it on the books? Finally! Ken would clear up the rumors about me and we could go about resolving the situation like rational people. I hadn't gone anywhere near the business, hadn't touched the books and I sure didn't give away any cars.

Ken said “No comment” and walked away.

I called him up. “What's going on?” I asked him. “‘No comment' is the same as telling them I'm guilty!”

He said something about how you never comment when there's pending litigation. I pressed a little and found out that he'd been threatened with a lawsuit himself and was afraid to say anything for fear he'd jeopardize his own case. I gave Ken the benefit of the doubt and let it go.

I didn't know if someone was cooking the books or stealing outright and it didn't matter. They must have thought I was the biggest knucklehead in the world, some kind of cash machine who would automatically agree to buy the dealership's way out of any problems in order to protect my image. They thought they knew me real well, that I liked things neat, that I never paid bills late, that I hated to be in debt, that I tried not to let myself get distracted by problems that could be solved with money. So they kept up their shenanigans, assuming I'd take out my checkbook and straighten it all out. A lot of very savvy business people stepped in to help me resolve the situation. Most of their advice consisted of figuring out exactly how much it was going to cost me to make the problem go away.

There were a lot of surprised people when I refused to be pressured into bailing anybody out. I stuck to my guns and didn't pay out a single dime. Not only would it have been be a major rip-off, but if I paid money to settle the dealership's debts, I'd practically be admitting that I shared some blame. I assumed that my reputation wouldn't suffer when I hadn't done anything wrong except let myself get suckered, and if I was wrong, then fine, I'd live with my bad decisions. But I still wouldn't pay for theirs. And if they wanted to start involving me in lawsuits that had nothing to do with me, I'd fight them tooth and nail in the courts even if I had to go broke doing it.

It was a good decision. Once they saw that I was serious, they somehow managed to figure out on their own how to get everything resolved, and there was no damage to my reputation.

It wasn't a happy situation, and I lost most of my up-front investment, but fortunately I'd followed a rule of mine when I went into the deal, and that is never to gamble more than I can afford to lose. Sounds absurdly simple, I know, but it always amazes me how few people follow it. “I put it all into Acme Whatever and lost everything when it went bankrupt.” Why would you risk everything you have on one thing? I think it's because people allow their greed to get the better of them. If you think Acme is going to double in value, you tend to think so much about the upside, and how much you're going to “lose” if it does double up and you left something on the table, that you dive in without thinking about what's going to happen if it goes bad. That's a gambler's attitude, not an investor's. Instead of being satisfied with a reasonable return in exchange for a reasonable investment, “hitting it big” is so tempting that people will roll the dice with their entire life savings. It's a bad idea. Even if it works, it is still a bad idea.