By Patrick Kehoe
Photo © Ed Mulholland/FightWireImages.com
Evander Holyfield isn’t the real deal any more.
The former king of the heavyweight ring, now 44, has won 3 and lost 3 in his last 6 fights. A long time resident of Atlanta, Georgia, Holyfield continues on with his professional heavyweight career trying to sell the image of himself as a contender for the title – the now mythic heavyweight championship – and a guy with a scared mission, on the rise, just a good night’s work from being “Commander Evander” once again.
The manta that made Holyfield a symbolic force during the 1990s was his determination to never submit the vagaries of incessant injury, ever larger foes nor even the passage of time. Just as the evangelist and faith healer Benny Hinn was credited with ‘healing’ Holyfield of cardio arrhythmia, not even losses to Lennox Lewis, James Toney, Chris Byrd and Larry Donald could dissuade Holyfield from his long standing obsession to “regain the heavyweight championship of the world.”
What was, in his younger days, a manifestly obvious goal which orientated the disciplined rigors of his professional trade has become, in his ring dotage, a manic fixation seemingly divorced from commonsense. But, Evander Holyfield’s likeness, were there a Mount Rushmore for Pay Per View legends, would certainly be along side Oscar De La Hoya and Mike Tyson. And as we all know, economic viability means that a fighter, especially a former heavyweight champion, will be subject to an almost endless recycling of CV build-up fights or comeback campaigns. All you need do is attain medical certification for licensing and start cranking up the promotional engine, emails, PR notices and rope-in a semi-credible former some-body to bludgeon for an arena full of starry eyed fans, who’s lingering adoration built on the athletic competences of yesteryear never really fade because respect and love are kept evergreen as imaginative yearning.
It doesn’t really matter that Evander Holyfield was unable to best the mediocre adroitness of a Larry Donald or that Holyfield’s three fight winning streak was notched against Jeremy Bates, the faded Fres Oquendo and the absurdly hyped Vinny Maddalone. Of course, Texas, a state willing to medically sanction a Holyfield fight, now offers up Houston resident Lou Savarese, himself a forty-something heavyweight apparently oblivious to memories of his own in ability to beat the mighty duo of Kirk “Bubba” Johnson, thee great underachiever of his generation and Leo Nolan, who came a cropper this year against a 12-5-1 Hector Ferreyro, who lost his very next fight to a 18-13-3 Ron Guerrero. No, in this sorted lineage styles do not make fights nor cover up the general mediocrity thrashing about the great state of Texas.
Calling Holyfield vs. Savarese a Pay Per View fight almost defies rationality, if not defiling it. At least it’s an In Demand package for the very casual boxing fan that has money to burn and way too much time on their hands. Able now to only throw about 4 combinations per round, Holyfield tends to faint and pose, jab and clutch after falling in with what ever punches he can push at his intended target. As a target, Savarese is certainly made to order; Holyfield and his team could hardly have picked a more lumbering mass than the titanic sized, though Lilliputian skilled, Big Lou.
Holyfield certainly knows one thing. To call his stated ambition of living up to his vision for himself, being the best he can be in his pursuit of excellence – i.e. the heavyweight title, a heavyweight belt – a folly, runs counter to the self-help ethos of our times. The cultural fixation for making over our bodies and even reversing entropy almost becomes self-rationalizing logic for Holyfield’s refrain for glory. Deny that Holyfield, whose history illustrates he’s actually been able to run counter to nature and circumstances, and you almost deny him the right of freedom of action. Cleared to fight in Texas, Holyfield indeed has the right to fight and win, fight and fail, fight to the last vestiges of his dignity or be the last man standing, turning the odds upside down, denying what looms as his probable fate.
Miracles do happen, though miracles in athletics tend to happen for those still empowered with fearless fortitude and resurgent weaponry. Evander Holyfield can still fight fearlessly; he cannot fight with the kind of mastery of the harsh moments he once could. Moments to attack drift off, his options smothered by ill timed advances that actually leave him center court, caught in the kill zone, without the back up of adaptive reflexive speed on the counter. Mostly, he has to charge into countering offensive bursts and try and get the better of his adversary by luck or happenstance.
Like all old warriors, fatigue visibly haunts him when he’s at work. Very occasional flurries are his attempts to appear capable of preemptive assaulting. In his prime, commanding the moment with bursts of combination punching was one of the hallmark qualities of his professional life as a championship boxer. If you hit Evander Holyfield you were going to be hit in return with multiple shots, guaranteed! Like an aging golfer, he’s more hope than hit from the championship tees.
And yet there’s a patient optimism he can still generate interview after interview. With a persistent asserting of his mission to “once again be the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world” Holyfield almost seems to chant the incantation, mesmerizing himself. Glistening with sweat just after another taxing workout, Holyfield tells everyone willing to listen to him that his long run of shoulder injuries has abated. He’s injury free and ready to fight his way back to the top of the heavyweight division. His body deemed a no pain zone is made to sound as if that alone means he’s set to resume boxing at the top level.
The religiosity of his self-assertiveness never seems to dim, no matter the performance levels of any individual contest, no matter how vainly he chased Larry Donald looking for a punishing combination over 12 stupefying rounds back in 2004. The image of the phoenix, rising from its own ashes reborn suggests another religious image so dear to Holyfield’s conception of self. Each and every time he trains to fight he reframes himself, reconstitutes himself as born again, remade in the image of his vision of himself, the eternal warrior, the man capable of reclaiming the excellence he once embodied.
You must not tell a man – anyone – to be less than they are, than they can envision themselves to be. That inalienable right of self determination is the law of self-regeneration that Evander Holyfield lives by, rationalizes his boxing ambitions under and against. Americans are by their philosophical founding reluctant to dispel any variant of this self-determining tenant. In the airless atmosphere of athletic struggles, flying too near the stratosphere of tolerable reason and rationality often proves our all too mortal ambitions folly and our courage dangerous, at least in the squared circle.
There is a reason that boxing should be a younger or still unusually able mans prerogative and province. Boxing is, after all, combat and dangerous at ever minute juncture, and thus its value as entertainment precisely equal to the dangers looming.
And though it might not be against Lou Savarese, Evander Holyfield may well get hurt in the sanctioned exercise of his freedom, running head long into his interior vision, which he seems incapable of dispelling to simply live as a father and domestic custodian to all of his children.
Sure he has the right to proceed, to endure, to risk the health of his magnificent physical being. Who would take away the right to dream from so contentiously inspired an individual?
No one meaningful, certainly not the man Evander himself; it’s out of everyone’s hands.
Would that not be like telling us all to aim a little lower, only do what you are probably capable of doing? No, it wouldn’t be actually.
Context disregarded blooms as possibility; it also rears up as danger.
Not that Evander could ever be sufficiently warned about what happens to mortals who never stop wanting.
Patrick Kehoe may be reached at pkehoe@telus.net
