By Mitch Abramson
Photo © Chris Cozzone/FightWireImages
He is Captain Ahab in boxing shorts, out to sea, dedicating his life to the pursuit of the heavyweight championship, even if it destroys him.
“Time is still on my side,” Evander Holyfield said in a phone interview, fresh off a plane from Houston, where he is training with Ronnie Shields. “I get better with age,” he said, chuckling.
He still wants to become undisputed heavyweight champion, even at age 44 (soon to be 45 October 19), when most men abandon their athletic dreams to focus on less exciting pursuits.
He is no Barry Bonds, who somehow got better (and bigger) with age.
It’s hard to imagine the still fascinating Holyfield in another career, but he says that early on, he wanted to play football, cornerback for the Atlanta Falcons.
He pauses to consider the idea: Holyfield back-pedaling to catch up to a fleet-footed receiver. He abandoned that thought when his high school coach didn’t play him all season then inserted him for the championship game, only to tell him afterward that he made a mistake letting him rot on the bench. Holyfield wept, upset that someone else could determine what he could and could not do, he first told USA Today in June.
Instead, he chose boxing, a love affair that has proven more resilient than most marriages.
“It’s what I do best,” he says.
He will fight Sultan Ibragimov (21-0-1, 17 knockouts) on October 13 in Moscow for the WBO title, conveniently filling in for the WBA champion, Ruslan Chagaev, who pulled out with an illness. Holyfield, who still conjures up images of the “baddest man on the planet,” with his sideways sneer and ripped physique, if not actions, is seeking his fifth heavyweight title.
He may not have a big win since President Bush came to office, but he has managed something that not even 43 could achieve: slay the news media, or perhaps, outlast them, which he may eventually do to the heavyweight division.
It seems that Holyfield’s persistence has worn down the journalists.
Recently, two of the more popular boxing writers today, our very own Tim Smith of the New York Daily News, and Wallace Matthews of Newsday, basically threw up their hands in resignation, giving a listless thumbs-up to Holyfield in his latest comeback.
In Newsday on July 5, Matthews wrote. “Logic hasn't worked, nor have legislation, ridicule and widespread apathy for the sport he once dominated and the division he once ruled. There seems to be only one way left to save Evander Holyfield from himself…Give Holyfield what he wants and maybe he'll go away once and for all.”
Smith sounded a similar note on August 8: “I still believe Holyfield should be at home in his rocking chair. But I'm not going to keep railing against him fighting, because it's not going to stop him. I just hope that if he does beat Ibragimov he will go home and find that rocking chair and stay in it.”
He’s done it. He’s exhausted the news media, not that Holyfield (42-8-2, 27 knockouts) noticed. Doing his best Bush impression, he said he doesn’t read the papers, to get the latest fight dope.
“Well, I truly believe that actions speak louder than words,” he said in his Southern drawl. “I never read what people said about me and I never cared about what people said. All that mattered was what’s in my heart and what I did in the ring. I have faith in God, and I believe in the word of God. If I didn’t, then I would have caved in long ago.”
He is still plotting a heavyweight takeover. He sees what everyone else sees in the division, a Congo line of middling fighters led by Wladimir Klitschko.
“He’s a good fighter,” Holyfield said of Klitschko. “But he can be a great fighter. It’s just when you have people holding on to win, you can never show that you’re a courageous fighter. You need to go in there and throw combinations. When you’re that much bigger than everyone else, you can grab and wear the other guy out. I was popular because I didn’t duck anyone. I didn’t think I shouldn’t fight them just because of their style. If that was the case, then I would have never fought John Ruiz, or that guy from Cincinnati (Larry Donald). Those guys didn’t fight my style, but you can’t always choose your opponents. If I was a matchmaker, I would never have made those fights.”
Holyfield has won four straight fights, two by knockout, against opposition that has been mostly prosaic.
He beat Lou Savarese in June, stopped Vinny Maddalone in March, and Fres Oquendo and Jeremy Bates in 2006. Does that quality him for a title fight?
“I’m just taking it one step at a time,” said Holyfield, who is ranked in the top 15 in all four major sanctioning bodies. “First you fight this guy, and you see what happens, then you fight that guy, and you do things a little differently. You stay busy, box some guys, go after others and try to land some hard shots. Everyone’s different.”
At least Holyfield conceded he is a different fighter from the one who stepped in the ring in 1986, a mere 11-0 to fight Dwight Muhammad Qawi and won the WBA cruiserweight title in a 15-round split decision.
“I’ve changed a lot,” he said. “The knowledge I have now, compared to back then- you can’t compare it. As a young man, I had a lot of ego; I was headstrong, and boxing was all about feeling emotion. Here I am, older, and I have a better sense of myself.
And then this shocker: “I realize that I can get hurt.”
He takes his strength and persistence from his religion, but also from his amateur career, when after a poor effort, a young Holyfield would drop his head as he exited the ring.
“Don’t drop your head,” more than one amateur coach would tell him. “Keep your head high and just work harder the next time,” and that’s what he did.
Even when Holyfield was put on indefinite medical suspension by the New York State Athletic Commission for “poor performance and diminished skills” against Larry Donald in 2004, there Holyfield was, strutting like a peacock on TV’s “Dancing with the Stars,” staying busy.
“The people from the show called, asking if I wanted to do it,” he said. “I had nothing else to do. I wish they would have told me how tough it was going to be. It was just as stressful as boxing. I was training as hard, trying to get the moves down, as I did when I was preparing for a fight.”
Holyfield claims his jazzy moves helped him get back into boxing.
“When the people saw how I could move, they realized that I wasn’t that old,” he said, chuckling.
His ordeal with the New York State Athletic Commission left him more determined than ever. He claims shoulder injuries led to his poor performance against Donald, though he never notified the commission of the wounds beforehand, chairman Ron Scott Stevens said. He had two wins in his last nine fights when he was initially suspended.
Eventually, the commission would lift the administrative suspension, after Holyfield won three fights outside of New York and his promoter, Main Events, petitioned for his return.
“He showed that he could defend himself,” Stevens said in a recent phone interview.
“He wasn’t a sitting duck like he was in the Donald fight. He claims he had shoulder injuries in that fight, but he never made us aware of that. He passed seven sophisticated medical exams to have the medical suspension lifted. Now he’s stepping in for a title shot. Even if he wins, I don’t know if he quits. He has to wonder at what point is enough and how much more punishment he wants to take.”
Holyfield is not so delusional to think he will fight on forever. He wants to get in the promotional side of things, and do more work with his foundation to help underprivileged kids when he finally leaves the sport.
But he didn’t put a timetable on his retirement, and he could never be a trainer, he said. He didn’t fully explain why he couldn’t work a corner, but one can easily see the dangers involved: he would probably never know when to throw in the towel.
Mitch Abramson has covered boxing for The New York Times and the Village Voice and is currently a staff writer at Newsday.