Boxing’s Best Has a Rare Quality : Heavyweight: Holyfield’s humility is both refreshing and out of place for a latter-day sports champion.

Before Joe Willie Namath and before Woodstock, before Muhammad Ali and before Reggie Jackson became the straw that stirred the drink, before someone turned up the volume on the planet Earth and made Howard Cosell possible, before everyone’s attention span was diminished to the length of an MTV subliminal image, before Madonna put on metal underwear and Bo got a plastic hip, there was a time when an athlete’s work mattered more than the athlete’s celebrity.

But once the vainglorious syllables of Ali’s shortest poem had been shouted into every ear around ...

“Me,

“Whee!”

... the athlete’s work became secondary. Public perceptions were shaped by our heroes’ eagerness to be their own sideshows. Evidence of such a trend is piled high here in the late 20th century. We know Jose Canseco’s driving habits, for example, even as we ignore Robin Yount’s beautiful gift of baseball talent. We see fame and we mistake it for talent so often that there come times when we see no talent if there is no fame to draw our attention to it. A man might as well be invisible.

He might as well come to the door in his bare feet, as Evander Holyfield did one morning not long ago. Barefoot and in blue jeans, wearing a blank blue T-shirt, blinking against the morning sunlight, his broad, thick, brooding face at odds with his soft voice, Holyfield opened the door of his country mansion and asked, “Want some coffee?”

This is the heavyweight champion of the world.

Barefoot.

Answering his own doorbell.

Willing to fetch some coffee.

This is Evander Holyfield, the invisible man.

We could say what a Nevada newspaperman wrote not long ago: “Evander Holyfield is a man of exemplary courage and desire, but invite him to a dinner party and everyone is going to remark how courteous he is and then fall asleep in their soup.”

But that’s petty and short-sighted and so slight as to be meaningless. What’s true and meaningful about Holyfield is his talent. He is a classy fighter of surpassing determination whose work is done so well that boxing’s craftsmen almost universally call him underrated and unappreciated.

The legendary trainer Ray Arcel, 85, believes Holyfield “stands out as the best we have today, a good boxer who can hold onto his title as long as he wants to.” Angelo Dundee, who trained Ali and Ray Leonard among a dozen champions, says of Holyfield, “He’s a fighter, he gives 150 percent, he’s the best heavyweight out there.”

Even Dundee’s praise is tempered, though, and in the next breath he says, “Riddick Bowe will beat him” in their heavyweight title fight Nov. 13 in Las Vegas. Neither Holyfield nor Bowe has lost as a professional. For both, the fight will be the most competitive of their careers. Dundee likes Bowe “because he’s a big, tall, stand-up fighter with a left hand and a clubbing right. This kid Bowe, to me, is what boxing needs as the heavyweight champion, a big man.”

Odd, such a thought. Bowe is big, at 6 feet 5 and 235 pounds. But Holyfield is not small at 6-2 and 210. It’s just that Holyfield has not always been even that large. He first fought professionally at 175 pounds. With high-tech weight training and nutrition supplements, Holyfield built a heavyweight’s musculature on a light heavy’s frame. In admiration and denigration, he has been called “Robo-Champ.” His legs and arms are relatively thin and Holyfield appears heavyweight size only in his upper body. Bowe, in contrast, is thick from neck to ankle.

Two years the heavyweight champion, 29, still undefeated, Evander Holyfield will neither agree nor disagree with anyone who wants to call him underrated or unappreciated. Rhetoric means nothing because he’s no speechmaker; he’s a fighter. “Besides, if I talked a lot, people would complain I talk too much,” he says. He raises his left eyebrow as punctuation.

Not that he won’t or can’t talk wisely. There is an uncommon common sense about him that profits anyone who takes a cup of morning coffee and listens to Holyfield say ...

“Working your way to the top like I did, it’s more fun than being on top because when you’re chasing something, well, there’s always something to chase. But when you’re there, there’s nothing to chase. The only thing you have to face now is criticism.

“For me, the challenge is how can I get people to side with me as being the best? People look at me and they say the only way I stay at the top is that all the guys are bums. Same thing they said about Joe Louis and his ‘Bum of the Month’ and they said about Muhammad Ali. There’s always something to keep you from getting credit.

“But I sure know I’m better than the people I’ve fought. Ain’t none of them beat me.

“It’s like people want you to be the kind of fighter they want, not the fighter you are. People almost want you to lose and then come back. Then they’ll say you’re great. My whole thing is, you don’t have to lose. Only thing you have to do is keep improving.

“I’m convinced if you keep winning, people will give in eventually. People like a winner. They keep losing when they bet against you, they’ll change over to your side eventually.”

Part of Holyfield’s image problem is that in two years at the top of his game he has done little in the ring to satisfy critics eager to see the sensations worked by an Ali and a Mike Tyson. Instead, Holyfield is a workmanlike fighter whose knockouts are hard labor, not the whimsical play of Ali nor the sudden gasps of fear created by Tyson.

Economic realities and Tyson’s troubles with the law also have conspired to leave Holyfield seeming insubstantial. Though Holyfield stalked Tyson for two years, waiting for his opportunity, Tyson first lost the title to Buster Douglas before winding up in jail. Holyfield quickly knocked out the sorry Douglas and then common sense directed him to the big-money fights: George Foreman and Larry Holmes, both overweight geezers to whom a loss would have been humiliating but who meant paydays worth $25 million.

Throw in an anxiety-raising victory over journeyman Bert Cooper, who scored a knockdown of Holyfield, and the champion comes to the Bowe fight carrying the unusual baggage of being an undefeated heavyweight champion who is, in essence, just starting his major work.

“You can get wrapped up in the fame, in the game itself,” Holyfield says. “You get to the point where you like being heavyweight champion of the world, but you don’t like the fighting. That’s a bad position. Each and every fight has to be your best one. But with Bowe, I do feel a little more excited about going into a fight with a young, competitive person, more so than the fights with George Foreman and Larry Holmes, where there’s nothing for me to gain.

“My thing now is, I want to take boxing to another level, the way all the champions do. I don’t know how I rate in all history, but I know I’d be better than all the guys who ever fought if they fought today the same way they fought then. Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali -- those styles couldn’t win today.

” . . . So my style is a cross between all the things the great heavyweights did. Rocky Marciano, regardless, kept coming in. I got a little of that in me when it comes to a do-or-die situation. Joe Louis would throw short, crispy, hard left uppercuts, right hands, short punches. I got a little of that in me, too. Then sometimes you have to come up with big shots, like Joe Frazier’s left hook. And Ali was the type who would pick you apart. I got a little of all those guys in me.”