Back to the Trenches : After Tough Bouts, Evander Holyfield Can End All Doubts About His Reign With a Victory Over Bowe

What’s another battle to a champion who has survived so many?

Every time he laces up the gloves, it seems, Evander Holyfield gets caught in an extraordinary struggle against challengers old and young, big and small, lean and fat.

And always, he wins.

And always, he takes as much as and sometimes more punishment than his challenger. Yet he wins.

But what about Friday night, when this 6-foot-2 1/2, 205-pound champion faces 6-5, 235-pound Riddick Bowe, described as the heavyweight champion’s most formidable opponent yet?

At what point in the career of the 30-year-old champion will his undeniably great heart be insufficient to lift him to victory, beyond another body and mind-pounding assault?

Those who favor Holyfield (28-0) against Bowe (31-0) Friday night in the Thomas & Mack Center point out that Holyfield is a winner, in the sense that no matter how much punishment he has dealt with on the way to victory, he endures.

There has always been a laser-like focus to this athlete, dating to the day he walked into the Warren Memorial Boys’ Club in Atlanta and announced he wanted to be a boxing champion.

“He was 8, and he weighed 63 pounds when he boxed in his first Pee Wee tournament,” Boys’ Club secretary Jeannette Hornsby said in 1990.

“He was a good little boy. He was very quiet, but mostly a typical boy. He just had his mind set on being a boxing champion, and he worked feverishly at it.”

Holyfield, by the way, who spent his youth in the neighborhoods around Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium idolizing Hank Aaron, has in recent years raised tens of thousands of dollars for his old Boys’ Club. He trained at the club as a teen, when he had a spare job pumping gas at a suburban Atlanta airport.

In the early 1980s, when he became a serious amateur boxer, his battles began.

His first test came from Detroit light-heavyweight Ricky Womack. By 1983, it was apparent Womack and Holyfield would be the leaders for the light-heavyweight berth on the 1984 U.S. Olympic team. They fought several times, and all their matches were punishing ones.

But Holyfield developed rapidly in the six months before the 1984 U.S. Olympic trials, and he beat Womack at the Olympic trials in Ft. Worth that summer, and again at the Olympic boxoffs at Caesars Palace.

To this day, Holyfield says Womack hit him harder than any opponent, amateur or pro. But Womack will never hit him again. He is serving a life term in a Michigan prison for murder.

Holyfield was one of three U.S. Olympians who did not win a gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympics, but he earned more notoriety in losing than any of the nine American gold medalists.

In the Olympic semifinals, he knocked out New Zealand’s Kevin Barry with a punch thrown a split second after a Yugoslav referee shouted a “Stop!” command. Holyfield was disqualified and later awarded a bronze medal.

But the grace with which he took the seemingly unjustified loss touched many who saw it.

Ever since, he has been all class. No one has ever heard him raise his voice or ridicule an opponent.

When he turned pro with half the Olympic team in Madison Square Garden one night three months later, it was Holyfield who received the loudest ovation from the crowd, not New York gold medalist Mark Breland.

His first big professional battle was against Dwight Muhammad Qawi, when Holyfield challenged him in 1986 for Qawi’s share of the cruiserweight championship.

In the first of a string of championship fights that will reach 11 Friday night, Holyfield won a 15-round fight during which he fought two opponents--Qawi and dehydration.

Late that night, July 12, 1986, hours after the fight, Holyfield’s wife, Paulette, called his doctor, Ron Stephens, to tell him the boxer was suffering from severe headaches.

Stephens, accompanied by a urologist and a nephrologist, drove Holyfield to a hospital, where he was treated for severe dehydration.

“We had to intravenously put 12 quarts of fluid into him before he could produce a single drop of urine,” Stephens said. “Had we not gotten him to the hospital when we did, his kidneys might have shut down forever. Now, he swallows that water between rounds instead of spitting it out.”

Holyfield’s next test came against bigger, stronger Michael Dokes, on March 11, 1989. In what turned into the most exciting heavyweight match of the 1980s, Dokes and Holyfield landed bombs for 10 rounds, when Dokes collapsed from exhaustion.

Four months later at Stateline, Nev., Holyfield temporarily quieted those who said he did not have knockout power. With one right hand, Holyfield put a much bigger Adilson Rodrigues on his back for five minutes.

Then came unbeaten Alex Stewart. Stewart had Holyfield in trouble several times in another punishing fight, but the bout was stopped after eight rounds when Stewart’s corner could not stop cuts over his eyes.

In October of 1990, Holyfield gained the undisputed title with a one-punch knockout of Buster Douglas.

In two of Holyfield’s three successful defenses, against George Foreman and Bert Cooper, he took more punishment than he gave out. Holyfield also defeated Larry Holmes last June.

Cooper, in fact, put Holyfield down for the only time in his career, and nearly knocked him out, early in the fight. Holyfield eventually stopped him in the seventh round. But when the fight was stopped, with Cooper on his feet, Holyfield had hit him with about 15 unanswered punches.

And so Holyfield, in an age when nearly all his opponents are significantly bigger than he is, continues to survive.

How many wars can he have left?

Holyfield shrugs when asked.

“I fight good fighters, and good fighters will hit you,” he said.

At times recently, he has hinted he would like to retire with a victory over Bowe. But at other times, he talks like a champion with a lot of mileage left.

At a September news conference in Las Vegas, Holyfield looked Bowe in the eye and said: “Riddick, I’ve told you--you can’t be champion in ‘92, you can’t be champion in ‘93, you can’t be champion in ’94 or ’95. But you can be champion in ‘96, ‘cause that’s when I’ll relinquish my belt.”

Then he turned to writers and added: “I love to box, I love the game. I will be champion as long as I box.”

However, some heard a hint of impending retirement when Holyfield was asked Tuesday about a Holyfield-Mike Tyson fight. Tyson has at least two years more to serve on his prison term, unless he is freed pending an appeals trial.

“I don’t think there will ever be a Holyfield-Tyson fight now,” he said.

Holyfield says he enjoys being a champion. He never seems to dodge autograph seekers, and in fact has gone out of his way to sign them for the small crowds who attend both boxers’ workouts this week in a tent behind The Mirage.

At the Barcelona Olympics, where he sat in on nearly every boxing session, he happily signed autographs throughout.

“I expected to be recognized at the boxing tournament (at the Olympics), but when I went to women’s gymnastics, track and field, swimming, and volleyball and people recognized me there, too, that really surprised me.

“People come up to me a lot and say they like how I carry myself, and shake my hand,” he said Tuesday. “I enjoy that. It means a lot to me.”

Throughout, Holyfield-Bowe has been a dignified promotion, in stark contrast to title fights of recent years. At news conferences before both fighters went to training camps, both Holyfield and Bowe often appeared in suits, white shirts and ties.

The customary barbs and knocks have been scarce. Bowe’s manager, Rock Newman, has deftly suggested Holyfield has not shown that he is a true champion.

“Evander Holyfield has been an extremely well-managed and an extremely well-promoted fighter,” Newman said at that news conference, suggesting the theme of Holyfield’s reign has been maximum dollars/minimum risk.

“Buster Douglas wasn’t in shape when Holyfield beat him, George Foreman was an old man who didn’t even go down when Evander fought him, and Bert Cooper, who only had a week to get ready for the fight, almost knocked him out.

“When Evander gets in the ring with Riddick Bowe--that will be Evander’s moment of truth.”

Holyfield smiled at that remark and said: “Rock, let’s make a bet. If I win, I’ll buy a new car for myself and you have to be my chauffeur for two months. If Bowe wins, I’ll buy a car for you and I’ll be your chauffeur.”

Holyfield’s people say Friday is their man’s night.

Said his promoter Dan Duva: “This is Evander’s fight. It’s his opportunity to silence everyone who says he’s not a true champion.”

In other words, still another war to go.