COMMENTARY : Holyfield Showed Plenty of Heart

At the risk of glorifying the profane to make a point about Evander Holyfield, there is a truth undeniable: Boxing is the hardest game. It is the most demanding physically and the most demanding psychically. Only gladiators need apply.

To move toward an understanding of those demands, do a simple thing. Hold your fists eye-high for three minutes while moving inside a 20-foot circle. Then extend those three minutes to a half-hour and throw a punch every five seconds.

Finally, not so simple, try the gladiator part. Get in the ring with a man who wants to make real the dream expressed in 10 reverential words by a fighter now at ease in Indiana. Mike Tyson often said of the man across from him, “I want to drive his nose bone into his brain.”

The point about Holyfield is that few fighters ever gave more of themselves to grace the mean game. It is his legacy that he twice won the heavyweight championship when with an ordinary effort he would never have been even a contender. His effort was extraordinary, even extraordinary times two. Had Muhammad Ali, to name a fighter, brought to his work the effort of Evander Holyfield, Ali for 20 years would have been undefeated and all but untouched.

With a training regimen unique to fighters, Holyfield made his body into a heavyweight’s by adding 30 rock-hard pounds in five years. Ali came to greatness as a 205-pounder who, with a training regimen light on training, became a 230-pounder of suspect fatty content.

Holyfield’s body became a temple.

Ali’s temple became a garage.

An instance: Measuring Holyfield in 1987, publicist Kathy Duva recorded his height at 6-foot-1 1/2, his weight at 188 pounds and his chest at 44 inches. It was the waist measurement that furrowed Duva’s brow: “Evander’s waist is smaller than mine. So I added an inch to it.” Still, the heavyweight’s waist came to 29 inches.

That was a year after Holyfield began workouts with fitness guru Tim Hallmark, who, among other torture devices, used the high-tech equivalent of a medieval rack, which stretched its victims not horizontally but vertically.

“Tim’s got this one machine,” Holyfield said, “where he straps your hands in and straps your feet in and then you’ve got to go like you’re climbing a mountain, sometimes for 30 minutes. Man, I’d be dying. And it’d be aggravating. I’d be worn out. Here I was, supposed to be the best, and my sparring partners were beating me.

“Then after some weeks the work began to catch hold. Finally, I got all four of my sparring partners in one day and I whupped ‘em all.”

Wait a second.

What’s that noise?

It sounds like a growling. Some fight fans are growling. They want a stop to this nonsense about Holyfield the temple and Ali the garage. It’s no bodybuilding contest, they say. It’s a fight. And they say if we’re talking about fighters, Holyfield doesn’t belong in the same sentence with Ali.

Agreed. No argument. At his best, Ali might have beaten anyone at his best. Boxing historians put Ali in the top five heavyweights; Holyfield might be in the top 25. No arguments there, either, for even a witness who saw greatness possible in Holyfield admits greatness was never realized.

No great fighter would lose to Michael Moorer, be knocked down by Bert Cooper and be bamboozled by grandpa Larry Holmes. Certainly those Holyfield fights were proof that something, somewhere, had gone wrong with the strongman who had knocked out the man who knocked out Tyson.

Versatility made greatness possible for Holyfield. He could move, punch and box. But in the Holmes/Cooper/Moorer/Riddick Bowe fights, Holyfield became a predictable fighter whose only defense was offense. He stopped moving and dared to fight even bigger men toe to toe. His tactics properly were denigrated as foolish, even suicidal. They certainly were not the tactics that once promised greatness for an intelligent fighter.

What went wrong? Visible symptoms suggested ego’s domination of reason. Holyfield began changing important people. Trainers came and went; managers were fired, longtime relationships were ruptured. And it wasn’t long before the Holyfield camp took on the Ali-esque odor identified with parasites sucking at the millionaire host.

Now, though, we may have a better explanation. At some time, for some reason, Holyfield’s body betrayed him. He had a bad heart.

Two days after Holyfield lost to Moorer, a cardiologist said it was a miracle Holyfield finished the fight. His heart had lost elasticity; it could not pump the blood necessary to carry oxygen to a fighter’s body.

Thirty-one years old, a happy multimillionaire who has four children and the fame that lives with any heavyweight champion, Evander Holyfield walked away from his gladiator’s work and said, “I love life more than going into the ring and swinging. I can use my heart in different ways now instead of using my heart to scuffle.”

Good for him.