Holyfield’s Past Includes Biting Incident

Jack Cantrell had forgotten the bite until about 18 months ago. There had been so many bouts, so many punches, so many strange things in the ring over decades of working with amateur boxers that one incident in one bout had faded from memory.

Then Evander Holyfield reminded him. And now everyone is reminding him.

“I’m still vice president of the Georgia Amateur Boxing Assn., and Evander Holyfield does clinics for us, working on training and things like that,” said Cantrell, who lives in Macon, Ga.

“He had come here and had fought Bert Cooper, and he was telling me he remembered getting knocked down by Jakey Winters and biting him. Then I remembered.”

Cooper had knocked Holyfield down, and Holyfield had remembered the only other time it had happened.

It was 1980, and Winters was a wild man, nine times a state Golden Gloves champion, then a welterweight. They were at the Atlanta Fairgrounds, and Winters was all over Holyfield, then 17.

“I beat the hell out of him in the ring,” says Winters, now a 35-year-old investment counselor living in Florida, then a hellion on a one-way trip to boxing oblivion.

Cantrell remembers.

“Evander was a better boxer than Jakey, but Jakey just threw punches--millions and millions of punches,” Cantrell said. “Then he knocked Evander down in the second round, and Evander got up and got Jakey in a clinch.”

Holyfield was still reeling from Winters’ left hook and trying to buy time near the end of the round, according to Cantrell.

“I had always taught my boxers to roll their shoulder forward to get out of a clinch and get some punching room,” Cantrell said. “So Jakey rolled his shoulder forward and nothing happened.

“They were still clinched. So Jakey rolled his shoulder forward again, and Evander bit him. I asked him why, and he said, ‘If he’s going to throw a shoulder, I’m going to do something with it.’ ”

Said Holyfield in a 1992 story: “After I got up, we got in a clinch and I bit him on the neck.”

“No,” said Cantrell, “it was the shoulder, and when Jakey got back to the corner he told me, in amazement, ‘That guy just bit me.’

“I don’t remember if he broke the skin or not, but I remember the teeth marks, and I figured that we didn’t want to win the fight by disqualification and take a chance of a doctor seeing broken skin and saying Jakey couldn’t fight anymore in the tournament. So I just wiped it out and Jakey went back out and won the fight.”

It was one of 100 that the son of Telum “Stormy” Winters, a middleweight contender until he was murdered, won as an amateur.

Jakey Winters lives now with a scrapbook that includes his Holyfield interlude, which he calls “nine minutes of hell.”

“I’m . . . happy for him,” said Winters in a story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He is living my dream. My dream has come true for him. He made it.”