In less than two weeks, Riddick Bowe will have his shot at the championship, but the combined puff of all the conversation stirred by the occasion so far wouldn't blow one orange leaf off a dying tree. He would have thrown out the first pitch for the seventh game. Wearing a Braves hat at the World Series, Holyfield was a less awesome figure than Jane Fonda. "People knew me," he said with touching astonishment. And yet, later, back home in Georgia, he exclaimed to a writer that Barcelona had been the first place he ever felt like a star.
The heavyweight champion of the world sat out of the way in a porkpie Coca-Cola hat (a good son of Atlanta) with a matching red purse cinched around his waist, the modern emblem of civilization. That is, he doesn't show it.Īt the Barcelona Olympics, he regularly attended the boxing matches without bringing either a chant or a chill to the room. What he has put his mark on must be much less than he dreamed, although he denies it. What Holyfield does isn't nearly as much anymore, certainly far from everything. I am the heavyweight champion of the world." I dreamed I was the heavyweight champion of the world. Haven't I put my mark on it? I dream, and my dreams always come true. But what I am is something and what I do is everything.
"I'm very sorry that I'm not what you expect," Holmes blurted 10 years ago, when he was still undefeated. Holyfield isn't just Gene Tunney replacing Dempsey or Holmes following Ali. Tyson didn't take the championship to jail. But what's happening now is more profound than an old trainer's lament. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis and Ali were all going to take boxing with them when they went. Other than $75 million worth of bad title fights (Douglas, George Foreman, Bert Cooper and Larry Holmes), Evander inherited little of that legendary station - Heavyweight Champion Of The World - hardly any of the enormous stature, almost none of the accompanying myth. Sullivan privilege of slapping the counter top and bellowing "I can lick any man in the house!" did not. He is a large man now only from the waist up.īy way of Buster Douglas, merely the belts of Mike Tyson passed to Holyfield. Far from a force of nature, he is an artificially reconstructed human being, who went into a Vincent Price laboratory weighing 174 pounds and, after a lot of whirring and buzzing, rolled out at 210.įor every fighter of a particular size, Michael Spinks declared several years ago in a hallmark of honesty: "I decided to become a heavyweight when I realized there was no money in being a light heavyweight." Unfortunately for Holyfield, the high-tech machinery that resculpted him in chiseled mahogany had a flaw in the design. Good neighbor Holyfield, the Olympic light heavyweight disqualified for not pulling his punches, is the perfect heavyweight to preside over the end of an aura. But even that is evaporating now, perhaps for good. For a long time, when the allure of prize-fighting became hazy, at least the awe for the champion stayed clear. As Don King and Bob Arum seem to be fading away, and all things boxing appear to be growing fainter and less relevant, Holyfield doesn't represent the championship so much as the lack of it, the loss of it, the end of it. "Do you know who said that?"Įvander Holyfield would be a champion if there were a champion, but there may not be one at the moment or, in a certain sense, ever again. "A champion would be a champion if he's a champion," Frazier replied thoughtfully, a complicated thought for him. Once won, is the championship ever completely lost?
Trevor Berbick, Joe Frazier against Jumbo Cummings, Frazier shook his head one day and said: "Isn't it funny? We've ended up in the same place." When they were finished as champions, but fighting on nonetheless, Muhammad Ali vs.
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