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March 2001
Each month we bring you a selection of articles from the current and past issues of BOXING MONTHLY. To buy the magazine, see our subscription or back issues pages, or use our world distribution map to find a news-stand copy. Why not use our Interactive Forum to express your own boxing comments and opinions!
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MAN OF HONOUR Of course Evander Holyfield could have made more money from rubber matches with Tyson or Lewis, but the Real Deal likes to do things properly and so it is a higher risk, lower profile rematch with John Ruiz that GRAHAM HOUSTON previews - and Ruiz could be very difficult |
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Evander 'The Real Deal' Holyfield
- Get Big Pic Last August, Evander Holyfield looked all of his 37 years as he eked out a unanimous but debatable decision over unheralded but determined John Ruiz at the Paris casino resort in Las Vegas. Watching at ringside that night it seemed to me, for most of the first six rounds, that age had finally caught up with the modern-day legend from Atlanta, Georgia. The "Real Deal" looked the "Done Deal" - as in over and done with. Finally, though, Holyfield began to mount a rally, and a strong last round allowed him to snatch victory and with it his fourth heavyweight title, this time the World Boxing Association version of the championship that belonged to Lennox Lewis but had become vacant due to one of those complicated boxing political wrangles. But Holyfield's manner at the post-fight conference was that of a man who knew he had not performed well and who sensed he might have received a bit of a break from the judges, although the ringside media was divided. Clearly, as promoter Don King said in the immediate aftermath, the two men had to do it all over again. The WBA mandated a rematch, and on 3 March, back in Las Vegas but this time at the Mandalay Bay casino resort, Ruiz, the "Quiet Man" from Chelsea, Massachusetts but with ancestral roots in Puerto Rico, gets his second chance to upset the odds against one of the great gladiators of the heavyweight division. Ruiz believed he had won the last fight. This time, he says, he knows what he has to do to put matters beyond doubt, even suggesting he can stop Holyfield this time. His performance last time has boosted his self-esteem. In a sense, he was fighting to prove he deserved to be there. This time he goes into the ring as a challenger who has earned respect. This is reflected in the odds. Last time, Holyfield was a 9-2 on favourite. This time, the veteran is just 2-1 on. The oddsmakers are taking into account Holyfield's age (almost another year older going into the return fight - and he looked old in the first fight), the wear and tear after so many memorable battles, the feeling that the well might finally have run dry. Ruiz has youth on his side, at the age of 29, and there is the perception that he was the victim of a bad decision in the last fight, when ex-champ Bobby Czyz, the expert analyst for America's Showtime TV network, had Ruiz winning by 9-3 rounds and even remarked that the fight was so one-sided it was actually becoming boring. But the judges did not see it that way. The two Las Vegas judges had Holyfield ahead by just one point, while a judge from Venezuela made it a four-point margin. Really, a draw would have been the right result, because the Vegas judges gave Holyfield credit for a 10-8 round in the third, when the older man wobbled his opponent with a right hand. But Ruiz had won most of the round. If there was a 10-8 round, in my opinion, it should have been the 12th, the only round that Holyfield truly dominated and in which Ruiz went down on one knee after taking a left hook - sort of a delayed reaction. But referee Richard Steele waved "no knockdown". All three judges made this a 10-9 round for Holyfield. It was enough - just. Had Ruiz won the round, the fight would have been a draw. And, of course, it would have come out all square had the two Vegas judges made the third round 10-9, not 10-8, in Holyfield's favour. That's how close the fight was. To Holyfield's credit, he did not try to avoid the rematch. He is a fighter who believes in living up to what he sees as a champion's obligations. A third match with Lennox Lewis or Mike Tyson would be much bigger than this one, but Holyfield is the sort of man who does not like unfinished business. He feels the need to beat Ruiz in a manner that leaves no room for doubt, in a pay-per-view fight that Don King is billing as The Last Word. Holyfield denies that he underestimated Ruiz last time. He says he expected his opponent to fight hard. "The fact that Ruiz fought really well does not mean that I fought badly," he said at the press conference to announce the fight. "That was last year. But this is my year. This is going to be a great year." He said it will probably be his last year as a fighter, and he plans on having three fights - and promises to win them all by knockout. "This year," he pledges, "I will be sensational." But he couldn't knock out Ruiz last time, nor knock him down - not officially, anyway. In fact, in terms of winning and losing, it was one of those life-and-death struggles. The question now is, can Ruiz improve on that performance or were we seeing his absolute best that August night? Did Holyfield just have a bad night, or has he reached the end of a guts-and-glory road that has included some of the great heavyweight fights of recent years? Holyfield's rough, tough, physical tactics in the last fight upset the Ruiz camp. Ruiz was thrown to the canvas four times, hit low, elbowed. If referee Steele had reined in Holyfield a little, the Ruiz faction says, there could have been a different outcome. Ruiz's manager, Norman "Stoney" Stone, says he appreciates the fact that boxing is a rough game and that Holyfield does whatever he feels he has to do to win, but his position is that the now-four-time champ was permitted too much leeway by far. But, to be fair, there were those at ringside who believed that Ruiz was allowed to hold excessively. My ringside neighbour that night, the boxing historian Bert Randolph Sugar, made Holyfield the winner and, never hesitant about offering an opinion, told me, as the crowd booed the decision: "You don't get points for holding." Well, that is true. But Ruiz did a lot of punching, too. He dominated in the punches-landed category on the CompuBox statistics for the fight, although it could definitely be argued that Holyfield's hits were heavier. But Holyfield looked somewhat beaten up, and I could hardly believe how easily Ruiz was hitting him, especially in the first half of the fight. This time, manager Stone wants Ruiz to box and move more, not get involved in the sort of brawling that favours the physically stronger Holyfield. Over the phone from Boston, he said: "It's up to Johnny to do different. He has to move on Holyfield, make Holyfield work. He can't fight the brawling style. That's it in a nutshell. He proved to himself and everyone else that he can stay in with the guy [in the first fight]- now he has to box him. "He wasn't going to listen [to the corner] in that last fight, and that's the first time that's happened to me with Johnny. He had so many people telling him he wasn't going to win the fight, he wasn't going to last three rounds with Holyfield, he just went out and fought hard. If he'd listened to me it would have been an easier fight. "You've got to make Holyfield move - Lennox did. The thing is, he's still a piece of steel. He's a tough, tough guy. He gave Lennox all he can handle, a lot of people don't realise that. "Johnny has got to fight him like Lennox did - and his jab is better than Lennox's jab. He should be able to pop it off and do what he has to do. Holyfield's going to try to knock Johnny out early, because he's not going to outbox Johnny - especially with the confidence Johnny has built up over this last fight." Both he and Ruiz feel that the Quiet Man came away as the moral winner. Stone said: "When they said 'unanimous decision' I said 'Oh, shit, we've finally got a break!' If they'd said 'split decision' I would have said 'Oh, they robbed us.' " He was critical of Holyfield's robust tactics but said: "You can't blame Holyfield. It's like a bank robber. He's gonna rob a bank till he gets caught. Holyfield's going to keep hitting Johnny with elbows until he gets caught. You're in there to do what you've got to do to win, but the referee didn't stop anything." So, the key for Ruiz is to box, jab, move, put punches together, not stay right in front of Holyfield for long periods. With his gritty and honest showing last August, Ruiz exorcised the demons of his 19-second blowout by David Tua five years ago. Now he can concentrate on boxing a smart fight - a winning fight. At least, that is his camp's theory. But Holyfield brings the experience of many big fights, including 14 world heavyweight title bouts, and, before that, six championship victories when he was cleaning up the cruiserweight class. This is a remarkable man by any standards. Just when the fight-game pundits believe he is on the way out, he comes back to shock the boxing world. But he cannot defy age indefinitely. He is older now than Jersey Joe Walcott was when that veteran became the oldest heavyweight champ in 1951 - and Walcott was considered ancient in boxing terms. But Holyfield prefers to consider himself ageless. He brings a record of 37 wins, three losses and a draw (25 KOs) and has ducked no one. That will perhaps be his enduring legacy: that he faced the greatest of his time, in several instances on more than one occasion. Ruiz, who has won 36 fights (27 inside the distance) against four losses, has not faced anything like the high-level of competition that his opponent has, but he is the younger man by nine years, the fresher, faster fighter and possibly in the right place at the right time - as he so nearly was the last time he faced Holyfield. The older man is the puncher in this fight. As ever, Holyfield will be looking to time his opponent for the right-hand or left hook counter. He hurt Ruiz with the right hand last time, in the third round, but it is possible that he then thought it was just going to be a matter of time. Instead, Ruiz rallied to outhustle Holyfield in the very next round. This time, if Holyfield is able to rock Ruiz I expect him to keep the pressure on him - if he can. Because, no one really knows exactly how much Holyfield has left. Body punching can play a big part, because Holyfield hurt the younger man downstairs in the last fight and certainly slowed him down. But if Holyfield loses too many of the early rounds, he might leave himself too far behind to close the gap if it goes to a decision. I expect more pressure, more intensity, from Holyfield this time, and more moving and more jabbing from Ruiz. A case can be made for either man winning this interesting match. The gamblers who wager on Ruiz will really be betting against Holyfield, believing that the challenger has a great ally in the unseen enemy that none of us can defeat: Father Time himself. But my feeling is that Holyfield, savvy and durable old warrior that he is, will find a way to win, if not by the knockout he predicts then by grinding out a decision by jabbing more and simply working more than he did in the last fight, when, from what I observed, he was relying a little too much on getting his man out of there with one big punch. I think that Holyfield will once again be behind on points after six rounds, but that he will again start to catch up with Ruiz as the fight wears on and (he hopes) his opponent starts to wear down. Going out a bit further on the limb, I hazard a guess that Holyfield can stop his man this time - perhaps in the 12th and final round. |
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