THE END OF THE LINE

To hear Evander Holyfield talking at the press conference after his one-sided pasting by James Toney on 4 October was like listening to a man in utter denial.

The former heavyweight champion was trying to make some sense of a struggling and sad performance in which he was outclassed, beaten up and knocked down by a beefed-up former middleweight at the Mandalay Bay casino hotel in Las Vegas.

Holyfield said he would have to go back to the drawing board to work out why he wasn’t using his height and reach. Why he wasn’t using his legs. Why he kept missing. Why he kept getting hit. He couldn’t seem to understand it all. He said he spent too much time watching Toney instead of throwing punches at him It all seemed perplexing for the four-time heavyweight titleholder.

Everyone in the room could have told Holyfield what went wrong. He had grown old. That’s what happened. That was why he couldn’t get out of the way of punches and why he couldn’t get off his own shots. In the 10 months between this fight and his loss to Chris Byrd last December it seemed that Holyfield had aged 10 years.

After a promising first round it was as if everything shut down. Less than a month away from turning 41, it was as if all the hard fights over a long career had caught up with him. Toney, four and a half inches shorter than Holyfield but only 2lbs lighter at a thick-bodied 217lbs (15st 7lbs) was not only beating him to the punch, making his miss and countering, which a lot of us had expected, he was backing him up to such an extent that a cruel old boxing saying kept straying into my mind: Holyfield was walking on his heels.

Now let’s be clear. Toney fought a superb fight, offensively and defensively. He stayed right in front of Holyfield, just the way he had promised, and got him out of there, as he had predicted. But he was fighting a shell of what once was a great fighter, in a rout that echoed past humiliations of former great heavyweight champions such as Rocky Marciano’s bludgeoning of Joe Louis and Larry Holmes’s punishing dominance over another totally faded ex-great, Muhammad Ali.

Holyfield had lost everything but his heart and his pride. They say a fighter’s punch is the last thing to go, but long before the ninth-round ending Holyfield was just pushing his punches at Toney, as if he had weights on each arm, so slow and laboured were his efforts. His legs looked shot. And, despite his still-impressive physique, the realisation soon dawned that Holyfield cannot absorb punches the way he once did. This is the man who stood up to the best that Lennox Lewis, George Foreman and Mike Tyson threw at him, but Toney was nearly bending him over with body shots and blasting him back with right hands.

Holyfield couldn’t outbox Toney, he couldn’t outpunch him, he was never going to outspeed him and it soon enough was clear that he wasn’t going to be able to outlast him, either. One thing I did not anticipate was that Toney was going to be able to hurt Holyfield to the extent that he did. Before the bout I could envisage Toney bewildering Holyfield with hand speed, but I never thought he would practically blow him away with shots upstairs and downstairs.

Part of the trouble may have been that Holyfield couldn’t seem to see the punches coming. When he thought Toney was going to throw one to the head, he got hammered underneath. When he got ready for an incoming body shot, Toney drilled him on top. Holyfield just didn’t know what to do. After three rounds it was essentially target practice for Toney. He couldn’t miss Holyfield — and Evander couldn’t hit him.

After the sixth it was just a matter of whether Holyfield could somehow make it through to the end of the scheduled 12 rounds. Even that was not to be. Holyfield was in front on the scorecards after three rounds, 29-28, 29-28 and 30-27, with all three judges giving him the first and third rounds. He had made such a promising start in round one, in fact, that Jay Larkin, the executive in charge of boxing programming at the Showtime TV network, evoked images of Dorian Gray when he told me afterwards: "I thought I was looking at a 30-year-old Evander Holyfield — I thought: ‘Unbelievable, he’s turned back the clock again. He must have a portrait up in the attic, ageing, because he’s not.’

But, from my ringside position, it seemed that something very obvious was happening. Holyfield was throwing everything he had and getting frustrated at the lack of results, and Toney was as relaxed and as comfortable as if he was in a sparring session at the Wild Card gym in Los Angeles, dipping and bending to make Holyfield miss, catching punches on arms and gloves, not showing any sign of concern when some punches did get through. I swear that a little, knowing smile crossed Toney’s features as the crowd of just under 8,000 roared at Holyfield’s attempts to land a big punch.

Then, in the fourth, the jabs started smacking into Holyfield’s face with increasing regularity, a right hand sent him back with surprise and concern written on his features and just for a moment his legs looked unsteady — and Toney had him. Afterwards, Toney said: "The idea was not to throw too much at first, just set him up, pick at him a little bit and then — boom — hit him with a big one, and that’s what happened."

It became, to me, a bit painful to watch. Toney was having fun. He did some cute walkaway moves, high-stepped, stuck out his tongue, even turned to wave his glove in what I took to be a "Don’t get excited" gesture to a Holyfield rooter at ringside.

After the fifth round, as Holyfield trudged wearily to his corner, Toney waved his glove at him in a "Bye-bye, see you next round" manner. I thought: "My God, he’s not content with destroying Evander he’s got to mock him, too." Holyfield was starting to totter a bit in the sixth. A left hook to the body caused him to lift his right leg off the canvas in pained reaction. ("I was trying to break his ribs," Toney told me afterwards.)

Whereas Holyfield had been trying to land the left hook in the earlier rounds — and being made to miss time and again — now he was basically going through the motions. There was blood in his mouth, and in the ninth yet another left hook to the body had him listing sideways. A follow-up hook down under that didn’t seem to land properly tipped an off-balance Holyfield to the floor, face down. He got up straight away but even as referee Jay Nady was giving him the eight count a commission inspector was getting up on the ring apron holding a white towel to convey capitulation at the request of Holyfield’s trainer, Don Turner, after one minute, 42 seconds of the round.

Turner said afterwards: "I had to stop the fight because I didn’t want to see my guy get hurt. The round before, I told him that if he didn’t show me that he could win this fight in the next round, that I would throw the towel in. He didn’t show much. Just before Toney knocked him down I had made my decision that I would stop the fight." Toney said: "I feel bad, because Evander was a great fighter. I watched him [on TV] growing up. I got paid to do what I had to do. It’s unfortunate he had to go out this way, but that’s just what I had to do.

"I’ll fight anybody, anywhere, any time. I’ve always struggled to make weight. I’ve been killing myself for 10 years," which indicated that although he holds the IBF cruiserweight title he will remain in the heavyweights. His promoter, Dan Goossen, said: "One of the things that the 6-foot-6 or the 6-foot-7 heavyweights don’t have that James Toney has is a heart that’s 7 feet tall.

"There’s a lot of opportunities for James Toney. Here’s what you’ve got with James Toney right now that you didn’t have 15 years ago, you’ve got someone that’s willing to put the work into the gym."

Some of us had worried about Toney’s weight — 27lbs heavier than when he defeated Vassiliy Jirov in a wonderful victory last April. Would he be too heavy to be effective? But Goossen said:

"I knew one thing that no one else really knew in this room, that he was in great shape. He’d been training for three months. His kids and his wife got sick with a cold a week prior to us coming out to Las Vegas, and sure enough James caught it, didn’t mention it to anyone. I saw it, I heard it, I could see it. But he’s just got that mentality that ‘I don’t care if I’ve got bumps and bruises, I don’t care if I’ve got a cold, flu, whatever, I’m just going to get my job done.’ That’s James Toney — that’s what great champions are made of."

Holyfield, who got a standing ovation when he entered the room, said: "James Toney fought a great fight. I don’t have any excuses. My arm didn’t hurt or anything like that. I fought a guy that outhustled me, and usually that doesn’t happen. He had a great defence and I found myself thinking more than fighting, so it allowed him to get his shots off.

"Every time I’d throw the left hook he got down so low that when I missed him, I missed him so bad I just started getting embarrassed, I was missing him so much.

"Things weren’t going my way so figured I’d wait until he gets a little arrogant and get me hurt, and hope to catch him with a shot. When he did hurt me, my corner felt it was right to stop it, but I kinda felt that it was to my favour now, because when people get people hurt they tend to get more aggressive, and I felt that might give me a chance.

"It just so happens that I went down and Don thought the fight should be stopped."

Holyfield admitted: "I got outmanoeuvred, I got outhustled and he fought the better fight today and I can’t do nothing but give respect where respect is due. He’s the most complete fighter that I’ve fought."

And he said that, no, he did not intend to retire. Even now, even after this, he still would not, could not, admit, what everyone else knew, which is that he doesn’t have it any more.

"I’m going back to the drawing board," he said. "What James Toney did, he showed me that if I’m not going to be aggressive, if I’m going to be over-thinking, then this is gonna happen again. I just didn’t make the adjustment. I kept doing the same thing over and over. I kept watching him, thinking: ‘How in the world is he gonna be hit?’ By the time I’d figured out how to hit him, he hit me."

What Holyfield did not seem to realise is that what he was describing was the predicament of every fighter who stays too long. They can see the openings but can’t pull the trigger. They know what to do, but their body won’t let them do it.

Chris Byrd, the IBF heavyweight champion, told me: "When I fought Holyfield I was thinking: ‘It’s too easy’ and he’d gone back even from that fight. He’s at his best in the trenches, but when he got Toney in the trenches he couldn’t do anything.

"I felt bad. This is a guy I looked up and prided myself after — to be a smart heavyweight, to fight anybody, to be a Christian. It hurt me. I stopped watching the fight after the third round. I had my head down and looked up at the big screen every now and again. I heard the cheers and I knew they weren’t for Evander. My wife said in the fourth round: ‘He’s going to get knocked out’ and I said: ‘I know.’

"James was never a big puncher, and now he’s a big puncher at heavyweight? Come on — that’s age. As an old trainer said: ‘When the lights are out, they never come back on.’ "

But, until this fight, few could have been entirely sure what Holyfield had left. It took Toney to reveal the reality. Now, at 35, Toney has revitalised his career. Toney was masterful, displaying the ring mechanics of the old-time great fighters that he reveres. But was he this good or was Holyfield that bad? Perhaps a bit of both, but Toney, surely, has put himself firmly in the heavyweight picture.

And of course, he was full of himself, even throwing out a word of caution to promoters and managers: "If you’ve got a good young heavyweight, you’d better keep him away from me, because I will ruin him."

Maybe he would at that.

Extra coverage, including Frontline Diary, in November issue