Becoming Holyfield by Evander Holyfield Page B

meeting in the semis or the finals. He’s tough and he can take a punch. Are you listening, Evander?”
    I guess I must have been smiling. It was hard not to, listening to that famous voice. His mouth was only a foot away from my head but he still sounded like he was delivering a lecture to about nine million people instead of just me. This…O-kel-lo…is good! I loved the way he said my name, too: E…Van…Derholy…FIELD! He made it sound like a whole sentence, or a piece of a song. I assured him that I was listening.
    â€œAll right, then. Go for points. Don’t try to knock him out; it’s too risky. Box the man and get the points!” I nodded politely, kind of thrilled to have such a famous and experienced guy give me advice even though I didn’t plan on taking it.
    The U.S. coaches taped the ABC telecast of the Okello bout and a bunch of us on the team watched it that night. Tell you the truth, we watched it about twenty times, with a lot of whooping and hollering, because two minutes into the first round Howard said on the air, “Only thing that troubled me about what Holyfield said in the prefight interview was that he was looking to put him out early. I’ve stated repeatedly in this competition, in an Olympic boxing tournament you go in to box. You don’t look to load up and knock the opponent out.”
    Twenty-two seconds later I loaded up and knocked the opponent out.
    Howard loved it, and couldn’t stop grinning afterward. I think he actually got a kick out of having been proven wrong. We spoke on the air ringside a few minutes after the fight ended and he said, “I must say, my young friend, you had the opponent absolutely cased, just as you described it in the prefight interview. You went to him and you got him.” I had to bite back my own smile in order to get a response out, and it was caught on camera.
    Cosell had the last few seconds of the fight replayed on the air as we talked and asked me to take him through it. I’d set Okello up with a left jab that pushed his right hand out of the way, then caught him flush in the face with a right. That got him up against the ropes. I threw a quick left jab to keep him off balance, then a hard right to the body and a full-out uppercut to the jaw that sent him sprawling through the ropes. Okello was plenty tough, though: After a few seconds of being in a kind of daze, he untangled himself from the ropes and managed to get to his feet, but by then the count had ended and it was over.
    Howard was right about one thing: Okello was a better fighter than Kevin Barry, my semifinal opponent. I wanted to KO my way to the gold, and was three for three so far, so I was determined to knock Kevin out and very confident that I could.
    It was only too bad Mike Tyson wasn’t there. As much as I liked Henry Tillman personally, I was sorry when Mike lost to him at the trials because it would have been fun to keep our private little competition going. I would have been up on him by one KO when the Olympics began and knew that Mike would have killed himself, not to mention the competition, to even the score.
    Someone came into the locker room and handed Nappy a piece of paper. He looked at it, growled and crumpled it into his pocket.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothin’.” He reached for some tape. “Gimme your hand.”
    I moved my arm away. “Nappy…”
    He blew out a noisy breath and wiggled his fingers toward my arm. As I held out my hand, he said, “Ref’s Yugoslavian.”
    I shrugged. “So what? I’m fighting a guy from New Zealand.”
    â€œYeah, but after you beat him, you fight a Yugoslavian for the gold.”
    Now I understood. There wasn’t a Yugoslavian fight fan alive who wasn’t praying that I’d lose to Kevin Barry today so I wouldn’t fight Anton Josipovic for the gold. Josipovic was a really good fighter, but after my knockout of Okello