He’s Always Ready to Dance All Night

LAS VEGAS —  Evander Holyfield is no name for a prizefighter. A character in “The Pickwick Papers,” perhaps. A federal judge in Chillicothe. A minor British poet. It’s just a little bit better than Algernon.

Fighters used to be named Tuffy Griffith, K.O. Christner, Battling Battalino, Roughhouse Carmody. Norman Selby knew better than to fight under that name. He became Kid McCoy.

Even the less warlike names had a nice ring to them--Honeyboy Finnegan, Mushy Callahan. You think Jake Lamotta would have scared anybody if his name had been Clarence? Dempsey didn’t even care for William Harrison, his real handle. He became Jack.

They don’t even have nicknames anymore. No more Belting Brakemen, no more Astoria Assassins, Manassa Maulers. And how would you like to climb into the ring with a guy known as the Brown Bomber? The Fargo Express wasn’t too reassuring, either.

To tell you the truth, Evander Holyfield doesn’t even look like a proper pug. A claims adjuster, maybe. An undertaker.

He looks too sad. He has the look of a guy who’s come to tell you how much your car repair bill is going to be. Kind of sympathetic, to tell you the truth.

He’s supposed to be easy to hit, but you’d never know it from his face. He can hear just fine out of both ears. His nose isn’t broken, his teeth are his own and when he talks, he doesn’t sound as if he is being strangled. Hollywood would never cast him as a pug.

Even the fight mob has its doubts. He’s too little, too slow. He can’t hit hard enough, they assure you through their cigar stubs. Louis would of taken him out in a round, they growl.

Maybe so, but Louis isn’t around. And nobody ever called Buster Douglas the Brown Bomber.

If Evander Holyfield is so deficient, how come nobody has ever beaten him? Lots of people have beaten Buster Douglas. The only major heavyweight that never lost a fight was Rocky Marciano. Gene Tunney only lost one in his pro career.

Evander must be doing something right. And what he’s doing right is coming into the ring in shape. He may not be as fanatic as Marciano or as meticulous as Tunney, but Evander Holyfield will never run out of gas in the seventh round--or even the 11th. You better come ready to fight. He doesn’t make your work easy for you. Evander doesn’t mind bleeding a little bit. He can stand suffering. Such people are dangerous.

Evander is leaving very little to chance, anyway. Pugilism used to be a simple business. All you needed in your corner was someone to stop the bleeding and someone to stand there with a pail and say, “He can’t hurt us!” All Jack Johnson needed was a bus ticket and a toothbrush. Dempsey just needed a shave.

Holyfield has, in the order of their appearances: 1) a strength coach, 2) a conditioning coach, 3) a stretch coach, 4) an endurance coach, 5) a swimming coach.

There’s even a ballet teacher, if you can believe it. Evander seems to think he’s either getting ready for a channel swim or Swan Lake. If a fighter needs entrechats, he’s in big trouble. It’s a great part for Maria Ouspenskaya or even Shirley MacLaine, but a prize fight can’t be choreographed--or, at least, so one hopes. There have been, to be sure, some that were.

Presumably, Evander would learn to sing Carmen if it would help him against Buster Douglas. But there are those who think he should just practice getting up. Buster is big, mean and he has a proper name for a fighter.

The fight at the Mirage here Thursday night should have its moments. Persistence is a word not often applied to the champion, Douglas, but it appears to be Holyfield’s long suit.

Buster, it has been reported, doesn’t seem to have hired a lot of conditioning coaches. Buster appears to think he is getting ready to play a department store Santa Claus. Buster, they claim, got ready for only one fight in his entire career, the Mike Tyson fight. And that was so he wouldn’t get killed.

Evander will fight you three minutes of every round, but since he will be giving several inches in height and reach to his opponent, he probably should hire a long-jump coach, too.

Evander’s problem is he’s as easy to hit as a parked truck. Evander lets his head take care of itself while he goes to work on your body. To date, that has worked fine. Evander has never been knocked off his feet. But it’s one thing to stand up to the flurries of Dwight Muhammad Quawi and quite another to absorb the blows of the man who knocked Mike Tyson out.

The qualitative difference does not seem to have affected the Vegas oddsmakers, who have installed Holyfield as an 8-5 favorite. They are apparently more impressed with a guy who gets ready for a fight the way the Bolshoi gets ready for Tchaikovsky than a guy who just needs a napkin, a knife and a fork.

One of the hoariest axioms of the fight game has it that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. But there was the unsung hero who didn’t believe that.

“No,” he said, shaking his head gravely. “The bigger they are, the harder they hit.”