Becoming Holyfield Read Free

ask me that after you’re already late. You gonna do that to people when you’re all grown up, break your word and then try to talk your way out of it?” There was a lesson every time, and she was never unfair. Strict, for sure, but not unfair. She was predictable, too. I can’t remember a time I got a whupping that I didn’t know for sure it was coming. So I pretty much learned early on about making choices and controlling my own life. Don’t want a whupping? Don’t play in that abandoned house when she told you not to. Very simple.
    But, as I said, most important of all was the love. Growing up I never once doubted that my mother loved me, not for a second, even if I was mad at her or she at me. I never once felt that I had to perform or accomplish anything to “earn” her love. It was just there, always. I might do things that made her angry or sad or proud or happy, but nothing I did could affect how much she loved me. It was that, more than anything, that shaped who I eventually became and how I try to treat my own kids.
    I learned a lot of lessons from Mama, about perseverance and keeping your eye on the big picture, about letting go of resentment that could drown you if you let it, and about picking your battles carefully. I learned not to nurse grudges, but to just do what needed to get done and move on. Having goals and working to achieve them wasn’t just some tired cliché Mama read in a magazine somewhere. It was a way of life. Nothing got her dander up worse than hearing excuses for not accomplishing something. That was a lesson that would go to the very heart of how I behaved when I became a boxer. I’ve had more than my fair share of bad calls and bad luck, like being denied an Olympic gold medal and having a piece of my ear bitten off during a fight, but I like to think that I didn’t dwell on them, that I didn’t go crazy and complain, that I figured out how to get past them and move on. It was pretty much always the right way to have done it.
    Sometimes later in life I’d have cause to wonder if maybe I should have been more forthcoming about a setback, like the time I lost a fight because my shoulders were badly injured. But there would have been no way to do it without it sounding like an excuse, so I just let it go. That caused me a lot of problems, including having my boxing license taken away, but you know what? Eventually, it turned out that keeping it to myself was the exact right thing to do, even though it didn’t seem that way at the time. Without Mama having driven all those lessons home, I probably would have given in to the temptation to rant and rave about the unfairness of it all, and not only not accomplished anything by it but made it harder to correct the situation.
    I’ll give you the best example of how strongly Mama stuck to her principles, even when it cost her something to do it. Like I said, I started boxing when I was eight, and she hated it right from the start. She didn’t like the idea of people beating each other up, no matter how controlled and “legitimate” it was. In the environment she’d grown up in, fighting was never a good thing. And what mother can stand the idea of somebody else trying to beat up on her kid? But she didn’t stop me from doing it.
    I didn’t lose a fight until I was eleven, but when I did, to a kid named Cecil Collins, it devastated me. I came home and told Mama I was quitting the sport.
    Big mistake. “You go on back in that ring and beat that boy!” she said. This from a woman who didn’t want me boxing to begin with. “You don’t quit until you do what you set out to do!”
    So I went back and fought Cecil again. And again I lost. “Go back and fight him again!” Mama said.
    I did, and this time I beat him. It felt wonderful, like I’d just climbed Mt. Everest or hit the winning home run in the World Series.
    â€œWell, there