Becoming Holyfield Read Free Page A

you go!” Mama said, beaming. “Now you can quit!”
    I didn’t quit—there were some things even my wise mama didn’t understand—but you get the point. If I hadn’t gone back in there and tried again and again, I probably would have spent a large part of my life regretting it. But Mama knew how I’d feel once I won, all proud and happy. Her attitude wasn’t, “See? I was right.” It was, “Don’t you feel good having finished what you started?” It was that feeling that shaped my later approach to life, not the fact that I’d done what Mama asked, and that’s why the lesson was so valuable. It really came from me; Mama just pushed me to get there.
    She had more to do with who I am than any other single person. Carter Morgan ran a close second, but by the time he got to me, my mother had already gotten the train headed down the track.

    Mama was born Annie Laura Riggen in July 1928 in Atlanta. Her grandmother had a very large family that stuck together through the years, so even though Mama only had one brother and no sisters, there were always a lot of kids of various ages running around. It wasn’t until her grandmother passed that Annie Laura realized that one of her sisters was really her aunt. They were the same age and nobody had bothered to explain things.
    Mama got married to Joseph Holyfield when she was fifteen. She took his last name, and after they split up in 1953, she kept it. Shortly after that she moved the family to Atmore, Alabama, to take care of her mother, who’d had a mild stroke. Atmore, a mill town about forty miles northeast of Mobile and two miles from the Florida border, is where she met Isom Coley, a lumberjack who was a gentle man despite being incredibly strong physically. He and Mama made plans to marry, but somehow never got around to it. So when they had me in 1962, her last name was still Holyfield, and that’s the name she passed on to me. Isom and Mama had a falling out before I was born so I grew up without him around, but later on he would come to all my fights and never had a problem with me having a name different from his.
    As for a first name, Mama hadn’t given it much thought before I was born. A friend of hers suggested “Evander” because she’d just read something somewhere about a hero of that name in Roman mythology. He was the son of Mercury, born in Greece with the name Euandros, which means “good man.” He went to what is now Italy and founded a new city on the site where Rome would eventually rise, and became its king, Evander.
    I hated both my names when I was little. They were unusual, and other kids were always cracking wise about them. One of my mother’s girlfriends was called “Chubby,” which my siblings thought was pretty hysterical. Some of them started calling me that because I was as skinny as a pencil. You’d think that “Chubby” was about the rottenest name you could hang on a little kid, but I didn’t mind it at all. It sure beat “Evander.” When I got to school I even insisted the teachers call me Chubby, and most of them did. It still comes back to haunt me once in a while: When I fought my first title bout as a professional, someone scrawled “Nail him, Chubby” on a blackboard in my locker room, and when the ABC cameras showed me warming up, there it was on national television, big as life. I had to explain it during the postfight interview.
    Later in life I came to appreciate my real names more and more, especially as I began to discover my spiritual side. Evander might be an unusual name in the United States, but when I went to the Olympics in Greece in 2004, people loved to open up baby name books and show it to me. I also once visited Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, which was named for a prominent New York educator.
    Our house at 81 King Street in Atmore is still standing today. It amazes me now