Free Becoming Holyfield by Evander Holyfield Page B

altogether. How could I go back and do better next time?
    Could this get any worse?
    â€œIt gets worse,” Nappy said as Sanders undid my helmet.
    I looked at Nappy but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He looked down at my gloves instead. “You’re not going to get your bronze medal,” he said without looking up.
    I turned to Sanders.
    â€œOn account of you being disqualified,” the assistant coach explained. “It’s in the rules.”
    Buddy Davis was sitting ringside and had tears streaming down his cheeks. He knew the rules and had already figured out I wasn’t going to get a medal. I had to look away to stop from crying myself, because as awful as I felt, I still had to go back to the center of the ring for the official announcement. I had to keep it together.
    In the middle of the ring, Novicic took both our hands and the announcer said, “The winner, by disqualification…Kevin Barry!” The ref lifted Kevin’s hand high into the air, turned us both around to face the other way, then walked away, leaving the two of us alone. Kevin immediately raised my arm and said “You won” into my ear, then walked me back to my corner and said the same thing to Nappy and Sanders.
    The enraged crowd was on its feet, people yelling insults and profanities and shaking their fists and flashing thumbs down with both hands. Nappy raised his head slightly, pointing toward something behind me with his chin. “This doesn’t look good,” he said. I turned and saw that Novicic was being escorted out of the arena by guards who surrounded him to stop anyone from getting their hands on him. A crumpled paper cup came flying into the ring, then a few with soda in them and then a couple with ice cubes.
    With the crowd on the edge of a riot, I was one of the few people in the whole place who was staying calm, something that was noted in nearly every one of the hundreds of newspaper articles and television features that would follow in the next few days and months. Writers and commentators talked about my “grace under pressure” and what a level-headed guy I was and how my behavior should make all Americans proud. It was all very nice, and sure made my mother feel good, and also made the whole thing a better story—I was a more sympathetic character than if I’d gone off the deep end and carried on for the cameras—but there was more to it than just good manners.
    It was me being catapulted back in time to 1978, to my bout with Stevie Kirwood. It was me standing in the middle of a boxing ring, a place I’d come to think of as home, but once again finding myself a stranger. I’d overcome poverty and racism in the most poverty-stricken and racist corner of the country, convinced that I’d left injustice far behind, but in less time than it takes to walk across a ring I’d somehow fallen down a mountain and back into the pit. When you get rocked that hard and disoriented that badly, you don’t sit around and plan your response. Conditioning kicks in, like an autopilot, and my conditioning said Behave yourself! I didn’t know what else to do anyway, because in my limited experience there was no precedent for this. I was center stage in what was supposed to be the most honorable, unsoiled arena on earth, an Olympic boxing ring. There were hundreds of pages of detailed rules to ensure fairness, dozens of officials charged with enforcing them and the whole world watching it all. Something like this wasn’t supposed to happen. It couldn’t happen.
    But it had, and in all my mental preparation, all my endless visualizations of every possible outcome, nothing like this had ever entered my imagination. So after nearly two weeks of Olympic excitement and ceremony and speeches and endless talk about high ideals and the glory of pure competition, I found myself in just another smelly little gym in another smelly little city, and me just another