AMERICA AT LARGE/George Kimball: Evander Holyfield, who has climbed out of more coffins than Bela Lugosi, will be looking to turn back the clock once again this weekend. When the 40-year-old warrior meets Chris Byrd in an Atlantic City ring on Saturday night, he will be in search of an unprecedented fifth world heavyweight championship, and while all signs point to a notably ugly fight, it is one Holyfield has a chance to win.
Exactly how Holyfield, and, for that matter, Byrd, came to be fighting for the International Boxing Federation version of the heavyweight belt is a tale more interesting than the match-up itself.
A few months ago, Byrd, rated the number one contender by the American-based organisation, looked the mandatory challenger for Lennox Lewis. Byrd is a light-punching heavyweight with an elusive defensive style who probably couldn't have hurt Lewis, but possesses the capability to make him look awfully silly.
Since no television network was knocking down the door to televise that one anyway, promoter Don King insinuated himself into the picture. King chased Lewis down in Ghana, and by promising him a million dollars, persuaded him to resign rather than defend the IBF belt.
This, in turn, allowed two King-promoted contenders to battle it out for the vacant title, and presented King with the pretext for a grandiose announcement of what he is advertising as a "Heavyweight Championship Series - presented by Lennox Lewis."
Holyfield-Byrd Saturday night is the first step, with John Ruiz's March 1st defence against Roy Jones, the undisputed light-heavyweight champion, the second. The suggestion is that the winners of these two title bouts would meet sometime in 2003, and the vague implication that the survivor emerging with those two belts would face Lewis for the undisputed world title.
Neither Ruiz nor Jones nor Holyfield nor Byrd is committed to this plan, of course, and King doesn't even have the promotional rights to Lewis.
Lewis's role as "presenter" will be exactly that - he has agreed to serve on the television broadcast team for both Saturday night's IBF title fight and Ruiz-Jones in March.
Holyfield is 2-2-2 in his last six fights, and while Byrd's will-o-the-wisp tactics aren't exactly suited to his own rough-housing style, history has shown that some of Holyfield's best performances have come when he's been all but counted out.
Originally, Holyfield was supposed to be a caretaker champion, having been the guy who got the first crack at Buster Douglas. The expectation was that Holyfield's reign would last just about as long as it took Mike Tyson to get into the ring with him, but then Tyson went away to prison.
Holyfield spent a couple of years beating up elderly former champions Larry Holmes and George Foreman, and once he lost his title to Riddick Bowe we figured we'd never see him again, but, after looking absolutely dreadful against Alex Stewart, he beat Bowe in a rematch.
HE lost his title to Michael Moorer and was thought to be permanently retired on medical grounds. Although his "non-compliant left ventricle" miraculously healed, he looked positively awful against Ray Mercer, Bowe, and Bobby Czyz. So bad, in fact, that Tyson agreed to fight him.
Holyfield knocked Tyson out once and was on the way to doing it again before Mike took to gnawing on his ears and got disqualified.
A controversial draw with Lewis, followed by a loss in the rematch, appeared to have ended his championship pretensions but in 2000, after Lewis was stripped of the WBA title, Holyfield found himself fighting for another belt, this time against Ruiz.
He won the first time, though the decision was so hotly disputed a rematch was immediately ordered. The second time around Ruiz knocked him down and left no doubt about the outcome, and when the finale of their trilogy produced a lacklustre draw, we were sure we'd seen the last of Evander Holyfield.
Back he came last summer to defeat another former champion, Hasim Rahman, to set up this latest assault on a championship. The Rahman verdict, by the way, was a technical draw, produced when Holyfield nutted his foe and produced a hematoma the size of a grapefruit on Rahman's forehead.
Tyson, you will recall, tried to defend the cannibalism he enacted on Holyfield's ears by claiming that he was retaliating for repeated head-butts Holyfield had laid on him. Since Holyfield had also been conspicuously penalised for punching Ruiz to the scrotum in their second fight, latter-day experts have recently detected that there might be a pattern to all of this mischief.
"First I was too small. Then I was too old. Now I'm too dirty?" Holyfield jokes about it. "It's not a good thing to hear, but you do hear. I used to tell people that it didn't bother me, but in fact, it did.
"Before the Tyson fight, how many people called me a dirty fighter? Nobody," pointed out Holyfield. "Then, everybody got the ref looking at me, and all of a sudden I started getting hit by shots because I was sitting there trying not to be a dirty fighter."
In Byrd, he will for once be fighting a man approximately his own size. When Byrd won the silver medal at the 1992 Barcelona Games it was at 165lb. He made his professional debut as a super-middleweight, and added the weight only gradually. The supposition is that if either tops 220lb at today's weigh-in it will be an upset.
Holyfield, by the way, supposes that Saturday night's encounter could prove to be more spectator-friendly than it looks on paper.
"I've been watching tapes of Byrd's fights," said Holyfield. "I never thought he'd fight the Klitschko boys the way he did. They were a lot bigger than him, but he charged them!"
Still, it is worth noting that when Holyfield was asked about Byrd immediately after the Rahman fight, his answer was an unequivocal "NO".
"Yeah," admitted Holyfield. "But when they asked about fighting Byrd it wasn't a fight for the title. Why should I fight Byrd if it's not a title shot? My goal is to fight for this title, and my ultimate goal is to retire as the undisputed heavyweight champion - again."
