Be sure to introduce the notion gently if you find yourself in his presence, but Evander Holyfield is no stranger to bizarre spectacles. So - armed with a Dictaphone, a Kit Kat Chunky and a profound curiosity as to what this living sporting legend would be like in the flesh – an excited yet anxious Sport.co.uk slipped into one of the Leicester Square Radisson Edwardian’s luxurious suites with the wilful intention of creating one of our own. There was the great man, wearing a baseball cap and sitting in a chair in front of a half-eaten burger. A tone of surreal awe, it seemed, had been set.
The only man to win the World Heavyweight title four times, it is a telling measure of mankind’s ceaseless appetite for the absurd that, while your average non boxing fan may not know of Holyfield’s remarkable accomplishments, they may very well remember him as the guy who lost portions of both of his ears to Mike Tyson’s snarling teeth.
Factor in a 1993 fight against Riddick Bowe at Caesar’s Palace that was interrupted by a paraglider and it should perhaps come as little surprise to learn that Holyfield, now 47, will be in Leicester Square this week playing poker against an amateur player from Shropshire who goes by the online username of GutShotRot.
The game will take place as part of this year’s Poker in the Park festival, at which Holyfield will be appearing as a spokesman for RealDealPoker.com, an online poker site that uses real cards rather than random number generators to create hands. Ah – ‘the Real Deal’, Holyfield’s near-ubiquitous nickname – the logic becomes clearer. So, how is his poker face?
“I have that,” Holyfield tells Sport.co.uk in no uncertain terms. “Showing no stress - I was born with that. The ability to make a decision.
“I grew up as a kid playing cards. It’s a fun thing to do, although I’ve never played it online, ever.
“Poker for me is just like boxing; you’ve got to play the hand that you’re dealt. I’ve fought guys who were taller, heavier, smaller, and all these things have something to do with a personal approach to what they have.
“These hands can change all the time, but all hands can be a winning hand. It’s just how much you bet on a hand.
“The whole outlook and strategy for me is [based on] how long am I going to be there.If I stay until the end, then my chances of winning will be greater. If you’re knocked out early, you’re out of there.”
What with the gorgeous weather bronzing smatterings of grateful sunbathers on Leicester Square immediately outside, it seems a shame that our interview is confined to an admittedly plush suite in the Radisson Edwardian. Holyfield, though, is glad to be here all the same.
“I’ve been coming here since the early nineties,” he says of London. “It’s a place away from home where I get the opportunity to be me. I’m a people person so, anywhere I go, eventually I get to know you.
“Expectations change [outside of America] because some tend to think that if you’re good at one thing then you’re good at everything; and we all know that’s not true.”
Inevitably, the conversation soon switches to boxing. How churlish would it be, after all, not to ask a man who defeated such fearsome characters as Mike Tyson and George Foreman one or two questions pertaining to quite how he managed to do it?
“The big thing in life is the truth,” comes his somewhat cryptic response when Sport.co.uk asks him how one goes about mentally preparing oneself for the kind of matchup that would constitute a nightmare in the minds of so many.
“If you can deal with the truth then you can deal with anything. It can make people smaller than they are and it can make people bigger than they are.
“Know what you know but the most important thing is to know what you don’t know: these are the things that give you hope of being the best that you can be at whatever you choose to.
“You have a choice to be intimidated by me. You have a choice not to be. So why be intimidated when you realise that intimidation is a part of fear? You’re afraid of the person.
“There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to lose. Okay, you don’t want to lose, so you should be intimidated. But remember what you’re going to do to offset that.
“You’ve got to practise to the best of your ability; then you know you’ve got a shot. ‘I did practise, I do know how to do this thing’ – that’s your only shot.
“It’s all about decisions that you’re going to make under the circumstances and based on your opponent. You have time.”
Undoubtedly the most notorious opponent of Holyfield’s sparkling record of 43 wins from 55 fights, including 28 knock-outs, is Mike Tyson, whom, Holyfield reasons, was just trying to get out of the ring when he famously bit him on both ears during their 1997 rematch in Las Vegas.
“I was brought up in a neighbourhood where people bailed out,” he explains. “They’d do something and they’d get out. His interior was: ‘I’m a mean man. I’m a bad man.’ He felt he’d lose this image if he quit.
“Regardless of whether you’re a good person or a bad person, quitting is the thing that you don’t do. Even if you’re a good person, people will say, ‘He’s no good, he quit.’ So his thought was, ‘If I foul and get out of here then nobody will know that I quit.’
“He bit me one time but they didn’t get him out of there. They gave him another chance. [Referee] Mills Lane wanted to get him out of there but he listened to the doctor who said, ‘He’s alright.’ So, when he bit me the second time, he knows that he did that on purpose to get out.
“I’m not mad about it but this is what he did. He knows he was trying to get out of there. He didn’t want any more. He knew he wasn’t going to win, and he said, ‘Now, why should I get the daylights beaten out of me?’ He gave up. That’s what it was.”
Giving up is certainly not an attribute that can be attributed to someone who has won four World Heavyweight titles, but which of these triumphs means the most to him now? Holyfield instinctively settles for a diplomatic response to a question that one imagines may be tantamount to asking a mother to pick a favourite child, but he is quick to home in on one title in particular; and, with it, a life philosophy informed by his devout Christianity.
“All of them [meant the most to me], and the reason I say that is because if I never became heavyweight champion of the world then I wouldn’t have been there for the second.” The dust settles fast. “I understand what you’re getting at and the reason I say the third time is because of who I was facing: Mike Tyson.
“Not that Mike Tyson made it that way; the world made it that way. They said, ‘You can’t beat Mike Tyson’, even though I beat the guy that beat Mike Tyson. Mike had shown that he could take people and bust them up: that’s what he’d do, and it’s easy for a person to think that you’re going to do something that you usually do.
“It didn’t matter what I did; people would just say, ‘Mike knocks people out: that’s what he does.’ I understood what they were saying. People looked at me as a good guy and thought, ‘There ain’t no way in the world that a good guy is going to beat a bad guy.’
“They would flat out just tell me: ‘You’re a nice guy, I like you and all that, but Mike Tyson eats people like you for lunch.’ This is what people were saying. I didn’t get mad with them – they had their own opinion. Everyone’s got their own opinion – it’s a freedom of life that you’ve got your own opinion.
“So that’s the reason why it was so thrilling beating him, because the fact of the matter was that they thought a bad man was better than a good man. People think that being nice doesn’t win. People just think you’re acting that way because you want sympathy. They think that if you’re being courteous and nice and respectful, then that’s weak.
“I proved that a guy can act that way [like Tyson] but a nice guy could still beat him up. Shake his hand, then beat him up again, and forgive him: that’s my whole thing, that’s what I tell people. I wasn’t mad with him then and I’m not mad with him today either.”
While on the subject of forgiveness, Sport.co.uk sees fit to ask Holyfield whether he harbours any lingering ill-feeling over the manner in which he was denied victory over ‘Russian Giant’ Nikolai Valuev – and with it a fifth Heavyweight title – by virtue of a highly controversial majority decision by the judges in favour of Valuev.
“Life is about getting over things in this big ol’ world,” he proffers. “You’re always going to have people who cheat, so you might as well get used to them. It’s how you handle it. My whole life has been based on something bad happening but the good part of something bad happening is how you handle it.
“I got cheated at the Olympics; everyone knows I should have won a gold medal but, because I handled myself properly and did the right thing, it gave me a platform in professional boxing. I was on television every time I fought, so that gave me the exposure I needed to jump out and make more money than a lot of fighters.
“I remember when I fought Buster Douglas, he said, ‘Evander came up with a silver spoon in his mouth, he’s been on TV every time he’s fought, he ain’t really fought nobody.’ That was his downplay to me because he had been watching me since I was amateur and he became heavyweight champion of the world before me.
“He made out that I had an easy way, and you know what I told him? I said, ‘When I beat you, that will be easy too.’ I knocked him out in the third round and everybody said, ‘It’s just like he said!’
“Even with the Mike Tyson fight, people talk more about the fight than the money I made from it – I made 35 million dollars in that nine minutes. That was a record itself but no-one knows about it. As a Christian, I forgave him right there and then [for the ear biting]. Not one week later or two weeks later – I forgave him.
“Because of how much I’ve been in the news for beating the daylights out of people, people think I’m a bad person. They think, ‘He can’t control himself.’ But look what these people are doing to me.
“A lot of the time it may look like you’re going to go under but, by doing things right, I’m still in the game. Of all the people who came out of my era, who’s still standing? I am. Ain’t nobody else. Anybody from ’88 still standing? Anybody from ’92? It’s all about how you handle it, and I just try to handle it properly.”
One man who has not handled recent proceedings with the finest knack of judgement is fellow boxer James Toney, whose attempts to move into mixed martial arts resulted in him being administered a resounding beating by Randy Couture last month.
“Yeah, I saw that; he got bust up,” winces Holyfield. “Step out that lane! It’s good to know what you do well and what you don’t do well. It’s like in this poker tournament; I’ll play with you, but I ain’t no challenger and you better believe that I wouldn’t be talking all this noise [like Toney was].
“We’re all professionals. We all have areas in life that we’re good in, and we have an area in which we’re great. The average person’s not going to beat you at what you’re great in.”
Returning swiftly, then, to Holyfield’s area of greatness: will he, as word has had it, be fighting Brian Nielsen next year for the 45 year-old Dane’s comeback bout?
“They spoke to me about it and I’m like, you know, only if it makes sense,” he says. “I don’t do things just to do them and I don’t do things just for money, but I need to stay active for the fights coming around that I want to fight.
“I want to be able to fight David Haye and the Klitschko brothers so the most important thing for me is to stay busy and fight people that will pose problems. But not great problems! (Laughs) I’ve got to fight somebody. I can’t just sit on the shelf and wait until they come and think that I might have a chance when I’m not actually doing the things that I need to do to be the best.”
At this juncture, Sport.co.uk decides to probe Holyfield about some of his notable non-boxing ventures, such as setting up a record company and being credited as the executive producer of little-known 1990 horror flick Blood Salvage.
So what happened to Real Deal Records, home of briefly successful R&B trio Exhale? “It was a great idea because I wanted to give other people the opportunity to sing. Singing is what I would love to do but I just wasn’t born with that gift and I ain’t taking no time to practise!
“I started Real Deal Records so I could be part of it for people who sing and say: ‘Wow, that’s my artist.’ Unfortunately, it’s just like boxing [in that] people were just taking my money, take take take, until the point that it was overbearing. So I had to let it go for right now until I find somebody who’s honest enough to do the right thing.”
Holyfield may not be a singer but an appearance on Strictly Come Dancing revealed that he is quite a nifty mover. “It was my mother,” he explains. “My mother had nine kids and we all had to dance with her, so everybody got their chance to dance to all different kinds of music. Whatever my mama did, that’s what we did. We all danced because we all had good rhythm.”
As for his Blood Salvage credit, Holyfield elucidates: “That was my manager’s son. They gave me the producer credit because I had money. It’s kind of cheap. Everybody thinks it’s because you had something to do with the movie when you just had some money. That’s the only thing that I was involved with.
“In other words, I was part of the sponsoring of the movie. I don’t know anything about making movies. It’s like with the music; people assume you had something to do with putting that record together when it was just your money and that’s it. Then everyone thinks they’ve got to cheese up to you because you can make them a hit.”
Earlier on during our chat, Holyfield attested to earning a staggering 35 million dollars for nine minutes’ work in the ring with Tyson. While on the subject of money, Sport.co.uk could not help but ask what on earth one does with such a sum of money.
“The sad part,” he says, “is that nobody educated you enough to know that, when you have all that money, the government’s going to take a big share of it. Because you’ve got more money, people are drawn to you because they know that you don’t know what to do with the money and, if you’re any type of person trying to be better, then you have to be around somebody who knows something that you don’t know.
“But nobody ever tells you how you know you can trust a person. How do you know this person’s telling the truth? But if you don’t believe anybody then you’ll never get better, because you just know about where you came from and nobody in your family knows about it because they never got as high up as you. So your chances of getting taken in are great because the fact is that you don’t know these things.
“That’s pretty much what happens to a lot of athletes: they came from this background and they’re the only one in their family who’s ever had this [amount of money] so they take more chances. I didn’t start making a lot of bad decisions until I started making more than enough [money]; when I made more than enough, that’s when I started taking chances and that’s when everything really started going down because people were taking advantage.
“They know what you don’t know, but that’s not how they look. A lot of the time, people see the way someone dresses and they think, oh, that’s a criminal, but I found out that there are criminals not dressed up this way. There are corporate America criminals who look and talk a good game, they know how to hide it and they just get your money.
“I read the word of God, which says ‘they come in sheep’s clothing but they’re wolves’. These people who are hard to identify, they come in like they’re just like you, they work hard, they do this, they do everything right, they come from great families and all this; and then, all of a sudden, boom! But you have to forgive them as well. You have to forgive everybody. Forgiveness is the key to overcoming anything.”
To end with, Sport.co.uk thought it could be a nice idea to cushion the impact of the obligatory “how long will you keep fighting for?” question by offering Mr Holyfield one of the ninety-six Kit Kat Chunky bars that were very kindly shipped to the office by KK HQ.
“Well, you know, I take one day at a time,” he says in response to our question about his anticipated remaining lifespan as a boxer. “I’ll fight any day. Tomorrow I may change my mind, but I don’t think so. I’ve got a goal like anybody: my goal is to be the heavyweight champion of the world and the only thing I can say now is that I look forward to it. But I still take one day at a time.”
Evander Holyfield, living legend of the ring, accepted our offer of a Kit Kat Chunky with relish – the condition of appreciation, that is, rather than the condiment – and proceeded to devour it on the spot. The man himself may have spoken of achieving his goals, but there is also something to be said for stopping once in a while to enjoy such an unforeseen tableau as this.
Let it never be said that Evander Holyfield did not gobble our Chunky. A true gentleman, both in and out of the ring.
Evander Holyfield is a brand ambassador for Realdealpoker.com.
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Evander Holyfield will be present at Poker in the Park and if you would like the opportunity to play at Sport.co.uk's tournament simply click here.