Becoming Holyfield by Evander Holyfield Page B

I wouldn’t have all the information I needed to make a good decision. I reminded him that Mrs. Abercrombie had said her first offer was her final offer, but it didn’t concern him. “I’m not going to ask her for more,” he said. “Just different.”
    Ken went back and suggested to her that she offer me a seven-year, $7 million deal. She thought that was reasonable, but Bob Spagnola, assistant director of her Houston Boxing Association, was there advising her and started shaking his head. “Don’t do it!” he warned. “That kid’ll be like just like the rest of them. You’ll see. As soon as he gets that money he won’t work hard anymore, he’ll get lazy,” and things like that. He wouldn’t let it go, and eventually talked her out of it.
    Ken wasn’t disappointed. He thought I’d make so much money with Main Events that all of this I was thinking about now would be chicken feed. It would just take some time. “The Duvas make champions,” he said, “and champions make money.”
    There was another problem with Abercrombie being both my promoter and my manager. There’s a built-in conflict of interest in that arrangement, because as my manager she was supposed to try to get as much money for me as possible, but as a promoter she’d want to pay me as little as she could get away with. It would be like a baseball player whose agent was also the owner of the ball club he played for. It didn’t make sense, even though in the boxing world it was surprisingly common. Don King spent his whole career promoting fights for the same guys he managed.
    I trusted Ken and believed that he was thinking only of me. I believe it still. One of the first things he did when I decided to turn pro was get some help, because while he was a good businessman, he didn’t know enough about the fight game and wasn’t willing to risk making mistakes that could hurt me. So he sought out one of the best managers in the business, Shelly Finkel, and brought him on as co-manager even though it meant cutting his own commissions in half.
    I took Ken’s advice and went with Main Events, which of course turned out to be a great decision. As soon as I signed the contract, my amateur career was over. In the years following I’d see Josephine Abercrombie often at fights all over Houston, and we stayed good friends. She’d always come up to me and pretend to cry over having lost me. She did go on to produce three champions, including Frank Tate, but she could have had four.

    I made my professional debut at a special “Night of Gold” at Madison Square Garden. They called it that because every fighter on the card had won Olympic gold in the 1984 Games just three months before. Everyone except me, anyway, but Lou Duva was running the show and he put me on the ticket. Just before the first fight of the night, Lou outdid Yogi Berra when he told a reporter, “Tonight is a new day.”
    A manager has to strike a careful balance when setting up a fighter’s first professional bout. On the one hand, he doesn’t want his guy walking into a buzzsaw and having his confidence so badly shaken that he’s ruined forever. On the other, he doesn’t want to face him off against a pushover so that everybody thinks the new guy can’t hack it with a real fighter. What he wants is a serious fight with plenty of challenge so that when his guy wins—and he’s supposed to win—the world sits up and takes notice. It’s a tricky proposition, and when the manager can’t find the perfect opponent, he errs on the side of going easy on his guy.
    Mine was the first bout of the night, and Lou must have worn himself out setting up all of the other matchups by the time he got around to arranging my fight. The guy facing me from the opposite corner was Lionel Byarm, light heavyweight champion of Pennsylvania, and he wasn’t