Current Biography Excerpts: Boxing

Current Biography Excerpts: Boxing

To view an excerpt from the Current Biography profile, choose from the list of names.

BOWE, RIDDICK
FOREMAN, GEORGE
HEARNS, THOMAS
HOLYFIELD, EVANDER
KING, DON
TYSON, MIKE

BOWE, RIDDICK
(boh) BOWE, RIDDICK
(boh)
Aug. 10, 1967- Boxer.

While the World Boxing Organization (WBO) heavyweight title has not heretofore commanded a great deal of attention among fans of the fight game, the same cannot be said for the man who currently holds it. The six-foot five-inch Riddick Bowe, the possessor of a lethal right hand as well as the most irrepressible sense of humor of any heavyweight champ since Muhammad Ali, won the undisputed world championship when he defeated Evander Holyfield in the fall of 1992. In the year that followed, he took on an unofficial role as boxing's goodwill ambassador, contributing money and labor to relief efforts in Somalia and lending his voice to the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa. After losing to Holyfield in 1993, Bowe began to fight his way back toward boxing's center stage, picking up the WBO title in the process. In November 1995 he successfully defended his crown against Holyfield, completing a trio of fights that have been compared, for their savage artistry, to the three classic battles between Ali and Joe Frazier that took place in the 1970s. Having observed another of Bowe's title defenses earlier in that year, Gerald Eskenazi of the New York Times (June 19, 1995) wrote, "Every person in boxing knows that Bowe, right now, is the best."

The complete article can be found in the June 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM (to be released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

Search for another athlete

FOREMAN, GEORGEFOREMAN, GEORGE
Jan. 10, 1949- Boxer; minister.

On November 5, 1994, at the age of forty-five, George Foreman defeated Michael Moorer to become the oldest heavyweight champion in boxing history, regaining the title he had lost twenty years earlier and completing a quest that, in the view of some observers, defied the laws of nature. In 1987, when he began his boxing comeback after a ten-year absence from the ring, Foreman was routinely dismissed as too old and out of shape to have a prayer of winning the heavyweight crown, and some boxing aficionados feared that he would not survive the attempt. But Foreman, who, when he first held the heavyweight title, was known for his mercilessness in the ring and his belligerent demeanor outside it, disarmed his critics with self-deprecating humor about his age and eating habits and with an ever-lengthening string of victories.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1995 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete

HEARNS, THOMASHEARNS, THOMAS
Oct. 18, 1958- Prizefighter.

The World Boxing Council super-welterweight champion Thomas Hearns is a knockout artist who is as crafty as he is rangy. Six feet one-and-a-half inches tall and possessing an seventy-eight-inch reach, quick hands, and a whip-like, paralyzing right, Hearns rose from Detroit's black ghetto to dominate prizefightings lighter divisions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Beginning as a flyweight and bantamweight, he won 155 of his 163 amateur bouts. In thirty-seven fights as a professional, he has been defeated only once, by Sugar Ray Leonard, when he, Hearns, then the W.B.C. champion, and Leonard, then the World Boxing Association champ, met to unify the world welterweight title. Hearns took the W.B.C. crown in the 154-pound class (the super-welterweight, sometimes called the junior middleweight) from Wilfredo Benitez in 1982, and he successfully defended his title against Murray Sutherland in 1983, bringing his pro record to 36-1, with thirty-two KO's. He is now setting his sights even beyond the middleweight division, on the light-heavyweight championship.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1983 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete

HOLYFIELD, EVANDERHOLYFIELD, EVANDER
Oct. 19, 1962- Boxer.

On November 6, 1993, fifty-one weeks after losing the heavyweight boxing championship of the world to Riddick Bowe, Evander Holyfield became only the third heavyweight fighter to regain his title by defeating the man who dethroned him. The day after Holyfield lost the title, in November 1992, he telephoned the new champion to congratulate him, and according to Pat Putnam of Sports Illustrated (November 23, 1992), Bowe responded by telling Holyfield, "You always were a class act." Holyfield's first reign as king of the boxing world was distinguished by his disciplined and dignified behavior, which was a refreshing contrast to the bravado and the questionable conduct often associated with many of the sport's prominent personalities. Holyfield's rise to the heavyweight championship of the world was a study in patience and determination. After spending a brief period as a light heavyweight, he moved up to the cruiserweight division, and less than two years after his first professional bout, he won a share of the cruiserweight title. He unified the cruiserweight titles of boxing's three sanctioning bodies two years later, then decided to vie for the astronomical amounts of money offered in heavyweight title fights.

With a natural body weight well below the range prescribed for heavyweights, Holyfield underwent an arduous bodybuilding program to gain the heft needed to compete, yet he was still smaller than the men he faced. After two years in the top division he defeated James ("Buster") Douglas for the undisputed heavyweight crown, in October 1990. Holyfield has pocketed $90 million over the course of his career, during which he has compiled a record of thirty (twenty-two by knockout) victories and only a single loss. Asked about the huge purses for heavyweight fights, Holyfield told Budd Schulberg for Parade magazine (October 27, 1991), "It's not really all that money for twelve rounds or less. What it means is all the work I've put in in the past that is finally adding up to being paid off--big."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1993 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete

KING, DONKING, DON
Dec. 6, 1932- Boxing promoter.

"There ain't no others like me," booms Don King, who bills himself as "The World's Greatest Promoter," and with good reason, since he is indisputably the most powerful promoter in boxing today. King's flamboyant public image is marked by his wild hairdo, flashy jewelry, and evangelical monologues embellished with quotations from Shakespeare and other literary immortals. A former numbers czar from Cleveland, Ohio, who was once convicted for manslaughter, he suddenly became a millionaire about two years after his release from prison. Beginning in 1974 with the George Foreman-Ken Norton fight in Caracas, Venezuela, King set the scene for such pugilistic extravaganzas as the Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle," the Ali-Frazier "Thrilla in Manila," the Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney "The Pride and the Glory," and the doubleheader "The Crown Affair." In his ten-year career as a boxing entrepreneur, Don King has shifted control of the power structure from the traditional white brokers to black entrepreneurs, has expanded the perimeters of the sport to the Third World, and has raised many millions for prizefighters.

Since the days when he promoted the career of Muhammad Ali, Don King has signed up "almost as many world champions and contenders," as one sportswriter has noted, "as the rest of the world combined." His stable has included Greg Page, Michael Dokes, Victor Galindez, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Wilfredo Gomez, Leon Spinks, Aaron Pryor, and Larry Holmes. Most of the major fights in the last decade have been promoted by King and his closest competitor, Robert Arum. When asked in a Penthouse interview (January 1984) whether it is true that he and Arum control boxing promotion in the United States, the controversial King, whose operations are constantly under investigation, responded: "We put on the most promotions because we work hard at what we do.. . . You have to deliver. I'll deliver, Bob Arum will deliver. And the rest of them will fall short."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1984 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete

TYSON, MIKETYSON, MIKE
June 30, 1966- Boxer.

In his sunset years, the late legendary fight manager and trainer Cus D'Amato returned from obscurity long enough to rescue a tough and troubled ghetto kid named Mike Tyson from a New York State reformatory. Under D'Amato's prot‚g‚ Kevin Rooney, Tyson went on to become the heavyweight champion who is now bringing back to prizefighting the excitement missing from pugilism since Muhammad Ali's retirement. "Iron Mike" became the youngest heavyweight champion in history when, at twenty, he won the World Boxing Council (WBC) title in November 1986. He added the World Boxing Association (WBA) title to his laurels in March 1987, and his claim to the heavyweight crown became undisputed when he took the International Boxing Federation (IBF) crown as well, in August 1987. Admirers of heavyweight contender Michael Spinks, among other naysayers, may denigrate Tyson's style and attribute his success in part to the mediocrity of his opponents, but other ring observers regard Tyson as the angriest, most devastating puncher since Rocky Marciano. At five feet eleven-and-a-half inches and 215 pounds, Tyson is compact by today's heavyweight standards, but he discourages and demolishes his taller, longer-armed opponents with his aggressiveness, speed, and combinations. Tyson has won all of his thirty-five professional fights, thirty-one of them by knockouts.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1988 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete