By Richard Hoffer

The machinery of menace ground to a halt last Saturday. Just like that, Mike Tyson's dangerous leer was wiped from his bloodied face. He wasn't so tough. He wasn't that tough. These things can be discovered very suddenly. You could almost hear the clanking in the desert air, the train cars piling into one another as this engine of fear was wrenched to a standstill.

Rise and Fall of Mike Tyson SI Writers • DR. Z: McBride used strategy to beat Tyson Photo Galleries • The long, strange journey of Mike Tyson • McBride stops Tyson after six rounds in D.C. Tyson Facts • Fight-by-fight results | Year-by-year chronology SI Flashback • NACK: Tyson aims to be youngest champ ever • HOFFER: Tyson shocked by Douglas in Japan • HOFFER: Tyson hits new low against Holyfield SI Flashbacks 1986: Ready to Soar to the Very Top 1986: Getting a Belt Out of Life 1987: Only One No. 1 1988: The End of the Trail SI EXTRA 1988: Who Owns the King? 1988: "I'm Gonna Hurt This Guy" 1990: KO'd! 1991: Firefight 1991: Where There's Fire? 1992: A Crushing Verdict 1995: Second Chance 1995: Con Job 1996: One Down ... 1996: Zero Tolerance 1996: Real Deal 1997: Feeding Frenzy 1999: Sudden Impact 2000: Quitting Time 2002: All The Rage

An economic empire had been built on Tyson's ability to paralyze opponents as much with his dark stare as with his ripping uppercut. Four times since his release from prison in March 1995, he had immobilized a foe, the job done long before the two boxers entered. It was a little disappointing, of course, when a so-called heavyweight champion fainted at the whiff of a left hook, as Bruce Seldon did two months ago. Still, these bouts had a perverse entertainment value. They were no longer sport. They were a spectacle of humiliation. And the promoters, even the fighter himself, smirked over the disturbing secret of their box-office power. "Thirty million a whop," Tyson said smugly. To see a guy give up his manhood.

It was a hateful thing, but there was no stopping it. The heavyweights were lined up from here to there. Tyson, untested in these four fights, was nevertheless assigned the ability to destroy all comers. The quickness of his bouts guaranteed his invincibility. There was no question that Evander Holyfield, too, would be run over on Saturday at Tyson's home court casino, the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Perhaps Holyfield's confidence would not be shattered, as the others' had been, but he was certain to be consumed by Tyson's terrible force.

In fact, various agencies had worked mightily to diminish their culpability in the event of the worst-case calamity. The Nevada State Athletic Commission forced Holyfield, who was once told that he had a heart condition, to go through a battery of medical exams. A pay-per-view retailer offered its customers a by-the-round price so that fans would not blame cable TV too much for another one-round blowout.

Holyfield, 34, though used up by years of hard fighting and only 4-3 in his last seven bouts, was nonetheless an overachiever who might endure just long enough to offer the fans a colorful palette of gore in the WBA title bout. Tyson, 30, apparently stronger and stronger as his comeback progressed, would cut through this man whom he had been picked to beat when this bout was scheduled to take place five years ago, then postponed by a training injury to Tyson and later canceled by Tyson's rape conviction. As late as the boxers' walk to the ring on Saturday night, there was nothing to make you feel that Holyfield could join Muhammad Ali as the only three-time world heavyweight champion. Holyfield sauntered in to a soft ballad, singing along quietly. Tyson, preceded by his professional yeller, Crocodile, arrived at a gallop. He gave the impression of barely controlled anger, a desire to hurt that had found a satisfying and legal venue.

Not even what had happened in Tokyo six years ago, when an out-of-shape Tyson succumbed to Buster Douglas, prepared you for what happened next. Douglas-Tyson, called one of the biggest upsets in sports history, can always be explained away by Tyson's lack of conditioning and desire. In this bout he suffered no lapse of preparation, no diminished lust for violence.

Tyson and Holyfield met in the center of the ring at the opening bell and engaged in the kind of furious combat that no heavyweight fight fan had seen in years. They swung wildly and then collapsed into clinches, shoved each other away and finally resumed battle as the cycle began again. It was breathtaking, especially when it became clear that Holyfield would not be flattened by Tyson's straight-ahead fusillades. Suddenly Holyfield, the built-up cruiserweight, seemed formidable at 215 pounds, his 77 1/2-inch reach putting him out of range of Tyson's 71 inches.

In the second round Holyfield, who is not known as a big puncher, hit Tyson with a left hand that seemed to stagger him. At the end of the round Tyson paused on his way to his corner and looked at Holyfield as if puzzled. In fact he was, as he admitted later, "blacked out." The fight went eight more rounds, until referee Mitch Halpern stopped it less than a minute into the 11th, but afterward Tyson could recall none of them. For everyone else the bout was unforgettable. Holyfield's constant pressure was a welcome sight after the weak-kneed efforts of Tyson's previous opponents, but the challenger was providing something more than action. By crowding in, he was taking away Tyson's hook, which is more effective from outside, and generally he was keeping Tyson too occupied to put together more than two punches.

Tyson was always a threat, of course, and in the fifth round he unleashed a right to Holyfield's body and an uppercut to his chin, reminding everyone of his power. But Tyson was plainly befuddled, strangely ineffective. The two fighters would clash, tie up and get broken apart by the referee, and there Holyfield would be, still standing in front of Tyson.

Later Tyson would say he remembered nothing from the third round on. Not the sixth round, when Holyfield opened a small cut above Tyson's left eye with an unintentional head butt and then decked him with a left hand as 16,325 people chanted Holyfield's name. Tyson was definitely in trouble. In the seventh he kept looking to Halpern, complaining about head-butting. And later in that round he rushed Holyfield face-first and inadvertently smashed his left eye into Holyfield's shaved head. Tyson gasped in pain, stood straight up and appealed to the ref again.

A sense that Holyfield really could win swept the crowd, and chants of "Let's go, Mike!" were squashed by choruses of "Holy-field!" Tyson tried trading punches with Holyfield in the 10th, but that turned ugly for him when Holyfield hit him with a powerful combination, followed shortly by a right to the head and, with eight unanswered punches, backed him into the ropes. In all, Holyfield hit Tyson 23 times in the 10th. It had been a long time since anyone had seen Tyson saved by the bell.

The fight was effectively over, but it went 37 seconds into the 11th round, when a big right to Tyson's head slammed him into the ropes again and Halpern embraced him in protection. "I don't remember that round," Tyson would say. "I got caught in something strange."

Tyson, though dangerous even in his cloudy state, was completely dominated by a fighter who had been, by the consensus of the boxing world, shot. Tyson's attempts to bore in were preempted by right hands from Holyfield. "I've been watching him for years and years," said Holyfield, who goes back with Tyson to the early '80s, when the two were fighting as amateurs. "And when he dips and throws a left hook, either you get hit or you hit him first with a right hand. You have to beat him to the punch."

In truth, though, that didn't seem a masterpiece of strategy. It had long been observed that by hitting Tyson first you could make him pause, derail his reflexes a bit. But his fists were so fast and his power so enormous that making him pause briefly only delayed the inevitable briefly.

Outcomes such as Saturday's are a mystery. They cannot be explained by ring adjustments or training procedures. It's true that before this fight Holyfield worked much longer than he usually does, up to 16 weeks instead of the normal six or so, and much smarter, employing a Tyson look-alike named Gary Bell for quick-burst sparring. But there's no reconciling Holyfield's performance with his increasingly uneven career, which had many of his followers calling for his retirement.

Shelly Finkel, who quit as Holyfield's manager when Holyfield refused to hang up the gloves after losing his title to Michael Moorer in 1994, said last week that there were only two types of fighters who could beat Tyson: big punchers and big men. Holyfield is neither. "But he has a great ability to rationalize," Finkel said. "I believe he believes he will find a way in the ring."

Moorer's trainer, Teddy Atlas, who helped train Tyson during Tyson's amateur days, said three days before Saturday's bout that Holyfield rationalizes too much and too often. Referring to Holyfield's contention that "a tiny hole" in his heart, diagnosed by doctors after the Moorer fight (a diagnosis later reversed by doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and the Emory Clinic in Atlanta), was cured by televangelist Benny Hinn, Atlas said, "No offense to anyone's beliefs, but that does say something about the guy's ability to deal with reality."

Atlas was also concerned about Holyfield's mileage. His three fights with Riddick Bowe were wars and might have taken their toll. "I hate to say this," Atlas continued, "but he looked almost talentless in his last fight, against Bobby Czyz [last May]. I have a lot of wonderment about what I didn't see in that fight." The Nevada commission wondered enough to run Holyfield through the Mayo Clinic but, as reluctant as it was to permit this bout, had to go along with the clinic's findings, which showed Holyfield to be in good health.

Holyfield was unperturbed by the fuss. He is literally a self-made man, having built himself into a heavyweight, and consequently he has a calm confidence that he can perform any task put before him. Also, he has a faith in God that can be maddening to those who believe God might not be a boxing fan in general or a Holyfield fan in particular. "This fight is blessed," he said five days before the bout, meaning Evander Holyfield is blessed.

Holyfield believes that his boxing success is a good platform from which to spread the gospel. Before Saturday he believed that people would watch the fight thinking, I want to see what God is going to do for him against Tyson. "I will beat Mike Tyson," Holyfield told one interviewer. "There is no way I cannot, if I just trust in God. God is that good."

If this faith is irksome to some -- Tyson, for example, wondered why God would shine on one side of the street and not the other -- it can be comical to others. During the Philadelphia revival meeting at which he allegedly healed Holyfield's heart, Hinn also told the divorced Holyfield that his future wife was at the same meeting. Sure enough, Janice Itson, who was there, became Holyfield's wife last month. They share his 54,000-square-foot house in suburban Atlanta, the care of his six children and, apparently, simple tastes. After they were married in a small private ceremony, they celebrated with dinner at Shoney's.

In the end it seemed things other than Holyfield's religious faith were at the core of his success in this fight. Principally, there was Holyfield's huge-hearted determination. He prays a lot, but he doesn't leave it at that. His work ethic is renowned, his capacity for concentration phenomenal. And he has focused on Tyson almost his whole boxing life.

Holyfield says he knew in 1984, when he and Tyson were trying to make the U.S. Olympic team, that they were destined to meet in the ring. Back then Tyson was the heavyweight sensation and Holyfield the light heavyweight. As they stormed through the ranks, it was natural to wonder if they'd ever fight each other.

Holyfield's respect and affection for Tyson date back to that time. He recognized the lisping 17-year-old as an outcast, a little like himself, the Georgian everybody called Country. Both fighters were ridiculed by the other Olympic hopefuls. Holyfield, however, saw how hard Tyson worked--"Nobody worked harder," he says. He befriended Tyson and, on one memorable day, sparred with him. That session was cut short when the coach saw how hard they were going at each other.

Tyson became the more famous fighter, and although Holyfield became wealthy from bouts against George Foreman and Bowe, among others -- earning more than $100 million -- he always yearned to prove himself against the man he considered the best. "When Mike went away, I lost my desire," he said after the bout, referring to Tyson's three years in jail. "After that, nobody really got me up to fight." With Tyson back, the desire was rekindled.

But what of Tyson? He is proving to be increasingly mysterious. There's still the fierce persona that he trots out from time to time. He'll show selected interviewers -- Roseanne, for instance -- his Nevada house, with its statues of Genghis Khan and Hannibal, and for the sake of news footage he'll roughhouse with his pet white tiger, Kenya, who weighs more than 200 pounds. But another side to him is growing dominant. In a wide-ranging discussion with boxing writers in Las Vegas four days before the fight against Holyfield, Tyson was relaxed, more pragmatic than pathological, almost suburban.

He can change diapers in a pinch, he said, but otherwise he isn't sure what kind of father he can be to three daughters, including one with his girlfriend, Monica Turner, a graduate of Georgetown University's medical school. "I know I've got to tell them what I did was bad," he said, "but I'm not looking forward to looking like an ass in front of my kids." He is becoming the kind of citizen who boasts that he is the first generation of his family not on welfare. Yet as a paroled felon, he can't vote or escape his past. He can't make sense of that past, either. "I'd like to think I was the way I was because of financial reasons," said Tyson, "and I'd like to think it was because of environmental reasons, but I don't really believe that."

He is clearly at odds with himself. Sitting in promoter Don King's house in Vegas, with Mozart piano music playing in the background, he didn't seem like much of a monster. He was just a guy who was stretched a little thin. His pride in his achievements couldn't quite crowd out the disappointments of his past. He said his life is over; from now on it's just a matter of providing for his children. He seemed tired. "All I know is that Saturday I'll pick up $30 million," he said, "then Monday I'll sign up for another $30 million."

It was a joyless approach. "I'm just here to render my services," he said. That was before Saturday, when his life got a little less joyful.

Well, someday he will surely sign up for another $30 million, perhaps in a rematch with Holyfield, who earned $11 million on Saturday and stands to make more by fighting Tyson again than by taking on any other opponent. But after losing the fight, Tyson, his forehead bruised purple, suddenly seemed a pitiful sight, almost as frightening in his new mortality as he had been in his invincibility. Turned out he wasn't monstrous at all--just another working stiff, just a guy who might not like his job so much anymore. Asked if he would come back from this defeat, he spread his hands and said he had to. "I make so much money to fight," he said, "how can I not come back?"

It seemed like a question he had already asked himself, not liking the answer then, either.

Issue date: November 18, 1996