Wild Night

Holyfield seemed to fight better when Bowe was leaking blood. In Round 8 the challenger reopened Bowe's cuts with an uppercut and then smashed him with a furious five-punch volley. Holyfield's blows were starting to move Bowe back, taking away the champion's counterpunches. After Round 9, Steward told Bowe, "We've got to go from here. You've got to take these rounds, and you've got the belt. You can beat him, but you've got to let the punches fly."

The pace and the fury began to catch up with both men, but, as in their first fight, both refused to give in to exhaustion. In the 10th and 11th rounds, Bowe was the aggressor, but Holyfield finished the last 30 seconds of each round with furious rallies, and five of the six scores from those rounds were in his favor. In the 12th the two men hammered each other with the dregs of their strength, attacking until the final bell. Even then they stopped only when Lane grabbed Bowe and Steward raced to protect Holyfield, tripping over an inspector's foot and accidentally tackling his own fighter.

Champion and challenger stood within arm's reach of each other as announcer Michael Buffer read the judges' scores: Chuck Giampa scored the fight 114-114, Jerry Roth had it 115-113, and Pat Jarman had it 115-114. Holyfield thus became only the third man in heavyweight history—Floyd Patterson and Muhammad Ali are the others—to regain his title in a rematch with the man who had taken it from him. Bowe turned and hugged Holyfield. "I was wrong about you," he said. "I am sorry."

There will be a third meeting, but not right away. Each man will have at least one bout in the interim—one for Bowe to repair his confidence, and a defense for Holyfield against either Michael Moorer, the mandatory challenger, or against Lewis, the WBC champion. "I don't know what I will do next," said Holyfield. "I didn't come back to win the title so much as to redeem myself. I didn't come back to win or to get the belt but to prove that one setback didn't make me a bum. My first pro fights I just went home, but my last three fights I went home with knots on my head. That tells me something. But I think I would like to go straight to Lennox Lewis and unify the title."

If the money is right, Moorer might be persuaded to step aside and allow that to happen. In any case it is Bowe's turn to stand in line. "The nicest thing to come out of all this," said Frank Maloney, Lewis's manager, after the bout, "is that now I won't have to have breakfast with Rock Newman."

After the fight Bowe paused only long enough to say that he had been beaten that night by a better man. Then he left for the hospital to be with Judy. From there he went to see Futch, his beloved Papa Smurf, who had been rushed to Valley Hospital after suffering heart palpitations at the end of the fight. Both Judy and Futch were out of the hospital the next day. As Bowe and Holyfield would be the first to say, some things in life are far more important than a fistfight.