Heart, the unmeasurable, incomparable, undefinable metric in professional boxing and in all of sport that frequently trumps conventional logic and wisdom all the time.
There’s an old saying and it may have some truth to it in that the bookies (sports books) don’t usually get it wrong — they don’t usually.
But if you push them on it boxing and the UFC are two of the sports where they frequently do just purely because of the nature of the sport’s where one punch can change it all but lately the matchmaking being much better with far more competitive fights then years ago.
Underdogs and upsets happen pretty much every week lately, big knockouts that no one saw come happen as well.
Why Evander Holyfield’s Heart Made Him Legendary
That’s the way it goes and is a proof of the great times boxing is in and is now coming into, once again, once more.
Heart however they will also tell you is always, always at the corner of these surprise professional sporting outcomes largely seen in professional boxing more than anywhere else.
Overnight successes happen all the time in professional boxing, a nobody can literally become a world champion over night with an upset, and do, regularly no less.
Evander Holyfield of the US was one of the few fighters to become undisputed cruiserweight and heavyweight champion in his day.
A very difficult feat to achieve and one that very few have done other than him David Haye and the likes of current heavyweight Kingpin Oleksandr Usyk for instance.
He went in with the head a bit too much in some fights, sure, certainly against Mike Tyson he illegally fouled and headbutted Tyson terribly in both fights but overall in his career the man’s heart was relentless, he literally just wouldn’t quit, you had to kill him. He was going out of there on a stretcher or winning.
You can’t measure this level of heart and courage and maybe it is just something some men are born with, it is difficult to see how you can teach heart.
Ricky Hatton said once that when the going gets tough at the highest level of world championship boxing there is nothing training, a coach in the corner and or anyone outside the ring even on the team of a boxer can do for them and when they have to dig down deep like a badger in trench warfare, that heart just has to be in the fighter within himself when the going gets very tough, and he very right.
Holyfield and some others simply would not fold not matter what, in any circumstance, any opponent, there was no breaking him, he refused to quit and believed in himself all the way.
Fighters like this don’t come along often.
