By Dan Ambrose: With just five days to go before his 50th birthday, former heavyweight world champion Evander Holyfield (44-10-2, 29 KO’s) is finally thinking about hanging up his boxing gloves and ending his once great career. He’s unable to get the big fights that he wants and his bouts against 3rd aging fighters aren’t giving him the attention that he wants to get from fans.
Holyfield still thinks he can beat the Klitschkos, which is kind of incredible given how poor Holyfield has looked recently. Holyfield hasn’t fought since last year in May when he stopped Brian Nielsen in the 11th round and it’s looking like Holyfield won’t fight at all in 2012.
Speaking with BBC Sport, Holyfield said “Right now I’m winding it down. I can’t get the fights I want. I haven’t made it official but the time is coming that I will. I don’t have much fight left in me…I believe I could beat the Klitschko brothers, even at soon to be 50.”
Holyfield says he wishes the Klitschko brothers would just give him a shot at the title for old times sakes for the things that he’s accomplished. That won’t happen, though, because the Klitschkos say they respect Holyfield too much to fight him. They don’t want to be punching a living legend, especially one that’s as old as he is.
Holyfield says he doesn’t want to have to go through the long ordeal of working himself into a position to get a title shot against the Klitschkos by beating younger heavyweights in their 20s and early 30s.
That’s wise of Holyfield because he would have to beat a number of decent heavyweights to get into position to where the Klitschkos would have to fight him, and that would take a long time, possibly as long as two years before the sanctioning bodies rank him high enough to where he’s the mandatory challenger. Holyfield would be near 52 by then, and Vitali Klitschko likely will have been long retired. That makes it not even worth it.
But the chances of Holyfield of fighting his way back into a title shot are probably next to impossible now because he’s no longer fighting at a high level. Holyfield looked terrible against Nielsen, and was staggered in his fight before that by cruiserweight Sherman Williams in January 2011. That fight was stopped on a cut but it looked like Holyfield was on his way to losing at the time of the cut stoppage.
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