Earn It: A Look Back at the War Between Evander Holyfield and Michael Dokes

[thenonpareil]

Thus, in early 1989, Holyfield was out to prove that he could still be considered “The Real Deal” at heavyweight, when he was matched with yet another “Lost Generation” veteran and one-time WBA titlist in “Dynamite” Michael Dokes. This was not the first or the last time in his illustrious career that Holyfield would enter the ring with questions to answer. That Dokes was the man to be asking them was a minor miracle in itself. No fighter from the “Lost Generation” era more closely resembled an F. Scott Fitzgerald character than Dokes, who spent much of the 1980s fleeing a head-splitting comedown on whiskey and cocaine. Dokes, Akron, Ohio, had won his slice of heavyweight gold in slightly fortuitous fashion in December 1982, when his first-round blitzkrieg against Mike Weaver resulted in a premature stoppage by referee Joey Curtis. Already with a penchant for mink, Dokes’s life went straight from vaudeville to burlesque. Suddenly rich and famous, Dokes now acquired a taste for cocaine that was practically insatiable: he once told Ron Borges that he had done two kilos in nine months, “enough to kill a rhino and a good part of the jungle.” “I used to pour it out on a piece of paper on the floor like you would pour flour,” Dokes told Borges in 1989. “I’d pour it out until it looked good. When it did, I’d stop pouring. Sometimes I’d stay up six, seven days on what I poured. I’d been a casual user since I was 15, but when I didn’t care about boxing anymore, I was off to the moon.”

https://hannibalboxing.com/earn-it-evan ... go-to-war/