Muhammad Ali 'Gave Me Courage' to Be a Champ, Evander Holyfield Says
— -- Former heavyweight boxing champion Evander Holyfield and ESPN's Jeremy Schaap celebrated the life of Muhammad Ali on "Good Morning America" this morning.
Holyfield, 53, said Ali inspired him well before he stepped into the ring.
"When I was 8 years old, I was told that I could be like Ali and that's how things started with my boxing relationship," Holyfield said. "He's a man that had confidence. He'd speak and he was able to back up everything that he spoke about and which gave me courage to move up and try to be a champion like he was."
Ali died at 74 from unspecified natural causes after a decades-long battle with Parkinson's disease.
Sports journalist Schaap, who had interviewed Ali, said the champ made a global impact.
“Just a couple of days after he won the world heavyweight championship in February 1964, defeating Sonny Liston, he went to Africa, he went to Ghana, he went to Nigeria, he went to Egypt," Schaap said. "He laid the foundation then for his global popularity. He quite literally took the world heavyweight championship around the world and made it global. He put the world in the world heavyweight championship…something no one else had done before.”
As for his favorite Muhammad Ali story, Schaap referred to a 1995 fight between Frank Bruno and Mike Tyson.
“My father and I were with Ali at a party watching the fight,” he recalled. “This was the early days of women’s boxing and there were some women fighting on the undercard and my father turned to Ali and he said, ‘Champ, what do you think of this? What do you think of women fighting?’ And Ali, whose voice by that time turned raspy, but he was still so quick with it, he turned to us and he said, ‘I only like it when they’re fighting over me.’”
“Nobody else could come up with that,” Schaap said.
