Taking it on the chin

If you have any extra money you'd like to invest - and in these days of $4 gas and rising food prices, that might be unlikely - it wouldn't seem wise to seek financial advice from former boxing champ Evander Holyfield. The Associated Press says Holyfield is facing foreclosure on his $10 million suburban Atlanta estate, and the mother of one of his children is suing him after Holyfield, through intermediaries, allegedly told the woman that he would no longer be able to make his $3,000-a-month payments. This could be just the tip of the iceberg, since Holyfield has at least nine children, most of them illegitimate. Said Randy Kessler, attorney for the mom who's suing, "My concern is there may be a lot of other mothers not getting paid, and I would like my client to be at front of the line." It's easy to feel sorry for the average Joe who finds himself on the brink financially, struggling to meet his responsibilities and possibly losing his home, often through no fault of his own, but it's also easy to NOT feel sorry for Holyfield, who at age 45 continues a ridiculous and personally dangerous campaign to reclaim the heavyweight crown, apparently because he really, really needs the cash. It's often a wise move to invest in real estate, but Holyfield believed he needed a 54,000-square-foot mansion that has 109 rooms, 17 bathrooms, three kitchens and a bowling alley. And he's also being sued for repayment of $550,000 in loans allegedly made so he could landscape his 235-acre estate. That's a helluva lot of trees and bushes. Based on the circumstantial evidence, it seems pretty likely that Holyfield is broke. He's not the first athlete to squander what to one of us "normal" people would seem like an unspendable amount of money, but this is a guy who has made hundreds of millions of dollars in his career, including close to $35 million for one fight against the ear-snacking Mike Tyson, another guy with mad skills when it comes to pissing away a fortune. At its core, this is a story about personal responsibility. It looks as if Holyfield has shown very little when it comes to managing his vast earnings, and that failure mirrors the choices he has made in his personal life. Holyfield always passed himself off as a devout Christian, a true man of God, while at the same time fathering children with a variety of women who were not his wife. If Evander does have a close relationship with the Big Guy, now might be the time for a few extra prayers, because the chickens are coming home to roost.