Was it after his battles with R. Bowe? Was it Lennox? Tyson? When did Holyfield go Downhill and not look back?
When Tony knocked him out is was sad. All Holyfield did in the Valouev fight was run around the ring and get tired, all Valouev did was walk, both lost that fight, the fans were cheated.
The Ruiz trilogy was poor but then Ruiz has that effect on everyone. Holy looked very sharp and snappy against Rahman. He lost wide to Byrd but that's a bugger of a style for someone like Holyfield anyway...he admitted that if it wasn't for the vacant IBF title being involved, he'd never have fought someone like Byrd. It gets forgotten about, but he did put in one of his busiest performance against Toney. First round was particularly good. But Toney was even busier, and more accurate, and Holyfield just couldn't take that kind of sustained punishment any longer. Looked utterly shot to bits against Donald, better against Bates, Maddalone and Savarese, poor again against Oquendo and Ibragimov. I don't think he was all that good against Valuev to be honest...certainly I would rank it behind all of his performances this decade apart from the Donald loss. It's just that Valuev did even less. I'm rambling. Okay. He's not 100% shot, but he's pretty shot and I'd date that back to the Toney thrashing in 2003. His better performances against opponents since then have come against markedly inferior opposition or guys like Savarese and Valuev that have a style that really suits him. Or don't throw any ****ing punches at all, like Valuev also.
Practically everyone agreed that Holyfield was close to "shot" going into his fights with Tyson. That's what made them such humongous upsets.