If any bookie had laid odds that Cooper would quit, as he had in the past, after taking his first serious dose of punishment from Holyfield, then he would have gone bust. That night, November 23, 1991, Bert Cooper, high school dropout, son of a minister, professional flop, was dead game. Which is exactly why he came out in the fourth bobbing and weaving, walking into a hail of punches just to land his own thumping shots—hard rights to the body, left hooks to the head—and in the last minute of the round landing a shocking multi-punch combination with Holyfield against the ropes. Despite his occasional successes, Cooper was taking one barrage after another. It was clear: Holyfield was breaking him down with hooks to the ribs, stiff one-twos, and an unerring right uppercut.

In the fifth round, Holyfield battered Cooper so relentlessly that one of his gloves split open and had to be replaced. A five-minute respite followed while Holyfield had his glove repaired, and Cooper sat on his stool, trying to recuperate from the jackhammer blows he had received. From that point on, Cooper was bone-weary, and the sixth round saw him decelerate with every passing second.

Although Holyfield slowed the pace and picked away at Cooper with uppercuts and body shots, Cooper, at this point, had still managed to land at a remarkable 55 percent clip. Needless to say, Holyfield was even more successful with his connect ratio. No fighter, particularly against a heavyweight, can withstand that kind of sustained punishment, and Cooper, little by little, was withering away under the ring lights.

Early in the seventh round, Cooper walked into another corkscrew uppercut. Seeing that Cooper was ready to give way, like a levee against hurricane waters, Holyfield attacked. Again and again Holyfield lashed out at Cooper. Again and again Cooper shook, tottered, and shuddered, but would not fall. With less than a minute to go, Holyfield tore after Cooper with a two-handed cannonade, including numerous uppercuts that threatened to decapitate him. Although Cooper practiced a version of the cross-armed defense (pioneered by Archie Moore), his variation had a counterintuitive flaw: He only crossed one arm. With his left elbow pointed up to the rafters in a strange chicken wing formation, Cooper left a wide gap through which Holyfield torpedoed one crushing uppercut after another. Nine times out of 10 a man who is hit with dozens of shots from a world-class heavyweight is going to see the black lights; hear, if from a distance, the 10-count tolling in his ear; feel, in the words of Floyd Patterson, as if he were on a pleasant cloud. But Cooper remained upright throughout the barrage and only the intervention of Mills Lane with just two seconds remaining in the seventh saved him from being seriously injured. “Bert Cooper is a tough guy,” Lane said after the fight. “But he took a lot of punches. He seemed to have lost the ability to fight back.”