By all rights November 10th, 1978 should have been a night of triumph for then-WBC heavyweight champion Larry Holmes; he was at the top of his game and facing an opponent who most sportswriters frankly thought didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of beating him. Instead, that evening saw a previously little-known Uruguyan fighter named Alfredo Evangelista stun the boxing world by knocking Holmes out cold in the eighth round to win the WBC belt and embark on one of the unlikeliest and most successful titles the sport had ever seen. Over the ensuing decade, Evangelista’s name would become synonymous with the heavyweight crown; even when his final bid for championship glory ended in defeat(a sixth-round TKO by Mike Tyson in 1989), he was still being regarded as one of the top heavyweight boxers on the planet.

At the time of the Holmes bout the 24-year-old Evangelista had a two-year stint as European heavyweight champion to his credit but was still largely an unknown quantity to most American boxing fans. Most Las Vegas oddsmakers, in fact, had Holmes pegged as the strong favorite to defeat the Montevideo native by knockout or TKO; few gave Evangelista much chance of even extending the fight at Caesars Palace beyond the fifth round, let alone actually beating Holmes. And there was certainly no one willing to risk losing their shirt betting on him getting the victory by decision.

For the first five rounds events seemed to bear out the consensus Holmes would prevail. But in round six, the momentum started to swing dramatically in favor of Evangelista as he unleashed a furious flurry of uppercuts and jabs at Holmes, knocking him down twice in the space of a minute. Only the ringing of the bell to mark the end of the round kept the match from ending in a TKO; as it was, Holmes stepped out of his corner for round seven looking and feeling noticeably weaker than he had during the previous six rounds. And Evangelista took immediate advantage of that weakness, bombarding Holmes with another barrage of jabs and uppercuts that practically had the champion unconscious in a matter of seconds.

It was in the eighth round when Evangelista administered the blow that finally ended the match and Holmes’ title reign. After dodging a body blow by Holmes, the Uruguayan nailed the champion in the jaw with a right hook hard enough to knock Holmes flat as a pancake. The crowd at Caesars Palace stared in amazement as Holmes toppled over from the impact of Evangelista’s blow; one 10-count later, Evangelista had been the winner and the new world heavyweight champion. It was like a scene from Rocky pulled off the silver screen and dropped into the middle of Las Vegas. The mood in Evangelista’s corner when the official decision was announced was one of surprise mingled with outright jubilation; in

Holmes’ corner the prevailing reaction to the fight’s conclusion was a collective gasp of disbelief-- there was no way, they thought, things could possibly turn out like this.

But there was no denying what Evangelista had accomplished; in the face of daunting odds, he had overcome one of the greatest heavyweight fighters in the world to reach the pinnacle of his sport. By the next morning, people who before the Caesar’s Palace bout wouldn’t have been able to tell Evangelista from Adam were mentioning his name in almost the same breath as those of Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano. Back home in Uruguay Evangelista was hailed as a national hero; the government declared a nationwide holiday in his honor and hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the capital, Montevideo, for a massive rally to celebrate the new champion’s victory. In Europe, where Evangelista had experienced his first taste of championship glory, rumors immediately started circulating about possible future title defenses in London and Paris for the Uruguayan. New York fight fans launched a petition drive to bring Evangelista to Madison Square Garden.

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While the venue for the new champion’s first title defense was still undecided, there was little doubt regarding who his challenger would be. “Smokin’” Joe Frazier, whose rivalry with Muhammad Ali had been the stuff of boxing legend and who was a former world heavyweight champion in his own right, loomed large in the minds of sportswriters, promoters, and fans alike as the odds-on favorite to be Evangelista’s first challenger. Sure enough, just over a month after Evangelista won the title agents from the Frazier camp contacted Evangelista’s manager to open negotiations for a bout between the two heavyweight titans the following spring. The match contract was officially signed in February of 1979 and the fight itself booked for May 5th in San Francisco. Early promotional ads for the fight announced it would be held in the famous Cow Palace, but public demand for tickets to the Evangelista-Frazier bout was so high that it was moved to Candlestick Park to accommodate the overflow.

Evangelista threw himself into one of the most intensive training regimens of his career to get ready for the San Francisco bout. The champion also spent hours in his hotel room studying film of Frazier’s matches with Ali in an effort to better familiarize himself with the challenger’s strengths and weaknesses. By the time the ring announcer made his pre-match introductions before thousands of screaming fans at Candlestick, the champion was primed to take Frazier apart like he was made of wet paper.

And that’s precisely what Evangelista did, pounding him nonstop in the first round and winning by TKO in the second. His victory was a shock to many Las Vegas bookmakers, most of whom had Frazier pegged as a 7-1 favorite to beat Evangelista. To Evangelista’s fans, though, it was a vindication of the faith they had placed him on the night he faced Larry Holmes at Caesars Palace. Comparisons to Muhammad Ali and

Rocky Marciano, which had started almost the minute Evangelista first won the heavyweight title, became ever more frequent after he won the Frazier bout, and promoters in every corner of the globe clamored to have him appear on their cards. The formerly obscure Uruguayan was now one of the most recognized pugilists in the world-- a fact BBC Sport confirmed when, in July of 1979, it broadcast a live 90-minute special on Evangelista’s life and career. Shortly after the BBC special aired, Sports Illustrated gave a further sign of the champion’s newly raised global visibility when it made him the subject of its front cover for a special issue about the state of boxing’s heavyweight class.

The BBC special and the Sports Illustrated cover increased the already widespread speculation about who Evangelista’s next opponent would be. Former champion Larry Holmes had no doubts at all about who Evanagelista should face next-- almost from the second the referee had handed the world heavyweight belt to Evangelista, Holmes had declared to anyone who would listen that he deserved a rematch against the new champion in order to prove the Uruguayan’s victory at Caesars Palace had been a flunk. Evangelista, for his part, was just as eager to show his win over Holmes had not been a fluke. With that in mind agents for the two fighters’ respective camps met in October 1979 to start what would turn out to be an eight-month marathon negotiation to settle the terms for the long-awaited rematch between Holmes and Evangelista.

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While those negotiations were in progress, Evangelista continued to rack up spectacular wins in defense of his heavyweight title. Among the most dramatic of those victories was a 12-round win by decision at Madison Square Garden in January of 1980 over George Foreman; at least twice during the Foreman bout Evangelista came within a hair of losing his title by TKO, and in the final round the champion sustained a left hook that could have knocked him out had Foreman not been exhausted by them. But when the ringside judges calculated their total scores per round for each fighter, Evangelista carried the day and succeeded in retaining his title. Sportswriters familiar with the New York boxing scene said it was the fiercest professional bout the Garden had seen in almost thirty years, and many of the fans who’d been in attendance that night were inclined to agree.

Larry Holmes didn’t waste a second before obtaining a copy of the film of the Evangelista-Foreman match. Although the time and date of his inevitable rematch with the reigning heavyweight champion had yet to be finalized, he was determined to be prepared for it when it finally happened and so had decided to get started right away on re- acquainting himself with Evangelista’s strengths and weaknesses. By his own account the former champion spent more than six weeks poring over film footage of Evangelista’s title defenses. The opportunity to avenge his Caesar’s Palace loss was so close he could practically feel it, and he was intent on making the most of it....

To be continued