With Evangelista back in the spotlight after more than a year from the ring, boxing fans around the world started counting the days until he would once again be fighting in a world heavyweight title match. Alfredo Evangelista and the heavyweight crown were practically synonymous by then; some boxing beat writers had even suggested that he looked almost naked without it. Furthermore, there was a hope among the more passionate members of Evangelista's fan base to see him take vengeance on Larry Holmes for Holmes' defeat of the two-time ex-world champion in their Superdome bout. Certainly Evangelista himself didn’t shy away from the prospect of a Holmes-Evangelista V; in an interview with a West German sports correspondent shortly after he came out from his self-imposed seclusion he made a number of comments implying he’d sign for another shot at Holmes the minute that one was offered to him.

     It was only fitting that one of the biggest movies to play in U.S. theaters that summer was Rocky III, because since that November evening five years earlier Evangelista had transformed himself into a real-life Rocky Balboa. Though nobody could say for sure where his boxing career would have gone if he'd lost that first bout with Larry Holmes, it was crystal-clear that winning the bout had helped thrust said career to a plateau even the most cock-eyed optimist would have found pretty tough to imagine. He had a massive following in many countries and was viewed as a national hero in his own. People who didn't know a right hook from a fish hook could recognize Evangelista at a glance. He had endorsement contracts worth tens of millions of dollars and rumors were circulating Hollywood he might be getting a movie deal himself before too long.

     No sooner had he begun his workout to get back in fighting trim for another title run than speculation got cooking as to who the two- time former champ’s first opponent might be in his comeback. Everyone from the now-retired Muhammad Ali to a then-still amateur Mike Tyson-- who was two years away from his professional debut at the time --was mentioned as a possible challenger for the veteran Uruguayan fighter. There was even an attempt to coax Cuba's Teofilo Stevenson to defect to the West just so he could be booked to take on Evangelista; nothing came of this plan, but it underscored the extent to which Evangelista had become an international figure.

      Evangelista’s wait for an opponent in his comeback to the ring finally ended in late October of 1983 when fellow veteran heavyweight Leon Spinks agreed to take on the two-time former world champion in a ten-round match booked for the last week in January in San Francisco. The bout, which would be televised on pay-per-view, sold out tickets within just three days after it was announced; sportswriters from all over the world flocked to the Graham Civic Auditorium, scheduled site for the match, just to get a quick word with Evangelista or Spinks. A promotional tsunami swamped the boxing world as the organizers of the bout sought to generate as much interest as they could in Evangelista's return to the ring.

      Not that it took much effort on their part. Even before the bout with Spinks had been officially signed boxing fans had been waiting for Evangelista's comeback with bated breath; once the bout with Spinks had been officially confirmed, would-be spectators practically beat a path to the ticket window in hopes of getting a seat to the match, and those who couldn't get a ticket or simply preferred to watch the action from the comfort of their living room rushed to their phones to order it on pay-per-view from their cable service providers. By the time Spinks and Evangelista checked into their hotel rooms there was hardly anyone left on Earth who wasn't aware of the impending showdown.

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      On January 27th, 1984 the largest crowd to witness a professional boxing match in San Francisco in at least twenty years assembled at the Graham Civic Auditorium to watch Alfredo Evangelista begin what many in the fight world hoped would be the beginning of a march back to the top of the heavyweight ladder. Conventional wisdom had it that Evangelista would be extremely aggressive when he was on offensive, and sure enough during the opening minute of the first round he came within a second of ending the match by knockout when he landed a right hook on Spinks that sent Spinks crashing to the canvas. Through the second and third rounds he kept up his assault, pummeling Spinks with jabs and uppercuts.

      By the start of the fourth round, Spinks looked and felt as if he had been run over by a herd of elephants; 1:48 into that round he ended up on the wrong side of an Evangelista left cross that not only knocked the wind out of him but sent him reeling halfway towards the middle of the ring before he finally toppled over the canvas, lying sprawled flat on his face as the ten-count began. He tried valiantly to pull himself back to his feet, but Evangelista’s blows had just been too forceful to overcome, and just as he had managed to reach the second rope the bell rang to signal the end of the bout and a victory for Evangelista in his return to professional boxing.

      The win over Spinks was the catalyst for a hot streak that thrust Evangelista back into the top five of heavyweight title contenders, and within a year after the Graham auditorium bout buzz was circulating all the boxing world that the Uruguayan superstar might soon be challenging new heavyweight champ Trevor Berbick for the title. Sure enough, in early February of 1985 Las Vegas promoters announced that negotiations were in progress between the Evangelista and Berbick camps for the two fighters to meet in a twelve-round match to be tentatively held at the MGM Grand. The match was officially signed two months later and boxing fans everywhere began counting down the days until Evangelista squared off with Berbick.

      But at the age of 31 time and injuries were finally starting to catch up with the two-time former world champion. He wasn’t quite the same man he had been when he stunned the world with his improbable win against Larry Holmes seven years earlier, and for the first time since that night the oddsmakers had him pegged as the underdog. Some of them even predicted Berbick would defeat Evangelista by first-round KO and suggested the match would mark the end of the Lynx of Montevideo’s pro career. Even some of Evangelista's own fans wondered if he had had any more rabbits to pull out of his hat.

      As it turned out, he did. When Evangelista and Berbick faced off at the MGM Grand on June 14th, 1985 Evangelista showed that he still had plenty of gas left in the tank. He survived a near-TKO during the third round, a knockdown in the sixth round, and a particularly fierce right cross by Berbick in the tenth round to pick up a split decision victory from the judges and embark on his third reign as the world heavyweight champion. Once again Montevideo became the scene of wild jubilation by Evangelista's fellow Uruguayans; many of those taking part in the post- fight celebrations had also been present for the festivities which had greeted Evangelista's two previous accessions to the heavyweight title.

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      What might have been the strangest bout of any of Evangelista's three world heavyweight title reigns-- and was certainly the match that generated the most controversy --took place in East Berlin in early May of 1986 only days after Libyan terrorists supported by the East German secret police had bombed a West Berlin discotheque and killed two U.S. Servicemen. It pitted Evangelista against East German heavyweight and three-time Olympic medalist Jürgen Fanghänel; it had been signed nearly six months earlier and billed by European promoters as a goodwill event to bring together fight fans from both sides of the Berlin Wall.

      Even before the discotheque bombing, the Evangelista-Fanghänel match had been the focus of widespread protests among West Germans. In the bombing's aftermath opposition to the bout mushroomed into a bitter undiluted hate towards Fanghänel as a symbol of the tyrannical Marxist regime in East Berlin and toward East Germany itself; some of the most extreme anti-Communist factions in West Germany actually threatened to storm the arena where the bout was scheduled to be held, drag Fanghänel to the Brandenburg Gate, and hang him in full view of the East Germans on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Ironically, in the long run these threats only served to make the two fighters that much more determined to go ahead with the bout. Nevertheless their respective managers, for the sake of prudence, agreed to have police details escort Evangelista and Fanghänel from their respective training camps to the Sportforum Hohenschönhausen(the chosen venue for the bout) and back again. In an all-too-rare show of cooperation between Bonn and Berlin, the police escort detail for the Evangelista-Fanghänel fight would include both East and West German police agents, nearly all of whom were trained in special tactics and counterterrorism.

    For East Germans who hoped the outcome of the Evangelista-Fanghänel match would prove the superiority of the socialist bloc over the West, a bitter disappointment awaited. Evangelista easily held his own during the first three rounds, knocked Fanghänel down twice in the fourth, and won the bout in the fifth round on a TKO. When the bell rang to signal the end of the fight, Evangelista found he was the one who had to worry about being hung from the Brandenburg Gate; outraged East German fight fans accused Evangelista's camp of bribing the referee to rig the bout in the champion's favor and tried to storm the ring to get revenge for their man's defeat. It was only when Fanghänel himself took to the mike to appeal for calm that the crowd finally backed off, and even then the crowd kept hurling abusive comments at Evangelista as he left the ring. At least one East German sports ministry official was fired as a result of Fanghänel's defeat and two others were demoted; the Honecker regime had staked a great deal on a Fanghänel victory, and the fact he'd lost the bout was attributed by East Berlin not to Evangelista's ability but to the perceived incompetence of Fanghänel's managers and trainers.

    Back in the U.S. and in Evangelista’s native Uruguay the champion’s victory against Fanghänel was hailed as a major triumph on the athletic front for the West in the Cold War. Newspapers throughout the Americas prominently displayed the photo of a victorious Evangelista and a prone Fanghänel on their front pages. By sharp contrast, most newspapers and broadcast media in the Warsaw Pact countries went of their way to play down Fanghänel’s defeat; the official East German government newspaper Neues Deutschland barely gave three paragraphs to the bout, and much of that inkspace was devoted to repeating the spurious charge Evangelista had used less-than-sportsmanlike tactics to win the match.

    Evangelista’s victory over Fanghänel marked the beginning of his swan song as a professional fighter. Mike Tyson, who had made his pro boxing debut a month after the Evangelista-Berbick fight, was already establishing himself as a bona fide heavyweight title contender and was determined to get a title shot against the reigning champion no matter what it took. He was tearing through the heavyweight ranks like a lawn mower gone berserk, racking up knockout after knockout-- with at least half of those knockouts coming in the first round. It would take a bit longer than either he or Evangelista could have imagined for these two fighters to meet face to face, but when they finally did it would seal the casket on the Uruguayan's professional career for good....

To be continued