{"id":597011,"date":"2026-04-11T12:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T12:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/597011\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T12:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T12:40:08","slug":"10-heavyweight-champions-who-couldnt-stay-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/597011\/","title":{"rendered":"10 heavyweight champions who couldn\u2019t stay away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\" style=\"line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 10pt;\">Holyfield went on to unify the WBA and IBF belts with a rematch win over Moorer in 1997, but\u00a0 in 1999, at age 37, he lost his titles to Lennox Lewis. Holyfield fought on, losing to John Ruiz, Chris Bryd and James Toney. The New York State Athletic Commission withdrew Holyfield\u2019s professional license in 2004 after his defeat to Larry Donald. Despite that, Holyfield made a return two years later with a win over Jeremy Bates. He made two more tries to win a heavyweight title \u2013 falling on points to Sultan Ibragimov and, controversially, losing to Nikolai Valuev \u2013 before hanging up the gloves for good in 2011 at 48 years old.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Holyfield went on to unify the WBA and IBF belts with a rematch win over Moorer in 1997,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[23374,703,49,48,13856,12613,56381,47991,119739,706,1605,82,5513,26877],"class_list":{"0":"post-597011","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-arslanbek-makhmudov","9":"tag-boxing","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-canada","12":"tag-evander-holyfield","13":"tag-george-foreman","14":"tag-joe-frazier","15":"tag-joe-louis","16":"tag-max-schmeling","17":"tag-mike-tyson","18":"tag-muhammad-ali","19":"tag-sports","20":"tag-tyson-fury","21":"tag-vitali-klitschko"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}