Evander Holyfield reflects on Alexander Guerrero ear-bite

When Miguel Olivo bit off part of Alex Guerrero’s ear on Tuesday, the world’s population of athletes who had been subject to dental assault doubled. Prior to Olivo’s cannibal-style attack on the highly touted infield prospect, the only prominent athlete to have had an ear removed during play was the heavyweight boxer Evander Holyfield, who saw a chunk of his right ear bitten off and spat onto the canvas by the powerful but emotionally troubled Mike Tyson during a June, 1997 championship bout. Incredibly, the fight was allowed to continue, but when Tyson also bit Holyfield’s left ear, the match was halted.

Given that Holyfield is the only man on the planet who can comment on being aurally assaulted with both experience and the perspective that the passage of nearly 15 years can bring, it was natural that he be sought out for his comments by the Los Angeles Times.

“That’s kind of sad,” Holyfield said, mourning the loss of innocence in our National Pastime. “I’m surprised that happened in baseball.” Holyfield was able to overcome the unexpected attack, saying, “I dealt with it... When your mind is in the right place, things both good and bad become old.” Still, his comments seem to indicate that the traumatic moment still lingers beneath the surface:

“All your nerves are in your ears,” he said. “It’s kind of shocking when you get bit in the ear. It ain’t a good thing. Getting bit just ain’t right.”

Or as John Hurt famously said in “The Elephant Man,” “I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!” This seems like fair comment in this case; animals bite and scratch and claw. Boxers throw punches, which, depending on your point of view, is at least a bit more evolved, and baseball players aren’t supposed to do violence to each other at all, and at the time odd times their tempers do run away from them, they tend to do a great deal of harmless shoving. Serious injuries from a pitched ball that were intentionally inflicted seem rare, and no one has been bonked on the head by a bat since the Juan Marichal-Johnny Roseboro incident of 1965. That too was an extremely unusual event, if not a unique one.

Similarly, when Reds infielder (and future manager of the Yankees) Billy Martin socked pitcher Jim Brewer in the eye in 1960, shattering his cheekbone, that level of damage was shocking given the general low-key nature of baseball violence. Brewer sued Martin in civil court and won a large settlement because, hell, this is baseball. We don’t do this kind of thing. Anything that gets beyond the out-patient stage is out of character.

“The key is being able to laugh about stuff,” Holyfield told the Times, but people chewing on people is a serious business and being able to laugh about it is actually a very bad sign. A recent article in The New York Review of Books detailed the history of the scientific inquiry into brain degeneration that ultimately identified rogue proteins called prions as the culprit in such mind-destroying diseases as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Kuru, “associated with participation in ritualistic cannibalism in New Guinea.”

Kuru, which is incurable and causes declining motor control, tremors, loss of speech, loss of excretory control, dementia, and so on, used to be known as “laughing disease,” because victims would also experience bouts of uncontrollable, out-of-context laughter. “Being able to laugh about stuff” after eating another human being is, despite Holyfield’s optimistic message, among the first signs that these weird chemicals from dinner’s brains are rewriting your own proteins, boring holes and accumulating plaques in your brain tissue, and are in general in the process of erasing you like an old hard drive that will soon be thrown out. And you will be.

Now, despite Holyfield’s assertion that “All your nerves are in your ear,” the outer ear is actually mostly flexible, fibrous tissue called cartilage and probably doesn’t contain much in the way of prions. Also, both Tyson and Olivo spit their chunk of ear rather than swallowing, which probably minimizes their chances of having their brains turned into malfunctioning, spongy goo. (Although with Tyson, how could you tell?).

Prions are really scary. They don’t contain any genetic code, like bacteria or viruses -- they’re just a damaged protein that somehow latches onto healthy proteins and tells them to be damaged too. That’s not normally the way disease works, so it’s all a bit frightening and confusing -- even that newfangled Middle East Respiratory Syndrome that has lately been showing up in the United States is a virus. We may not know how to stop it, but at least we understand what it is. Eating someone else’s brain (or a squirrel’s, or a cow’s) and then having it unstoppably destroy you, well, that’s disconcerting. While the now-unemployed Olivo is probably fine, the ear is awfully close to the brain.

I’m not saying we should be on the lookout for Zombioliva, but if he, like Holyfield, can eventually laugh at all this, laugh at it a lot, with perhaps a loss of bladder function, well... run. As for Guerrero, who was pounding the snot (another source of disease transmission) out of Pacific Coast League pitching at .376/.417/.735 with 10 home runs in 127 plate appearances, we can only hope that initial estimates of a five-week absence were overstated. Holyfield said he was able to return to practice right away, and Guerrero is going to need to do so as well.

First, the Dodgers need him in the absence of injured third baseman Juan Uribe, second because second baseman Dee Gordon has finally cooled from an unlikely hot start, hitting .247/.302/.303 in May, but finally, and most important, Guerrero will need to be ready to defend himself... Olivo may be back to finish his meal.