Saturday's defeat by John Ruiz, a steady but unspectacular fighter, brings the end of Evander Holyfield's career another step closer.

Although Holyfield has said that he intends to fight on, at 38 years of age and with just one win in his last four title bouts, the end is close.

When the time does come for the Georgian to hang up his gloves, boxing will lose one of its finer protagonists.

A deeply religious man, he is the only heavyweight in history to have won a world title on four different occasions.

But the manner of those wins was more impressive than the feat itself.

His battles with Riddick Bowe in the early 1990s restored faith in a heavyweight game that was already showing signs of developing into the Mad Mike and Dodgy Don show.

Then, having been temporarily forced to retire when he was discovered to have a defective heart, he kept himself in good enough shape to get himself a shot at Mike Tyson in November 1996.

No-one gave him a chance - least of all the boxing writers who worried that a 34-year-old with a dodgy ticker would suffer serious punishment at the hands of Tyson.

He proved that shock win to be no fluke by out-classing Tyson again in June 1997, handling himself with immense dignity while his opponent chose instead to disgrace the sport.

Holyfield had began his boxing career at the age of eight at the Warren Boys Club in south-east Atlanta.

It was there that Carter Morgan, his late coach, impressed upon him the virtues of desire, hard work and perseverance that were to shape the course of his career.

Defeat by Lennox Lewis, after a draw that had embarrassed even his own camp, would have been enough to push most men into retirement.

But Holyfield came back to win a world crown one final time with the win over John Ruiz in August last year.

His time is increasingly spent running the Holyfield Foundation, a non-profit organisation he set up to help inner-city kids in his native Atlanta, and although his commitment in the gym remains as strong as ever, the mind is increasingly more willing than the flesh.