The Big Fight Read online

  One spring afternoon, my survival was more at stake than ever, and it was my own fault. I went for a walk with a few friends along the creek near our house in Seat Pleasant when I slipped on the rocks and fell into the freezing water, which was at a higher level than normal after a week of heavy storms.

  Unable to swim, and in a state of panic, I grabbed on to whatever objects I could—branches, logs, anything. It did no good. The current was too powerful, dragging me downstream with alarming speed toward a hole about fifty yards away where I might have easily drowned. Somehow, I clawed my way to the edge, walked through the woods, and was soon carried off by a friend’s older brother to safety, to the relief of family members who had gathered in a nearby field after word spread through the neighborhood. I was brought home, where my mother put cold towels on my head. My lungs filled with water, I threw up for the rest of the day. We didn’t go to the hospital because we couldn’t afford to. Looking back, the experience taught me I could overcome any challenge, which was to prove vital in the years ahead.

  It was six or seven years after the beating I took at the No. 2 Boys Club in D.C. when Roger convinced me to give boxing another try.

  At first, I didn’t see the point of beating up another human being, and I could not imagine I’d be any good at it. But Roger, three years older, did not stop nagging me, and besides, I was sick of him being the bully in our family. He used to hit me whenever I wasn’t prepared for it, not terribly hard, but hard enough to make me cry. Learning how to fight, I figured, might be the way to stop him. I was also encouraged by my best friend, Derrik Holmes, who took up the sport a few months earlier. Derrik was the coolest kid I knew in school, a tremendous athlete, and a stud with the girls. If Derrik thought boxing was a worthwhile pursuit, there must be something to it. I joined the new program at the rec center a few blocks from our house.

  The program was not exactly state-of-the-art. There was no actual ring and there would not be one until 1976. Our practices were held on four mats spread out on a hard wooden floor, which made maintaining a proper balance important, and they were cut short to make room for basketball. We used only one speed bag, two heavy bags, and a cracked dresser mirror for shadowboxing. The next Joe Louis wasn’t coming out of this dive. Of course, the way I appeared on that first day, it would not have made a difference if I showed up at the famous Stillman’s Gym in New York. I held my hands close together in front of my face in the familiar fighting pose of John L. Sullivan, the heavyweight champion from the late 1800s. I looked ridiculous.

  No matter. There would be plenty of time to pick up the sport’s rich nuances. What did matter was that from that day forward, I was hooked. The appeal did not result from any desire to pound my opponent into submission. In my family, I was the one least likely to fall in love with fighting. I wasn’t like Roger, who could not make it through lunch without starting a fight, or the occasionally combative Kenny. I was the reserved Leonard. I preferred to read about heroes instead of trying to be one.

  What was it, then? What made me return to the rec center day after day for years? What inspired me to wake up at five each morning to run five miles in the snow with icicles hanging from my lips?

  For one thing, I knew I was finally good at something, unlike my unsuccessful attempts to excel in basketball, track, and wrestling. In basketball, I was too small, and I didn’t have a good enough jump shot to make up for it. In track, I seemed to pull a muscle every other day. I took up wrestling for several months but tore a ligament in my shoulder and did not wrestle again. With every sport, I was just behind my peers. Yet within a few months of boxing, I knew how to throw a jab and avoid a left hook. But picking up new skills wasn’t what drove me the most. What drove me was the power it instilled, the sense that I was in control instead of being a victim. In the ring, for the first time in my life, I felt I could conquer any force. Strange, isn’t it? The ring is where men try to do great harm to one another, and where I felt the safest.

  Due to the tireless efforts of Dave Jacobs, Pepe Correa, and Janks Morton, the boxing program, despite its less than ideal working conditions, slowly turned boys into fighting men.

  Each was indispensable in his own unique way. Jacobs, or Jake, as he was called, made us believe that we could accomplish anything, in or out of the ring, though I was a bit uncomfortable with how fervently he preached the Gospel. “Give him the victory that his heart desires, Jesus, that his heart so deserves,” he would ask the Lord before sending his troops into battle. I always felt, with all the problems in the world, there was something wrong with asking God for help in a silly boxing match. When I prayed before a fight, I prayed for my safety and the safety of my opponent. I never asked for a victory.

  A talented boxer, Jake won the city’s AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) featherweight title in 1949 and turned pro a year later. But after winning eight of his first ten bouts, he figured boxing would never be lucrative enough to pay the bills, so he quit and landed a job at a pharmaceutical company. In 1970, he began volunteering at the rec center. He was our coach and resident cheerleader. A group of us used to go to his house almost every day to see films of the all-time greats, such as Willie Pep and Jersey Joe Walcott and Sugar Ray Robinson on his projector, Jake showing us how to execute the right cross and the left hook.

  If Jake was the model of discipline, Pepe was the opposite. He spent much of his youth running from one city to the next, always just a step ahead of the law. Pepe possessed a spirit and energy that were contagious, and no one seemed more proud of his black heritage. I constantly marveled at his ability to recite verbatim Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech with remarkable passion in each syllable. It was as if he had been standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on that historic day in August 1963, gazing at the mass of people in the National Mall, hopeful, at last, about a more tolerant America.

  At six feet one and 230 pounds, Janks Morton dreamed of a career in the NFL, but started an insurance agency in the Washington area when he, too, found out the money in pro sports wasn’t enough to make a decent living. The gospel for Janks, who volunteered four days a week, was honest, old-fashioned hard work. No amount of push-ups or sit-ups or jumping rope or hitting the speed bags satisfied him. The only way to be among the best, in his view, was to show more desire than your opponent. Years later, when I needed money and advice after the Olympics, it was Janks who came through.

  During the first year, many kids dropped out, the demands too much, narrowing the group in the program from about forty to a rough dozen, everybody anxious to see how they might stack up against one another in the ring.

  I relished every aspect of the process, from the five-mile runs in the dark and cold to the jabs I threw from one end of the court to the other to the consistent pounding of the speed and heavy bags. After school, I couldn’t wait to get to the gym to see if I was any sharper with my punches or quicker with my footwork. I also developed my own special workout routine in which I sometimes ran to school instead of taking the bus. The other kids assumed I was crazy—and maybe I was—but I needed to believe the extra effort would pay off someday. I came home from the rec center on numerous occasions with a black eye or a busted lip, much to the dismay of my mother, but I always went back the next day for more. During those first sweet and painful months, I knew, somehow, that something was already changing in me—in my body as well as my head. I became dedicated to the point that many years when I needed to lose weight, I sat in the car for hours during hot summer afternoons, the windows closed, wearing a sweatshirt covered by a sheet of plastic.

  Like my dad in his yard in South Carolina, I took on anyone, including kids several years older and as much as fifty pounds heavier. It didn’t matter. All I cared about was improving every time I put on the gloves. I weighed only about 120 pounds, but pretended I was the heavyweight champion of the world, Smokin’ Joe Frazier, getting down into his familiar crouch to bob and weave, anxious to knock people out with the left hook. But when I realized t
he advantages of fighting in a more upright style, the way Ali boxed, I started to score more effectively with my jab and absorb less punishment from taller fighters. I was also drawn to Ali’s magnetism, in and out of the ring. After I switched my allegiance, I never switched again. I became almost obsessed, as Ali was, with keeping my face pretty, unmarked. When I got acne, as every teenager did, I put on makeup to cover the zits.

  The boxing program saved lives—it was as simple as that. By spending time under adult supervision, our group avoided a more dangerous form of violence, in which the weapons of choice were guns, not fists. Our parents knew where we were and that we would make it home safely, even if it wasn’t until one or two in the morning. For many kids our age in Palmer Park, that was no guarantee.

  We became brothers, although any brotherly love was put aside during the actual matches. No friends in the ring, we told ourselves. A healthy dose of adolescent ego also came into play. There were two ways of getting your name in the newspaper if you were a black teen in D.C.—the bad way or the good way. The bad way was through the police blotter. The good way was through boxing, the winner’s picture appearing in the Washington Post.

  Knowing how to box wasn’t enough. I needed to learn how to communicate, and that’s where Roland Kenner came in.

  Roland ran Dave’s Supper Club in Glenarden, where I made a couple of bucks helping out a few days a week. He told me and Derrik Holmes that since only the heavyweights made any serious money as pros, we had to set ourselves apart from others in our weight class, and the surest way to accomplish that was to be smart and articulate, dispelling the image in white America of the black prizefighter who could do nothing else in life. Roland conducted mock interviews with us on old reelto-reel tapes, demonstrating how to look into a camera and answer questions: Mr. Leonard, what will you do after you retire from the sport?

  How will you change your strategy in the ring if your first plan of attack doesn’t work?

  What got you interested in fighting as a kid?

  We also learned to dodge any questions to which we did not know the answers. I became an expert at that technique.

  I didn’t see the point to these sessions at first, because the white, educated world was not one I ever expected to inhabit, and neither did Derrik. What possible difference would it make how two poor black kids from Palmer Park looked into a TV camera? So what if I spoke too fast for people to understand me?

  Over time, I saw the wisdom of what Roland preached and worked on my responses every night before I went to sleep. My delivery grew slower. My answers made sense. I never stopped working on this area of self-improvement just as I never stopped practicing my left jab and right uppercut. Years later, after turning pro, I spent a few minutes almost every day with a dictionary, picking up as many new words as I could.

  Derrik, on the other hand, did not display the same dedication. He went pro in 1978 and did quite well for several years, piling up fourteen victories and a draw in his first fifteen bouts, including ten knockouts. With his smooth style, he was known as “Holmes, Sweet Holmes.” There were no limits to what he could accomplish.

  As the years passed, though, Derrik began to realize he would not be as successful as he hoped, and I believe that haunted him. He was much better than me in the beginning, but once I eclipsed him, he never caught up. After the WBC champion Wilfredo Gomez put him away in the fifth round of their super bantamweight title fight at Caesars in 1980, Derrik stepped into the ring only five more times. One of those was on my undercard in Reno in February 1982, when he fell to an unknown by the name of Franco Torregoza. Derrik came into my dressing room as I was going through my last-minute preparations to take on Bruce Finch.

  “What the fuck happened out there, man?” I asked him.

  “He took my heart away from me, Ray,” he said. “He took my heart.”

  “Even if it’s true, Derrik, you don’t ever fuckin’ tell somebody that,” I said.

  I was angry. I respected Derrik, but he didn’t respect himself. He turned to drugs. He reached a point where he had to make a choice: Give up drugs or give up boxing. He made the wrong choice, and it cost him his freedom.

  Derrik, to be fair, was no different from countless other blacks who have taken up the sport since the days of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis but have been unable to make enough money to set themselves up for the rest of their lives. There was never a Plan B for Derrik Holmes, just as there isn’t one for the overwhelming majority of black boxers. He could not rely on a formal education or family connections to help him find a place in the world. Think about it: How many ever went to college? How many grew up in Beverly Hills? Boxing is a poor man’s profession. It always has been and always will be. The drugs were not accessible in the gym, but on the streets, Derrik could obtain any controlled substance he desired.

  The drugs didn’t get rid of the anger inside him, which came to a head on a December day in 1983 when he ran into his mother, who was taking his four-year-old daughter shopping because he didn’t have the money. He resolved to get some any way he could. He robbed the owner of a Christmas tree business where he had worked a week earlier, shooting the man with one thought in mind—that he needed money for the daughter he loved. Fortunately, the man survived, or Derrik would have been convicted of murder instead of attempted murder, along with armed robbery. He did twenty-three years, not getting out of prison until January 2008.

  In the summer of 1986, only a few years into his incarceration, I visited Derrik at the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown. I was scared, but not of the inmates. I was scared of my emotions. I was not sure I’d be able to contain them. When we were top amateurs, we trained with prisoners at a facility in Virginia. Being in excellent shape and very strong, they gave us quite a workout. Now, more than a decade later, Derrik and I would be together again in a similar environment. Except only one of us would walk out.

  Derrik, head of the prison’s boxing program, found a few middleweights to spar with me. I took on about three or four fighters, but what I’ll always remember is the smile on Derrik’s face. For one day, at least, he was among his friends again. What also stands out is the compassion he showed to his fellow inmates, particularly one fighter who I nailed with a hard right. Derrik was worried that if I knocked the guy out, he would be humiliated in front of his peers and reminded about it wherever he went.

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered to Derrik. “I won’t take him out.”

  The session was soon over and it was time to leave. Derrik was given permission to escort me and a few others to the gate. I gave him a hug and didn’t look back. The next thing I heard was the sound of the doors closing behind me. I started to cry. I didn’t see Derrik again for more than twenty years.

  During his first two years in the joint, Derrik felt sorry for himself, drinking a pint of liquor every chance he got, earning a new nickname, “Hennessy Holmes.” He was put in lockup seven times, and was well on his way to racking up enough extra time to make sure he never got out.

  It was a good thing he found the Lord. It turned his life around. He became an aide in the prison library and didn’t touch another drop of alcohol. These days, he’s in charge of a boxing and fitness gym in Capitol Heights, Maryland, teaching others not to follow his example. He is married to a lovely woman, Regina, and they have an amazing story. They were married before, in the mid-1990s, but the physical separation was too great for them and they got divorced. Derrik never stopped thinking about her. Three weeks after he was released, he called Regina and they got together. Soon they were back at the altar. If that isn’t true love, I don’t know what is.

  The sport turned me into a different person, afraid of no one. One day, a bully, probably about six feet two, threw me against a locker at Parkdale High. I was almost knocked out cold.

  The old me would have searched for any peaceful way to end the mismatch. The new me fired off a succession of left hooks, missing wildly. The bully began to laugh. Yet each hook kept
coming closer and closer, until one put his butt on the ground. The guys who had surrounded us, expecting to see me get whipped, were speechless. For the rest of the afternoon, I walked around school as “the man,” everyone spreading the word: “Did you hear what Ray did?” I looked down at my fists, seeing them in a whole different light. I realized they could operate outside the ring as well as they did inside. As for the bully, he never bothered me again.

  The same went for Roger, who found out the hard way that I was not the same little brother he used to push around. The day I beat Roger up for the first time was a turning point in my life and we both knew it. He began to take such a routine whipping from me, he told Dave Jacobs that our mother did not want her sons to fight each other any longer. She never said that.

  Once he couldn’t beat me up, Roger realized he might as well take advantage of my new skills. With gloves hanging over his shoulder, he took me to visit others in the neighborhood. “My little brother will kick your ass,” he said. I suppose you might say Roger was my first matchmaker.

  This being the early seventies, when television and film still provided a lot of strong male role models, it was no surprise that I found one for myself: the martial arts star Bruce Lee. I was blown away by how much speed and power he could generate for such a small man, and how pretty he looked in the process. Lee was unbelievably intense, possessing a will to overcome any obstacle. After seeing one of his films, I went home and tried to copy his technique by driving my right fist as hard as I could into the ground in our front yard. Needless to say, I never tried that again. Lee inspired me for years, long after I turned pro. When I threw punches at my sparring partners, I made the same noises he did during his fierce exchanges. I wish I could have met him. He died under mysterious circumstances in 1973 at the age of thirty-two.