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TONY AYALA JR.: THE GLORY OF WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, THE HORROR OF WHAT WAS

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The news that former junior middleweight contender Tony Ayala Jr., 52, was found dead early Tuesday morning in San Antonio, Texas, shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the turbulent and troubled life of the onetime boy wonder who was known as “El Torito,” the Little Bull, when he was blasting his way to a 22-0 record with 19 knockouts and a No. 1 ranking from the WBA before his 19th birthday.

Perhaps the only stunner is that Ayala passed away so apparently peacefully, slumped over in the otherwise empty Zarzamora Street Gym where he had again been trying to dig out from the wreckage of a lifetime of abhorrent behavior and disastrous decisions, this time as a boxing trainer.

There are those who would have wagered heavily that Ayala’s end would have come violently or under suspicious circumstances, befitting someone who squandered his once-prodigious talent, and huge chunks of his time on earth, behind prison walls for crimes that even now that are chilling to polite society.

Thus are there two schools of thought that are invariably intertwined when recalling Ayala: one is the potential all-time great who might have been held in the same lofty esteem as contemporaries Marvin Hagler, Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns; the other is an emotionally disturbed, heroin-addicted volcano always threatening to erupt. That Ayala went on drug binges and brutalized women whenever his inner demons could no longer be suppressed.

Of Ayala the fighter, his former manager, Lou Duva, once observed: “Forget Leonard, forget Hagler and, yeah, forget Mike Tyson. Rocky Marciano and Tony Ayala were the guys. Not even Muhammad Ali, great as he was, had it quite like those two.”

Dispute Duva’s take on Ayala the fighter if you must, but the prevailing viewpoint of the man outside of the ring is not in such glowing terms.

“I hope they prosecute him to the max in San Antonio,” Passaic County (N.J.) assistant district attorney Marilyn Zbodinski, who prosecuted Ayala for the 1983 rape convicted that landed him in prison for 16 years, said upon learning he had been arrested for a strikingly similar transgression in 2000. “He is a habitual, vicious criminal, and he’s not going to change.”

In many ways, the Tony Ayala Jr. story is reminiscent of another extremely gifted but tortured fighter, Johnny “Mi Vida Loca” Tapia, who was just 45 when his finally heart gave out on May 27, 2012. If there is a difference between them, it is that Tapia stayed out of trouble long enough to capture world championships at super flyweight, bantamweight and featherweight, and whose lengthiest period of inactivity was 3½ years. Ayala on the other hand, did not box for nearly 17 years, his first conviction forever erasing his already-agreed-upon title challenge of WBA 154-pound champ Davey Moore.

Were Ayala and Tapia victims of unfortunate circumstances that predisposed them to tragedy and heartbreak, directed at themselves as well as others? Were they deficient in some way that prevented them from rising above those circumstances? Or, especially in the case of Ayala, was he simply an inherently bad seed who pondered at length the forces that shaped his destiny?

For Tapia, the compelling reality of his life was the rape and murder of his mother, Virginia Tapia Gallegos, when Johnny was eight years old. The pain of her absence in his life drove him to dull the most jagged edges of his psyche with narcotics, and to take his anger out on opponents inside the ropes.

During his first incarceration, Ayala admitted to having been sexually abused as a boy by a male acquaintance of his family, something he was unable to speak about to his parents, Tony Sr. and Pauline, and then-wife Lisa for many years.

B. “I kept this from everybody, especially the people I care about,” Ayala told me during a two-hour interview session at Bayside State Prison in Cumberland County, N.J., in January 1998. “I kept it from my mother, my father, my wife. The first person who ever heard about it was my prison psychologist (Brian Raditz, who became Ayala’s manager upon his release).

“My drug use was more of an open secret. Other people knew about it. My dad didn’t. My dad is very ignorant about things like drugs and drug use. My dad never did anything like that in his life and he couldn’t imagine anyone he loved doing that either. He couldn’t detect the signs and the behavior that are associated with drugs.”

Not that Ayala’s personal failings or his heroin habit prevented him from battering his way toward the top of his profession.

“It became a situation where I had to prove myself constantly,” he said during the same interview. “Everything I did, including boxing, became about my machismo, my manhood, my ability to dominate and control my world and the people in it. It was about imposing my will on another person.

“It affected my sexuality as well. I felt a constant need to prove myself to be straight and strong and virile. There was this cycle that kept repeating itself. I’d fight and receive a great deal of praise. I was everybody’s favorite child. Then, within a short period of time, I would get arrested for being drunk, getting into a brawl, breaking into somebody’s house or whatever. Then I would fight again and the bad things would be more or less forgotten. Until I did them again, and I always did.”

The insanity came to a boil in the early-morning hours of Jan. 1, 1983, when a booze-fueled Ayala committed an act so heinous it could no longer be swept aside with by his boxing fame. No longer would he be everybody’s favorite child.

According to testimony presented at Ayala’s trial, a 30-year-old woman living in his apartment complex in West Paterson, N.J., was awakened by the sound of her bedroom doorknob turning. The door opened to reveal a man, a man she saw only by the light of a clock radio. The intruder produced a knife, tied her to the bed with her socks, blindfolded her, then had his way with her. In the next room, the woman’s 29-year-old roommate was awakened when a man entered her bedroom. He warned her that her roommate was tied up, and would be killed if she attempted to call the police. Minutes later, the roommate jumped out of her first-floor window and ran to a neighbor’s house, where she called the police. When the cops arrived at the apartment complex at 5:30 a.m., they found Ayala, clad only in blue jeans, wandering the grounds and smelling of alcohol. He claimed he was going to his car for cigarettes, but he fit the description of the assailant and was arrested.

At his trial, Ayala contended that the victim had invited him into her apartment and that they had engaged in consensual sex. The jury wasn’t buying it, and after deliberating for only 3½ hours, Ayala was found guilty on six charges: burglary, aggravated sexual assault, two counts of possession of a knife for an unlawful purpose, threatening to kill, and terroristic threats.

In noting Ayala’s history of violent behavior – at 15 he was placed on 10 years probation after pleading guilty to aggravated assault in the beating of an 18-year-old woman in the restroom of a San Antonio drive-in theater – the presiding judge sentenced him to a 15- to 35-year prison term, ordering that he serve at least 15 years without the possibility of parole. An appellate court later adjusted the sentence to 15 to 30 years.

B b“I can’t express how much regret that I allowed myself to get to a point where I had to commit this terrible crime to recognize what I was doing to myself,” said Ayala in admitting that his claim of consensual sex was a blatant falsehood. “I deserved to be punished for what I did. I am remorseful beyond words that I caused pain that person will have to carry for the rest of her life.

“But you know what? I don’t blame anyone or anything else for my circumstances. It was me. It’s not society’s fault. It isn’t mommy and daddy’s fault. It’s not because I’m Hispanic (of Mexican descent) and not white. It’s not because I’m misunderstood. That’s a crock of crap.”

Well-spoken and seemingly sincere, Ayala talked a good game, but he was denied early release on several occasions despite being what he termed a “model prisoner,” and one who even served as a counselor to fellow inmates. He served the full 15 years mandated by the presiding judge because, according to Andy Consovoy, then a member of the New Jersey Parole Board, the nature of his crimes indicated an especially high recidivism rate.

“John Douglas (an FBI profiler who was a consultant in the making of the Academy Award-winning “The Silence of the Lambs”) talks about something called `precipitating stress,’ Consovoy said. “Once Ayala (lost a fight), he was going to go off. There was no doubt.”

Having regained his freedom, Ayala vowed he would never again put himself in a situation that might again entrap him in a cage with iron bars.

V “I want to live a good, positive life, not just in boxing,” he said. “My life isn’t boxing. Boxing is only a small part of my life. After I fight two, three, four years, I fold that tent and go on with the rest of my life. I won’t lay down and die. I didn’t spend all those years in prison to get out and make a comeback. I prepared myself for life in its entirety, with all its problems and its choices. I want to make good choices from now on.”

For a time, Ayala’s impossible dream of rediscovered contention seemed, well, maybe not quite so impossible. He won five fights as a super middleweight, lost to Yori Boy Campas, then won four times more before Consovoy’s dire prediction came true, not long after the erstwhile “El Torito” was stopped in 11 rounds by Anthony Bosante on April 25, 2003. In 2014 he completed a 10-year prison sentence in Texas for burglary of a habitation.

But there was still a bit deeper toward rock-bottom that Ayala had to sink. His father, a trainer to world champions John Michael Johnson, Jesse Benavides, Gabby Canizales and Maribel Zurita and who pulled all four of his sons out of high school to concentrate on boxing, was 78 when he died of complications of diabetes on April 10, 2014. Even in Tony Jr.’s darkest hours, his dad had been the closest thing he had to an emotional anchor, and now that anchor line had been cut, leaving the son to drift away.

One wonders what might have happened had Ayala, during his first incarceration, cooperated with Sylvester Stallone on a movie project that would have taken an unstinting look at Ayala’s ruined life and career.

“He offered good money to do my story,” Ayala said in 1998. “But I didn’t want my story being told then because the movie would have had to end one way and one way only, with me in prison. It would have been a sad ending. I’d rather be forgotten than to have my story end that way.”

Now the story has its ending, and it’s still sad. All that remains is the speculation and conjecture as to what a focused and trouble-free Ayala might have accomplished in the ring. Ayala thought about that, and often, given all the years he had to contemplate the might-have-beens.

“Hagler, to me, was a great fighter, a great warrior,” he said of one of the dream matchups that never became reality. “I think me and him would have been one of the greatest fights in history. One of us would have gone down.

“Duran, I would have blown out. At any time in my career I would have knocked him out. Duran punked out and I still hold it against him. He punked out before `No Mas’ (his surrender in his second fight with Leonard), as far as I’m concerned. Duran’s place in history is undisputed, but if he had come into my territory, he would have been mine. I owned the junior middleweight division.

“To beat Leonard, I would have had to knock him out. I wouldn’t have won a decision because he was America’s poster boy. He was everything America tells blacks they can be. And he played the role good. He was a great fighter. Bu he was so popular, he won some fights he shouldn’t have won, against Hagler and the second one against Hearns.

“Tommy Hearns and I would never have fought. That was an agreement made between Emanuel Steward (Hearns’ manager-trainer) and my dad. Emanuel and my dad were real good friends from the amateur days. Anyway, Emanuel knows I would have taken Tommy apart.”

This is where any story about the death of a notable boxing figure is supposed to end with the expressed wish that he rests in peace. Here’s hoping that peace also extends to the victims of the uncontrollable rages that took Ayala down a road no one should ever have to travel.

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R.I.P. IBF founder Bob Lee who was Banished from Boxing by the FBI

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“The image some people have of me is disappointing,” said Bob Lee in a 2006 interview, “but I also feel I had a positive impact on the sport…”

Lee, the founder of the International Boxing Federation who died yesterday (Sunday, March 24) at age 91, spoke those words to Philadelphia Daily News boxing writer Bernard Fernandez who was the first person to interview him when he emerged from a federal prison in 2006. Lee served 22 months on charges that included racketeering, money laundering, and tax evasion.

Born and raised in northern New Jersey and a lifelong resident of the Garden State, Lee, a former police detective, founded the International Boxing Federation (henceforth IBF) in 1983 after a failed bid to win the presidency of the World Boxing Association. At the time, there were only two relevant sanctioning bodies, the WBA, then headquartered in Venezuela, and the WBC, headquartered in Mexico. Both organizations were charged with favoring boxers from Spanish-speaking countries in their ratings at the expense of boxers from the United States.

Bob Lee’s brainchild, whose stated mission was to rectify that injustice, achieved instant credibility when Marvin Hagler and Larry Holmes turned their back on the established organizations. Hagler’s 1983 bout with Wilford Scypion and Holmes’ 1984 match with Bonecrusher Smith were world title fights sanctioned exclusively by the IBF, the last of the three extant organizations to do away with 15-round title fights.

Lee’s world was rocked in November of 1999 when a federal grand jury handed down an indictment that accused him and three IBF officials, including his son Robert W. “Robby” Lee Jr., of taking bribes from promoters and managers in return for higher rankings. The FBI, after a two-year investigation, concluded that $338,000 was paid over a 13-year period by individuals representing 23 boxers.

The government’s key witness was C. Douglas Beavers, the longtime chairman of the IBF ratings committee who wore a wire as a government informant in return for immunity and provided video-tape evidence of a $5000 payout in a seedy Virginia motel room. Promoters Bob Arum and Cedric Kushner both testified that they gave the IBF $100,000 to get the organization’s seal of approval for a match between heavyweight champion George Foreman and Axel Schulz (Arum asserted that he paid the money through a middleman, Stan Hoffman). In return, the IBF gave Schulz a “special exemption” to its rules, allowing the German to bypass Michael Moorer who had a rematch clause that would never be honored. (In a sworn deposition, Big George testified that he had no knowledge of any kickback).

After a long-drawn-out trial that consumed four months including 15 days of jury deliberations, Bob Lee was acquitted on all but six of 32 counts. His son, charged with nine counts, was acquitted on all nine. The jury simply did not trust the veracity of many that testified for the prosecution. (No surprise there; after all, they were boxing people.) But neither did the jury buy into the argument that whatever money Lee received was in the form of gifts and gratuities, a common business practice.

The IBF was run by a court-appointed overseer from January of 2000 until the fall of 2003. Under its current head, Daryl Peoples, who came up from the ranks, assuming the presidency in 2010, the IBF has stayed out of the crosshairs of federal prosecutors.

As part of his sentence, Bob Lee was prohibited from having any further dealings with boxing and that would have included buying a ticket to sit in the cheap seats at a boxing card. This was adding insult to injury as Lee’s passion for boxing ran deep. As a boy working as a caddy at a New Jersey golf course, he had met Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, two of the proudest moments of his life.

As for his contributions to the sport, Lee had this to say in his post-prison talk with Bernard Fernandez: “We instituted the 168-pound [super middleweight] weight class. We took measures to reduce the incidence of eye injuries in boxing. We changed the weigh-in from the day of the fight to the day before, which prevented fighters from entering the ring so dehydrated that they were putting themselves at risk. All these things, and more, were tremendously beneficial to boxing. I’m very proud of all that we accomplished.”

Bob Lee was a tough old bird. Diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in 1986, he was insulin-dependent for much of his adult life and yet he lived into his nineties. Although his coloration as a shakedown artist is a stain that will never go away, many people will tell you that, on balance, he was a good man whose lapses ought not define him.

That’s not for us to judge. We send our condolences to his loved ones. May he rest in peace.

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Australia’s Nikita Tszyu Stands Poised to Escape the Long Shadow of His Brother

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They held a confab for the boxing media last week at the spacious Las Vegas gym where WBO super welterweight champion Tim Tszyu has been training for his forthcoming match with Sebastian Fundora. Tim was there, of course, as were many of the fighters in the supporting bouts plus Tim’s younger brother Nikita who was inconspicuous in this gathering.

Nikita Tszyu isn’t on Saturday’s card and so was never spotlighted, but it’s likely that most of the media-types there knew nothing about him. Had they been Aussies, he wouldn’t have been able to blend into the scenery as the Sydneysider is already a major sports personality in the Land Down Under. More than that, he is seemingly on pace to become as big a star as his older brother who has been called the face of boxing in Australia.

In his last start, Nikita wrested the Australian 154-pound title from previously undefeated (10-0) Dylan Biggs. Their bout in the Australian harbor city of Newcastle headlined a pay-per-view telecast.

Nikita was down in the first 45 seconds of the contest and was buzzed in the third, but had Biggs in dire straits in the fourth and ended matters in the next frame with a wicked left hook to the liver. Biggs somehow made it to his feet, but the bout was waived off seconds later as Biggs’ corner was throwing in the towel.

It improved Nikita’s record to 8-0 (7 KOs) and burnished the reputation of the Tszyu dynasty. Collectively, the three Tszyu’s – his Hall of Fame father Kostya, his bother Tim and Nikita – are 48-0 in Australian rings.

Outside the squared circle, Nikita Tszyu, who is 26 years old and looks younger, comes across as thoroughly unspoiled. Talking with him, what started as a formal interview quickly became a relaxed chat between two old souls (as Nikita described himself) enjoying each others company. And as prizefighters go, he sure is different. A college grad, Nikita cited gardening, of all things, when we inquired if he had any hobbies.

As amateurs, Nikita had a deeper background and was more decorated than Tim. But in 2017, he turned his back on boxing to pursue a degree in architecture. He was away from boxing for five years before deciding to give the sport another fling.

“I wanted to be the first person in my family to be smart,” he says tongue-in-cheek when asked how he could abandon a sport that was seemingly in his blood. “My mom wanted one of us to get a college degree,” he says, elaborating. “When it wasn’t going to work out for Tim, it fell on my shoulders.”

As is well known, Nikita’s parents divorced (Nikita was then just starting high school) and his dad then returned to his native Russia and started a new family. But the brothers and their father remain on cordial terms – they speak on the phone periodically – and they are close to Kostya’s parents (their paternal grandparents) who live near Nikita in the Sydney area and are currently watching Nikita’s three dogs, a husky, a French Bulldog, and a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. “I can’t imagine a life without them,” says Nikita who, unlike his brother, has no special lady living under his roof.

The family tie extends to the brothers’ trainer Igor Goloubev who is married to their aunt (Kostya’s sister). Uncle Igor, a training partner of Kostya Tszyu in the old days, came to Sydney in 1997 with a touring Russian amateur team and, unlike the famous boxer, never left.

During the lull between the two generations of fighting Tszyus, Igor Goloubev founded a construction company that he still owns. While working for an architectural firm (working remotely because of Covid), Nikita was able to work part-time for his uncle which was good hands-on experience for a future architect.

When Goloubev counsels one of the brothers between rounds, the old becomes new again and this blast from the past doesn’t stop there. The brothers are managed by Newcastle NSW businessman Glen Jennings who formerly managed Kostya, widely considered one of the two or three best junior welterweights of all time. (Jennings says that as a boxer Nikita is more like his dad whereas Tim is more of a pressure fighter.)

Glen Jennings Flanked by Tim and Nikita

Glen Jennings flanked by Tim and Nikita

This is Nikita Tszyu’s second trip to Las Vegas. He was here last year when Tim was preparing for a match with Jermell Charlo. When that match fell out, Nikita used the occasion for a little holiday, the highlight of which was a hike through Northern California’s Redwood Forest, home to the world’s tallest trees.

“Your national parks are the coolest things about America,” he says. As for the food? ”Too much fat,” he says, wrinkling his nose, but that’s a moot point as Team Tszyu now travels with its own chef.

Nikita Tszyu will defend his Australian title on April 24th. At this writing, the opponent is uncertain. Three leading candidates fell by the wayside, two because they lost a fight they were supposed to win, ruining their credibility, and another because he got injured. Finding good opponents may prove to be a recurrent hassle in part because Nikita, unlike his brother, is a southpaw.

Coming up the ladder, Tim Tszyu looked forward to fighting at the MGM Grand where his father won his first title (TKO 6 over Jake Rodriguez in 1995) and had one of his most memorable fights, a second-round stoppage of Zab Judah in 2001. The T-Mobile Arena didn’t exist back then, but sits on MGM Grand property, so Saturday’s fight is a dream come true for the older Tszyu brother.

Looking down the road, it’s easy to envision Nikita becoming a headline attraction here too.

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Dalton Smith KOs Jose Zepeda and Sandy Ryan Stops Terri Harper in England

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Dalton Smith KOs Jose Zepeda and Sandy Ryan Stops Terri Harper in England

England showed off its talent in Sheffield.

Super lightweight prospect Dalton Smith advanced into the championship level and Sandy Ryan proved to be not just another world titlist on Saturday.

Dalton Smith (16-0, 12 KOs) faced the venomous punching power of Jose “Chon” Zepeda (37-5, 28 KOs) and eliminated him with a body shot knockout that left the world title challenger gasping for air at Sheffield Arena in Sheffield, England.

“I had to be on my game. He (Zepeda) puts people to sleep,” said Smith.

If any questions existed on Smith’s ability to compete at the championship level, the 27-year-old answered emphatically with a clinical and professional-style win.

Smith walked into the prize ring realizing that southpaw slugger Zepeda could end the night with a single punch. He carefully measured the California-based fighter’s movements and punching power before stepping on the gas from the second round on.

“He’s a great fighter,” explained Smith of Zepeda. “That’s what made me train harder.”

During the first several rounds the two hard-hitting punchers were able to score. Zepeda clipped Smith with quick rights and occasional lefts but discovered that the British fighter has a chin. That seemed to allow Smith to open-up slightly more with one-two combinations.

After Smith gained serious momentum in the third and fourth rounds, Zepeda shortened up his stride and looked to put on more pressure. In the fifth round Zepeda moved closer into firing range and ran into a right cross to the belly that took the strength out of his legs. Down went Zepeda for the count at 1:25 of the fifth round.

“I was hitting him with clean shots and it wasn’t doing anything,” said Smith of his head attack.

Apparently, the body shot was the answer.

Sandy Ryan Wins Battle of Champions

WBO welterweight titlist Sandy Ryan won the battle between British champions with a pile-driving stoppage of Terri Harper who, after dropping down a weight division but was unable to be competitive.

Ryan (7-1-1, 3 KOs) walked into enemy territory and quieted the pro-Harper (14-2-2, 6 KOs) crowd with a riveting attack at Sheffield Arena. There was no stopping her on this night.

“I’m just happy,” said Ryan, 30, of Derby England.

After spending months in Las Vegas, Nevada living and training away from her home in England, the tall slender fighter Ryan finally was able to lure a fellow British world champion in the boxing ring.

“I was away from family and friends for so long,” Ryan said.

A close first round between the two female champions saw Ryan open up the second round behind a riveting left jab and body shots that made Harper hesitant and gun shy to counter.

Ryan seemed to sense early that she was in control and opened up with five- and six-punch combinations. And when Harper retaliated, Ryan returned fire again almost daring her rival to engage in a free-for-all.

Harper clinched several times in the third round to stymie Ryan’s constant attack, but it was not enough. The WBO titlist seemed even more eager to win by knockout and opened up with little concern of Harper’s counters.

In the fifth round it was obvious that Ryan was in complete control, the only question was if she could maintain the frenetic pace. Again, she opened up with punishing combinations as Harper looked for a solution. Instead, rights and lefts pummeled the super welterweight titlist until the end of the round.

Harper’s corner decided to end the fight, Referee Marcus McDonnell declared Ryan the winner at the end of the fifth round by technical knockout.

“I felt her fading,” said Ryan.

The win by Ryan sets her up for a rematch against Jessica McCaskill who holds the WBA and WBC welterweight titles. Their first encounter ended in a split draw after 10 rounds last September in Orlando, Florida.

Ryan expressed a desire to face any champion.

“Any big fight. All the big names,” Ryan said.

Other Results

Ishmael Davis (13-0) defeated Troy Williamson (20-3-1) by unanimous decision after 12 rounds for a regional middleweight title.

James Flint (14-1-2) handed Campbell Hatton (14-1) fis first defeat as a pro by unanimous decision after 10 rounds in a super lightweight match.

Photo credit: Mark Robinson / Matchroom

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