“Say, Janks, how many dead people you think are in that graveyard?” he asks his trainer, Janks Morton. The old mentor of Sugar Ray Leonard guesses 6,000, maybe more. “You’re wrong,” Bowe tells him emphatically. “It’s all of ’em.”
Morton and Kareem Muhammad, a former light- welterweight who has been with Bowe since he turned pro in March 1989, laugh for most of the 10-minute drive from their pick-up point, a modest single-bedroom apartment Bowe is sharing with his wife, Terry, on reservation land owned by the Potawatomi tribe.
Across the road, in an open-air arena still under construction at the back of FireLake Casino, the 37-year-old former world heavyweight champion will make his return to the ring against a journeyman called Marcus Rhode in the early hours of next Sunday. It will be his first fight in eight years.
“You pretty sharp this mornin’,” Muhammad says to Bowe. “Sharp? See that sign?” Bowe asks, pointing to a board near to the casino advertising his bout in the aptly named Pow Wow Grounds. “ ‘Riddick Big Daddy Bowe, built like a truck but smooth like a cat’. Pretty too, and too good for these heavyweights today.”
He is surprisingly lucid and jaunty, unlike the late-thirtysomething Muhammad Ali, of whom reports suggest he was eerily reminiscent. Retired at the age of 29 after a pair of hellishly punishing encounters with Poland’s Andrew Golota — in the rematch he sustained 408 power punches, and in his post-fight interview he was barely comprehensible — Bowe quickly found himself alone and lost.
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His then wife, Judy, left him, claiming custody of their five children. Desperate, Bowe arrived with his brother one morning at dawn at their North Carolina home and seized them, a kidnapping he describes as “a crime of passion” for which he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
On April 17 he walked out of Cumberland Federal Correctional Institute in Maryland, a free man, but a marked man. His defence team claimed “brain damage” had impaired his ability to think rationally and control his impulses. But this did not prevent him, even before his release, from announcing plans to resume his boxing career.
“Marc Ratner (the executive chairman of the influential Nevada State Athletic Commission) is not for this at all,” says Joey Miller, director of the Potawatomi Citizens Boxing Commission, an autonomous body responsible for administrating the sport within the Potawatomi Nation and for licensing Bowe for his comeback fight. “We have taken all precautions in relation to medicals, eye and blood examinations, an MRI scan of the brain, and he has passed them all. We don’ t have a legal basis not to license him.”
But, if not in this Oklahoma outpost, then certainly where the fight crowd converged this weekend for Oscar De La Hoya’s showdown with Bernard Hopkins in Las Vegas, questions are being asked, with many people drawing dark conclusions.
“Riddick Bowe’s ‘lounge act’ in Oklahoma does not appear destined to lead him down a path to another shot at the heavyweight championship,” warns Bert Sugar, one-time editor of Ring Magazine. “Instead, in all probability it will lead him down another path: that of making the once poster boy for the sport the posture boy for its abolition.”
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THE LATE Eddie Futch, Bowe’s revered trainer, used to say: “He was 6ft 5in, he could box, he could fight inside, he could do anything. He could have been one of the all-time greats.” Futch sparred with Joe Louis and trained Joe Frazier. He was a student of the works of 19th-century poets, not a mouthpiece for hyperbole.
Bowe’s jab was wicked and beautiful, comparable to Ali’s and more powerful, perhaps surpassed only by the left wand of Larry Holmes. He speared it repeatedly into the face of Evander Holyfield on the night he won the championship. His work inside on that night made him the complete heavyweight, capable of achieving the success that would one day be realised by his biggest rival, Lennox Lewis, with whose destiny he seemed intertwined after their Olympic super- heavyweight final in Seoul, where Lewis won gold in two rounds. But with Lewis, there was no final reckoning. Bowe threw away his WBC belt when Lewis was the top-ranked contender, their paths never crossed again, and greatness eluded him.
Out of shape, he lost a rematch with Holyfield (his only defeat against 40 wins) before he became the first man to stop Holyfield in the dramatic last act to their trilogy. Finally, he suffered in two brutal meetings with Golota, both of which the Pole lost by disqualification for repeated low blows. Then Bowe’s career and life disintegrated.
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“Truth be told, once I retired, everything went haywire.
Everything went wild. I was home all the time, angry and mad at myself. I made living with me pure hell for everyone, and things fell apart,” he admits. “I didn’t realise it at the time, but the way I was thinking was different. I was in a predicament I didn’t want to be in. My manager at the time, Rock Newman, persuaded me to retire. I didn’t want to. I know now that he didn’t have my best interests at heart.”
In Bowe’s heart, if his fighting days were done, he wanted to be a Marine. But his fierce meetings with Golota and his turbulent relationship with Judy had reduced him to a shell. He lasted only 11 days in the Marine Corps Reserve.
“After two, three weeks I expected it would be easy, but that wasn’t going to be the case,” he explains. “I’d have had to go another eight or nine weeks dealing with this, the discipline, an officer shouting and spitting in my face, cleaning floors, scrubbing walls. I did it for as long as I could. Then I came home.”
His behaviour became increasingly erratic. He began to sell off his boxing possessions: boots, trunks, belts. His weight ballooned. Amid reports of domestic violence, Judy fled with their children to Cornelius, North Carolina. Then in the early morning of February 25, 1998, Bowe, armed with a buck knife, pepper spray and duct tape, set out to bring them back. Judy managed to raise the alarm in South Hill, Virginia, and soon afterwards a police car forced Bowe to pull over. After a lengthy appeals process he began to serve his time in June last year, “a bad dream, the worst thing that could happen to a person like myself. Jail is for animals. That’s what you find animals in. If you’re not strong-minded, you won’t come out the same. But I found out I have a lot to live for.”
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Bowe completes 14 laps of the track at Oklahoma Baptist University. His grey T-shirt is soaked in sweat. His pace drops at regular intervals, but a message, in white lettering, on the back of a girl wearing an orange top, carries him home: Dream It; imagine it; achieve it; become it.
“I love my kids with my whole heart and I wish I could see them,” he says. “I’d love to take them to a baseball game or a basketball game, but I can’t do that. I pay child support, but I’m not allowed near them, and it’s unfair. I’ve suffered enough. But I can reach them one way, maybe. I can win back the heavyweight championship of the world and make them proud. I can achieve what I should have achieved first time around. I can show them that their father’s a fighter to the end. I won’t give up trying to see them. I won’t give up.”
RICHARD RESTACK, a clinical professor of neurology at George Washington University, addressed the court room, describing the damage boxing had done to Bowe’s brain: “You have what we call cerebral reserve, where it’s almost like any other kind of reserve, financial reserve or whatever. You write a certain cheque, all the money is gone. Same thing here. You take a certain number of punches, particularly if they’re in close proximity, then you have a dramatic fall-off in a person’s ability to cope.”
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Johnnie Cochran21, who defended OJ Simpson, brought to the stand a team of doctors. They concluded that Bowe suffered from frontal lobe syndrome, a type of brain damage that affected his ability to make wise decisions.
“That was a ploy to try to get me off those charges. It kind of backfired,” Bowe says. “But anybody who talks to me will realise that I’m 100% sound. The attorneys just said at the time it would be a good defence and I went along with it.”
The judge ordered that he could not box again for four years. And there is no rush within the boxing community to welcome him back.
“But there were dangers before,” he reasons. “The dangers are there each time you step in the ring. If you can get around the dangers and come out with your faculties intact and become champion of the world, that’s worth doing. That’s what I’m striving for, that’s why I’m training hard and doing the things I do.”
But Thel Torrence, who worked with Bowe in tandem with Futch throughout his career and whom Bowe wants to run camp for him again, harbours genuine doubts. It is all happening too quickly for his liking. Bowe, he believes, requires more time to prepare, to get his weight down and to focus his mind.
“I am definitely not in favour of this fight at this particular time,” admits Torrence. “It’s premature, Riddick doesn’t have to fight for financial need. He’s kept a lot of his money (Bowe is estimated to have retained $20m of the $80m he has earned in his career). So he needs to slow things down. Not schedule fights and just spend time in camp, work the rust off and work hard on regaining his technique and all those skills that made him such a formidable heavyweight. Then we’ll determine when it’s time to move.
“After such a long layoff, if he’s got the passion back, there’s only one way for him to do it, and that’s to do it right. I don’t think that getting in the ring and fighting before he’s physically and mentally ready is the right thing right now.”
Bowe is adamant that if he were at greater risk than any other fighter, he would call the whole thing off. “Dying ain’t much of a living,” he says. “If Evander is still doing it at his age, why can’t I do it? Being eight years out of it, I’m probably the most well-rested fighter out there.
“But the truth is, this is all I know, boxing. I don’t know what else I will do. I’m too old to start playing basketball.
I can’t join a police academy. “The only thing I can do to give my life longevity and meaning is to become champion again. Other than that, what you gonna do with Riddick Bowe?”