THE HAUNTED
“ONE thing you should know,” there is a weight to Harry Simon’s voice. “Sometimes people ask me, ‘How are you, Champ?’ and I think to myself, ‘Champ? Where is that boy? I want to see that boy again.’ I have to remind myself that it’s me. I want to know what happened to him. I tell my children this and I always break down when I tell them what happened. When people say they want to see the champ I look at myself in the mirror and tell myself ‘Harry, come on. This is still you, man’.”
Simon will always be ‘Champ.’ It is a title fighters proudly carry into old age, long after any belts are consigned to the trophy cabinet. Whether uttered by a friend or stranger in the street, that one simple phrase is an instant reminder of the person they once were.
But the word haunts Simon. Allowing himself to remember the man he once was means confronting the reasons why that confident, brash character no longer exists.
Thursday, November 21, 2002. The events of that autumn day will be forever burned into Simon’s mind. He spent the day showing a documentary film crew around his hometown of Walvis Bay in Namibia. He worked out for the cameras, took them to the bank to film him counting his money and drove them over some nearby sand dunes in his
