Championship Rounds (Round 4)

By Bernard Fernandez

Award-winning journalist Bernard Fernandez releases Round 4 of his history-spanning boxing anthology. 

Few can match Bernard Fernandez's peerless prose about boxing. He is a master storyteller and a uniquely gifted writer in the mold of A.J. Liebling, the sweet science's greatest scribe. Every page of Bernard's latest

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bernard Fernandez
• Release date: Sep 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088283486

Book preview

Praise for ‘Championship Rounds, Round 4’

In the world of writing – not boxing writing, not sports writing, but writing – there’s Bernard Fernandez and everybody else. In the latest edition of his boxing anthology series, ‘Championship Rounds, Round 4,’ he tells the stories you didn’t know and makes you care about things you didn’t realize you cared about. It’s a throwback to a different era of storytelling, one sadly lost to the Twitter generation.

*Thomas Gerbasi, senior editor for BoxingScene.com, longtime editorial director of Zuffa LLC and 2022 inductee into the Women’s Boxing Hall of Fame in the Non-Boxer category

Bernard Fernandez is one of the premier boxing writers of his generation and this, the latest collection of his reportage, demonstrates why. Every piece portrays a wisdom and enthusiasm for prizefighting tempered by loyalty to the finer points of writing and truth. He remains essential reading.

*William Dettloff, editor-in-chief of Ringside Seat and author of biographies of Hall of Fame boxers Ezzard Charles and Matthew Saad Muhammad

Bernard Fernandez is a one-of-a-kind storyteller. He proves that again with his latest boxing anthology. I’m honored to know him and even more honored to count him as a friend.

*Dr. Margaret Goodman, founder and chair of the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association (VADA) and former chief physician of the Nevada State Athletic Commission

In the stories contained in ‘Championship Rounds, Round 4,’ Bernard Fernandez accompanies his subjects to places far beyond the ring. These competitors have known the bliss of success and the misery of failure, but the author relies on his many years of lyrical sports writing to deliver an understanding as to why they ever began their journeys, and how they fared along the way.

*Mac Gordon, longtime newspaper columnist and author of

Hometown: How a Small-Town Newspaper and Ordinary Citizens Joined Together in the 1960s to End Racial Violence in McComb, Mississippi

Few can match Bernard Fernandez’s peerless prose about boxing. He is a master storyteller and a uniquely gifted writer in the mold of A.J. Liebling, the sweet science’s greatest scribe. Every page of Bernard’s latest anthology, ‘Championship Rounds, Round 4,’ sizzles like a Joe Frazier left hook.

*Rick Assad is a longtime sports writer in Southern California with degrees from UCLA and CSUN

Championship Rounds

Round 4

Bernard Fernandez

Foreword by Ron Borges

Front cover art by Richard T. Sloane

Copyright © 2023 Bernard Fernandez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

RKMA—Drexel Hill, PA

ISBN: 979-8-218-28195-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-0882-8348-6

Title: Championship Rounds: Round 4

Author: Bernard Fernandez

Digital distribution | 2023

Paperback | 2023

Published in the United States by Love-Love Publishing &

the New Book Authors Publishing Team

Dedication

My life did not really begin on Feb. 12, 1965, the day when, as teenagers on a blind date, I met my future wife, Anne Marie d’Aquin. Nor did it begin on Aug. 24, 1968, the day I took Annie as my bride. But those two seminal events ceremoniously mark our 58-plus years together, and our 55 years as a married couple. Not that it is necessarily so, but all other events of my earthly existence shrink to relative insignificance when placed in comparison.

Contents

Praise for ‘Championship Rounds, Round 4’

Championship Rounds

Dedication

Championship Rounds Round 4

Section A

Section B

Section C

Section D

Section E

Section F

Acknowledgments

Championship Rounds Round 4

Foreword by Ron Borges

When done well there is a rhythm to boxing. The great fighter moves to the sound of a jazz rift whose notes only he can hear, leaving the rest of the world to marvel at the beautiful violence of the dance he creates. So, too, there is a sweet rhythm to the great boxing writer, whose keyboard taps out stories deeper and more revealing than the reader anticipates.

Both are forms of magic, the science of the great fighter and the art of the great fight writer. In both disciplines there are a lot of pugs, journeymen for whom the music never plays. They often work hard at mastering their trade but something eludes them. They never quite feel the rhythm.

Then there are the artists, the few who can turn a brutal sport into a sweet science and a bruising business into a glorious tale of triumph or tragedy, sometimes both in the same arena.

Philadelphia has produced many of those kind of fighters: from Battling Levinski to Tommy Loughran; from Bob Montgomery to Gypsy Joe Harris to Bennie Briscoe; from Sonny Liston to Joe Frazier to Bernard Hopkins. Those and many others created something unique. Something known as a Philly Fighter. Those two words were the only ones necessary to understand what they conveyed. They were badasses.

The City of Brotherly Love has also produced a rich tradition of sweet scientists at the keyboard. Memorable storytellers like Larry Merchant, Jack McKinney, Stan Hochman, Tom Cushman and Elmer Smith. There has long parade of Philly writers to go along with those Philly Fighters and chief among them for nearly 40 years is Bernard Fernandez, who took over the boxing beat at the Philadelphia Daily News after apprenticeships in places like Houma, Louisiana, Jackson, Mississippi, Miami and Pittsburgh but perhaps most of all in New Orleans. There he was raised by a former Louisiana welterweight turned cop named Jack Fernandez, a man who taught him there could be sweetness and literature inside a boxing ring if you really knew what you were looking at.

Later, as a young copy boy with a dream of reaching his version of the main event, he was tutored by the Crescent City’s greatest sports writer, Peter Finney, at a newspaper oddly called the Times-Picayune. What Fernandez learned there about boxing, about people and about storytelling has gained him admittance into the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Atlantic City and International Boxing Halls of Fame. It also won him the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism, which is the fistic equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, and an award for long and meritorious service to boxing. He deserved them all because, like the best Philly fighters, he mastered his trade the hard way, sparring with men like Don King, Mike Tyson, his hometown favorites, Hopkins and Meldrick Taylor, and literally thousands of other fighters, bucket carriers, cut men and professors of pugilism.

Along the road he told stories that made you smile, laugh, frown and occasionally caused a tear to run down his reader’s cheek. Boxing is that kind of sport and the best boxing writers, the few like Fernandez, understand that and find ways to put all its raw emotions into words.

That combination of empathy, understanding, backbone and grit has won Fernandez a legion of fans, fans not simply of fighters but of the kind of writing you’ll find in this fourth volume of Fernandez’s collected essays. Most guys have trouble filling up a newspaper column worth reading. This guy has produced four volumes of fight writing as slick and sly as Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and as powerfully truthful as a Smokin’ Joe Frazier left hook.

Championship Rounds, Round 4 includes, for example, an insightful explanation of why a man of fire like Roberto Duran could suddenly quit in the middle of a title fight with Sugar Ray Leonard.

In Fernandez’s hands the No Mas fight becomes not a criticism of a man’s worst moment but a study in how fragile even a great champion’s mind can be when the moment turns sour.

From his keyboard springs a case study in the swirling emotions that can engulf one of boxing’s fiercest warriors when, as Fernandez puts it, he finds himself in a place where bravado cannot rescue him from a dark place he never expected to be thrust into.

Who but an artist of the fistic mindset could find in the telling of such a story a place for the words of both Floyd Patterson and Ernest Hemingway while also quoting undersized former heavyweight champion Chris Byrd’s succinct explanation of why Duran cracked. Nobody wants to get clowned, Fernandez quotes Byrd saying.

The ability to get athletes who bleed for a living to open up has long been one of Fernandez’s greatest gifts. It comes through on nearly every page of this volume but perhaps nowhere more poignantly then when he quotes a young Oscar De La Hoya speaking of the wide gulf between himself and the man who most made him a boxer, his father Joel.

He’s a Mexican father,’’ De La Hoya told Fernandez in a 1999 piece on the eve of his fight with Felix Trinidad. He has a big ego. When Fernandez points out the father had recently praised his son’s skills De La Hoya responded, I read it in a newspaper. But I don’t want to read it. I want to hear it."

If you ever wondered why Oscar De La Hoya fought so fiercely for so long, you needed only read what Fernandez got him to say to understand the source of that fire.

In a 2002 portrait of the great heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis before he faced Mike Tyson in what Lewis felt would be his signature moment, Fernandez encapsulated the dilemma the big Brit faced trying to win over skeptical American fight fans who felt he was more often a caution sign than a green light when in the ring. Perhaps Lewis can’t win, even should he win, Fernandez wrote. Enough said.

In a preview piece about a fight no one really cared to see between a hairy towering Russian heavyweight champion named Nikolay Valuev and a fading Evander Holyfield, Fernandez saw the match in a way few writers would have, describing it as an oddity before pointing out, As is often the case in boxing, circumstances dictated that the ridiculous become reality.

In one of his most passionate pieces, he writes of the fallen Meldrick Taylor after having seen his dream of defeating Julio Cesar Chavez disappear with one wave of a referee’s hand only two clicks of a watch away from victory. With that mastery of rhythm Fernandez delivers the whole sad story in his five opening words.

How long is two seconds? he asks.

In the end too long for Taylor to have his hand raised in a fight he was leading widely on two scorecards as the final round wore down and he wore out. Fernandez understood the agony the bleeding and exhausted Taylor was feeling in that moment and he lays out his agony brilliantly.

Boxing has always been a writer’s sport in the way others are not. It’s why so many literary champions from Hemingway to Norman Mailer to Joyce Carol Oates have found it so fascinating. So did Bernard Fernandez. He just wrote it better.

His explanation of an essential part of the great fighter in the opening of a 2005 piece on the Diego Corrales-Jorge Luis Castillo fight is Fernandez at his most revealing best.

Perhaps the first truth of boxing is that fighters lie, he wrote. It’s not necessarily a character flaw.

No, it’s not. Not in boxing at least, but how many writers would have realized that or, more significantly, been able to put it into words?

Only one did, which is why you’ll enjoy every page of Bernard Fernandez’s newest collection of sweet writing on the sweet science.

About Ron Borges

Ron Borges has attended over 1,000 world championship fights around the world. He covered boxing, pro football, golf, baseball, hockey and four Olympic Games for 25 years at the Boston Globe. He then became the lead sports columnist at the BostonHerald, where he also continued to cover prize fighting. He has been named Massachusetts Sportswriter of the Year five times, was selected one of America’s top 10 sports columnists by the Associated Press Sports Editors multiple times and his work has been anthologized in "Best Sports Stories’’ more than a dozen times. On June 13, 2022, he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He is also the author of Present At The Creation, the autobiography of Upton Bell, son of legendary NFL commissioner Bert Bell and a long-time NFL executive, as well as Fighting For Survival,the autobiography of Christy Martin, boxing’s greatest female fighter.

Section A

Tales Worth Telling

‘No Mas’ Fight Showed Every Fighter Fears Something

TheSweetScience.com, Nov. 24, 2015

So many fighters say the same thing. I’m ready to die if necessary, they publicly pronounce, and some might even believe it. But while bravery is as much of a staple of winning boxing as talent, answering the bell against even the most fearsome puncher is not the same as a soldier charging a machine-gun nest or engaging in hand-to-hand combat with an enemy who is actually trying to end his life, not just knock him out. A fighter’s fortitude and strength of character certainly are tested in the ring, but all the convenient comparisons to war go way too far. Boxing is a sport, and not one for the faint of heart, but it is never a matter of kill-or-be-killed. At least it shouldn’t be.

The truth is every fighter – probably every human being, for that matter – is afraid of something. The seemingly meekest individual is capable of extraordinary heroism, given the proper circumstances, and the most blustery bully can be exposed as a paper tiger if confronted by someone made of sterner stuff. The only thing that holds true in either case is the observers who stand off to the side critiquing the actions of the actually involved as being courageous or cowardly. And once the more odious label is applied, it can be extremely difficult to scrape off.

There might never have been a boxing match to fuel as much armchair psychoanalysis as the second of the three bouts that pitted Panamanian tough guy Roberto Duran against flashy American Sugar Ray Leonard. Nov. 25 marks the 35th anniversary of that curious bout in the Louisiana Superdome, in which Duran, who had been widely perceived as the fight game’s most implacable and relentless destroyer, abruptly threw up his hands late in the eighth round, muttered something to Mexican referee Octavio Meyran and began to walk away. It was a blatant act of surrender by the one man from whom no one would ever have expected it.

The bout soon came to be known, rather notoriously, as the No Mas fight, a reference to the words in Spanish Duran supposedly had said to Meyran, which meant No more, although Duran to this day steadfastly insists he never said any such thing.

A disgraced Duran went home to find his palatial home vandalized, his most ardent fans holding him in contempt and the Panamanian government, which had assured him he would get to keep all $8 million of his purse because of his status as a national hero, now disposed to nullify that exemption and take $2 million off the top in taxes.

Fortunately for the Hands of Stone, his legacy has been largely restored. He went on to fight 21 more years after No Mas, winning another two world championships along the way, and, who knows, he might still be fighting today, at 64, had he not been forced to retire after being in a bad car accident in October 2001, when he was 50. Several historians today rate him higher on various all-time pound-for-pound lists than Leonard, who lost their first fight (which was terrific) on a close but unanimous decision before Sugar Ray won parts two and three of the trilogy.

In New Orleans, Duran became the story, Leonard said of the No Mas fight that, even in victory, didn’t turn out the way he had anticipated. All everyone talked about was him quitting. He got more attention for quitting than I did for winning the fight.

There have been, of course, other fights – major ones, too – in which one of the principals quit, if only in a manner of speaking, rather than to allow himself to be knocked out or his humiliation to be extended to the final bell. But it is No Mas that has become a case study of the swirling emotions that can engulf even a great fighter when he finds himself in a place where bravado cannot rescue him from a dark place he never expected to be thrust into.

At the press conference to officially announce Duran-Leonard II, Duran dismissed Leonard and brashly predicted he would beat him much worse than he had in their first bout, which took place in Montreal five months earlier.

I don’t like to see clowns in the ring, he sneered with undisguised contempt. I like to see boxers. To fight and beat me, you have to come into the ring and fight me, hard. (Leonard) goes into the ring and he tries to imitate (Muhammad) Ali, but an imitator is a loser.

Leonard imitated Ali all right, and pretty damn effectively, the most obvious example coming in the seventh round, when Sugar Ray wound up his right hand in windmill fashion, as if he was going to throw a bolo punch, before delivering a stinging left jab to Duran’s nose, causing the WBC welterweight champion’s eyes to water.

William Nack, writing in Sports Illustrated, described that moment as the most painful blow of Duran’s life. It drew hooting laughter from the crowd and made Duran a public spectacle – a laughingstock.

Perhaps ironically, Duran – who was not in the same tip-top shape he had been for the first fight with Leonard, having had to take off anywhere from 40 to 70 pounds in a relatively short time, depending on which version of the tale you choose to believe – thought by simply walking away he was putting himself in a better light than if he had continued to be the target of Sugar Ray’s largely successful attempts to embarrass him.

In Duran’s mind I think he expected that the crowd would condemn Leonard for having made a mockery of the fight, rather than for him quitting, said veteran trainer Emanuel Steward, who was in the Superdome with his fighter, WBA welterweight titlist Thomas Hearns, to agitate for a unification showdown with the winner. It was an egregious miscalculation.

He quit out of humiliation and frustration, Leonard told the late George Kimball, author of Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearn, Duran and the Last Great Era in Boxing. It’s one of those things that happens to bullies. Duran threw up his hands without realizing the repercussions it would have on his legacy."

Not surprisingly, Duran’s people quickly put up a smokescreen in which they blamed their guy’s disappointing performance, and eventual surrender, on stomach cramps and an injured right shoulder more than on Leonard’s superior foot and hand speed.

If Duran had stomach cramps, wrote Al Goldstein, the boxing writer for the Baltimore Sun, it must have been his guts shrinking.

Ed Schuyler Jr. of The Associated Press, cracking wise to his colleagues in the press room, said, They’re checking Duran’s birth certificate back in Panama. They think now he may be a Guatemalan.

To appreciate and understand the furor attendant to No Mas, it is necessary to go back to their first encounter, on June 20, 1980, at Montreal’s Stade Olympique, in the same city in which Leonard was the breakout, gold-medal-winning star of the 1976 Olympic boxing competition.

Perhaps Duran’s resentment went from slow boil to volcanic eruption when it became apparent that he and his team had been snookered at the negotiating table by the Sugar man and his savvy attorney/adviser, Mike Trainer. Trainer had arranged for Leonard to receive the entire site fee and 80% of the closed-circuit and foreign TV sales, which wound up being nearly $10 million, by far eclipsing the previous high payday for a fighter, which was the $6.5 million Ali got for his third bout with Ken Norton. Duran, meanwhile, had signed quickly for $1.65 million, which was his biggest purse to that point but so much less than he might have received had he sought a more equitable division of the financial pie.

In any case, this was a fight in which it was virtually impossible to sit on the fence.

The casting is perfect, said Angelo Dundee, Leonard’s chief second. You have Sugar Ray, the kid next door, the guy in the white hat, against Duran, the killer, the guy with the gunfighter’s eyes. It’s the kind of fight where you can’t be neutral.

Duran played his part to the hilt, except that he wasn’t playing. He insulted Leonard from the get-go, and his constant disparagement of the Olympic poster boy had Leonard convinced that his best course of action would be to beat the mouthy Panamanian at his own game. He had that bully’s mentality, Leonard said after he was handed his first loss as a pro. He always tries to intimidate opponents. He challenged my manhood, and I wasn’t mature enough to know how to respond. All I could think about was retaliating.

Despite facing Duran on the Panamanian’s terms, Leonard met fire with fire. He barely lost on points, coming up short by margins of 146-144, 148-147 and 145-144 on the judges’ scorecards. And it wasn’t long before he concluded that he would fare much better with a revised fight plan, particularly in light of the nonstop celebrating engaged in by Duran, who now saw himself as invincible, or at least something close to it. So Leonard and Trainer pressed for a quick rematch, offering Duran his biggest-to-then purse, but only if he agreed to the November date.

I knew Duran was overweight and partying big time, Leonard said. I’ve done some partying myself, but I knew when to cut it out. I said to Mike, ‘Let’s do it now, as soon as possible.’ In retrospect, it was pretty clever of me.

So, how does No Mas look now, 35 years down the road? Should Duran have insisted on more time to get his body back in peak condition, and if so, would the outcome have been different? Might it have been preferable to chase after Leonard, slowly being beaten down and then stopped?

Duran, in an interview with Nack three years after No Mas, continued to give Leonard something less than full credit for winning while absolving himself of at least some of the blame. Leonard knew I had nothing, Duran said. He was running and clowning because he knew I couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t going to let myself get knocked out and look ridiculous in the ring.

It is a mindset that is hardly unique to Duran. A two-time former heavyweight champion who had won a silver medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics as a 165-pounder, Chris Byrd made a career of flummoxing larger heavyweights who would have preferred being pounded into submission by someone more like them than to be shown up by the flitting Byrd.

It’s called ‘getting clowned,’ Byrd said before his Dec. 14, 2002, bout with Evander Holyfield for the vacant IBF heavyweight title, which Byrd won by unanimous decision. Nobody wants to get clowned. They’d rather get knocked out than to get frustrated and embarrassed at the same time. But I’ve been doing that to people for a long time … since I was a kid. I pride myself on that. I kind of make guys look foolish, particularly heavyweights since they’re a lot slower.

Which brings us back to the subject of fear in the ring, in all its various forms. There is the most obvious application, which is the fear of being beaten bloody, the kind that virtually paralyzed some of the opponents faced by such devastating punchers as Sonny Liston, George Foreman and Mike Tyson. And there is the more subtle form of apprehension and dismay, the kind perhaps displayed by Tyson – a fighter who, by the way, has always looked upon Duran as a role model – when he got himself disqualified in his rematch with Holyfield, by twice chomping on Evander’s ears, a form of submission as much as Duran turning his back on Leonard, at least in the opinion of noted boxing commentator and former Tyson trainer Teddy Atlas.

One of the more gentlemanly fighters ever to have achieved significant success, the late two-time former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, was as far removed from Duran, both stylistically and personally, as anyone could be. But Patterson gave one of the most honest and insightful interviews ever to author Gay Talese in the March 1964 edition of Esquire magazine, in which Patterson spoke of the near-terror that gripped him before both of his clashes with Liston, who won each by first-round knockout.

Oh, I would give up anything to just be able to work with Liston, to box with him somewhere where nobody would see us, and to see if I could get past three minutes with him, Patterson told Talese. "I know I can do better. I’m not talking about a rematch. Who would pay a nickel for another Patterson-Liston fight? I know I wouldn’t. But all I want to do is get past the first round.

It’s not a bad feeling when you’re knocked out, Patterson said a bit further down in the article. It’s a good feeling, actually. It’s not painful, just a sharp grogginess; you’re on a pleasant cloud. But then this good feeling leaves you. And what follows is a hurt, a confused hurt – not a physical hurt. It’s a hurt combined with anger; it’s a what-will-people-think hurt. All you want then is a hatch door in the middle of the ring, a hatch door that will open and let you fall through and land in your dressing room.

For his first fight with Liston, Patterson – who had a sinking sensation he would lose in pretty much the manner that he did – brought a false beard, false mustache, hat and glasses to his dressing room so that he could slip away as quietly and anonymously as possible.

You must wonder what makes a man do things like this, Patterson told Talese. Well, I wonder, too. And the answer is, I don’t know. But I think within me, with every human being, there is a certain weakness. It is a weakness that expresses itself more when you’re alone. And I have figured out that part of the reason I do the things I do is because … I am a coward. You see it when a fighter loses.

So, Patterson was asked, could the menacing Liston be a coward as well?

That remains to be seen, he replied. We’ll find out what he’s like after somebody beats him, how he takes it. It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself.

On Feb. 25, 1964, the big, ugly bear, Liston, got clowned big-time in his first meeting with Cassius Clay and quit on his stool after the sixth round, citing an injured shoulder which in retrospect appears as dubious an excuse as was Roberto Duran’s stomach cramps.

The fights go on, and sometimes the hardest struggle is the one that a fighter wages within himself to tame the beast that gnaws at his insides when things aren’t going his way and the prospect for a turnaround are dimming fast. It calls to mind something written by Ernest Hemingway, not necessarily about boxing, although it very well might have been.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places, surmised Hemingway, who also noted that Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. It is a point of view that would seem to be the basis of extensive debate. Papa did not weigh in on the conundrum of a fighter being clowned. You’d have to think it would have been the basis for a terrific novel, though.

Boxers and Motorcycles: Fatal Attraction

TheSweetScience.com, March 24, 2016

They are, or were, superbly conditioned athletes, adept at moving quickly, hitting hard and taking risks. For some, the risk-taking part is merely an occupational hazard, part of a job description that by definition entails some degree of personal peril. For others, those who know the exhilaration of staring into the face of disaster and making it blink, it might be easy to feel as if they are indestructible, somehow impervious to the possibility of instant tragedy. Courting danger, conquering one’s fear in the process, can almost be an aphrodisiac. Hurtling down a highway at a high rate of speed provides the kind of rush that not even participation in the most physically challenging of sports can furnish.

Boxers and motorcycles have always gone together, like a right cross off a left jab. But there is often a high price to be paid for the attraction certain fighters have for land rockets that offer them scant protection from the kind of horrific collisions that make bikers 25 times more likely to suffer death or serious injury than those involved in car crashes.

All of which makes former two-time world champion Paul The Punisher Williams one of those fortunate enough to have been involved in such a motorcycle accident and live to tell about it. Just a week after signing for an HBO Pay Per View fight with Canelo Alvarez that, had he won, might have made him incredibly rich and a certifiable superstar, Williams was in Atlanta, where he was to serve as best man at his brother Leon’s wedding. The date was May 27, 2012.

But Williams, who was more accustomed to dishing out punishment than receiving it in the ring, never made it to the nuptials. Driving a modified Suzuki 1300 Hayabusa, a recent gift to himself, he was going too fast (an estimated 75 mph) when he swerved up a steep roadside embankment to avoid a collision and was catapulted 60 feet into the air. His body landed with such force that his spinal cord was severely damaged, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Williams was later told by workers at Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, Ga., where he arrived by ambulance, that there had been three motorcycle accidents in the Atlanta metropolitan area that weekend, and that he was the only rider among them who had survived.

Initially clinging to the hope that he could be rehabilitated to a point where he could resume his boxing career, Williams understandably slipped into periods of depression when it became obvious that he would be forever confined to a wheelchair. But the Aiken, S.C., native is an optimist by nature, and he makes his much anticipated return to the fight game, as a trainer, on Friday night at the Buffalo Run Casino in Miami, Okla., where his protégé, super welterweight Justin DeLoach (13-1, 7 KOs), takes on Dillon Cook (16-0, 6 KOs) in the opening eight-round bout of a ShoBox: The New Generation quadrupleheader, the 10-round main event of which pits super lightweight knockout artist Regis Rougarou Prograis (16-0, 13 KOs) against Aaron The Jewel Herrera (29-4-1, 18 KOs). What’s happening has happened, Williams said of his altered circumstances. "It is what it is. This is my first time stepping back into the world. I love boxing.

What I don’t want to see is a fighter getting hurt. This is a hard sport. I know when I was in there I was always going for broke. But I want Justin – all fighters, actually – to come out of the ring in the same way they came in. Win or lose, I don’t want to see anybody get hurt.

But despite his fervent hope that those in his potentially damaging profession remain safe inside the ropes, there is a part of The Punisher that will always regret that he can never again know the joy of taking to the open road on his supercharged motorcycle and feeling the wind in his face. Like the character played by Tom Cruise in Top Gun, he wistfully still feels the need for speed, like other adrenaline junkies who weigh the benefits of feeling that freedom against the sobering statistics and decide that the risk is worth taking.

There’s nothing like being on a bike and it’s just you and the road, Williams told writer Jason Langendorf of Vice Sports for an article that was posted in January 2015, 32 months after the accident that forever changed his life. "Peaceful. That was some of the best times, clearing my head. The fun. It’s a different world.

Of course, you’ve got people who say, ‘Oh, he’s stupid. He should’ve never got on that bike.’ Hey, you know me. I don’t have no regrets. I don’t mean to be selfish, but if I had my legs again, I’d bike to the house right now.

The allure of motorcycles to the adventurous and those who reject conformity is, of course, a matter of long-standing. The silver screen has romanticized the image of the biker as rebel. Think of a leather-jacketed Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, Cruise as hotshot jet fighter pilot Maverick in Top Gun. It is one of the reasons milquetoast CPAs and librarians in Las Vegas pack the Harley-Davidson apparel store on the Strip, loading up on cool-looking gear, whether or not they actually ride bikes, that allows them to channel their inner Brando. It is also the reason thousands of spectators were drawn to the daredevil antics of the late Evel Knievel, who used to jump his chopper over long rows of parked buses and 18-wheelers. Sometimes he even made it all the way over. And when he didn’t … well, seeing him bounce off the pavement like a rag doll on failed attempts was part of the show, too. We could not turn away because the constant possibility of death or grievous injury was as much of a reason for watching as Knievel’s chances for actually pulling off feats that seemed nearly impossible.

Williams is hardly the first fighter or noted athlete to have risked so much on a motorcycle, and lost, nor will he be the last. Perhaps the most notable example in recent years is former IBF super featherweight and WBC lightweight champion Diego Chico Corrales, winner of perhaps the most spectacularly action-packed fight of the 21st century, on May 7, 2005, at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay, in which he somehow rallied from two 10th-round knockdowns at the hands of Jose Luis Castillo to win by a stoppage in the very round in which he appeared to be all but finished.

You can vote now, Gary Shaw, Corrales’ promoter, excitedly said at the postfight press conference after his guy had staged the comeback to end all comebacks. This was Fight of the Year, Fight of Next Year, Fight of the Decade. I don’t believe you’ll ever see anything like this again.

Added Joe Goossen, Corrales’ trainer: In my 35 years (in boxing), that was the greatest fight I’ve ever seen.

Exactly two years to the day after registering the victory that forever shall be the cornerstone of his boxing legacy, Corrales died on a Las Vegas highway when the 29-year-old, depressed over a downturn in his fistic fortunes and aboard his newly purchased racing bike, ran into the back of a car and was then struck by another from behind. Corrales – who police said had been traveling at a high rates of speed, estimated at 100 mph – was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of one of the two cars involved sustained minor injuries.

The guy was a true warrior. Simply by the way he fought he should be in the (International Boxing) Hall of Fame, a somber Shaw said of Corrales, a father of five, who left behind a wife who was six months pregnant. Believe me, if he could’ve got off that cold pavement, he would.

Ironically, Corrales had discussed his motorcycle riding the previous summer in a Las Vegas Review-Journal story.

I’m only young once and, unless someone hasn’t told me something yet, I only get to live once, he said. If I couldn’t do this stuff now, stuff I always wanted to do, I would never get a chance to do it.

Corrales’ cautionary tale is very similar to that of heavyweight Young Stribling, a 1996 inductee into the IBHOF who posted a 22413-14 record, with 129 victories inside the distance, in a career that spanned from 1921 to ’33. Sometimes criticized for being overly cautious in the ring, Stribling was famously reckless outside of it. He was observed traveling at breakneck speeds, whether it was behind the wheel of a car or on a motorcycle. But it was on his bike that Stribling’s life was cut short, at 28, when he was involved in a terrible crash that left him with internal injuries that ultimately proved fatal. He was rushed to a hospital in Macon, Ga., where he died on Oct. 3, 1933.

The list of fighters killed or seriously injured in motorcycle-related accidents has continued to mount. Former WBO light heavyweight champion Julio Cesar Gonzalez, 35, was killed in a motorbike accident in Mexico on March 10, 2012, following a hit-and-run involving a drunk driver. Australian women’s amateur titlist Donna Pepper was 30 when she died in a crash on Feb. 13, 2012, in Cambodia while on a five-month Asian holiday. Former WBC super middleweight champ Anthony Dirrell, who was