The names Ezzard Charles and Muhammad Ali illicit emotions of wonder, command respect and they are synonymous with greatness.
What does the name Donnie Fleeman mean to you?
For many it will provoke a Google search and a click through to BoxRec where one would learn that he was the fifth opponent of Muhammad Ali, then fighting as Cassius Clay, in what was the Texan’s last contest.
By then, he’d also met and defeated Charles near the end of the great Cincinnati Cobra’s career.
Donnie had defeated Charles in round six, lost to Ali in six and along the way fought the likes of Willie Besmanoff (w pts 10), Roy Harris (l pts 12) and Pete Rademacher (l pts 10).
He’d seemingly disappeared in retirement and old age, a footnote in the Ali story; lost in the shuffle, lost from boxing. Lost, full stop.
In 2010 I was covering a Manny Pacquiao fight in Arlington, Texas, and decided to put some feelers out to try and find Donnie.
Within a day or so I had a number from a friend who collects autographs and I rang.
A man picked up and asked who I was. I explained I was an English boxing journalist in town to cover a big fight and while I was around I wanted to talk to Donnie.
Turned out I was speaking to him, and he cautiously invited me out to his home at Red Oak, about 25 miles from where I was staying but far enough away for it to feel like I was travelling from the suburbs to the country.
By the time you’re a little way from the interstate, you’re nowhere and then, according to my notes, ‘you negotiate an old rail-road crossing before turning left into the 19th century.’
It was at that point when a local farmhand with bare feet appeared, running with dogs while chasing horses.
Time had forgotten to nudge Red Oak forwards.
Still, I arrived around 40 minutes after leaving my hotel but there was no one at Donnie’s address. I waited awhile but left. I actually went to visit Curtis Cokes, who was about an hour away.
Fleeman had initially been reluctant to meet but I called again the next day. Again, he coolly told me to come out and again I left the hotel.
I knocked on his door and he answered. He’d forgotten we’d spoken.
It explained why he’d gone out straight away after arranging to meet me a day earlier.
We shook hands, his palms were like plates, his long, bony fingers like knotted sticks.
We sat down and Donnie soon admitted that his past, his boxing days, were condemned to what had been written in the record books.
I asked him about Charles, Ali and Pete Rademacher. He looked blankly, albeit with an air of blank pride and distant satisfaction that we were talking about his achievements at all.
“Well, I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I don’t remember. I fought all the good ones. You’ll just have to look it up and see.”
I tried prompting here and there but Donnie was better talking in the present than the past.
He’d worked for a supply company after retiring from the ring a few months before his 30th birthday. He’d won 35, lost 12 and drawn once.
But by this point in his life, at 78, he was reduced to talking about now rather than then. As I tried to get him to cast his mind back he called his neighbour, Mary, and asked her to help him filling in the blanks.
They’d lived nextdoor to one another for more than a couple of decades. They were both widowed and had been close friends. Their late partners had been close, too, and they were left with one another.
Donnie also had eight cats. They had the run of the place and he jokingly said his wife, Jimmie, would have been horrified to have watched them take over. He liked their companionship.
He rescued all of them.
I asked Donnie when he last spoke to anyone about his career.
“It’s been a long, long time,” he replied. “Someone came by here and wanted to and I said, ‘I can’t help you because I don’t even know when I boxed last’.”
He was loosening into our conversation and got up to show me a picture of himself from his pomp in a fighting pose hanging on a corridor wall.
“Someone wanted to know who I was and I tell them, that’s who I am,” he smiled, as he picked up one his cats. “And them kitties are the rest of me.”
Donnie’s memory may have dissolved but physically he looked strong and as we went into the kitchen he shared his secret.
“Here’s what I use,” he said, pouring himself a large glass of Pepsi. “I put peanuts in my Pepsi Cola. You can say what you want but peanuts are good for you. They make you mean. I eat peanuts every day. Every day. Sometimes I’ll eat them three or four times a day and you might want to put them in there and see what they taste like.”
His drink fizzed and popped and he tipped the concoction clean down his throat.
He offered me the opportunity to try. I politely declined.
Mary came round and sat with us for a while.
She said she was surprised that he’d let me in. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d entertained anyone who’d wanted to take him back into the past.
“He’s 78 and I think he can hold his own right now,” she said. “He’s in very good health and he’s very strong. And that’s his secret, peanuts and Pepsi.”
Donnie recalled things in flashes; how he started boxing, travelling to fight in Italy, South Africa and Scotland, his time in the Air Force…
Some old fighters and boxing people used to phone and check on him but in later years he couldn’t remember who they were so the calls dried up.
In 2010, when I visited, he only really went out to get food with Mary or to stock up on cat food, peanuts and Pepsi at the local Wal-Mart.
Within a few hours I was part of the media gaggle with outlets from around the world being represented at a pre-fight Pacquiao-Joshua Clottey gathering.
I thought about Donnie a lot.
Two years later he was gone. He was a lovely man.
Oftentimes I’m asked to name my favourite interview. Was this it? It’s certainly one of the most memorable.
Donnie might have instantly forgotten about me when I left that day, but my time with him will stay with me forever.