Tommy Morrison Quotes

I rewatched a couple of his fights (Enis, Lewis) and decided to do some reading on him, hoping to learn more about his addictions and how it affected his training. Listening to some of his interview, he seemed pretty well-spoken and fairly intelligent despite his troubles but damn, this guy is off. "Sex became a part of my conditioning program," he says. "I'm serious. It was just all the time...three different women a day for seven or eight straight days." Morrison denies that he contacted HIV by having sex with so many women. He blames his condition on steroid injections. "I didn't get it sexually," he insists. "HIV is just a dead piece of skin, that's all it is. Every time you pierce yourself with a needle, you are putting the microbes in your body, these little pieces of dry skin. That's exactly how I got it." You can't pass it during sex from man to woman anyway. It cannot happen, I don't care what people tell you, it cannot happen. It happens from man to man because that's forbidden of God. You know, it's an abomination, you're going to pay the price. What causes AIDS is drugs." Morrison is upset that prison officials have refused to furnish his room with a television, tape recorder and laptop computer. They turned down his offer to buy a $6,000 weightlifting mechanism for everyone to use. Claiming he is innocent, Tommy says he agreed to plead guilty only because his mouthpiece led him to believe he could wear his own cloths in prison. They lied. He's wearing a corn yellow uniform while picking up trash and cutting weeds. "I didn't do anything wrong," says the man charged with weapons and driving offenses. "I'm guilty by association more or less, but I'm pretty bitter about the whole thing." He received a 10-year-sentence with eight years suspended. With credit for good behavior, he could be released as soon as December. He's hoping for one more comeback. "When you get to a place like this, there's no place to go but up," says Tommy. Six days after his diagnosis, Morrison held a press conference in which he speculated that he’d contracted the virus from an HIV-positive fighter or through unprotected sex. He got a referral from Magic Johnson—the AIDS-cocktail poster child—for HIV specialist Dr. David Ho, who’d later be named Time’s “Man of the Year.” In the years since, however, he’s been advancing every other explanation for his diagnosis: That it was a conspiracy to keep the undisputed world championship out of a white man’s hands, to help Don King “make gazillions out of the sport once I was out of the way.” That his positive result came from steroid abuse, not the unprotected sex Morrison was notorious for, and that “heterosexuals can’t transmit the virus.” That HIV is “an invented virus” making money for the drug industry. (“There’s no money in a cure,” Morrison says, “but there is money in treatment.”) That the antiretroviral drug AZT, not HIV, causes AIDS. That he was tested for antibodies, but not for the presence of HIV itself—the viral-load test—which Morrison claims to have passed repeatedly in recent years. "Blacks are so tough till you hurt 'em once," he says. "Then you own 'em. I learned patience in prison, Learned the value of time there, too, and that I really don't like black people."