Tommy Morrison Update - 8/26/13 - New article added - Mother says he's dying of AIDS.
See last post from me for update from Fight News
http://www.boxingscene.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13685050&postcount=43
ESPN Published this article today and this picture of Tommy. I've been trying to find updates/etc. and there's been nothing from him for over a year now, until this came out today.
http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2013/0822/otl_morrison5_400.jpg
Full Article:
http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/9588582/tommy-morrison-latest-big-fight
In a house on the edge of a dead-end road, an old woman waits for her son to die. The call will come any day now, she says, and when it does, she wants her youngest boy to be buried in Sulphur Springs, Ark., with the rest of the family. She dreads and hopes for this call, if that makes any sense. Only none of it makes sense.
Diana Morrison crushes a Pall Mall, lights another and dissects her son's fate. She's matter-of-fact about it, barely emotional, perhaps because Tommy Morrison, former World Boxing Organization champion, former HIV cautionary tale, has stared at death before. But this time it's different.
She says he has full-blown AIDS. She believes he's in his final days. His skin is jaundiced; his liver is failing. "He's too far gone," she says, flashing an incredulous look when asked whether he could recover. "He's in the end stages. That's it." She says Morrison has been bedridden for a year, can't speak and is being kept alive with the help of a feeding tube and a ventilator.
EnlargeTommy Morrison
Bobby Bank/Getty ImagesTommy Morrison in April 2011 at an event in Parsippany, N.J.
"I talk to him on the phone," she says. "I tell him that the family loves him, he's always in our prayers. What can you say to him? I don't tell him to keep fighting or nothing, because I want him to go."
She is interrupted by her ex-husband, who's living with her now because he's had a couple of strokes. Tim Morrison wraps his arms around Diana, and she tells him to go lie down, but he keeps pacing around the house with a blank look on his face.
It's the middle of the afternoon, but the house is dark. Diana lights another cigarette. She is slight but imposing, harsh but sentimental; she's a woman with tattoos on her arm and her great-granddaughter's pink bike parked outside the house.
Diana gets up off her chair and searches for proof of her son's status, pulling down a picture from the wall. It captures one of the last times she saw her son. She's not good with dates, and can't remember when it was taken, but Tommy is thin, gray-bearded -- barely recognizable as the strapping, confident man from six years ago who swore he was not HIV-positive and vowed a comeback. In the photo on the wall, he looks lost.
It's been about a year since she last saw him. It's complicated. She just had back surgery; he's been shuffled to various health care facilities in at least three states. She says she doesn't have the money to leave her house in Aurora, Mo., and drive hundreds of miles to see him. There's tension between her and Morrison's wife, Trisha, and at the moment, it seems thick. In her heart, Diana believes her daughter-in-law loves Tommy, but is keeping him alive through extraordinary means. She says Tommy wouldn't want it this way.
She says Trisha, like Tommy, doesn't believe he has HIV.
"Tommy blowed smoke up her butt about it," Diana Morrison says. "He's been in denial ever since he's had it. So he's blown smoke up her rear end and got her believing."
The women communicate daily by text. It's easier that way. Diana says he's in a hospital somewhere in Nebraska. Morrison's wife, reached by phone, declines to say where he is. She doesn't want the hospital to be inundated with reporters and visitors. "He is somewhere," she says, and adds that she is touching his arm as we speak. She says he was to have surgery Thursday to replace a gastrointestinal tube. She is steadfast that his illness is not HIV-related.
Since Feb. 10, 1996, when the Nevada Athletic Commission said Morrison tested positive for HIV before a fight, the 44-year-old has spent most of his days dodging the diagnosis. And now Trisha Morrison, who married Tommy two years ago, is carrying on that battle. She says both of them question whether the virus exists in him, and if it exists at all.
She says Morrison's health issues began more than a year and a half ago, when a doctor left a 12-foot piece of surgical gauze in his chest for eight days. She declines to name the hospital or doctor, only that it happened in Tennessee. Things got worse, she says, when he contracted Guillain-Barré Syndrome, an ailment in which the immune system attacks the peripheral nervous system. She says Morrison has the rare Miller Fisher variant, which manifests as a descending paralysis.
She has hope, but it's all up to Tommy now, she says. God and Tommy. She hangs up the phone, and texts a photo of a gift she says Tommy gave her before he got sick. It's a picture of a heart-shaped piece of wood, and on it is a handwritten note.
"Don't give up on me!!" it says.
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