Must read article on Rid**** Bowe

[Dynamite Kid]

It wasn't the first time Rid**** Bowe had paid more attention to someone in the crowd than to the business at hand in the ring, but at least this once he waited until the fight was over. There was Bowe, his hand being raised in triumph by the referee, spotting Bill Cosby and jiggling his head like a dashboard dog, a trademark Cos gesture. Here Bowe had gotten the biggest win of his young life, a two-round knockout of Bert Cooper, and this mugging was all he could think to do. "Good old Bert," as Bowe had called him, had yet to be gathered from the canvas, and Bowe was on to the entertainment portion of the program. Ladies and gentlemen: the Clown Bomber.

Is this the future of the heavyweight division, a boxer whose idea of a fight plan is to shtick and move? Could be. Bowe is quickly emerging as the class of an exciting second echelon of heavies—several notches below Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson and Razor Ruddock—which also includes Ray Mercer, Tommy Morrison and Bruce Seldon, undefeated prospects waiting for the smoke to clear at the top. Bowe, a remarkable physical phenomenon—he is 6'5", weighs 230 pounds and has the limber moves of a middleweight—may be the most gifted of the bunch, and he's now being hailed as much for his Muhammad Ali imitation in the ring as for his Eddie Murphy imitation outside it.

His success has served only to confuse Bowe, a self-styled comic genius with a repertoire of celebrity impressions, who suddenly finds himself being taken seriously as a fighter, the dashboard-dog bit notwithstanding. At 23, Bowe is 20-0, with 18 KOs. His jab has been compared to the one Larry Holmes used in his 24 title fights, and his footwork has invoked memories of Ali. What's more, his trainer, Eddie Futch, has armed Bowe with a right hand, a destructive tool that has gotten him out of the ring in an average of less than three rounds in his pro career. Futch has more teaching to do, but even Bowe's critics, who once dismissed him as a buffoon, concede that he may finally be capable of exercising his talent in the ring instead of at the Improv. "He's really grown up," says Ken Adams, the U.S. Olympic coach who baby-sat Bowe at the 1988 Games. "He says things that make sense sometimes."

You can't imagine the turnaround this statement represents. In Seoul, Bowe offered a brand of postfight whimsy that had reporters begging for more and his coaches smacking their foreheads. He advised the scribes after one of his bouts that they had just seen his "****** whopper." He suggested that an opponent might think to bring his pension plan along, "because I'm going to retire him." After twice being dropped for an eight count by the Soviet Union's Aleksandr Miroshnichenko, Bowe modestly said, "It was quite embarrassing for the great one to be on the canvas." Bowe won a decision.

Anyone with a sense of history and a sense of humor understood that Bowe was emulating Ali, a big enough influence on his life that Bowe timed his first appearance in a boxing gym 10 years ago to coincide with Ali's birthday. And as long as Bowe won, he was surely entertaining. A slow day in Seoul? Bowe informed reporters that the U.S. boxers had a betting pool going on the quickest knockout. "It ain't kosher!" yelped Adams, in his role of beleaguered coach.

But as Bowe attracted fans, he also acquired skeptics. They tended to remember an Olympic bout during which Bowe sat in his corner, supposedly listening to frantic instructions from assistant coach Tom Coulter. A voice rang out in the crowd: "Hey, Rid****!" Bowe swiveled mightily, and Coulter had to take Bowe's head between his hands and turn it back toward him. Or they recalled the time Bowe was kicked out of the U.S. team camp for arguing with Adams. "He told me to take the first thing smoking," says Bowe, as if still surprised.

"Spaceship Bowe," said Ferdie Pacheco as NBC's fight commentator in Seoul. "An enormous talent, but no mental stability whatsoever." It wasn't hard to line up with the Fight Doctor after Bowe walked through his gold medal match, a loss to Canada's Lennox Lewis. Who knew Bowe's family was dying all about him? Who cared to guess at this clown's torment? Nobody, really. So Bowe, who believed that all the world is a stage, got the hook.

For many boxers the Olympics represent a terrific send-off. Bowe remembered the attention that Mark Breland, who trained in the same Brooklyn gym at which Bowe worked out, got after winning the gold at 147 pounds in the 1984 Games. Before the 1988 Games, Bowe had said, "Perhaps they'll give me a parade, like the Mets. I'll get a ride home from the airport on top of a fire truck."

But he had miscalculated. His wife, Judy, and two children, Rid**** Jr. and Ridicia, were the only ones looking for him at the gate when he got back from Seoul. It was a lonely ride back to the Brooklyn housing project and the growing wreckage of his family.

Bowe's performance at the Games had been so disappointing that even promoter Butch Lewis, once an avid pursuer, washed his hands of him. "I had Greg Page flashbacks," says Lewis, referring to another failed heavyweight prospect. So diminished were Bowe's prospects that he considered joining the Army

[Dynamite Kid]

The Army would have been a significant improvement over his life in Brooklyn. The forces of his Brownsville neighborhood were undeniably corrupting. He, almost alone in Dorothy Bowe's brood of 13, had escaped drugs. An older brother, Henry, had lain dying as Bowe struggled in Seoul. Of what? "Good question," says Bowe mysteriously. "He was just sick." Only months before the Olympics, a sister, Brenda, had been stabbed to death while resisting a crack addict's attempt to steal her welfare money. Another brother is, says Bowe, "in and out of jail." Another sister "just can't leave that crack alone."

Most people cannot imagine what that silver medal condemned him to, not even Rock Newman, one of Lewis's assistants. He maintained an interest in Bowe, though Lewis warned him, "That boy will break your heart." Newman believed that a hand injury sustained before the Olympics—Bowe had had surgery on it the preceding April—was the explanation for his defeat at the Games. Newman also knew that Bowe had been shattered by his sister's death and that, for all his wisecracking, all he wanted to do while in Seoul was return home and repair his family. "We were just so tight, Brenda and me," he told Newman. So Newman visited Bowe, on a kind of character-finding tour.

Newman had managed Dwight Muhammad Qawi, a hardened product of the ******s of Camden, N.J., and was familiar with America's version of ground zero. However, while walking up to the housing project where Bowe, Judy and their children still lived with his mother, Dorothy, even Newman became unnerved. "He meets me outside the building like I'm some kind of tenderfoot," says Newman. " 'Believe me,' I tell him, 'I've seen my share of city life.' There's this long line of people coming out of the building. I'm thinking it's a soup kitchen. 'What's this?' I ask. He says they're standing in line to buy crack. They were 50 to 60 deep. And it's cold. I say, 'Can't be.' So he shrugs and takes me upstairs. He lives on the sixth floor, and the elevator, of course, is broken. He points out people sitting on the landings with automatic weapons. He mentions, like an aside, that people around here really don't respond too well when things happen. I say, 'What do you mean?' He says, 'A guy got shot out here the other day, like at four in the afternoon, and they never moved his body out of the hall until the next morning.'

"So we go into the apartment where he lives. Small living room, got all his trophies, the tapes from his amateur career. I look into this tiny bedroom, where he, his wife and two kids are living, and it struck me there. If he could have survived here, there must be something special about him."

What in the world was Bowe laughing about all those years? His family was breaking down. The world he knew was in magnificent disrepair. Yet he reconstructed his childhood to resemble something torn from a Saturday Evening Post cover. "Oh, we had a lot of fun," he says. "If I could just go back to being between 10 and 16, I'd never grow up."

Still, he did not completely deny the reality of his environment. If conversation flags, he will perk things up with some horrible and violent reminiscence. "I was once standing this close to a guy, and he got his head blown right off," he will say casually. But everything is presented as mostly normal and innocent. Even the lurking menace of Tyson, ahead of Bowe at Public School 396 and a bully, is recalled gently. Says Bowe, "About all I remember is that he was big for his age, and he always had a bag of cookies with him." He pauses. "Good old Mike."

There is a softness to Bowe that belies his background and his profession. He is a kid who walked his mother to her job at a plastic-housewares factory, 1½ miles every night. Bowe would pour out his dreams to her, how he wanted to be somebody, be different. He would like to be champion, he told her. He would enable her to retire. He would buy them a house. Dorothy, who is given to wearing shirts with BIG DOT on the back, didn't much go for this mush. Just don't go to jail, she told him, because that's one place she would never visit.

Newman, hearing all this, couldn't wait to get into his own pockets and sign this kid. He was supposed to be a quitter? Newman dished out $50,000 and began the reclamation program. He knew that Bowe needed something more than money, though. He needed a trainer who could push the right buttons. There was only one, really—Futch, then 78, trainer of 15 world champions. Of course, Futch wasn't about to take on Bowe. "I'd heard the stories," Futch says. "And I saw the Olympic final, which was kind of puzzling." Maybe you can take chances on mystery fighters when you're young, but darned if Futch was going to spend his 80's with a nut case.

Newman was determined. He picked up the phone a dozen times to call Futch, then put it back down to jot down even more persuasive arguments. "By the time I called him, I had three pages of notes," says Newman. "I was more nervous than when I asked my wife to marry me."

Several months after the Olympics, Futch finally agreed to work with Bowe. Bowe didn't know how fragile the arrangement was. Once, while training Bowe near Reno, Futch said that he was leaving on other business but that Bowe should get his running in anyway. Do it on his own. It was-6°, there were two feet of snow on the ground, and up over a hill came Bowe, plodding along. Good thing. Futch, who had been hiding on the roadside, was at last satisfied. "Good old Papa Smurf," says Bowe.

[Dynamite Kid]

Meanwhile, at Newman's urging, Bowe moved his family into a modest house in comfortable Fort Washington, Md., outside of Washington, D.C. Oh, there was one thing, Bowe told Newman. The yard had to have a fence so that his children (there is a third now, Brenda Joyce) wouldn't get lost in the bewildering vast-ness of suburbia. They must be safe. A house with a fence having been chosen, Bowe went back to Brownsville, walked the 1½ miles to the housewares factory to take his mother her lunch, and told her supervisor he was giving two weeks' notice for Dorothy. She was going to move in with him. It was his dream—a desperate one—to make his family whole. Today, on top of his TV, as a kind of shrine, are pictures of Brenda and Henry.

Newman has run a calculated campaign on behalf of Bowe. Seeing how Sugar Ray Leonard has benefited from not being tied to one promoter, Newman has kept Bowe from Don King and the rest. Nobody holds options on him. That has proved costly. Until Newman put together a limited partnership of investors, he had to shell out $250,000 of his own money to keep Bowe going. Why so much? You would hate to call it a conspiracy, but Newman discovered that to get Bowe on certain cards, he had to pay not just his own boxer's purse but the opponent's and some promotional overhead as well. Bowe wasn't even fighting for free; he was paying for the opportunity.

Newman brought Bowe along slowly, matching him with confidence-builders before allowing him to face Pinklon Thomas and Cooper. Newman hopes the payoff is at hand, perhaps in 18 months. Even before that, he thinks, Bowe's marquee value could force a $25 million non-title fight, something like the unsanctioned Michael Spinks-Gerry Cooney bout of 3½ years ago. Bowe's widely watched two-round knockout of Cooper, on the Holyfield-Buster Douglas card, was more of a promotional tool than a victory. The crispness of the knockout—"Look, here's Bert trying to double-jab, and here's my right [Bowe is chuckling as he watches a tape of his fight with Cooper]. Good old Bert"—is a credential the WBC can't provide.

In the meantime Bowe's life as a contender is pleasant enough. Five months ago Newman allowed Bowe to use part of the $60,000 purse he received for beating Art Tucker to splurge on a Jeep Cherokee, which has been customized into a convertible. Bowe tools around Maryland in it, calling up friends on his car phone as he passes by their houses—"Can you see the Sunoco station from your window? O.K., I'm in the right lane.... "—and then going home to wash it or to play with his kids or to talk to his mother, safely ensconced in a basement bedroom.

However, he still has much to do. He wants to buy a BMW 735i and his own apartment complex back in Brownsville. "How many apartments you think are in a complex?" he says. "Well, let's figure it out. Six floors to a building, 12 apartments to a floor and four buildings—288 apartments. I remember back in '87, walking through a complex just like that, thinking, If they ever sold that complex, I'd like to buy it for my family. Put all my brothers and sisters, relatives and friends in it, everybody close to me, put 'em right there. Like a big happy family."

Good old Bowe.

[Dynamite Kid]

Eddie Futch, 79, will be in heavyweight Rid**** Bowe's corner on March 2, when Bowe meets Tyrell Biggs in Atlantic City. Here is Futch's list of the 10 best champs he has handled, along with his comments:

1. Joe Frazier (heavyweight)—The greatest heart of all, he fought from bell to bell. Every trainer should have one Joe Frazier in his life.

2. Michael Spinks (light heavyweight)—Unorthodox, but he could adapt perfectly to any opponent.

3. Mike McCallum (middleweight)—A thinking fighter who tears you up downstairs, then pulls your teeth.

4. Larry Holmes (heavyweight)—He learned from his mistakes, and he was always in great condition.

5. Alexis Arguello (lightweight)—All the tools in the world. You could put him on course, and he stayed on it.

6. Don Jordan (welterweight)—My first champ, in 1958, he was an excellent boxer who never reached his potential.

7. Hedgemon Lewis (welterweight)—A boxing master. When he sparred, other fighters would come to watch.

8. Maurice Blocker (middleweight)—Tall and skinny, he doesn't look the part, but he finds a way.

9. Marlon Starling (welterweight)—He moves so well, and when he's on, he controls everything in the ring.

[Dynamite Kid]

Rid**** Bowe's schooling didn't end with his fight last Saturday afternoon against Tyrell Biggs. After stopping Biggs near the end of the eighth round of a scheduled 10-round bout in Atlantic City, Bowe trudged upstairs to a small meeting room in Harrah's Hotel and Casino. Along with the press, he listened attentively while Biggs, his face swollen and slightly torn, gently lectured him on his mistakes.

"It could have been easier," said Biggs, the 1984 Olympic super heavyweight gold medalist, to Bowe, the 1988 Olympic super heavyweight silver medal winner. "I'd like to point out a few things...."

A few feet from where Biggs stood at the lectern, Eddie Futch, Bowe's 79-year-old trainer, nudged his 23-year-old charge. "Listen to him," Futch whispered. "Be aware of what he's saying." Bowe leaned forward.

Bowe, who weighed in at a half pound more than Biggs's 225, has a fine jab, not exceptionally fast but extremely accurate. His mistake is that he hesitates before he throws anything behind it—say, a right hand, his most devastating weapon. "After the jab, I could see the right coming and I could duck it," said Biggs. Bowe nodded in agreement.

"And the head," Biggs went on. "You've got to move the head more. I found it pretty good with the jab." Both fighters smiled, one of them sheepishly.

Futch loved it. "This is the greatest learning experience in the world," he said.

That the fight itself would be a learning experience for Bowe was expected. Since turning pro on March 6, 1989, he has fought often, though he had built most of his 21-0 record against nonen******. The 30-year-old Biggs, winner of his last four fights, including an easy 10-round decision over undefeated Rodolfo Marin last December, was the perfect springboard to a higher level.

"He's no pushover," said Rock Newman, Bowe's manager, before the fight. "Rid**** can't help learning from Biggs, who still has one of the best jabs in boxing. Rid**** has to learn how to neutralize a jab like that."

Despite his 20 knockouts, Bowe is considered a classic boxer in the Muhammad Ali mold. He says he doesn't want to be known as a big puncher. Newman smiles at that. "No one knows how really powerful he is," says Newman. "His powerfulness is hidden by his gracefulness."

Says Futch, "Now that Rid**** is no longer afraid to throw the right hand that he injured as an amateur, I rate his punching power with Sonny Liston's. For pure power, I only put four fighters—Rocky Marciano, Earnie Shavers, Mike Tyson and Joe Louis—ahead of him, and with time and experience he can equal those."

[Dynamite Kid]

Futch told Bowe to forget boxing against Biggs. One of the oldest rules of boxing says to beat a jab, use a jab; this time Futch broke the rule. "Stay in his face," he ordered. "Pressure him. Don't box him, fight him."

Dutifully, Bowe almost took Biggs out with the first right hand of the fight. Staggered by that first-round blow, Biggs escaped by fighting back fiercely. Finesse was forgotten; the two went into the trenches. In the third round, Bowe got playful—a bad habit—and Biggs stunned him with a savage left hand. "Another lesson," Bowe said later. "In this league, if you play, you pay. I stopped that."

In the corner, Futch offered other advice. "Stop going to the head," he demanded. "Go to the body. And you're throwing too many right hands. He's looking for them. Throw hooks."

For Bowe, it all came together in the eighth round of a close fight. After seven, two officials had him ahead 67-66; one had him in front 68-65. The body shots Futch had ordered slowed Biggs's legs; his hands began to come down. "Now the head," Futch said after the seventh.

Early in the eighth, Bowe countered a lazy right hand with a sharp hook that rocked Biggs. There would be no escape this time: Bowe is ordinarily one of the best finishers in boxing. Trying to fight his way out of trouble, the courageous Biggs was hurt again by a right uppercut-hook combination. A moment later, an overhand right to the temple dropped him for an eight count. When the battle resumed, Bowe connected with another right uppercut, and Biggs backed away, only to be hammered down by another savage overhand right, again to the temple. Stepping in, referee Frank Cappuccino wisely called it off for Biggs, who fell as a fighter and arose as a tutor.

"Rid**** needs a few more fights against top opponents," said Biggs at the press conference-cum-lecture. "Before he fights a guy like Tyson, he needs to get into at least one more hard fight, one where he has to dig down. Then he will be fine."

Finding opponents might be harder than fighting them. Bowe has already leaped over the current crop of young contenders: Bruce Seldon, Tommy Morrison and Ray Mercer, all mostly one-dimensional fighters. "We'd love to fight Mercer, but not for any damn WBO title." says Newman, referring to the dubious crown that Mercer wears. Instead, Newman has tried to make a date with Britain's Lennox Lewis, Bowe's conqueror in Seoul. So far, Lewis has said no.

On April 20, Bowe will fight former WBA champion Tony Tubbs at Harrah's, the second of a two-fight package for ABC-TV. Talks with Don King for a June fight against Tyson have broken off. Now Newman suggests that Bowe may fight a co-feature with Tyson in June, with a possible September fight against the former champion. Holyfield's people have expressed an interest in making a fight after Holyfield meets George Foreman in April. "We'll take Holyfield in a heartbeat," says Newman.

"We're in a great position," he adds. "Unless Holyfield and Tyson fight each other, Tyson's biggest money fight is with Bowe. And Holyfield's biggest money fight is with Bowe. They need us."

Newman is also talking with HBO about a multimillion-dollar, multifight deal, with a possible title shot at Holyfield late in 1991. Bowe is in no hurry. "I can wait or I can fight somebody like Tyson tomorrow," he says. "If need be, I'll fight Tyson for nothing."

[Dynamite Kid]

Eddie Futch, the sage of boxing, got a late start; he did not throw a punch until he was 20, after he had asked a friend to teach him how to box so that he could teach the sport at the Detroit YMCA. Last week Futch celebrated his 80th birthday. As he sat in the dressing room in the Atlantic City Convention Center last Friday night with his latest pupil, unbeaten heavyweight Rid**** Bowe, Futch opened his huge textbook to the chapter entitled "How to Fight an Underdog with a Big Punch."

"He's got nothing to lose," said Futch of Bruce Seldon, that night's opponent. "He'll come roaring out to try and gamble and get rich quick. Get his attention with a hard jab, and then take him out with a right hand. It should be a short night."

The small, soft-spoken trainer figured four rounds, maybe five. "Inevitable," said Futch.

Bowe nodded in response to Futch's instructions. If Futch had told him that Seldon had two heads, Bowe would have gone into the ring wondering which one he should hit first. "If Papa Smurf says it's so, then it is," says Bowe.

Seldon, the aptly nicknamed Atlantic City Express, came and went in just 1:48 of the first round. Working in front of a TVKO pay-per-view audience, Bowe met Seldon's furious charge with a right hand. He missed. Bowe tried another right and missed again. A third right hand was more of a lunge. Oops, wrong hand, thought Bowe.

Turned by the momentum of Seldon's attack, Bowe threw a hard jab to the head. Two more followed, crisp, hurtful. Down below, Futch smiled. "Now the right hand," he said to himself. Inevitable.

Crack! Bowe's right hand, a fearsome weapon, smashed against Seldon's head, dropping him facedown on the canvas. Referee Joe O'Neill counted to seven. Seldon didn't move. "Eight," said O'Neill, his right hand rising. Up leapt Seldon, startling everyone but Bowe and Futch. "I had seen his act before," said Bowe later.

Bowe peered into his opponent's glazed eyes and smiled. "You're mine." he thought. Bowe, who weighed in at 225� pounds, had won 22 of his 25 bouts by knockout. Against a wounded opponent, he is as deadly and as quick as a guillotine. In those moments he becomes cold, swift, slicing steel.

"You have to do more than teach a man how to fight," Futch had said a few days before the fight. "You have to teach him how to think. That is what Rid**** is doing now; he is thinking."

"He's looking for the right hand," Bowe figured as he moved in on Seldon, a 220-pound, muscular block of a man. Seldon saw the right hand flicker and he shifted to his right, away from danger. He never saw the left hook that sent him crashing to the floor. "Ten," said O'Neill after watching Seldon twice try to rise, only to fail. The loss was Seldon's second in 20 fights.

[baya]

met him at an espn card a couple of years ago here in DC at the lincoln theater; such a good dude.

he got lazy was the problem.

great read by the way.

[Dynamite Kid]

Cancel Christmas," said Bowe, staring down at Seldon.

After 26 bouts in 29 months, a remarkable pace, Bowe has decided to turn his guns, for the moment, in another direction. "I've got a more important fight coming up," he says. He plans to join **** Gregory in Little Rock, Ark., where the comedian turned activist and nutritionist has been waging a battle against an invasion of drug dealers.

Bowe wore a baseball cap featuring the word DIGNITY, Gregory's battle cry against drugs. "Going to go down and help **** clean up the dealers," says the 24-year-old Bowe. "I grew up in the middle of that stuff [in Brooklyn], and there is nothing more I would rather see than America getting rid of drugs and drug dealers."

While Bowe wages that war, his manager, Rock Newman, will continue negotiations with Larry Holmes, the former heavyweight champion who came out of retirement in April. The 41-year-old Holmes is scheduled to fight Eddie Gonzales, a slick but light-punching cruiser-weight, in Tampa on Tuesday night. Holmes also has a bout set for later this month in Honolulu.

"We're getting closer on the money," says Newman. "Before tonight a lot of people said they wanted to fight us, but we couldn't get any names on a contract. They say Bowe is afraid of them, but they are always saying it while they are running away. After tonight, I don't know. I just hope Holmes answers his telephone tomorrow."

Happy birthday, Papa Smurf.

[Dynamite Kid]

met him at an espn card a couple of years ago here in DC at the lincoln theater; such a good dude.

he got lazy was the problem.

great read by the way.

Id like to meet him too he seems like a cool guy.

Ive always like Bowe's personality and fighting style.