Must read article on Rid**** Bowe

[Dynamite Kid]

The lapse of memory was deadly. As Rid**** Bowe's left fist landed well below the legal boundary, Pierre Coetzer, the WBA's top heavyweight contender, forgot boxing's cardinal rule: Protect yourself at all times. Glancing toward referee Mills Lane, Coetzer lowered his leather mittens. He expected to be granted a moment to recover. Instead, as Jack Dempsey had done to a similarly careless Jack Sharkey 65 years earlier, Bowe, the WBA's No. 2 contender, whacked Coetzer in the head.

The free shot, a crackling right upper-cut, caught the 6'4" Coetzer solidly on his lantern jaw and drove his 215 pounds up and to the right. In an instant a left hook-right hand combination from Bowe flung Coetzer against the ropes. Four more unanswered punches moved Lane to stop the fight with a single second remaining in Round 7.

Bleeding and battered and well behind on all three judges' cards, Coetzer protested, but mildly, and not even about the foul. "I thought [Lane] might let the fight go longer," he said.

The weird ending notwithstanding, last Saturday night's bout at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas was heavyweight boxing the way it's supposed to be: two giants in an honest fistfight, neither asking nor giving quarter, a classic contest of heart and chin, with the heavyweight champion waiting to take on the victor. On Nov. 13 Evander Holyfield—a beleaguered champion after three successful but uninspired defenses against aged, flabby and/or forlorn challengers—will fight Bowe, the undefeated 6'5" brawler from Brooklyn, in a real fight.

It gets even better. Earlier on Saturday Razor Ruddock, the WBC's No. 1 challenger, finally signed to meet Lennox Lewis, the WBC's No. 3 contender ( Bowe is ranked second by the WBC), on Oct. 31 in London. The winner of that bout will fight the Holyfield-Bowe winner, and the king of the hill will be the guy who truly belongs there. No longer will we wonder.

What's more, Ruddock's signing ends the WBC's threat to strip Holyfield of his title and turn the heavyweight division once again into a comic dance of Eeny, Meeny, Miney and Mo. "It wasn't easy, but it's done," said a relieved Dan Duva, the promoter who hammered out the complex heavyweight championship trifecta. "Nobody is going to give anybody the title. Nobody is going to give anybody a title fight. Everything will be earned where it should be—in the ring."

When Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight champion now imprisoned in Indiana, was prowling the perimeter as the leading contender for Holyfield's title, the other top fighters resembled a chorus line from a convalescent home: They were all lined up neatly in a row, but nothing was moving. Fearing that a defeat would knock them out of a multimillion-dollar title shot, none of these contenders was willing to fight any of the others. As a result their recent opponents looked as if they had been drawn from a bowling league in Peoria. John L. Sullivan was fighting tougher guys in burlesque houses when he was offering $1,000 to anyone in the audience who could last four rounds with him.

The logjam began to clear when Tyson was locked up last March. The cable people—HBO, TVKO and Showtime-helped matters when they decreed that there would be no more million-dollar paydays for 10-cent fights. To prove the point, HBO paid Bowe only $180,000 and Coetzer a mere $100,000 for last Saturday's fight. If these two had fought a year ago, both their purses would probably have been in seven figures. "We are not happy with what we are being paid," said Bowe's manager, Rock Newman, who has guided his man to a 31-0 record. Still, Newman took the fight. No one was offering more.

The problem the cable folks had was Coetzer, an unknown from Pretoria, South Africa, who had put together a 39-2 record by beating up on such eminently forgettable opponents as Dan Murphy and Carlton West. "Coetzer belongs in the Top 10," said Newman with a diplomat's flair. "But moving him to Number One must have taken some quintessential politicians."

Somehow the WBA had decided that even though Coetzer had never faced a Top 10 opponent, he was the organization's leading challenger. Still, if the WBA selects its contenders on toughness and heart alone, then it got this one right.

[Dynamite Kid]

Coctzer's oft-bloodied face may be covered with parchment, but the rest is pure granite. He resembles Lurch with a Keystone Kops mustache and an Alan Ladd haircut, but he fights with the heart of a warrior. He has some modest skills, but his real talent is absorbing punishment.

From the films he had studied, Eddie Futch, Bowe's 80-year-old trainer, expected Coetzer to go right at Bowe. Instead Coetzer stayed outside, where he showed a good jab and excellent combinations. Bowe, a 10-to-l favorite, was forced to be the aggressor. "He fooled us," Futch said after the fight. "He made us alter our plan drastically."

Coetzer set a strong pace early on, but after three rounds he began to tire. "Go right after him," Futch ordered Bowe. "Keep the pressure on. Don't let him recuperate."

Coetzer's face began to disintegrate. Bowe's varied and quick arsenal ripped cuts over Coetzer's right eye and over and under his left. By the end of the sixth round, he was also cut on his nose and cheek, and the rest of his face looked as if it had taken a broadside of buckshot. He was fading badly.

In Round 6 Bowe had walloped Coetzer on his protective cup, after which Lane stopped the proceedings for a minute and a half to allow Coetzer to recover. The low blow in Round 7 was less devastating, and Lane let the action continue. "I saw it," Lane said later, "but that is not the punch that hurt him."

The crusher was the right uppercut. Even granite crumbles if it's blasted enough. Lane is a district-court judge in Reno, and he knows when a man belongs in protective custody. Coetzer surely did.

No one was more relieved at the outcome than Holyfield, who feared that if Coetzer won, a Holyfield-Coetzer bout would be the same kind of public relations disaster that the champion's recent fight with Larry Holmes had turned out to be. Holyfield had not wanted to fight the 42-year-old former champion but was trapped when Holmes upset Ray Mercer in February. Expecting Mercer to win, Holyfield had agreed to meet the winner of that bout.

Now Holyfield had agreed to face the Bowe-Coetzer winner. Consequently, no one rooted harder for the big fellow from Brooklyn than Holyfield. He fears no man; he wants to fight the best. Perhaps he should be forgiven for boxing only up to the level of his opposition. It must be difficult for a fighter like Holyfield to motivate himself to pound on fat old men like Holmes and George Foreman.

But now, once more, there is the sound of drums and marching feet in the heavyweight division. It's wonderful.

[Dynamite Kid]

At a ballroom in the mirage hotel in Las Vegas early last Saturday morning, Evander Holyfield was dancing. In his suite 26 floors above, Rid**** Bowe had more pressing duties. He took a long, hot bath, followed by a 45-minute massage. Finally, dressed in a comfortable dark-blue sweatsuit, he emerged from his bedroom. He was on his way to a party to celebrate the world heavyweight championship he won two hours before, but numbing weariness had won out over high fashion. He held an ice bag against his swollen right eye. He made only a fleeting appearance at the party, and then, with the same grim determination that had carried him through 36 minutes of brutal combat, he walked to the suite of his manager, Rock Newman. Bowe wanted to watch the videocassette in Newman's VCR.

Gone was a tape from the 1988 Olympic Games, banished forever; in its place was a brand-new tape of Bowe's 12-round unanimous decision over Holyfield for the undisputed heavyweight title. No more would Bowe watch his loss to Lennox Lewis in the super heavyweight final in Seoul. No longer would the 6'5", 235-pound Bowe, who was said to have quit under fire four years ago, watch and wonder why the world continued to question the size of his heart. "I've looked at that damn tape hundreds of times." he said.

The damn tape always showed the same thing. Against Lewis, Bowe had taken two standing eight counts in Round 2. As referee Gustav Baumgardt counted off the second one, Bowe raised his arms above his head and bounced on his toes. Alter reaching eight, Baumgardt put his arms around the shocked Bowe and said the fight was over.

Even after he had gone on to win 31 professional lights without a defeat, the loss to Lewis was the yardstick used to measure Bowe's fortitude. "Keep watching the fight," Eddie Futch, Bowe's wise old trainer, had ordered. "Just remember that they won't forget that one until you win the heavyweight championship."

Futch was never more right. In Friday night's historic bout Bowe emphatically erased all memory of that earlier fight. Ernie Pyle should have covered this war from ringside. Neither man danced, and neither took a voluntary step backward. Each man waded fearlessly into the guns of the other, no quarter asked, none given. Through 12 rounds Bowe and Holy-field painted a portrait of courage that will hang forever in the memories of those who watched.

The 25-year-old Bowe, who had fought his way out of a crack-ridden Brooklyn housing project, allowed himself a brief smile as the new videotape began to play in Newman's suite. Scenes of unimaginable courage filled the 20-inch screen. The pace of battle was furious as the two figures hammered each other with murderous volleys. "Yowser" was the tired champion's most vivid comment.

No one had expected anything less. Each fighter was out to prove something to a disbelieving public. Holyfield was unbeaten in 28 fights, but he was still regarded as a 30-year-old cruiserweight hiding inside a weightlifter's body. He won his title two years earlier against flabby Buster Douglas, who had shown up only for a payday. Holyfield had subsequently defended his crown against two overweight senior citizens—George Foreman and Larry Holmes—and an undertrained former drug addict, Bert Cooper.

Not that it had been a bad ride for Holyfield. For those four fights he earned $56 million, nice padding for a bank account already fat with the $9 million he had made in his 24 previous fights. For fighting Bowe, Holyfield will earn another $15 million to $18 million after all the pay-per-view returns are in.

Holyfield was out to show the doubters that he could fight the young, big and strong heavyweights, a category exemplified by Bowe. But during his recent bouts as a heavyweight, Holyfield made a distressing discovery: Added muscle does not mean increased punching power; the blows that had made him a dominant cruiserweight weren't enough once he started hitting the big people. They simply hit him back.

In the weeks leading up to the Bowe fight, Holyfield cut his weightlifting from four days a week to two. He was training for speed and mobility. "Thank god," said George Benton, Holyfield's trainer, an old Philadelphia fighter who views the modern boxer's retinue of ballet teachers, nutritionists, conditioning experts and weightlifting coaches with contempt. "In the old days all a fighter did was train and spar," he said. "That's all you need. Evander used to be so tired, he couldn't do either."

[Dynamite Kid]

Bowe trained as he always did, under the watchful eye of Futch, the 81-year-old guru who had already guided five men to the heavyweight championship. Futch has trained Bowe since 1989, when the then 21-year-old picked pro boxing over a career in the Army. After the loss to Lewis, said Bowe, "I was on my way to the recruiter when Rock came to Brooklyn and said he had faith in me. Everybody else had given up. Since then it has been just me and Rock and Papa Smurf." Papa Smurf is Futch, a gentle man who tutors Bowe with the no-nonsense demands and love of a father.

To his support staff for Friday's fight—an $8 million payday for the challenger—Bowe added **** Gregory, the onetime fat comic who has become a slim, self-proclaimed expert on nutrition. In early September, when Bowe began training for Holyfield, he weighed 281 pounds. Gregory put Bowe on a diet of 300 vitamin and protein tablets a day. Each day Gregory would arrive at camp with two or three six-inch-tall jars of pills. He would stand by waiting for Bowe to swallow them all, which usually took 15 minutes.

Gregory's other specialty was an ungodly concoction that Bowe called "maggot juice," a thick beverage of beets, carrots, celery, lettuce, cucumbers, garlic, onions, bananas, maple syrup and anything else that was within Gregory's reach and could fit into the blender. "I was afraid to put my hat down in the kitchen," said Newman.

According to Gregory, Bowe's innards represented a monumental challenge. The first thing he had to do, said Gregory, was clean Bowe's bowels, lymph glands and red blood cells. "The hard part was to clean out the 50 trillion cells in his body," Gregory said. "And each cell has three billion genetic bytes, and damn if I didn't have to clean out all of those, too."

But Bowe trimmed down to 235, and hours after the Nov. 11 weigh-in, he celebrated at Sadie's Southern Dining, a Las Vegas soul-food restaurant, with a repast of red beans, ham hocks, beef tips, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese.

And so the cast was in place, the good little man with all the experience against the good big man with the question-mark heart. Holyfield got off to a strong start, but his fondness for trench warfare soon had him in trouble. Tossing aside speed and mobility, Holyfield chose to fight inside, a place where big men are usually at a disadvantage. Not Bowe. In close he hammered Holyfield with short rights to the body and clubbed him hard with both hands to the head.

After nine rounds Holyfield's right eye was closing; his left one was cut. Bowe's left eye began to swell in the fourth round. In the eighth his right was almost closed by a Holyfield thumb. In the corners both cutmen worked furiously to keep their fighters' eyes open.

Still, neither man would give ground. By the 10th round Holyfield's jab and right hand had almost been forgotten. Instead he had taken to loading up and trying to take Bowe out with hard left hooks. But he was hunting a bear with an air rifle. And the bear had a sledgehammer.

Upon leaving his stool for the 10th, Bowe, ahead on all cards, decided that enough was enough. "I decided it was time for him to go," he said later.

After an early exchange, a Bowe right uppercut jerked Holyfield's head up hard and spun him to his right. Bowe jumped on the dazed champion, missed with two chopping punches and then drove him hard into the ropes with a hook to the head. As Holyfield reeled away, Bowe followed, firing hard with both hands but always with discipline. Unable to escape, Holyfield pressed forward, trying desperately to smother Bowe, who calmly backed away, firing as he went. At last, after the 40th punch of the assault. Bowe ran out of ammunition.

[Dynamite Kid]

Only a minute had passed in the round. Time stood still; for a split second both men were frozen in a clumsy embrace, their burning lungs sucking deep for oxygen. Holyfield's recovery time was astonishingly short. One moment he was under attack; no one knew what was keeping him on his feet. The next he was peering through swollen eyes, ready to mount an assault of his own.

It was magnificent. A hard right hand from Holyfield started the second minute of fighting. Then the exhausted fighters came together in a clinch. With a minute remaining, Holyfield launched a hook, then two combinations and three upper-cuts. Badly winded, Bowe could only hang on and ride out the storm. He tried to keep Holyfield off with a lazy right hand, then three pushing jabs. Holyfield ignored them all. Firing wildly, technique abandoned, he unloaded on Bowe, slamming a right hand and two hooks to his head but not with enough power to save his title. Then Bowe, despite being pounded by a salvo of 14 shots in 15 seconds, found a hidden reserve. His punches began to regain their sting.

As the round ended, both men stood with their feet planted, retreat forgotten. They were exhausted, but still they hammered at each other, wondering if this hell would ever end. A combination caught Holyfield at the bell. The 18,000 fans in the Thomas & Mack Center gave the fighters a standing ovation.

No heavyweight champion and challenger have ever fought a more heroic round. Other boxers have been linked in three-minute essays in raw courage—Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes and Ken Norton, Tommy Hearns and Marvin Hagler—but none can claim to have been in a round fought more ferociously.

Later, in Newman's suite, Bowe stared at the flickering images on TV. "I was rumbling, that's all I know," he said of the magnificent 10th. "I was trying to take him out. I wanted to prove to him that I could be just as strong in the late rounds. In the corner before the round, I'd said to Eddie, 'I think I can take him out and put him on the canvas.' Eddie had told me to go ahead and get him. Then after I shook him, I realized he was still strong and determined. He somehow made it through my barrage, and after that I said, 'I'm just going to box him the rest of the way.' "

Holyfield, amazingly, came out strong to open the 11th. But the champion was caught by a left hook that drove him back. Moving quickly, Bowe tagged Holyfield with a right uppercut and then nailed him with another from the left side. Holyfield fell forward, lunging for Bowe, whose back was to the ropes. As Bowe dipped down and away, the champion toppled forward across the top rope. A Bowe hook swept down and crashed against the side of Holyfield's head, slamming his throat against the ropes. Holyfield went down on both knees. Instinctively he flung his right hand up and behind his head to guard against another blow.

As Holyfield regained his feet, referee Joe Cortez counted to the mandatory eight. "How you feeling? You all right?" Cortez said. Holyfield allowed that he was line.

Moving in, Bowe summoned one more big burst, a well-disciplined 13-shot volley that failed to dent Holyfield's resolve. After the last punch Holyfield grabbed the challenger. For a moment the men clung to each other, stealing a moment's respite. When they separated for the last half of the round, it was the indefatigable Holyfield who went on the attack, but Bowe's flicking jab held him at bay.

Holyfield spent the last three minutes valiantly trying to do what he had failed to accomplish in the first 11 rounds. He had the will, but he never had the power. Showing remarkable stamina after such a punishing fight, Bowe boxed well in the last round. Fittingly, each man threw a punch at the final bell. The scoring went as expected. Judges Jerry Roth and Dalby Shirley scored it 117-110. Judge Chuck Giampa had it 115-112. As ring announcer Michael Buffer recited the speech that would make the decision known to all—"...and new heavyweight champion..."—Holyfield pointed to Bowe. Bedlam broke out in Bowe's corner.

Leaning far out over the ropes, Bowe shook his right fist at Lewis, who was at ringside doing color for TVKO. Lewis, the British champion and the WBC's top contender after his stunning KO of Razor Ruddock on Oct. 31, is eager to have the first shot at the new champion, and in the giddy moments after his triumph, Bowe seemed ready to oblige.

[Dynamite Kid]

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"You're next!" Bowe shouted.

"Sign a contract!" Lewis shot back.

Newman suddenly entered the impromptu negotiations. "Maybe," countered the man who now controls the biggest prize in sports.

The WBC is demanding that Lewis be Bowe's first challenger and has said it will strip Bowe of its share of the title if he meets anyone else. Newman has said all along that if Bowe were to win the championship, he would be happy to have him fight Lewis—perhaps as the second part of a two-fight package. The first part? Sadly for the sport, which regained a healthy dose of credibility on Friday night thanks to Holyfield and Bowe, Newman talks about fighting 44-year-old George Foreman. In boxing only the names of the champions change, never the back-room intrigues.

For his part, Holyfield remained a champion to the end. At noon on Saturday, he telephoned Bowe in his suite and congratulated him for a great fight. Bowe, whose sore body had prevented him from sleeping, nodded happily as he listened.

"Hey, Champ," Bowe said, "I was going to call you. You put up a hell of a fight and have nothing to be ashamed of. You always were a class act in my book, and my thoughts have not changed. I just hope we can get together and hang out. I want you to know we are still buddies. I want you to know you got me good, and I am going to have to sit down now."

After hanging up, Bowe talked about Holyfield. "What a classy guy," he said. "You know what he told me? To just keep doing the things I'm doing and to watch my money. He said everyone is going to try and get into my back pocket, and that I should put my money away for a rainy day. What a gladiator. He fights his heart out, he's gracious and he's humble, and for him to call and say how highly he thinks of me, well, wow...."

Bowe suddenly turned reflective. "Heavyweight champion of the world," he said in the voice of a man who has just pinched himself to make sure he's not dreaming. Bowe's former home in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a building in which crack dealers stationed armed lookouts on every landing, seemed a world away. Murders there were commonplace. One victim, shot in the head one floor below where Bowe lived, lay in the hall for 11 hours before anyone moved the body. In 1988 Bowe's sister Brenda was murdered near the apartment, knifed by a drug addict who was trying to steal her welfare check.

"I knew somehow, someday I would get out of there," said Bowe, who now lives in Fort Washington, Md., with his wife, Judy, and their three children. "I lived there, I survived and I fought my way out, and they said I had no heart." He smiled. "The heavyweight champion of the world," he said for the hundredth or perhaps the thousandth time in the last 14 hours.

Someone knocked at the door. The caller was Alex Fried, a local ***elry salesman and acquaintance. "At no profit for myself," said Fried, as he displayed a variety of watches, rings and bracelets. "Let me show you these."

[Dynamite Kid]

How much do you charge?" asked Bowe, recalling Holyfield's advice.

For a moment the two men negotiated in whispers. "My hand hurts," said Bowe suddenly, while trying on a pinky ring. Fried was unflappable. "Put your hand in a towel full of chopped onion," he said. "In four hours you don't feel a thing. It's the onion juice."

Bowe bought a watch and wrote Fried a check, telling him not to cash it for a week. "I haven't been paid yet, and I want the check to clear the bank," he explained. "I don't want you to think I am doing a job on you."

With Fried gone, Bowe ordered from room service: three eggs, corned-beef hash, a ham steak and a large order of watermelon. As he hung up, Judy came into the room. "Uh-oh," Rid**** said, reaching for the phone. He grinned sheepishly as he spoke to room service: "This is Rid**** Bowe again in room 26002. I forgot to order for my wife." He asked for fried shrimp.

Time drifted on. Rid**** flipped through the TV channels with a remote control. He paused at a nature program about beavers, one of which was shown creeping toward an outstretched hand offering food.

"Look," said Bowe, "he's afraid." He waited until the beaver had taken the food and sailed safely downstream. Flip. A Ricardo Montalban movie. Flip. A Chinese-cooking show. Flip. A program in Spanish. Flip. The Streets of Sun Francisco. Flip. College football. Bowe went back to the Chinese-cooking program and learned how to make a hot pepper sauce.

This nice big kid from Mike Tyson's old neighborhood was beginning to wear the championship like a pair of old slippers. A few hours earlier, as Bowe returned from a press conference, the elevator in which he was riding had briefly become stuck on a lower floor. Bowe waited out the crisis seated on a bench. After a moment he lifted his head and said, "This whole thing is a big deal, isn't it?"

He knew he had the money. He was just looking for assurance that there was more than wealth at the top of the mountain. He liked the neighborhood, but he wasn't about to buy a house until he was sure it was really where he wanted to live.

[Dynamite Kid]

Four nights had passed since Rid**** Bowe took the heavyweight title from Evander Holyfield before 18,000 fans in Las Vegas and another 5 million TV viewers around the country. On this evening Bowe's audience was considerably smaller. He lay stripped on a table in the basement of his Fort Washington, Md., home, where a masseur worked him over.

Around him was domestic pandemonium. On one side of the basement family room, six-year-old Rid**** Jr. squealed while hanging upside down from a Universal weight machine. Riddicia, the new champion's four-year-old daughter, was running in circles. Brenda Joyce, the youngest, at two, had found a pen and was on a couch, scribbling. Turning onto his back, Bowe told the children to quiet down so that he could recite his latest poem: "Rid**** Bowe made a promise as a kid/ He would do what Ali did."

While growing up in the mean Brownsville section of Brooklyn, the 12th of Dorothy Bowe's 13 sons and daughters, Rid**** fell under Muhammad Ali's spell. "He saw himself as Ali," says Bowe's wife, Judy. "He put Ali on a pedestal and strived to get there also."

Ali was 22 years old, 210 pounds and lightning fast when he first won the heavyweight crown, in 1964. At 25, Bowe is 25 pounds heavier and displays none of the ring artistry of his idol. But his easy, spontaneous humor is like Ali's. Indeed, after his right hand, humor is Bowe's best weapon, and he used both to good effect with Holyfield. While taping an ESPN special two nights before the Nov. 13 bout, Bowe leaned over to Holyfield during a commercial break and whispered to the champion. Holyfield, who had been trying to keep his game face on, broke out laughing and told Bowe, "Keep the good stuff for when we're on the air."

Bowe was in fine form again the next day when he spotted a boxing glove with his likeness painted on it in the window of a Caesars Palace store. "You got a picture of the future world champion in the window, and you're only selling it for $225?" he said to a sales clerk. "I'm coming back tomorrow, and it better be more."

As he works to define his image, Bowe is at his best when he shakes off Ali and is his own, entourage-free self. "Can you believe this?" he said last week, standing next to his Jeep Cherokee at a Maryland filling station. "The heavyweight champion of the world pumping his own gas?"

Can you believe it when Bowe says that he has never taken a drink, never done drugs and never fooled around with other women? Don't you want to laugh at this man who laughs so easily, because in sports these days—all right, in life—such a declaration seems utterly ridiculous? Except that you can find no one who takes issue with it. Further, there is no evidence that becoming the possessor of the grandest title in sport is working any changes on Bowe. "What are you blushing at?" says Judy when four teenage girls spot her husband and begin wooing him with a collective "Ohhhh, Bowe."

Here's something else you can believe: Bowe is financially secure for the rest of his life, even if he never fights again. His earnings have been channeled into a variety of conservative investments, and his children already have trust funds to pay for college, which is precisely where Rid**** and Judy plan to head this winter when both will enroll as freshmen at Howard University. Judy will concentrate on health services, and Rid**** will study business administration and drama. "I've got to practice what I preach," he says. "If a big dummy like me can go to school, then anyone can."

Anyone who knows Big Daddy—who is most definitely not Big Dummy—knows you can question his stamina, you can question his weight, and you can even question his decision to wear ordinary white briefs at his televised weigh-in on Nov. 11 ("You got a problem with my Fruit of the Looms?" he said). But the one thing you don't question is what Lennox Lewis, the Briton who is the WBC's top contender, questioned after Bowe's loss to him at the 1988 Olympics: his heart. Don't ever, ever question Bowe's heart. When he sits on his pedestal these days and swings around for a look at his world, above all else the champ knows exactly where his heart lies.

Right after they wrapped the three championship belts around Bowe in the ring at the Thomas and Mack Center, Judy wrapped herself around Rid****. He bent down and whispered in her ear, "We did it." Judy looked up at her husband and said, "When you get hit, I can feel it."

[Dynamite Kid]

Rid**** first met Judy in Brownsville in the summer of 1982 while he was walking down Christopher Avenue with one of her cousins. Rid**** saw her sitting on the stoop of the two-family brownstone where she lived. He asked her cousin to introduce them. "So we walked across the street, and I met my wife," says Bowe.

Rid**** used to catch a bus to the New Bed-Stuy Boxing club on the corner where Judy lived, and he would often stop by her house just to talk. "He was so different from the other guys," says Judy. "He cared about me, not what he could get from me. He said in the beginning how he felt about me, but he realized that I wasn't into relationships. He was a true friend. If I needed him, he was there. If I didn't need him, he was still there."

Three years passed before Judy and Rid**** began to date. They would sneak nights together at Bowe's house while his mother worked. When Judy couldn't get out, they would do the same thing at her house. "He was never at my house past 12 o'clock," says Mildred Gordon, Judy's mother. "At midnight he was right out the front door."

"I was out the front door and right back in through the back," says Bowe, winking. "That's how Junior came about."

Rid**** and Judy were married in April 1986, and Rid**** graduated from Thomas Jefferson High that June. Judy gave birth to Rid**** Jr. a month later. Teenagers becoming parents is not unusual in Brownsville. What is unusual, Judy offers, is that Bowe did not leave for some other girl. He stayed put through a difficult pregnancy for Judy, during which she suffered fainting spells. Once while she was slipping in and out of consciousness, Judy heard Rid**** ask her mother, "What's wrong with her?" and start crying.

"After that, I knew he was in for the long haul," she says.

Riddicia was born in '88, and Brenda Joyce arrived in '90. "I laid down and made these babies, and I figured it was my responsibility to take care of them," said Bowe, still on the massage table. "Having these kids gave me a reason to live. In my neighborhood people are always telling you that you are no good, that you can't do this, that you can't do that. But having these kids and knowing they need me, well, that helped me. They are the reason I get up and run in the morning."

With his eyes closed Bowe winced as the masseur went to work on his sore right knuckles. "I know there is a God and he loves me, believe it or not," Bowe said. "Because there were certainly a number of times I could have gone the other way."

Bowe remembers the time a friend named Bugsy stuck a loaded .38 in Bowe's hand and told him it was the best way to take care of a neighborhood enemy headed their way. "I realized then that whatever revenge I might get on this guy wasn't worth 25 years in prison," said Bowe. "So I handed the gun back to Bugsy and decided he wasn't my friend after all."

Today Bugsy is in jail, and Bowe is in the comfortable suburb of Fort Washington, in a modest two-story house he bought after his manager, Rock Newman, a Washington, D.C., native, insisted that Bowe move to the capital area in 1989. The first item a visitor to the house sees is a framed evaluation from Rid**** Jr.'s school that reads: "J.R. had a very good day at school today. When he gets home from school give him a big hug."

[Burning Desire]

Great read but i always thought Rid**** Bowe was a bit overrated, i see him get totally outboxed by a shot Tony Tubbs who was really on the downslide. I see him have quite alot of trouble with Tyrell Biggs who was also on the downslide.

Rid**** Bowe always struggled with fighters who fought him on outside, or fighters who had good jabs and kept him at range. He got destroyed by Andrew Golota, because he could never counter Andrew Golota's jab, and he would never move his feet to get out of the range of Andrew Golota's jab. Which is why he always got caught on the counter with the jab.

He had big problems with Evander Holyfield in there 2nd fight, because Evander Holyfield used stick/move tactics do you see a pattern emerging here ? with the kind of tactics that gave him trouble against Tony Tubbs, Tyrell Biggs, Andrew Golota x2, Evander Holyfield 2, ?

If Rid**** Bowe would of fought a prime Lennox Lewis in the late 1990s, Lennox Lewis would of destroyed Rid**** Bowe with his jab like Andrew Golota did. I give Rid**** Bowe a shot at the early 90s version of Lennox Lewis who was sloppy and had bad balance.

But i think there were many other Heavyweights who had just as much talent, as Rid**** Bowe and threw it away. Greg Page, Tim Witherspoon, Ike Ibeabuchi, ETC. Its only because Rid**** Bowe had great wars with Evander Holyfield. That he is seen as some sort of force that would of never been beaten in his prime which is untrue.