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i dont he deserves every ****ing bit of what he has, horrible monster i hope he goes to hell and everyoen who feels srry for him better wake up
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Sorry, but who is G-man?Originally posted by SturmRules -
gerald mcclellan(sp)Comment
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Originally posted by SturmRules
I saw pictures of him on
the internet and heard what
hapened to him. What the hell
did he do to make you hate him
like that?Comment
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Damn dude......
We had this discussion on here before and alot of people did not like everything that McClellan did as a person. I cant give an opinion because I never actually knew the guy. But I do know how the press will paint the picture of a guy however they want to.
Whether or not he was a bad person does not matter in this case I believe. The fact that a fighter lost his motor skills and then life is a tragedy, no matter who it happens to. Things like this hurt the image of the sport. A loss of life.
If the things were true that I read about him then he may have had it coming, the world has a way of dealing with ones who are seemingly evil. But still a death in the ring is never something that I take lightly`, no matter who it is or was..........Rockin'Comment
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Originally posted by SturmRules
I second that.. He killed at least 100 animals. He tied there mouths together and legs as his Pitbulls ravaged them.. I hope he dribbles saliva all over himself for the rest of his vegetable life. Anyone who hurts innocent animals or children deserves that same fate..Comment
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yes i do care about what happend to him, i think it's really sad and it hurts me to see him like this.
here's an article and as you see his condition doesn't only affect his life but the life's of his family as well.
Lisa McClellan has thought about it.
The sister of former middleweight champion Gerald McClellan has thought about getting her life back – A life that was changed forever on February 25, 1995, the night her brother was stopped in the tenth round by Nigel Benn, suffering severe brain damage in the process.
Oh yeah, she’s thought about what would happen if Gerald were placed in a nursing home. But thinking about it is as far as it went.
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“Something wouldn’t let me do it,” says Lisa. “I couldn’t do it.”
She couldn’t stop taking care of her brother, something she does tirelessly and selflessly with her sister Sandra - the only two siblings who remain after sister Stacey couldn’t bear the grind any longer. And to be honest, it’s understandable that someone could finally reach the point of no return, a point where the constant care of a grown man can become too much of a burden.
It also makes what Lisa and Sandra do even more special, dare I say even superhuman, because not many people would want to stand in their shoes for a week, let alone ten years.
But they do it.
We in the media revisit the plight of McClellan every now and then, mainly around the anniversary of the Benn bout, and then go back to our lives. Lisa and Sandra live it when the notepads are put away and the tape recorders are shut off - 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the last ten years. On Friday, it’s an anniversary of a day that changed more than one life.
“It will probably be a down day, because it’s a reflection,” said Lisa of the 10th anniversary of the Benn bout. “But it’s also a day to be thankful.”
Lisa McClellan is tough, make no mistake about that, especially if you get on her bad side; but it’s the other side that makes her special – the side that lets her look at such a tragic day and be thankful, not for what happened to her brother, but that he lived through the three and a half hour operation in a London hospital to remove a massive blood clot from his brain.
She says it doesn’t feel like a decade has passed since that night, but it has, and Gerald McClellan has daily reminders of what boxing left him – he’s still blind, and needs assistance to walk, and do many of the daily chores we take for granted.
“He’s independent in a lot of ways, but he’s very dependent as well,” says Lisa, who notes that her brother can give himself a bath, but needs someone to get him in and out of the tub; he can feed himself, but needs someone to fix his food and give it to him; and he can brush his teeth, but only after someone puts the toothpaste on the toothbrush.
It’s a huge change from when McClellan was terrorizing the middleweight division in the early 90’s, and closing in on a superfight with amateur buddy Roy Jones Jr. It was something that was not to be, and a constant reminder of what can happen to any fighter whenever he steps into the ring. Think of that the next time you hear someone call a fighter a coward, or say he has no heart.
Repeat after me - there are no cowards in boxing.
But there are plenty of heartbreaking stories of those who were left broken by the game they loved. Most don’t have sisters like Lisa and Sandra to take care of them.
“I have never left him alone, not even to run to the store for a pack of cigarettes,” said Lisa, who after Stacey removed herself from the picture has had precious few moments to herself away from their Freeport, Illinois home. “If I don’t have something that we need, and nobody comes, we go without it.”
As far as a medical prognosis is concerned, Lisa says, “His memory is better, and gets better all the time. But as far as the eyesight, we were told that it would probably never return.”
McClellan no longer uses a wheelchair, but he has never walked under his own power since the Benn fight, using either a treadmill to exercise, or his sisters’ shoulders to walk from room to room. But if there’s a light in this sea of darkness, it’s that according to Lisa, “He’s got the exact same personality.”
“The only thing that’s different in his personality is that he’s more emotional now,” she continues. “Then, he showed very little emotion. Now he’ll cry at the drop of a dime. You can tell him a sad story and he’ll start crying. He was never dependent; he was always very independent and always had a lot of pride and always had to look the best. Now he’s so calm and so patient – the little things that matter to him never mattered to him before. Like hugging and saying ‘I love you’, those things matter to him now. Every day he’ll tell me he loves me and that I’m his favorite sister. I probably never heard that until after he got hurt.”
As kids, Lisa used to chase after Gerald and her other brother Todd as they went off on their adventures. She wasn’t too welcome.
“I was a tomboy, and I got in their way, and I got on their nerves,” she remembers. “By me being a tomboy, I always wanted to follow them, but when I got back I told everything they did. So they didn’t like me following them because they knew I was gonna tell.”
And when the two got older, matters didn’t change much.
“As young adults, me and Gerald were like gasoline and fire,” said Lisa. “We couldn’t sit in the same room together.”
But kids had a way of softening the heart of the knockout artist, especially his niece, Lisa’s daughter.
“When I went into labor with her, he went to the hospital with me, and he was more excited than I was,” Lisa remembered. “He had a picture of her in his wallet, and he told everybody that was his daughter. He spent a lot of time with her.”
Lisa’s daughter, who will be attending college in Colorado this year, is close with her uncle, who was injured when she was just seven. She has also had to adjust to life after February 25, 1995.
“It was hard on her, because with her being an only child she got all the attention, and sometimes I had to give Gerald more than I could give her because his needs were greater than hers,” said Lisa.
McClellan also has three children of his own, sons Gerald Jr. and Mandell, and daughter Forrest. And while he has only had sporadic contact with his sons recently due to traveling distance, Forrest, 10, is a frequent visitor.
“Her mom has made sure that she knows her dad and that she knows what happened,” said Lisa of Forrest. “She keeps her a part of Gerald’s life.”
And Gerald makes sure he’s a part of his daughter’s life, always asking after she leaves the house whether her hair was combed and her clothes clean, and being the proud papa at a recent school awards function.
“She’s an honor student and she’s in the honors program,” said Lisa. “We took Gerald to the school because she got like five awards. We had to tell him, ‘listen, they’re calling Forrest’s name’. They said ‘Forrest McClellan’ and he clapped really loud. They went on to the next kid and he was still clapping.”
But after being told that he could stop clapping, McClellan retorted, “Don’t tell me what to do, this is my daughter.”
“She’s really attentive towards him,” said Lisa. “If we’re out on the holidays, she’ll call all over town and track her dad down. She’ll come over on her bike, bring him a bag of chips, or stop at the store for some candy. He’ll sit her on his lap, they’ll talk for a couple of hours, and she’ll get back on her bike and ride home. They have this bond that is beautiful. She is daddy’s girl.”
After ten years of hardship, with his trust fund virtually empty for over a year, it’s these relationships that can brighten the days that may seem to never end, that can give you breathing room when you’re feeling trapped in a dream you never asked for. Lisa doesn’t complain, even though the situation is a lot bleaker now in terms of assistance from family members then it was 10 years ago. And even she doesn’t have an answer when you ask why she’s stuck with her brother all this time.
“Why haven’t I been able to walk away like everybody else? I honestly don’t know.”
What may even be more difficult to understand is that Lisa McClellan is not leading the ‘ban boxing’ brigade. Despite what boxing did to her brother, she still follows the sport, and watches the fights. To her, it’s not just a pastime; it’s been a part of her life.Comment
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“When we were young we had one television and my father was determined that his boys were gonna be championship fighters,” said Lisa. “We didn’t have cable, but we had a VCR, and boxing in our house was a family thing, so we all had to sit there and watch tapes of boxing probably five or six hours a day and all day on Saturday. Every fight that Gerald had in the Golden Gloves, it was a family event. We all had to take part in it.”
Lisa took that notion literally.
“As a young girl I would be in the audience arguing with people if somebody said something about Gerald not winning or him not looking good,” she said. “I’d literally stand there and argue with these grown men.”
Once, the argument got so heated with a fellow fan that she made a wager.
“I bet him with no money in my pocket that Gerald was gonna win,” she laughs. “And he won.”
And the winnings?
“Probably like a buck.”
But despite her love for the game, that devotion was tested when Roy Jones Jr. suffered his second consecutive knockout defeat last September to Glen Johnson. Lisa was in the crowd in Memphis that night when Jones - who has always been one of the rare supporters of McClellan among the fighting fraternity – lay eerily on the mat after being knocked out by Johnson.
“I cried the whole night,” said Lisa. “I felt for him, I felt for his family, I felt for his kids, and I felt for his mom. It reminded me of what happened to Gerald.”
In an even more ominous note from that night, one of the ringside judges was named McClellan. Thankfully, Jones came out of the fight unscathed; Lisa McClellan was not as lucky as she saw how fans cavorted in glee after Jones’ knockout defeat.
“Here we have a man who put himself in the ring to entertain us, and we can’t sit in our seats long enough and quietly enough to make sure he’s okay?” she asked. “Fine, this is a sport, but it’s also somebody’s life.”
“As much as I love boxing, that night I said I don’t respect it anymore.”
She also went one step further and wrote Jones a letter. Part of it read:
Gerald can’t get out of bed unless somebody’s there to get him up.
Gerald can’t eat unless somebody’s there to fix it for him.
That’s not the life you want to live.
It’s a not a life that Gerald or Lisa McClellan asked for, but they’re doing the best with what they’ve got. Boxing can be the most beautiful of sports when it’s done right at its highest level, much the way Gerald used to fight; It can also be the most brutal and unforgiving of endeavors, unworthy of even being called a sport. Sometimes it’s somewhere in the middle, like the night ten years ago where a single fight changed a number of lives forever.
But strangely enough, boxing still flows through the veins of Gerald McClellan, who can still remember the most triumphant moments of his career and that he was at one time one of the most feared prizefighters in the world; and it also sits in the heart of Lisa McClellan, who has faced down all the obstacles placed in front of her over the last ten years, bore her cross, and still moves forward, unwilling to abandon her brother to strangers.
As she puts it, once the negative thoughts inevitably fade, “now I can keep fighting.”
To contribute to the Gerald McClellan trust fund, send a check or money order, made payable to Gerald McClellan Trust Fund, to:
Gerald McClellan Trust
C/O Fifth Third Bank
PO Box 120
Freeport, IL 61032
All supporters who pledge to help Gerald McClellan by donating $50 or more
will receive a magnificent limited edition art print of Gerald McClellan in his prime painted by Hall of Fame artist Richard T. Slone.Comment
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And i'll probably donate 50 bucks.Comment
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karma's a ***** sometimesComment
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