Off The Ropes: The Ron Lyle Story. Candace Toft

Ron was considered the scourge of Cañon City, and it got so that no one within the walls would take him on. Maddox had to bring in boxers from the outside, mainly from Fort Carson Army Base, thirty miles way.

      Jimmy Farrell fought middleweight on that Army team and remembers the first time they traveled to Cañon City. “Our heavyweight was a highly regarded boxer named Howard Smith who went on to become ranked professionally. We were surprised this convict could beat him so easily. That was the first time I ever saw Ronnie Lyle.”

      Ron won every one of the frequently scheduled fights against the Fort Carson team, and his reputation, along with the Cañon City Rock Busters team, grew, reaching Denver and the notable boxing supporters in that city.

      By the summer of 1966, Ron had used up almost every conceivable opponent, and Maddox was looking to Denver and the Rocks, an amateur boxing team that had just become a charter member of the now-defunct International Boxing League. He contacted the club's owner, Bill Daniels—a prophetic move, as it turned out.

      Daniels was a cable television magnate, enormously wealthy and an avid sports fan. He had been the undefeated Golden Gloves Champion of New Mexico, but he had also invested in automobile racing and an American Basketball Association team, the Los Angeles Stars, which he later moved to Utah. He served as president of the A.B.A. and was a founder of the United States Football League. Daniels was one of the first cable owners to focus on sports programming, a pioneer in what is now of course a multibillion-dollar industry.

Beyond all that, Daniels was a war hero and a humanitarian. In World War II and the Korean War, he was a naval fighter pilot, serving for a time as the commander of the “Blue Angels.” Later, he helped found Cenikor, a nonprofit rehabilitation center for drug addicts, alcoholics, and people with criminal behavior problems. He donated his seven-million-dollar mansion, “Cableland,” to Denver so the city would have an official mayoral residence.

      In 1966, Ron could barely hope to be released from prison in time to develop a professional career and was dependent on whatever good boxers Maddox could scare up. That year, it wasn't to be the top heavyweight for the Denver Rocks.

      Dennis Nelson, who was training his brother, Rocks light heavyweight Donnie Nelson, remembers that Barnell Stidham, their best heavyweight, refused to box the formidable Ron Lyle. “Ronnie scared the ‘you-know-what’ out of him,” Dennis says. “He was that good. In fact, the first time my dad and I saw him box, he told me we had just seen the next heavyweight champion of the world, but neither of us could figure out how a twenty-five-year-old guy with at least eleven more years to serve in prison could even get a chance to try.” The answer was Bill Daniels.

      As an expression of his belief in Cenikor and its dedication to the rehabilitation of convicts, Daniels frequently visited the Colorado State Penitentiary. It was on one of those visits that he first heard of Ron Lyle, and he arranged for his next Cañon City trip to coincide with one of his fights.

      From the first time he saw Ron box, Daniels wanted to help the young convict. He began almost at once to exert his considerable political influence throughout the state in hopes of winning Ron parole. But even for Bill Daniels, it wasn't going to be that easy.

      He managed to obtain a parole hearing in 1967, but Ron's devotion to his dream of a professional boxing career was a major obstacle. Despite positive testimony from Maddox and others, the parole board turned him down; members were not accustomed to releasing prisoners to become professional boxers.

      “I went to the parole board, and they sent me back for a year, two years,” Ron says. “They said boxing's not a parole plan. The head of the parole board said he didn't think I could fight my way out of a wet bag. They didn't think I'd make it. I told them that this is what I'm going to do when I get out. They said, ‘Prove it to us.’”

Ron didn't get angry, and he didn't give up. He just kept working, sparring, and getting fights when he could. Maddox kept after him, prodding him to work harder, squeezing the best out of him. And they both kept learning—the art of defense, throwing punches in combination, and rhythm. Ron got better and better. And because Bill Daniels and Clifford Maddox believed in him, he started to believe in himself—that boxing would give him a second chance at life.

      Ron grapples with the difference between street fighting and boxing. “In high school, boxing didn't interest me much, mainly because I was always having to fight my way out of a lot of after-school scraps. When I had to fight, I didn't enjoy it,” Ron said in an interview. And the fights he had behind bars, “personal squabbles,” he called them, had been a continuation of his life on the streets, only more meaningless and disheartening. Boxing was different. It not only became the controlling force of his life in prison, it continued to guide his life long after he was released.

      After he had entered the professional arena years later, he told a reporter, “Fighting is something that I need, an individual competitiveness, the supreme battle of man against man. Whatever it is, I need boxing, because in prison it gave me the will and determination to constantly better myself during the times when it was rough.”

      Ron also remembers 1967 and 1968 as a time for focusing on what he had learned was most important: “My father tried to teach me things I couldn't understand at the time. In prison I started to know what he was trying to do. I learned how important self-discipline is. And my mother taught me how to believe God was there with me in prison. I had to have faith. You lose faith; you lose hope.”

      The hardest lesson for Ron Lyle was learning respect: “Respect was something that took me a long time to get used to. In fact, I think the first person I ever respected outside of my family was Lt. Maddox. He changed my entire outlook. And he didn't do it by conning me—he did it by respecting me as a person. To him, I wasn't another prison number. I didn't always keep my nose clean, even then. But all the time I was in the joint he never once asked me about another convict. He kept me out of trouble a lot of times that he could have just as easily put me in the hole. He treated me fairly.”

      Some years later, Clifford Maddox was quoted as saying, “I don't like to take any credit for what happened, but Ron turned into a real gentleman.”

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Life moves on, even for families with a loved one in prison. While his mother did all she could to lift Ron's spirits during her weekly visits, and his sister Joyce wrote letters of encouragement, Ron found it increasingly difficult to be away from the Lyle home during the years of so much change.

      He had missed Bill going off to college at the University of Denver in 1961 to study accounting and business administration, Michael joining the Army in 1963 and being assigned to Bravo Company, Kenneth being hospitalized in 1964 with what is now recognized as bipolar disorder. The worst was in 1966 when Michael was killed in Vietnam.

      Maybe because Michael was considered a war hero, or maybe because his brother Ron was starting to gain the respect of the prison powers-that-be, Deputy Warden Fred Wyse made it possible for Ron to go to his younger brother's funeral, an unusual privilege in those days.

      Ron remembers being driven by the Fremont County Sheriff himself from Cañon City straight to the Denver City jail, where he was kept overnight. He was driven to the funeral the next day, and his handcuffs were removed before he stepped into the temporary company of his family and Michael's friends, but he wasn't allowed any socializing. Right after the service, he was delivered straight back to Cañon and incarceration.

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      Weddings and new babies, trade schools and jobs kept happening to the Lyle family, faster than Ron could keep track. Boxing kept him going. But even as he trained, sparred, and knocked out the opponents Maddox could muster, that world, too, was changing.

      After Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston in early 1964, an immediate rematch was set, a violation of W.B.A. rules, and in June that organization withdrew its recognition of Clay, who had changed his name to Muhammed Ali as part of his conversion to Islam. The World Boxing Council continued to recognize Ali as champion until he refused to go into the United States Army after