Off The Ropes: The Ron Lyle Story. Candace Toft

withdrew recognition of Ali. So, in 1968, Joe Frazier, champion of the W.B.C., and Jimmy Ellis, recognized by the W.B.A., became the guys to beat.

Ron read articles about Angelo Dundee, Ali's trainer, in The Ring magazine and decided to write him a letter. To his amazement, Dundee not only wrote back but encouraged Ron not to lose hope. He answered some of Ron's basic questions about training and offered to meet with him whenever he was released. Dundee's letter was just one more reason to keep going—another person to trust. The trainer did, in fact, have several conversations with Ron in the years following that letter—another promise fulfilled. Ron remembers Dundee this way: “He really held the door open for me on the professional end. He's a very special person. I love him. He's a good man.”

      By late 1968, Ron began to believe that he would be released. The faith Nellie had instilled in him took hold, and he told Lt. Maddox that he knew that he was meant to go to prison, to pass the tests, to learn the lessons, but that the time had come to live the dream.

      Ron is quoted by Stephen Brunt in his book, Facing Ali: “Having the misfortune to be incarcerated, it taught me patience, but it also taught me how to look ahead, to plan ahead and to be able to see the dream when it appears. If I don't pursue it, I miss the boat. That's the way I approached it. . . I think that's the route that God intended me to travel. He's the one that gave me the dream, so obviously that was the route. I had to follow the route. And I did.”²

      Ron probably could have been paroled earlier if he had told the parole board he would take one of the low-paying jobs offered to him by some members of his growing fan base in Denver, but as he later described it to a reporter, “I was firmly convinced that I could succeed as a pro boxer and I wasn't going to lie to them.”

      Finally, in November 1969, Bill Daniels provided the parole board with the assurance they required. He testified that he would guarantee Ron a regular job as a welder with a firm he owned while the parolee worked on his boxing career.

      On Saturday, November 22, 1969, Ron was paroled from Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City. The day he left prison, he followed the advice of an old bank robber named Tom Johnson, who told him to never look back. “Even on the bus, I never turned around to look at the place where I had been for so long.” He never dreamed he would return to Cañon City again and again in the years to come.

      Ron had served seven and a half years behind bars. He was two months away from his twenty-ninth birthday, the peak age for most professional boxers, and he had yet to pay his dues as an amateur.

      3

      Denver Rocks

      Shortly before Ron was released from prison, his parents purchased a six-bedroom house on Hudson Street in Park Hill, about three miles east of the Curtis Park Projects. Everyone in the family had contributed to the down payment, including Ron, who put in all the money he had inherited from being named a beneficiary, along with his mother, on his brother Michael's Army life insurance policy.

      After a separation of seven and a half years, Ron gratefully moved back in with his family. The house was one of the largest in the neighborhood and provided plenty of room for the Lyles, comparatively speaking. Only ten children were left at home, including toddler Karen, the last of Nellie and William's nineteen children. A step up from the projects, Park Hill had wide, tree-lined streets with an assortment of mostly wooden bungalows topped off by gently pitched gable roofs.

      The year before, Denver had experienced its own version of the race riots consuming larger cities. Skirmishes between black youths and police in Five Points had spread to Park Hill, where an eighteen-year-old was shot by police in a shopping center. Within a few months, both black and white activists in the predominantly black neighborhood agreed to join forces to fight segregation, and the white membership of the Park Hill Action Committee merged with the black-dominated Northeast Park Hill Civic Association to form the Greater Park Hill Community, Inc. Again the Lyles found themselves living in a mixed, generally harmonious community.

The volatile 1960s had appeared and reached their peak while Ron was locked away. John Kennedy had been assassinated; the Vietnam War had begun and was still raging, as were war protesters on the streets and college campuses. Malcolm X had become the national minister of the Nation of Islam and a champion of African-American black separatism and pride. In 1963, more than two hundred thousand people had marched on Washington D.C., the largest civil rights demonstration ever, and had heard Martin Luther King Jr., give his “I Have a Dream” speech, but the brutality continued as four African-American girls were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act, and Dr. King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

      Ron didn't fully realize his frustration at being left out of the greatest civil rights movement in history until he heard how the family had reacted to events—the march led by Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery, the assassination of Malcolm X, the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the race riots in Watts, and the political activists Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale. Black Power. But the Lyles’ involvement in the struggle followed their own tradition, paralleling that of the Reverend Martin Luther King. Nellie led the way, reminding family and neighbors that God wants us to show love and respect for people of all colors.

      The assassination of Dr. King in 1968 had somehow stoked the fire that raged within Ron to live his own dream. Still in prison but convinced he would soon be paroled, he vowed to represent not only his family but his race with honor. When asked what he remembered as the high point of his professional life, he answered without hesitation, “The highest point of my life boxing was when I was an amateur. I was representing the United States Boxing Team on the amateur tour in Yugoslavia—Belgrade. They played the national anthem, and I was standing proud in the ring. I was representing my race and my country and all the convicts left alone in prison.” He added, “That's when I knew I belonged there.”

      Dr. King also influenced Ron in his vow to stay clean. The “juvenile delinquent,” the young man convicted of murder, has never, for the rest of his life, taken a drink, “not even a beer,” has never done drugs, has never smoked a cigarette. When asked how he managed to avoid all those temptations, he answers, “I needed my body to carry me where I wanted to go.” Then he adds with a smile, “And, besides, my mother didn't want me to.”

The afternoon after Ron was paroled from prison, he appeared at the Denver Elks Gymnasium and made it official; he told Bill Daniels he wanted a spot as heavyweight on the Denver Rocks boxing team. Donnie Nelson, the Rocks’ light heavyweight, was training that day with his father Albert and brother Dennis in attendance. Dennis remembers his father predicting that not only would Ron bring greatness on himself, but that in the process, he would elevate the Rocks to prominence in the U.S. boxing world.

      Featherweight Abby Espinoza was at the Elks that first day, too. Eight years younger, Abby considered himself in good shape, but he had never seen anyone as “chiseled” as Ron Lyle. “My dad, Joe Espinoza, was a good friend of our coach, Joe Garcia,” Abby says. “We all watched Ronnie work out every day, and I told my Dad he would be the next champion of the world. I believed that.”

      It only took a week for Ron to replace Barnell Stidham, the team's heavyweight, who had refused to fight him in Cañon City. As the Nelsons and the Espinozas watched Ron unequivocally knock out Stidham in an early round, Donnie remembers, “My dad asked me how I would like to fight Ronnie and I told him ‘not at all.’”

      Less than a month after being paroled from prison, on December 19, Ron made his amateur debut in Denver against Fred Houpe of the Chicago Clippers with a knockout in the third round. That match was only the third league fight for the Rocks, who had met the Clippers in Chicago two weeks before when Houpe had knocked out Stidham. Ron was elated. His boxing career had begun with a big shot, and the Rocks were on the map, a force to be reckoned with.

      A month