TOMMY MORRISON
A personal account of the former WBO heavyweight champion
ACHAMPION lived a couple hours’ drive from my childhood home. He had relatives the next town over. He’d won fights an hour or two north of us, and fights an hour or two south of us. My older brother knew people who knew him. His name was Tommy, and Tommy could hit.
I remember describing his powers to classmates on the playground. I told of survivors who gave trembling accounts that when struck squarely with his left hook the gates of hell could be heard rattling in the ear that was soon pressed against the canvas. His left hook made men who had trained all their lives, since they were seven years old, convulse with stupefied shock as their legs went limp, as though they had never been hit this way before. As though they didn’t realise a man could hit this way.
Of course, Heavyweight Champion of the World is the highest title a man can attain. I understood this by kindergarten. It puts the mortal at the table with Mars, the god of war, and Thor, god of thunder. The heavyweight champion of the world is the one who will rise from bed and lace his boots to meet any intergalactic invaders foolhardy enough to enter our atmosphere in the middle of the night. That heavyweight champion of the world lived a couple hours’ drive from our house.
This changed the air in a town like ours. It was a small town in the middle of the States that the coasts dismissively call, “flyover”. No one’s destination – just that distance of hills and mountains that the collision of the continents had inconveniently sandwiched between the metropolitan cities of consequence.
Tommy changed things. He made the self-proclaimed greatness of other parts of the country sound less triumphant and more uncomfortably desperate. We were all raised to know that there was no benefit in being unfriendly, so when a businessman passed through from the ruins in the west to visit those in the east, we’d offer him a smile and comforting slice of pecan pie, but we all knew where the Champ came from.
Women tossed their made-for-comfort bras into the trash and ordered by mail those which lifted and added the illusion of an extra cup size or two. Men started rolling up the short sleeves of their T-shirts, and rolling down their windows. They’d drive slowly down Main Street with an elbow hanging out. All the men grew sideburns and the police department bought toothpicks to issue to all three officers to chomp on while making traffic stops. Labour unions started to form as workers decided that 40 or 50 hours of their lives each week ought to buy a comfortable living for them and their families. At least that’s how I remember it. People felt better about themselves. About what they were worth.
Whenever there was a big fight the four of us would pile into the car and drive a couple of hours, past fields of grazing cows and into the woods, to Grandpa’s house. He had one of those big, steel satellite dishes so wide that even my Dad couldn’t reach both edges at the same time if he tried. With it, Grandpa could buy pay-per-view fights or record HBO and Showtime fights on his VHS VCR. I still have the tapes today. Sitting on Grandpa’s couch we watched Tommy win. And win. And win.
Grandpa, who had been following boxing since Joe Louis was sovereign, was the first in our family to recognise Tommy’s potential. He told Dad a fighter named Tony Dewar fell in the first round to Tommy’s left hook. The left collapsed Joe Adams in the first a month later and seemed only to graze Elvin Evans before putting him down for a nap. The next time out, January 24, 1989, Tommy took a trip to Great Falls, Montana to drop Mike Foley, again in the first round. I remember the TV announcers warning viewers not to visit the refrigerator as the bout against Traore Ali was about to begin because Tommy was yet to be extended beyond the first round. Ali fell twice against Tommy’s other big punch, the right uppercut, before the referee stopped it in the fourth.
In these early interviews he talked about wanting to be successful enough to help his parents, while his promoter praised his potential and pointed out how nice a guy he was. He was articulate, even with the Oklahoma accent, and humble. He had been winning fights since puberty, having used a fake ID to enter a Toughman Contest at 13 years old and going on to win 49 of them, but complimented his conquered opponents before smiling and giving a thumbs-up to the camera. When Rick Nelson stuck his tongue out at Tommy in the second round of their fight, Tommy didn’t retaliate in kind – though Nelson’s corner did throw in the towel a minute later. Tommy was just a good kid who liked to listen to Elvis when he worked out. The most bravado he showed in those early days was donning a nickname. Claiming to be the great grandnephew of John Wayne, he was first announced in the ring as Tommy “The Duke” Morrison moments before his two-minute win against Alan Jamison.
Along the way, Sylvester Stallone had noticed Tommy. Sly was making a fourth sequel to that perfect film he’d made in 1976, and he wanted Tommy to be in it. Tommy played Rocky’s protégé who would eventually tangle his feet in the dirty side of the sport.
There was a peculiar point at which make-believe and reality overlapped. It was in West Orange, New Jersey where Tommy fought Lorenzo Canady. Stallone was always striving to make his fight scenes realistic and thought the swiftest route to that destination was to film a real fight. As ESPN’S cameras broadcasted the fight, the real Tommy wore the trunks Apollo Creed gave Rocky to wear in his rematch with Clubber Lang. Stallone and Burt Young, playing the characters of Rocky and Paulie, shouted encouragement and instructions to the real Tommy as he fought a real heavyweight throwing a real heavyweight’s punches.
The result was that Tommy fought his ugliest fight. He was distracted, nervous, sloppy and impatient. He lunged uncharacteristically with his punches and
some heavy blows from Canady opened a cut on Tommy’s cheek. He won on points though, and as the fight concluded he had to remember to go to Rocky’s corner, where Stallone popped into the ring and patted Tommy’s shoulder, held the water bottle so he could get a drink, and then helped Tommy into his robe.
As Tommy was rising up out of boxing auditoriums with low, tiled ceilings on his way to pay-per-view glory, he did so under the shadow of a monster from a mythical era in boxing history. George Foreman had decided to return to the sport, and confirmed for all who were playing it a little fast and loose with their rhetoric, that one should hesitate before mentioning the modern heavyweight’s name alongside his, Ali’s, Frazier’s or Norton’s.
Twenty years after his prime, George Foreman rose from his 10-year retirement and took the finest heavyweights of the day to the edge of defeat, pushing some over. He repeatedly called out Mike Tyson, telling David Letterman, “I want this Mike Tyson. I assure you I will do it [win] in the same fashion. One or two rounds. I guarantee you.” Tyson did not accept the challenge. Foreman won 24 consecutive bouts before stepping into the ring with the undisputed champion, Evander Holyfield. At 42 he took Holyfield the distance. At nearly 46 he knocked out the then-champion, Michael Moorer.
When asked by reporters, who were concerned for his safety, whether he intended to retire soon, Foreman pointed out that nobody had yet knocked him down. He promised that if they did, he’d quit, and if anyone knocked him out he’d never talk about boxing again.
Between Foreman’s title fights with Holyfield and
Moorer it was noticed that nobody had the WBO heavyweight title, and it was decided that Foreman would be given the chance to fight for it – and so would Tommy.
I can’t say whether either fighter was susceptible to nerves at that point in their careers, but I certainly was. My two favourite fighters were facing one another. Butterflies filled my stomach well enough that meals were missed. I paced my bedroom floor as my hairline began its decades-long recession. “Is the car gassed up?” I asked Dad 10 days out. “When are you going to lay out my clothes?” I asked