Читать книгу Off The Ropes: The Ron Lyle Story - Candace Toft - Страница 14

Ron tried to apply the lessons he had learned in Buena Vista to life in the state penitentiary, but he lost his way almost immediately. Reform-school rules are woefully inadequate for doing hard time. And Cañon City was harder time than most.

Conditions in “Old Max” were so appalling that as late as 1977, prisoner Fidel Ramos sued the state, charging that the Department of Corrections was inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on its inmates. A federal judge agreed—but too late for Ron Lyle and the hundreds of prisoners that served with him.

“Ramos was, without a doubt, the case that led to the modernization of Colorado prisons,” says David Miller, former legal director of the Colorado ACLU. “People forget that Old Max was a hellhole. Cells were twenty-eight square feet, and people were locked down in them for long periods of time. Sewage came up the pipes. The food was often inedible. Violence was rampant. The stronger inmates really ran the prison.”¹

During the time Ron was incarcerated, murders were so frequent they seemed commonplace to the inmates. The most gruesome method was fashioning a gas bomb and throwing it into a cell, burning the adversary alive.

Probably because of his size, Ron found himself constantly being challenged by inmates who bore no resemblance to the kids he knew in reform school. Most prisoners were still black and Chicano, but the brotherhood between the races that had strengthened the friendships there did not exist in Cañon City. He was as likely to be tripped or pushed by a black or Chicano guy as by a white one. And he pushed back.

Within weeks of his arrival, Ron found himself locked up in solitary confinement for fighting. On subsequent occasions, he found himself in lockdown with all the other inmates for no other reason than as an “administrative” measure. Prisoners were often kept in their cells between twenty-two and twenty-three hours a day, without congregate dining, exercise, work opportunities, or religious services, let alone reading material.

Nellie Lyle traveled to Cañon City almost every week to visit her son, sometimes driven by Bill, other times taking the four-hour bus trip. On several occasions that first year, she arrived at the prison only to find that she couldn't see him because he was in solitary confinement or lockdown. She would wait for the return bus, hoping to see him when she took the trip again the next week.

Ron trusted no one, keeping to himself as much as he could. But when threatened, he always gave at least as much as he got. At one point, after a fight, he'd been stripped, thrown into quarantine, and left there for twenty-three hours. Finally released to the yard, he wandered dazed, wondering if he was going crazy.

One of the old-timers walked right up to him and told him he needed to follow three rules and he'd be okay: “First, mind your own business.” So far, so good; Ron knew that rule from Buena Vista.

“Second, don't go into another man's cell; and third, don't steal anything from anybody.”

He followed those three rules all the time he stayed in Cañon, but he got into trouble, anyway, because he wouldn't take guff from anyone. “Don't stick a stake in a lion's den,” was Russ Perron's explanation of Ronnie fighting other prisoners. “Remember, he was pretty disillusioned.”

Disillusioned and bitter, Ron had no reason to believe he would spend less than fifteen years in Cañon, maybe up to twenty-five. Life seemed over before it could begin. “I was a troublemaker. For a long time I didn't know how to live there—in prison. It was the start of what lasted most of my life—trying to reconcile my Christian background with the code I learned in prison.”

That code was to fight back whenever he was threatened and never to squeal on anyone. Even though it got him in more trouble as the months wore on, the code was all he had to fall back on. Then Lt. Clifford Maddox entered his life.

Maddox served as part-time guard, part-time recreation director at Cañon City. Physically unimposing, barely five feet nine with glasses and a receding hairline, he nevertheless commanded respect from everyone in the prison, convicts and fellow guards alike. He had worked at Cañon for twenty-seven years, earning some leeway in his dealings with prisoners. One day he approached Ron Lyle in the yard and asked if he'd ever played on athletic teams.

“I told Maddox I had always been interested in sports but could never make the teams in high school because of my grades. I told him I had played on a semipro basketball team, and he said that's where I should start then. He let me know that in prison, everything was up to me. I had to take the first step. So, after a while, I did.”

The relationship between convict and guard didn't go smoothly at first. Ron remembers Maddox trying to get him to open up, and his own response, in effect: “Man, you're a screw and I'm a convict. I came here by myself and I'll leave the same way.”

But the guard kept prodding, and Ron kept going to practice, and before long he was the mainstay of all three Cañon City teams—football, basketball, and baseball. His performance from the winter of 1962 through the fall of 1963 is part of the record. The first basketball season, he averaged twenty-three points a game. When baseball came around, he batted .400. And in the fall, he routinely kicked fifty-yard field goals for the prison football team, the Rock Busters, while throwing touchdown passes, one for seventy yards. And it was the football team that brought Ron his first real friend in prison.

Ron had heard the name “Doobie” Vigil ever since he had been in reform school when some guys there said that when Vigil was in Buena Vista, he was the toughest guy there. Ron heard the same thing when he arrived at Cañon, but he didn't meet Doobie until he started playing football. Both six feet three and over two-hundred pounds, Ron and Doobie were the most physically daunting members of the team, and the hard-hitting Hispanic reminded Ron of some of the guys back in the projects. Maybe it was a natural that the two started immediately to build a team alliance and a friendship that managed to survive not only incarceration but release many years later.

The Rock Busters with Ron Lyle and Doobie Vigil did so well they were invited to play an exhibition game against a semipro football team called the Colorado Colts. Former Colts player Gary Snyder remembers Ron Lyle on the field that day: “We kidded around about playing the prison team at first, saying the referees should wear checks instead of stripes, and that the police wouldn't let the wide receivers go long, but after the game started and we saw Ronnie Lyle play, it was a different story. We won the game, but just barely, and afterward, everyone, including our team, voted him MVP.”

■ ■ ■

Even as athletics relieved the generally unrelenting pressure of prison life for Ron, the high point of each week continued to be his mother's visit. She never failed to tell him how much she believed in him, and would always end their half hour with a prayer.

When Bill took word of Ronnie's prowess in the prison athletic program back to the family, they started to hope things would get better for him, but Nellie never needed to hope—she had faith in her second-oldest son.

Ron says he never has been “saved,” at least not like Bill, who “spoke in tongues” as he emerged from the holy water. “But it didn't matter, you know? My mom had enough faith for both of us.” He adds, “She made sure I believed, too. God knows I have never completely lost faith, not even in prison.” Athletics helped.

No one in Cañon City, not even any of his teammates, doubted that Ron Lyle was the best athlete among the 1,400 convicts. And for the first time in his life, Ron started to believe that he was blessed with an exceptional physical ability. But he was still angry.

“Maddox constantly got on my back, even during a game. He used to sit behind the baseball backstop and tell everyone how lousy I was. It got to me at first. I mean, here I am, the best player on the field and he's making me look like a fool.”

But slowly, if reluctantly, Ron grew closer to Maddox, or at least more dependent on his program. He remembers that the guard was “not the kind who'll pat you on the back. Instead, he'll stay on you and try to get you to do that little bit extra. It worked for me, but only after he hassled me to death.”

During football season, Maddox would hold team meetings, and Ron started to get the feeling the coach was talking directly to him as he urged the players to put out a little more. He threw out indirect messages and taunts during the games, and Ron started to get it.

“One day, Maddox had been on my back, and I told him he needed to respect me as a convict and I would respect him as an officer. I told him about my code and how I lived by it. I told him I could have brought six buddies with me, but I didn't squeal on anyone.”

Maddox mostly just listened, but Ron remembers that conversation as the first time they connected as two people, setting aside for just a little while their respective roles of player and coach, inmate and guard.

As the seasons wore on and basketball returned, there were other such moments. Ron knows now that they were beginning to understand each other, and that Maddox was not only making him a better player, but a better person. Whether influenced by the guard, or his mother, or a little of both, Ron started lending a helping hand to other inmates on occasion.

He remembers the day he noticed a young convict hiding in a corner of the gym, watching him shoot at the basket. He had seen the kid before, mostly hanging around alone, a couple of times taking guff from some of the inmates, probably because he looked so young. Ron had guessed he was still in his teens and had even thought about talking to the kid—because he knew how tough it was to spend so much time alone—but had decided against it. First rule, mind your own business.

But that morning, the kid looked so meek, standing back in the shadows, that Ron nodded at him and got a shy smile in return. He went back to shooting layups with what had become an exceptional ability to focus on the athletic task at hand, and he forgot the kid was there.

The next day, the young convict was back in the gym when Ron arrived, sitting on the floor closer to the court this time. He gave a half-wave when Ron walked over to the ball rack.

What the hell. “Wanna learn how to play?”

“Sure.” The kid jumped to his feet with a big smile, and Ron lobbed the ball to him. The second real friendship Ron formed in prison began that day. He worked out with the kid every day they both had recreation privileges, and before long they were playing on the same team, even though the kid was on the bench as a backup guard most of the time.

“He got out of the joint long before I did,” Ron remembers. “But I'll never forget the letter I got one day while I was still in prison. It was from him. He said he had married, found a job and was going straight, and that I was his idol. Nobody ever told me that before. I had such a great feeling that I had helped somebody and he appreciated it.”

Ron never forgot that feeling. For the rest of his life, he has sought opportunities to help kids that need something from him. But he doesn't see himself or want others to see him as some kind of do-gooder. “I just never got tired of feeling appreciated, of being somebody's idol.”

■ ■ ■

Ron had seen his first prison boxing match a few months after he arrived at Cañon City. Lt. Maddox had asked him if he wanted to be a part of the boxing program, but he was just starting to get into the rhythm of playing on teams and wasn't particularly interested in the rigors of boxing—not then. Not until something happened that once again turned his world wrong side out.

A little over a year after Ron entered prison, he still found it difficult to confide in anyone. He had begun to appreciate Maddox in the same way the kid he mentored in basketball appreciated him, but he couldn't bring himself to trust the men at Cañon. Except for Doobie, even his teammates were suspect, because anyone could be bribed or paid off by anyone else in prison, inmate or guard. After practices, he kept to himself as much as possible. It was almost worse after he had gained some success during athletic contests, as several of the inmates took to pestering him, sometimes during meals and sometimes in the yard.

“Some days it seemed that everyone in prison was mean,” Ron said years later. “At least in the beginning, it felt that way.”

One guy in particular was on his back almost every day, and Ron kept shoving him away. He didn't want fighting to get him back in the hole. Finally, one morning at breakfast, the guy challenged him to meet in the laundry room, and Ron, sick of the confrontations and knowing his own superior strength, took him up on the dare.

They had barely squared off when the guy pulled a homemade shiv out of his pants and shoved it to the hilt into Ron's abdomen. The tip of the knife pierced an artery near his spine, and by the time the guards got him into the hospital wing, he had bled out a dangerous quantity of blood.

The doctors took him into surgery just before ten o’clock, laboring to find the artery and stop the bleeding. When they rolled him out seven and a half hours later, Ron Lyle had received thirty-five pints of blood transfusions and had twice been declared clinically dead. His death certificate had been signed.

Years later, asked if he survived the stabbing in prison because of his physical strength and “hard-nosed attitude,” Ron smiled and shook his head.

“I survived because my mother saved me.” He said that when he woke up after surgery, the first thing he remembered was “. . . sliding down a long tube. Then my mother reached down and pulled me back. That's why I'm alive. She wanted me to live.”

The devastating prison assault turned out to be the defining moment in Ron's life, and not only because he learned to believe in his mother's power to save him. Two other extraordinary events pointed him in the direction the rest of his life would take. It started with his first visitors.

When he fully awakened the next morning, he opened his eyes to his mother holding his left hand and on his right, Lt. Clifford Maddox, bending over him and asking how he felt. It wasn't until Maddox began to cry that Ron knew the old guard cared about him. “He didn't have to come to the hospital and see me. After all, Maddox had been depending on me for the baseball team, and I knew I had let him down again, just like other times before.”

Ron finds it difficult to describe how that visit made such a change in his outlook on life. “They were both there together, my mother and Clifford Maddox, both caring about me. I knew then that Maddox was a good man, and I figured there had to be other good people out there, too. I started to believe that day, not only in my mother's faith, but in the decency of others.”

And then there was the dream.

Vivid dreams in the Lyle family were often seen as visions, messages from God, and beginning with William dreaming of building a church near the mountains, life decisions were sometimes made based on those dreams.

Ron's vision happened while he was still in the hospital. He had barely closed his eyes one night before he found himself in a vivid dream, fighting for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. When he woke up he remembered every round, every punch.

For years after his boxing career was over, Ron told people about that dream—how he fought for the title, how he didn't know his opponent, but how the fight he eventually had with Muhammad Ali was exactly the fight he had dreamed about. In the dream he knew he had all the punches and could put them together. He remembered a hard jab to the head, a right uppercut, and a left hook to the body. He just didn't know how the fight ended.

With that vision, Ron began to dream of becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. Every day he lay in the hospital, he became more convinced that boxing was the path chosen for him, the way to redeem himself in the eyes of the mother he had caused so much pain. Then he remembered the white prison guard who was wearing a badge when he bent over the hospital bed, his face filled with concern, the second thing Ron saw when he woke up in the hospital. And he knew how he was going to live his dream.

When Maddox had talked to him a couple of times before about joining the boxing team, Ron had been far more interested in improving his team skills, especially in basketball. But after the stabbing and the dream, he knew what he wanted, not only in athletics, but in life.

“I had a lot of time to think, and I wanted something out of life better than I had up to this time. I wanted a way to beat the system that society puts on you when a con gets out of the pen.”

That way would be professional boxing. But he had a very long way to go.

■ ■ ■

Pastor Sharon sums up her brother Ron's experiences by quoting Proverbs 24:16, “A good man will fall seven times and get back up,” then adds her own wisdom, “Each time he gets back up, he'll be stronger.” And so it seemed in the fall of 1963.

First, Ron had to achieve full recovery from his grave injury. Then, after weeks of hospitalization, unbelievably, he was placed back in solitary confinement as punishment for the fight that could have killed him. After ninety days in the hole, he was sent to the rock gang on the hill above the prison for another ninety days because an officer thought he had instigated the fight when he followed the other inmate to the back of the laundry room. But Ron doesn't make much of all that. He remembers spending his time in the hole with the exercise regimen Maddox had assigned—doubling, tripling, and quadrupling the numbers until he was doing a thousand push-ups an hour, one every 3.6 seconds. Long after his professional boxing years were behind him, he would continue to demonstrate that incredible feat.

Maddox had told him that boxers have to be in better shape than any other athlete, and to get there, he had to work harder than he'd ever worked in his life. And so he did; most of his waking time during the locked-in twenty-three-hour days was spent in gaining strength and stamina, but because he could do little more than stretch out his body the length of the cell, he limited his initial workouts to mostly push-ups, sit-ups, and running in place.

Ron learned more lessons and passed more tests during the rest of his prison years, but it was in that last term of solitary confinement that he developed both the desire to reach a maximum level of physical fitness and the self-discipline it takes to get there.

When Ron entered Cañon City, Sonny Liston was World Boxing Association Heavyweight World Champion, but by the time he got out of solitary confinement in 1964, a young Cassius Clay, remembered vaguely by Lyle as the Rome Olympics light heavyweight gold medalist, had won the title. It was time to get to work—to go after the dream.

Lyle started, not by sparring, but by getting into the best shape of his life. He invented his regimen from a variety of sources, mainly from Maddox and from a couple of inmates who had boxed pro for a time. He also did his own research. “I would read Ring magazine from cover to cover every month and try to pick up ideas by reading about the top-ranked fighters. I never tried to copy their styles because I fight my own way, but I did pick up some good training tips.”

Whenever Maddox could get him permission, he watched fights on television, always thinking he could do better than what he saw on the screen. And when he knew he was ready, he started working out in the ring. Before long, he had mastered the basic skills, and Maddox set him up in his first fight.

Ron did not make a very auspicious debut behind prison walls, losing big to a fellow inmate by the name of “Texas” Johnson, but as he continued to do for the rest of his life, he learned by his mistakes. He beat Johnson soundly in a rematch and didn't lose to another inmate again.

Maddox had never seen anyone work as hard as Ron. The increasingly promising fighter worked out on bags in the gym when Maddox could get him in, ran whenever he was in the prison yard, and continued his daily thousand push-ups an hour, discovering in the process his own rhythm, which he would later describe to newscaster Peter Boyles as “bada-bing, bada-boom.”

Before long, 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.”

■ ■ ■

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.

■ ■ ■

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 being drafted for Vietnam in early 1967, at which point all sanctioning bodies 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.