To Lose a Battle But Win the War : Ken Norton, Whose Boxing Career Ended in a String of Defeats, Is Back in the Sports Business

He was not a ghetto kid, driven to the ring by poverty. The son of middle-class parents, he grew up in a small town in Illinois. Rebellious and spoiled, he turned down college football scholarships, played briefly at a small school, then joined the Marine Corps. When a white officer beat him out of a starting-running-back position on the base team, he started boxing and turned pro.

He fought in obscurity and poverty until he upset an unwary Muhammad Ali, leaped to the top level of the sport and went on to hold the World Boxing Council heavyweight championship. Always popular with fans, he became rich and, with the help of his business friends, invested his money well. Now Ken Norton is back on the sports pages.

“He who kicks last kicks the best,” Norton says, drawing on the violent lessons of his earlier life for guidance in safer but trickier careers. The antithesis of the stumbling ex-pug, Norton escaped from the sport intact and wealthy, and he and former manager Jack Rodri began investing in a number of enterprises. Now the partners have started a new business--the Ken Norton Management Co., which represents athletes in contract negotiations.

While in the Bahamas last year, Norton met Eric Dickerson, the L.A. Rams’ running back who demanded a better contract after breaking the National Football League running record last season. This year, Dickerson asked Norton to manage his money and to represent him. Although Norton and Rodri knew little about pro football, they understood that Dickerson was in much the same position Norton had been in as a fighter--as badly needed by the Rams as Norton had been by boxing promoters. The Ken Norton Management Co. signed its first client.

Norton seems well cast as the agent out to right management wrongs. His voice is deep; the muscles of his big arms and chest are clearly delineated. “Good right uppercut and pretty fair hook” is how his old trainer, Bill Slayton, described Norton’s skills. Up close, it’s easy to see why those punches wore down so many heavyweights.

But today, those muscles are used for tennis, and the motto “he who kicks last kicks the best” refers to the combination of combativeness and patience that has taken him from an apartment at 88th Street and Broadway in Los Angeles to a home in expensive Ladera Heights, where he lives with his wife, Jackie, and four children. What helped Norton become a post-boxing success, though, is that he actually likes the business details that often bore other athletes with big incomes.

“Going to the bank, that’s the most inviting to me,” Norton says. And he was lucky, at the beginning of his boxing career, to fall into the hands of a group of businessmen who taught him how to invest his winnings. Painfully, painstakingly, the fighter became the businessman.

One of his teachers was the late Bob Biron, vice chancellor at UC San Diego, business executive and developer. “Bob was a very, very smart man,” Norton says. “He taught me a lot about money management, about business in general. I’ve always wanted to learn. I wanted to learn everything.”

Another was Rodri, who, with Biron, managed the young boxer in the late 1960s. Rodri, a short, roundish man, has an office next to Norton’s on the second floor of a building near Wilshire Boulevard, just west of downtown. They treat each other like a couple of old business partners.

“You back?” Norton asks as Rodri enters the office.

“I’m back. Does it look like I’m back?” Rodri answers.

“I mean back to stay,” Norton says. “See what I go through?”

They used to call themselves “the unusual pair,” “because I’m black and he’s Jewish--that’s very unusual,” Norton says. “It’s also unusual that the fighter and the manager stay together after fighting. It all started when I told Jack I wanted to learn business.

“At first it was very difficult for me, sitting in the office all day, even half a day. I’d work an hour, get up and walk, eat. Now I enjoy it. I know what I have to do. It’s sacrificing, like in sports I had to sacrifice. I can sit here, read what I have to read; I digest it.”

Norton used to be suspicious of strangers, but has shed much of that. “He tended to think that everyone who talked to him was a phony,” Rodri says. “It took years to straighten that out.”

And he was suspicious with the press. “I’m from a small town in the Midwest, and I like being left alone,” Norton explains. “I’d miss press conferences, or meetings with a reporter. I just wouldn’t go.”

Biron and Rodri told Norton that his attitude was costing him valuable publicity. “They told me I couldn’t do that,” he says. “With the respect I had for Jack and the respect I had for Bob, over a period of time I gradually came out of that.”

Norton grew up in Jacksonville, Ill., a farm town of 20,000. He was a talented high school athlete and, as he admits, “a little cocky at times because I was very good in sports and didn’t want to listen that much.”

He turned down football scholarships at major colleges, attended Northeast Missouri State College briefly and then joined the Marine Corps, where he started boxing. Art Rivkin, a San Diego Coca-Cola distributor, persuaded him to turn professional and formed a management team with three other businessmen, one of them Bob Biron. They paid Norton $100 a week and a share of the purses.

In his first fight, on Nov. 14, 1967, Norton knocked out Grady Brazell in nine rounds. But the purses were small, and after Norton had won 16 bouts, 15 by knockouts, he was having trouble finding fights. That’s when he became poor.

“First it was my son, my first wife and myself,” he says. “Then I got a divorce, and it was my son and myself. What an obligation! I sacrificed my youth, my street life. In those days, a man walking down the street with a 15-month-old son, and there’s a girl--forget it, no way. Now, it’s different. I had a semi-lonely life, not as much fun as I should have had. But I wanted my son . . . .

“I took a job once at Ford Motor Co. in Pico Rivera, on the assembly line. I’d get up in the morning, go run, take a shower, take my son to the lady across the street who was helping me out, drive out to Pico Rivera, come back after working all day--and I mean those were hard shifts--drive straight to the gym, work out and go home.”

From the beginning, he was combative outside of the ring, too. When the then-unknown Norton signed to fight Muhammad Ali in 1973, Howard Cosell called the match a disgrace. After Norton won on a decision, breaking Ali’s jaw, Cosell said, “Kenny, you made me look silly.”

“That’s OK, Howard,” Norton replied. “You always look silly.”

Norton’s defeat of Muhammad Ali was his big break, making him a star in a sport that had become a big-money TV attraction thanks largely to Ali’s skill and personality. He fought Ali two more times, losing both, the last by a decision. It was a fight many thought Norton had won.

“Ken didn’t sit down once during that fight,” Slayton recalls. “Stayed up 15 rounds. He was in such great shape for that fight. After that, he lost his heart.”

“It took a lot out of me,” Norton says now. “I didn’t train as hard, ever. Each time I trained, it was a little less than the time before. All I wanted was the money out of it, to make sure I had retirement plans.”

But there were more big fights, and finally Norton was given the vacant World Boxing Council title. He lost it in his first defense to Larry Holmes, but he didn’t quit fighting until he was knocked out in the first round by Gerry Cooney on May 11, 1981, in Madison Square Garden.

As Norton and Eric Dickerson became friends, the former boxer explained how his own managers had supervised his investments, provided him with legal advice and taught him business after his retirement. It was then that Dickerson asked Norton to represent him in renegotiating his Ram contract.

Happy with the Dickerson negotiations, Norton and Rodri are looking for more sports clients.

Having bested the boxing business and fought the Rams evenly in the early rounds, Norton is approaching the future with the calm of a man who’s been through worse.

“It didn’t turn out that bad,” he says of his life, “but it could have been a lot better. For instance, the fight with Larry Holmes--if I’d trained as hard for that fight as for the Ali fights, it could have been different. But I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe in fate.”