Knox Finds He Has the Will to Win

He was just going to have to get up. That’s all there was to it, he told himself.

Darnell Knox had bounced back from too many blows, the biggest one outside the ring, to let this one stop him.

An instant earlier, Knox had been two rounds away from his first title shot, clearly dominating Alex Ramos in a bout he had to win to qualify for a North American Boxing Federation middleweight championship fight.

Then had come the Ramos right hand, unseen and unanticipated.

“I was thinking about this fight coming up while I was laying there,” recalled Knox, referring to Thursday, when he will meet Michael Nunn in a 12-round battle for the NABF title in an outdoor ring at the Las Vegas Hilton. “I told myself, ‘If you lose to Ramos, you’re going to stay right here, stay at the bottom.’

“The question was, was my heart big enough? Did I want to pull it out?”

The answer was yes. Knox got mad, got up and got the job done, stopping Ramos in the 10th round of a Las Vegas fight held two months ago.

Impressive? Knox has done better. Eight years ago, he got up off the ground and saved his boxing career. The impressive thing that time was that the blow that had put him down came not from a fist but from a gun.

Knox first put on the gloves in his hometown, Detroit, at age 12. He fought brilliantly for three years then quit, becoming more interested in sports like basketball and baseball.

“He’s a gifted, coordinated athlete,” said his manager, Emanuel Steward. “I think he could have been a hell of a baseball player.”

Instead, by age 19, Knox was working in a fast-food restaurant. One night, two men with guns came in and demanded money. Knox and a fellow worker emptied the cash register.

That wasn’t good enough.

The intruders fired a couple of shots, one of them hitting Knox in the left calf.

“I guess,” Knox said, “they wanted to leave some kind of a message.”

The bullet was lodged too close to a nerve to be removed.

“I knew then I couldn’t be a basketball or baseball player because I wouldn’t have the movement,” Knox said, “so I decided to give boxing another try. I thought I could still do that.”

It had been four years since he’d been in the ring, but Knox, bullet and all, returned with his skills intact.

He fought one more year as an amateur, finishing with a 76-6 record, then turned pro in 1981.

Starting as a welterweight, he won his first 12 matches before losing a 10-round decision to Manning Galloway in Akron, Ohio, in 1983.

It was to be Knox’s only loss.

He moved to the junior middleweight division, winning eight in a row in that division, then up to middleweight where he is 7-0, boosting his record to 27-1 with 21 knockouts.

But there were other problems along the way.

In August, 1985, he defeated Roman George on a seventh-round knockout to win the ESPN cable network’s junior middleweight title.

But then, having finally slugged his way into the national spotlight, Knox turned the lights out himself, again dropping out of boxing.

This time, the reason was managerial problems. Unhappy with the way Dennis Spandel was managing his career, Knox parted company with him.

And with boxing for a while. He didn’t fight again for 14 months while he looked for a new manager.

Oh, he stayed in the ring, but only as a sparring partner for people like Thomas Hearns, who will be trying to win his fourth world title on Thursday night’s card.

Finally, Knox signed with Steward, who also manages Hearns out of the Kronk Gym in Detroit.

And now, at 27, Knox, ranked 10th among middleweights by both the World Boxing Council and the International Boxing Federation, has his first shot at a title.

His opponent, Nunn, of North Hollywood, is 26-0 with 17 knockouts and is ranked fifth by the WBC, sixth by the IBF and seventh by the World Boxing Assn.

Nunn also fought Ramos but had little trouble with him, dominating every round in their Reseda Country Club fight last November for the California middleweight title.

Does it worry Knox’s handlers that Nunn so easily disposed of a fighter Knox had to struggle with?

No way.

“I’ve found,” Steward said, “that when people are down on a fighter like I am on Darnell because of the Ramos fight, that fighter’s next fight is often his best because he’s trying to prove something. Anytime a good fighter has trouble in the gym, I tell people to watch out, because his next opponent is going to have problems.”

Perhaps Knox’s best endorsement came from Hearns.

Hearns approached Steward one day and said, “I’d like to manage somebody.”

“You’d like to what?” Steward asked.

“I’d like to manage him,” said Hearns, pointing to Knox, with whom he had just sparred.

Now remember, Hearns has been in the ring with people like Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler.

Steward told Hearns he had his hands full fighting without worrying about managing.

” Well, then you ought to manage him,” said Hearns, still pointing to Knox, “because that boy is going to be a champ.”