AFTER THE GOLD : Boxer Tries to Cope With Shadows on Career

Anyone in this town should know better than to bet on a sure thing.

Here’s the sure thing: a great young boxer, one of three U.S. gold medalists at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Discharged from the Army and marries his sweetheart. Wins, easily, his first four pro bouts. Considered the best pro prospect from the class of 1988. At 23, no history of any problems with drugs or the law.

So, do you bet on Kennedy McKinney or do you pass? Is he too good to be true or is he the real thing?

Unfortunately, the bizarre story of McKinney’s life since winning the gold medal, the improbable last 12 months, is nothing new.

When the boxer tells of a gradual slide into drinking and eventual cocaine use, it is as familiar as today’s news. When he says he disappeared for three days to take care of some personal business, it’s not surprising. When he tells of his arrest for something he didn’t do, we nod knowingly. Of course.

So far have athletes fallen in our moral expectations these days that little they may do is shocking. Promising athletes fall off the end of the earth with such frequency that no one seems to miss them anymore.

That is why the story of Kennedy McKinney is trite. He is a living cliche. All that is left is for him to announce soon that he has blown all his money, pawned his gold medal and will soon be checking into a convenient alley.

To listen and believe McKinney’s story and its well-marked trail of coincidence requires a leap of faith. Or at least a suspension of the cynicism that is easy to assume.

Still, he says he is one fighter who desperately does not want his life to be a cliche. He apparently has a fight on his hands.

“Over in Korea, I put it in my mind: There was only one way I could come back successful, and that was to win a gold medal. The training and dedication I put into that was really unbelievable. Staying away from the partying and the drinking. Going to bed on time, getting up on time. Eating the right thing. So, there was no way I could lose, no way. I could have beat the world at that point in time--which I did.”

McKinney was sitting in his attorney’s office this week, trying to come up with some coherence for his falling into cliche No. 1.

“Working so hard to get the gold medal, and being so determined . . . when I got back it was party time. That’s basically what it came down to. I just partied a little too much,” he said.

“I wasn’t much of a party type until then. When I came back, it was just time to party with the guys. Either they had tried out for the (Olympics) or they had seen me on TV. It was there waiting on me, I guess. It was beer drinking and going out to the clubs. Going out and having fun with your friends until 3 or 4. At that time I didn’t have to be in (at a certain time. But) I had to be in because I had a fiancee and I couldn’t neglect her.”

McKinney’s life moved willy-nilly. He married and signed a pro contract two months after returning to Killeen, Tex., where he had trained as a bantamweight for the Army boxing team stationed at Ft. Hood. McKinney signed with manager Fred Glusman for a $65,000 bonus.

He moved here in January.

“The party just kept going,” he said. “I was enjoying it. I felt I owed it to myself. It did get out of hand. It started in Texas, I guess you could say I brought it here.

“Once we started getting into the gym, it didn’t come to a screeching halt. It slowed up a lot. It was like we ran into a school zone. That came from me. I knew that my professional debut was coming up now, I wanted to look good.”

McKinney had his pro debut Feb. 24 on the undercard of the Iran Barkley-Roberto Duran fight in Atlantic City, N.J. He scored a second-round knockout.

And in his second fight, McKinney had an even easier time.

“That’s when I figured, ‘Hey, this is the same stuff, it’s easy,’ ” McKinney said. “That was a problem. Then I got back into partying.”

By his third fight, McKinney was losing interest. The fight went six rounds and his work was uninspired. He won his fourth fight, on the undercard of the Thomas Hearns-Sugar Ray Leonard fight June 12. It was the worst kind of win, for it did untold damage to McKinney. It drove him deeper into drugs.

Cliche No. 2 is cocaine. McKinney was a user.

“I can’t pinpoint it. It just happened,” he said. “A mistake. I was never a heavy user. It was something that I did on occasions. I told my wife (Inga) about it. She suggested I tell Freddy, my manager, about it. I did. I went and got help. That’s it. It was a problem that needed to be stopped.”

McKinney had by then failed two drug tests. He checked into a rehabilitation center for 28 days in July. When he emerged, he said, drugs were out of his life.

“I was doing this for no one else,” he said. “I was doing it for Kennedy McKinney. So it didn’t matter what I had to do. I wanted to correct that problem. I went to them. They didn’t have to find this out. I went and did it because I wanted to do it.”

McKinney had three weeks to train for his fifth pro fight, set for Aug. 28.

By his own admission, he was too eager to show everyone that his drug problem was over. The fight was the means to that end.

“I rushed myself a little too much,” he said.

The fight ended in a technical draw after 1 1/2 rounds, both fighters being called for unintentional head butts.

“It was my very first draw,” McKinney said. “It was hard to deal with. I swallowed that with a big lump. It hurt. I can’t believe that was on my record. I guess it got me down a little bit. That was a period of an emotional letdown. That draw took so much out of me. It took a lot out of my training. It had a bad effect on me.”

No sooner had McKinney collected his paycheck for the fight than he got in trouble again.

Cliche No. 3 was going AWOL from training.

Early in September, two weeks ago, McKinney left town without telling anyone. He missed three consecutive days of training. His wife called the police and filed a missing-persons report.

Then McKinney returned, as suddenly as he had left. Where had he been, what had he done and with whom? McKinney refuses to say.

“It was something that I had to do personally,” he said. “If I had told (his manager and trainer), they wouldn’t have understood, from the beginning. If I would have said, ‘I have to do this, I have to have three days off,’ they wouldn’t have agreed to that. I had to do it. There was no way I could have gotten around it. It was a very personal problem of mine.

“My wife didn’t know I was there for three days. She still don’t know what I had to do. Like I say, I still can’t even tell her. I just want to make this clear, it didn’t have nothing to do with drugs at all.”

Everyone had presumed that Kennedy was on a bender somewhere, snorting away his career. McKinney knew enough to anticipate the reaction.

“Sure they thought it was drugs. That’s exactly what they thought,” he said. “They didn’t even give me the benefit of the doubt, to say, ‘Well, McKinney, we are going to give you a urinalysis test. If you come up positive, you are finished.’ They told me I wasn’t welcome in the gym. I thought it would work itself out.”

It hasn’t.

Cliche No. 4 was the arrest on Sept. 12.

McKinney was driving with Howard Hilliard and Nathaniel Smith that Tuesday afternoon, looking for a man they knew as Nay Nay. This man had allegedly taken $500 from Smith’s hotel room.

“We saw a female standing on the corner with a blue outfit. She looked like Nay Nay’s girlfriend,” McKinney said. “We pulled up across the street and said, ‘Have you seen Nay Nay?’ The young lady just broke off and ran.

“Automatically, we thought she knew where he was. She ran to a motel. I did a U-turn and pulled into the motel. Howard got out of the car and went down to the room and looked in. When he didn’t see Nay Nay, he said, ‘I’m sorry.’ By this time the motel manager came out. We tried to explain the story to him as best we could. Then we kept driving, looking for the guy.”

The motel manager called Las Vegas police and an hour later McKinney’s car was stopped. McKinney says they had no idea what the police wanted. When they were told they were under arrest for kidnaping, they said in unison, “Kidnaping who?”

“If I had tried to kidnap the young lady, I’m not dumb enough to keep driving around in the same neighborhood, knowing the manager had got my license plate number,” McKinney said. “I’m not that dense.”

McKinney spent four days and three nights in jail before being released last Friday.

The charges against McKinney and Smith have since been dropped by the district attorney, who cited insufficient evidence.

Meanwhile, the story of McKinney’s arrest was flashing across the nation. The next day, the story of his drug rehabilitation broke and his mysterious disappearance was reported.

“They had the paper in jail, they had the TVs on,” McKinney said. “The other guys knew who I was. They asked me, ‘Man, were you in the Olympics?’ I said, ‘No, that was my brother.’

“I was very embarrassed. When I found out that it was in the paper and on the TV and everybody heard about it, I just hung my head.”

McKinney has shielded his wife from reporters. He feels his actions have already embarrassed her enough. McKinney was especially upset that the drug rehab story had leaked. It colored everything else.

“That’s exactly what came to their mind, drugs,” he said. “I was condemned right there. People will label me as that for a while. But I can fight through that. I’ve fought through a lot of things. It won’t be easily washed away, but in time it will be washed away.”

McKinney’s attorney, Dominic Gentile, is angry that the drug rehab story has been linked to McKinney’s arrest.

“There’s no way,” he said. “It’s a cliche, I’ll give it to you, but there’s no way it holds any substance. Nobody would have cared that the guy got arrested and the charges were dropped. Nobody. They bring up this drug stuff and right away, ‘Oh, he must have been broke. He’s burned up all his money. The fame went to his head.’ And none of it’s true. There’s nothing there.”

Cliche No. 5 is trouble with a fighter’s management.

It has variously been reported that McKinney’s contract with Glusman and his promotional agreement with Top Rank have been terminated. They have not.

“When prior to this incident (the arrest) he hadn’t come to the gym for a couple of days, he was running in the streets,” promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank said. “Freddy Glusman was at his wits’ end. The incident then occurred and Glusman and the investment group . . . well, it was embarrassing to them.”

Included in the group of investors who “bought” into McKinney are basketball Coach Jerry Tarkanian of the University of Nevada Las Vegas and the mayor of Las Vegas, Ron Lurie.

Arum talks of a reconciliation between Glusman and McKinney. But Glusman said last week, “I have no desire to talk to Kennedy McKinney.”

For his part, McKinney wants to start over, without the cliches.

“That gold medal has such a high standard in boxing,” he said. “That’s not too good, either. I had to drop my pride down a little bit and start all over again. Forget that I’m a gold medalist. Work toward my goal--world champion.

“All this has happened and I’ve taken a good, long look at myself. It’s time to start all over. Set some new standards. That’s what I’m going to do. To myself, I’m not the gold medalist anymore. To myself I’m a young boxer struggling to be a world champion.”

Times staff writer Earl Gustkey contributed to this story.