He Believes His Role Is to Emulate a Model

R ole model is a phrase with a connotation that has come under considerable public obloquy of late. Athletes resent being asked to be it. Psychologists doubt its validity.

“All I owe my fans is a good performance,” superstar after superstar snarls. “Your father should be your role model, not me.”

Old Swats or Three-Point Harrigan or One-Putt Kissinger don’t care for the responsibility, in other words.

But occasionally, a career surfaces indicating that the American tradition of looking up to its sports heroes is alive and kicking.

Take Riddick Lamont Bowe, the fistfighter, for example. Riddick Lamont is probably the best pugilist in the (free) world today. (The only one who can legitimately dispute the claim is doing 6-10 in an Indiana pen.)

Bowe has never been beaten in 30 pro fights. He’s knocked out 26.

He was raised in the tougher sections of Brooklyn--Bed-Stuy, Brownsville. He was the second-youngest of 13 children and he might be running the streets today with a knife in his teeth and a price on his head--except that he had a role model as a youth.

His role model? Abraham Lincoln? Uh-uh. George Washington? Nope. George Washington Carver? None of the above.

Are you ready? Ta-da! Muhammad Ali!

Riddick was going through the motions in junior high school. Education bored him. He wanted to hit the streets, not the books.

One day his reading teacher brought in a tape that changed his life.

“I’ll never forget it,” he says. “It was the Champ. Muhammad Ali. I was thrilled. The way he spoke, the things he said. I fell in love with Muhammad Ali. I knew I was going to emulate him. I dreamt Muhammad Ali, I slept Muhammad Ali, I was Muhammad Ali.

“I never had any desire to finish high school. But when I heard that Muhammad Ali finished high school, once I found that out, I had to finish high school. I found out he didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, didn’t do crime. So I knew I wouldn’t do any of those things--I didn’t do nothing Muhammad Ali wouldn’t do.”

“What,” the interviewer wanted to know, “would you have done if Muhammad Ali had done any of those things?”

Bowe shook his head. “It would have broken my heart,” he said.

Riddick modeled his life after his idol. He did everything like Ali. He walked like him, talked like him.

“If he had jumped off a bridge, I would have jumped off a bridge,” he said.

Riddick weighed 128 pounds at the time but he walked into the gym like the heavyweight champ of the world.

“I came in there saying, ‘I’m goin’ to whup you! I’m the greatest!’

“I wasn’t nothin’. I didn’t even know how to fight. I was just talk. I got beat up something awful. But the next day, I was back there. I wanted to fight them again. Each time I did better. My trainer, George Washington, said, ‘You either got to be crazy--or you’re going to be a champ.’

“When I got to be 16, I took off in height and weight,” he says. “I went to 6-5, 200 pounds. I was glad. Now I got to look like Muhammad Ali.”

He had 204 amateur fights. He won 146 by knockout. He won four Golden Gloves titles, a junior World Championship (in Bucharest, Romania), two Junior Olympic titles.

He made the Seoul Olympic team. And in the heavyweight final, against Canadian Lennox Lewis, Riddick won the first round handily, flooring Lewis on one occasion.

“But in the second round, the referee kept intervening,” Bowe says. “He kept warning me for something he considered against the rules but I couldn’t figure out what it was. He upset my concentration. I got so I was afraid to throw a punch. I was afraid I’d be disqualified.

“I got careless. I got hit. I went down. But I got up. He was giving me a standing-eight count. I was very much OK. I was in full possession of my senses. He talked to me. But I couldn’t understand his accent. All of a sudden, he waved his hands. He was stopping the fight!”

Those things happen in the Olympics. Just ask Evander Holyfield.

Bowe’s frame of mind going into the Olympics was not the best. A brother had just died of pneumonia. A sister was murdered on the street by a robber to whom she would not surrender her welfare check.

“She had four kids,” notes Riddick. “She wouldn’t give up the money without a fight.”

Bowe had also been treated for fallen arches--he thinks from wearing hand-me-down shoes--before the fight.

He managed to shrug off the defeat. After all, Ali did that after the first Frazier bout, didn’t he?

“It might have done me good,” he says.

With Tyson imprisoned and Holyfield given to fighting ghosts of champions past, Riddick Bowe is the last best hope of the once-proud heavyweight division. Undefeated in 30 fights, he hopes one day to break Rocky Marciano’s mark of 49 fights without a defeat.

He meets the South African, Pierre Coetzer, at the Mirage in Las Vegas next Saturday. It’s a fight he has to win to protect his title shot in Las Vegas against Holyfield on Nov. 13.

If he wins the title, can we expect a little Ali bombast? Bowe shakes his head.

“There ain’t but one Ali. He’s the greatest. I’m just the latest.”

What will his reign bring?

Bowe grins.

“I’ll just try to be a role model for some kid in Brownsville, I guess.”