Bowe Says He Wants to Be a Role Model

Is the world ready for a heavyweight champion who says his wife is his best friend and that his marriage has been “the happiest years of my life?” Who says that he only took up boxing to be different from everyone else? Who admits he stayed out of trouble as a kid because he was afraid to go to jail like his brothers had? Who can look back on a childhood in a New York neighborhood that makes downtown Beirut look like a vacation spot and say, “I had it pretty good growing up?”

Is the world ready for Riddick Bowe?

Well, ready or not, Riddick Bowe is here, and for as long as he remains undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, he means to shake up the way people look at him and the position he holds. “I want to be more than the heavyweight champion,” he said Monday in an exclusive interview with Newsday. “I want to do great things.”

By boxing standards, Bowe already has done great things, especially in the 10th and 11th rounds of his title-winning fight against Evander Holyfield on Nov. 13. But what Bowe has in mind goes beyond boxing, into the realm of being a true role model, not only symbolically but backed up with real deeds.

“I want to set up drug awareness programs,” he said. “Plus I want to try to do something about world hunger and Apartheid. There’s more to life than boxing and there’s a lot I can do to help. I feel like I’ve been blessed my whole life. I think it’s my calling to help people.” Bowe has no real plan yet to implement his ideas, but he seems to have a strong belief that he will figure one out.

Although he empathizes with Mike Tyson, to whom he dedicated the Holyfield fight, Bowe promises to be a different kind of champion. Before his appearance Monday night on Arsenio Hall, Bowe asked to wear a red lapel ribbon, symbolic of support for the fight against AIDS. And in a wide-ranging talk backstage after his appearance, Bowe disclosed sensitivities and concerns not often found in men who knock out other men for a living.

“I always tried to be different from everyone else,” he said. “Then I found out about boxing. That was the way I could be different from everyone else. I always went against the crowd.”

To Bowe, that also meant avoiding the pitfalls of the streets that claimed so many of his friends and sent two of his seven brothers to jail. And it meant falling in love with and marrying a neighborhood girl who, like himself, went her own way. Bowe went out with her for six months before he even told her he was a boxer.

“Here was a girl who went to church three days a week,” Bowe said. “I never heard her curse or raise her voice. Everybody I came into contact with always wanted something. Judy never asked me for anything. She liked me for me.”

Bowe married her in 1986 and they have three children, 6-year-old Riddick Jr., 4-year-old Ridicia and 2-year-old Bvenda. One of Bowe’s biggest regrets is that his career has taken him away at crucial moments of their development. It is why he says he probably will fly home to Fort Washington, Md., in the early evening Thursday, and may even skip Thanksgiving Dinner at his mother’s home in Coney Island, N.Y.

“One fight, I went away to train and my little girl was in Pampers,” he said. “I came home and she was potty-trained. She was crawling when I left and walking when I came home. These are things I don’t want to miss anymore.”

And it pained Bowe that while he was spending Monday in Los Angeles getting the Hollywood treatment, he missed Brenda’s first day of nursery school. Bowe is still deeply scarred by his non-relationship with his late father, who left his mother when he was a baby. Aside from arch-rival Lennox Lewis, Bowe’s father is the only person he consistently shows anger toward. “Bleep him, he never did nothing for me,” he said. “Son of a bitch died last year. They wanted me to go to the funeral, but nothing doing. My mother was my father, my sister and my brother.”

Rather than leave him embittered, however, the experience seems to have deepened the 25-year-old’s resolve to become a role model for youth. “I have a great responsibility, not only to my fans, but to kids who are going to look up to me,” he said. “I have to carry myself in a certain way. I can’t be using vulgar language or disrespecting people.”

Bowe said he intends to enroll in classes at Howard University in the spring, studying business administration and drama. He said his dedication to earning his degree is such that he will hire a tutor, if necessary, to travel with him while he is training. “I want to show kids that if the heavyweight champion of the world can go beck to school and get a degree, so can they,” he said. “These things can be done.”

Still, Bowe can find compassion for Tyson, who came from the same streets but took a disastrously different path. Bowe was criticized for dedicating the Holyfield fight to Tyson, but he has refused to back down. “I’m not condoning what he did,” Bowe said. “But he’s a human being and he didn’t have the upbringing that I had. Deep down, I think Mike is a good brother.”

Bowe said he and Rock Newman would try to visit Tyson at the Indiana Youth Center some time after Thanksgiving. “I ain’t never been in a jailhouse, not even to visit my brothers,” he said. “I was always afraid of jail. That’s probably why I always stayed out of trouble. That must be a horrible feeling when the doors clang shut behind you. But I’ll go to see Mike and let him know I’m thinking about him.”

Bowe also is thinking about fighting Tyson when the former heavyweight champion gets out of jail in about 2 1/2 years. “Everybody else will just be time-killing until Mike gets out,” he said. “That’s the one I’m really waiting for.”

In the meantime, Bowe is enjoying his new fame and wealth. He is having a house built in an exclusive Maryland suburb that he says will have 13 bedrooms, an indoor pool and a home theater. “The only reason I’ll have to leave this house is to get food,” he said.

Food is something Bowe says he never had to worry about. Although Dorothy Bowe raised 13 children by herself, Bowe says he and his siblings never went hungry. The only appetite he has now, he says, is to leave a mark that goes beyond the Ring Record Book. “I only want to fight until I’m 27 or 28, and then get on with my real life,” he said. “I think I’m going to make a great champion.”

And then he’ll go on from there.