Diamond in the Rough : Boxing Gave Up on Bowe After His Olympic Defeat--Except for Rock Newman, Who Saw a Special Quality

Rock Newman was recalling a fateful day in the fall of 1988, the day he decided to take Riddick Bowe to the heavyweight championship of the world.

“Bowe had just had that bad fight in the Olympics against Lennox Lewis, and all the people in boxing who liked him suddenly didn’t like him--except me,” said Newman, who will be at ringside tonight at RFK Stadium, where Bowe will defend his heavyweight championship for the second time, against Jesse Ferguson.

“At the time, I was working with Butch Lewis, who’d managed Michael Spinks when he had the title,” Newman said. “Butch also liked Bowe, but before the Olympics.

“Hey, everyone loved him before the Olympics--Don King, Bob Arum, Lewis . . . everybody.

“I told Butch if he was no longer interested in Bowe, that I would like to work with him.

“Butch looked at me and said: ‘Rock ‘n Roll (Lewis’ nickname for Newman), your problem is you love fighters too much. And believe me, this kid will break your heart.’ ”

Almost five years after turning pro, the heavyweight nobody wanted is 33-0 and recognized by nearly everyone in boxing as the heavyweight champion.

But if Bowe has been brilliant in the ring, Newman has been equally impressive with his guidance.

First, he lined Bowe up with 81-year-old Eddie Futch, who had to be talked into training Bowe in 1989.

“I don’t know how much time I got left on this planet, I got no time for flakes,” he reportedly told Bowe in their first meeting. “First time you foul up, I’m gone.”

Slowly, patiently and with great care, Newman and Futch brought their 6-foot-5, 235-pound fighter along. Newman wanted to take him to the championship as a free agent, with no long tie-ins with powerful promoters such as King, Arum or the Duvas.

In the beginning, it was easy--no one else wanted him.

The word in boxing gyms in 1988 was that the gifted Bowe was only part fighter, that he was mostly a jokester, a quipster, that he didn’t like serious gym training. Too much personality, not enough fire.

“(Newman has) done a great job with the kid, I congratulate him,” said Shelly Finkel, who took Evander Holyfield, Pernell Whitaker and Meldrick Taylor to world championships.

He, too, passed on Bowe.

“We (Finkel and Dan and Lou Duva) worked out Bowe, had him in our gym in 1988, and we just didn’t like him. He had a kind of a lackadaisical way about him we didn’t like. Obviously, Rock saw something we missed.”

To hear Newman tell it, what everyone missed were intangibles.

Such as character and courage.

Newman, after his conversation with Lewis, contacted Bowe and arranged to talk to him at the boxer’s apartment in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

It was the same neighborhood that produced Mike Tyson. The locals call it “Gunsmoke City.”

“The day I met him at his apartment building, what I saw there . . . I dismissed every negative thing I’d ever heard about him,” Newman said.

“The kid is a . . . miracle.

“To have grown up in that neighborhood and kept that goodness in his heart, with his courage and character intact, was unbelievable to me. There were drug deals going down on every corner.

“I saw kids on rooftops and stairways with Uzis. His apartment was like a cubicle and his mother had raised 12 kids.

“When we parted that day, I told him: ‘To me, you’re a world champion right now.’

“I also predicted to him that day that if he gave me a chance to manage him, he’d become the world heavyweight champion on Nov. 21, 1992.”

He was eight days off. Bowe won the title by beating Holyfield on Nov. 13, 1992.

*

Newman was born in 1952 in a small farmhouse near Brandywine, Md., about 20 miles southeast of Washington.

“My mom had five sons and two daughters, but I was the last one by 12 years,” Newman said. “Mom was 45 when I was born. She thought I was a tumor.

“My dad, who died in 1973, had a fourth-grade education. My mom had an eighth-grade education. We never had much money, but to this day I never met anyone who could stretch a dollar like Mom.

“We were never hungry. My dad drove a cement truck sometimes, and raised a few hogs, chickens and dairy cows. Most of what we ate, we grew--eggs, cheese, string beans, potatoes, tomatoes, corn. when I was a kid, I knew how to slaughter a hog.

“My dad also moved a little moonshine on the side. We’re talking about corn whiskey at $4 a gallon.”

Newman’s mother is 86 and still lives in the old Brandywine home, which didn’t have indoor plumbing or running water until Newman was 15.

“I’ve repeatedly asked Mom to let me move her into a nicer place, but she won’t budge,” Newman said.

Newman said a 1964 boxing match he heard on an old radio steered him to boxing.

“I listened to that first Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston fight at home, and I got so excited, my mom thought I was having some kind of breakdown,” he said. “I was running all over the house, screaming.”

Newman began and left several careers before going to work for Lewis in the late 1980s.

He had earned a recreation administration degree from Howard University, where, he says, he had a .371 batting average for the baseball team.

Newman attended segregated black schools before leaving home for the first time at 18 to enter Howard.

“The first thing I did after I left college was sell life and health insurance,” he said. “My first month, June of ‘74, I made $3,300. I felt like I’d hit the jackpot. But it wasn’t something I wanted to do for long.

“One day I was on my way to an appointment in my orange Chevy Vega that had over 100,000 miles on it. It started smoking, then there was a grunt and it just died, right there in the street.

“I walked to the nearest pay phone, which was an auto dealership. Next thing I know, they’re hiring me to sell cars. I did that for three years and when I left in ’77 I was making $36,000 a year and had a Corvette and an apartment overlooking a pool.

“Then one weekend I sold a car to an old black couple who’d come in. The sticker price on the car was too high, $1,900, and the dealership hit them with a high interest rate on the loan. And they were very happy when they left.

“It bothered me so bad I quit. I went back to Howard as a counselor, for $17,500 a year. The five years I did that were the most rewarding years of my life. That counseling experience, more than any other thing in my background, prepared me for my journey with Riddick Bowe.”

There was a five-month stint as a radio talk-show host, two hours every night on Washington station WOL. Then he was re-exposed to boxing--as part of a radio broadcast team for Sugar Ray Leonard fights.

“The first fighter I ever worked with was Dwight Braxton,” Newman said.

“I just met him one day and learned he didn’t have a car. I said: ‘You’re the light-heavyweight champion of the world and you don’t have a car?’ I told him I’d get him one. The next day I got him one for free--a promotional deal with some dealership. He was impressed with that, so I became his manager.”

In 1986, Newman worked with Lewis and had a hand in putting together Michael Spinks’ fights with Gerry Cooney, Stefan Tangstad and Mike Tyson. At the same time, he had a side marketing business--recruiting nurses for hospitals.

“At that time, I’d seen Bowe box in the amateurs, and watched him make the Olympic team. But I never dreamed I’d be trying to sign him,” he said.

“Then I couldn’t believe it when I learned all the power guys were passing on him after the Olympics.

“See, what people never knew then was that Riddick was boxing in the Olympics with two physical injuries and also with a broken heart. His older sister, Brenda, was murdered shortly before the Olympics by a mugger who was trying to steal her purse.

“And he had hand and foot injuries. It was a very bad time for him.”

Even at that, Lennox Lewis, who is today recognized as champion by the World Boxing Council, did not demonstrate clear superiority over Bowe in the 429th and final bout at the Seoul Olympics.

Bowe was behind on points and had been given two standing-eight counts when an East German referee abruptly stopped the gold-medal bout, even though Bowe didn’t appear to anyone else to be in any difficulty.

When the “Riddick and Rock Show” got under way, it did so with borrowed money.

“I got $250,000 from 10 people, put in around $50,000 of my own money--and I had to sell my car to do that--and formed a limited partnership for the investors,” Newman said.

“I had a buyout clause in it, and everyone was paid off two days before the Holyfield fight.”

Now, he has a heavyweight champion unencumbered by promotional entanglements.

Bowe will earn $7 million tonight, meaning he will have made about $20 million in purses since November.

And a month after beating Holyfield, Bowe signed a six-fight deal with HBO worth up to $100 million--providing Bowe wins them all.

Much of Bowe’s money, Newman said, is invested in annuities and treasury bills.

“If Riddick retired next week, he’d still earn about $250,000 a year, tax-free, for life beginning at age 40,” Newman said.

Bowe, however, is not the only fighter on the team. The excitable Newman has had his share of fights, too.

He once engaged a rival manager, Marc Roberts, in a mid-ring shoving match during a TV interview. Another time, when Bowe was being repeatedly kicked by opponent Elijah Tillery, Newman leaped onto the ring apron, grabbed Tillery around the neck, and back-flipped him over the ropes and into the seats.

Then, in November, seconds after the decision announcing Bowe’s victory over Holyfield, Newman was seen on worldwide television, repeatedly punching a news photographer. Newman was fined $35,000 by the Nevada Athletic Commission and apologized to the commission.

But when asked to comment on it, he replied: “There’s going to be litigation (the photographer, Douglas Pizac of the Associated Press, has filed suit) on that, but I will say that it happened at the most jubilant time, the happiest moment of my life. Only the most severe provocation would have caused me to do what I did.”

*

There are eight in Rock Newman’s hotel suite, all talking at once. But Newman, who is talking into his speaker phone, doing a radio talk show, is the loudest.

Papers are being thrust at him to sign.

Free tickets to the fight are sought.

The maid is asked to come back later to clean.

Another phone is ringing.

Bowe’s lawyer, Milt Chawsky, is writing notes to Newman.

Another phone is ringing. . . .

After he finishes with the talk show, Bowe gestures to a reporter and says: “Let’s get out of here.”

In an adjoining room, Newman talked about his late father.

“You know, in the dressing room that night, after Riddick won the title, I got very emotional thinking of my father,” Newman said.

“My father’s two heroes in life were Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott. I was only 23 when he died, in 1973, so he couldn’t possibly have guessed his son would become the manager of a heavyweight champion.

“That night, all I could think of was: ‘What if I could bring him back for one night, in this dressing room, to experience this?’

“What would he think?”