With Premium on Unleashed Fury, Boxing Has Given James Toney . . . : License to Rage

Perhaps only in boxing is uncontrollable rage something to be nurtured rather than reported to the proper authorities.

James Toney is, by all appearances, a two-fisted time bomb, unfit for circulation in the mainstream.

Bill Miller, the fighter’s 74-year-old trainer, acknowledges that the anger that makes Toney unbeatable in the ring makes him frightening outside it.

“I tell him a lot of times, ‘Young man, if there wasn’t any game like boxing, you would self-destruct,’ ” Miller says. “You can’t take that type of mental attitude out in the business world every day.”

Where would Toney be if not for boxing?

“Dead,” Miller says without hesitation. “Out there today, these kids carry pistols. They shoot each other. Who’s going to fight him fair? I tell him all the time, ‘James, all the tough guys are dead.’ ”

Jackie Kallen, Toney’s 48-year-old manager, knows her hell-bent champion will someday have to walk the streets as Joe Citizen.

It scares her.

“If the plumber shows up late, you can’t just come up and slam him to the ground,” she says. “You have to deal with people.”

So far, though, rage has paid Toney nice dividends. There is time later for therapy to purge his demons, to psychoanalyze how a man’s father might come to shoot his mother six times while cradling a baby--James--in her arms.

The prescription so far has been to harness Toney’s raw energy and pent-up anger and then unleash it with calculated detonations between the ropes every few months, cash a paycheck, then line up the next victim.

Toney, you might say, is Jackie Kallen’s Manhattan Project.

“It’s helped me 46 times,” Toney says.

Toney is 44-0-2, is considered one of the world’s best pound-for-pound fighters and is poised to defend his International Boxing Federation super middleweight title against Roy Jones Jr. on Friday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, where people are walking on eggshells.

Toney, 26, is the modern-day Jake LaMotta, the original Raging Bull who is Toney’s inspiration. Toney rehearses his part daily in West Hollywood at Mickey Rourke’s Outlaw Gym.

One recent day, the fighter stopped training cold and cleared the room with thunderous authority.

“Get the . . . out!!” he yelled from the ring. “I just don’t give a . . . You all understand English? I just don’t give a . . . .”

Toney minions, well conditioned to his outbursts, executed the order.

This, apparently, is standard operating procedure before a fight. Anything can set Toney off and sometimes it is as simple as Toney’s seeing a person in the gym he does not like.

“You have to let him simmer down,” Kallen says. “If you put your hand in boiling water, you’re going to get burned. There’s nothing anyone can say to control him. You can’t. You learn. It’s like a red alert, like a tornado warning. You hear it and get out of the way.”

It is all part of the process. But it’s never comfortable.

“It’s the only place where it’s appropriate,” Kallen says of Toney’s behavior. “If he was an assassin, I could see him going out and going, boom-boom, walking away and going to eat a hot dog. Literally. I’m used to it. I’m willing to work with it. I don’t say I condone it. It’s not about accepting it, it’s about the fact that this is what he is.”

Kallen knows the wild mood swings are not normal. Toney, at one moment, can be unabashedly sweet, playful as a kitten, lavishing Kallen with diamond rings, pink teddy bears, $100 sweaters.

The next, she’s running for the storm shelter.

Believe it or not, this is a kinder, gentler Toney, a Peace Corps volunteer compared to the person Kallen met when she and the boxer first crossed paths.

That was 1989, Detroit. Kallen, a former entertainment columnist before she became Tommy Hearns’ publicist in 1978, walked in on a sparring session at about the time Toney was trying to break Tom Dempsey’s field goal record with a spit bucket.

“I said, ‘Who is that? And what’s wrong with him?’ ” Kallen recalls. “Someone said ‘That’s James Toney. He’s crazy.’ I thought, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting.’ ”

Toney, from Ann Arbor, Mich., was a street thug who, at 16, had already shot a man and exchanged dope for dollars. Toney’s first manager, known as Johnny Ace, had a crack cocaine distribution business going on the side until he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting.

“I had just talked to him, right?” Toney says. “A half-hour later, he got blown away.”

Everyone kept leaving Toney. He never knew his father, also James and also a fighter. Only recently did Toney learn that when he was 3 months old, his father shot his mother, Sherri, while she was holding James.

Sherri survived and lived to become one of her son’s inspirations. Toney’s father later went to prison on a rape charge. He is expected to be released soon.

Toney has not tied a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree. In fact, his family won’t tell him when James Sr. is getting out.

” . . . my dad,” Toney said. “I’m glad he’s not around me now because my butt would be where he is, in prison. Because I’d have to kill him.”

Toney formed his life philosophy early.

“I don’t like people because you don’t know who to trust,” he says. “People you can trust go ahead and stab you in the back at the last minute.”

Kallen has always had a soft spot for problem cases. She is married and has two grown children, but always imagined herself running a home for waywards. She has been a steadying influence.

Kallen’s devotion apparently knows no bounds.

“If it’s in the cards to be shot by one of my fighters, maybe that’s a fitting way to go,” she says. “Trying to save someone’s life.”

Most saw the savage in Toney but she saw the salvageable.

“To see somebody pick up a chair and slam it through a window, or put his fist through a glass door, or pick up a scale and throw it across the room, I had not seen that kind of rage,” Kallen says. “It wasn’t in my background.”

She also saw a menacing, tenacious fighter who liked what he did for a living and was willing to take on all comers. Kallen hounded matchmakers for bouts until Toney emerged from obscurity in May 1991, when he scored a technical knockout over Michael Nunn, then the International Boxing Federation middleweight champion, in the 11th round.

At the weigh-in, Nunn had playfully patted his opponent on the head. Toney blew all circuits and the fighters had to be separated.

That prefight scene has been played out many times since.

After the George Foreman-Michael Moorer fight this month, Toney told Jones during a television interview: “I’ll knock your punk ass out.”

They keep lining up the best fighters in the business, and Toney keeps mowing them down--Nunn, Iran Barkley, Tim Littles, Prince Charles Williams.

Running out of challengers, Toney says the Jones fight will be his last at 168 pounds. Toney, who struggles to make his fighting weight, plans to eat his way into the heavyweight division within two years.

He wants a piece of the action in a division where some boxers--Michael Moorer to name one--claim not even to enjoy fighting.

“Roy (Jones), he don’t like to fight either,” Toney says of Friday’s opponent. “I like to fight. If you don’t like to fight, you shouldn’t be in the game. But it always shows, like Michael Moorer--Bam!--knocked out. Now he can retire and be a cop like he always said he wanted to be. I’ll knock out Roy Jones and he can retire and become a basketball player, like he always wanted to be.

“I like boxing. When I lose the desire, I’m going to call it quits. I go to every fight card when I’m home. I watch it on TV every Tuesday--ESPN has its shows. I watch it on my satellite.”

Toney is a paradox, a man given to spontaneous bursts of violence, yet a boxer steadfastly disciplined when it comes to his career.

To strengthen his resolve, he purposely trains in the heart of Hollywood, a $5 cab ride to any temptation.

So much for theories that boxers must retreat to log-cabin isolation to train for big fights.

From his hotel room, Toney can hear the back beats from the House of Blues.

“If people have to train outside, in the woods, they’re not disciplined,” he maintains. “I’m a disciplined person. I’m around House of Blues, but believe it or not, I haven’t been outside my hotel. Only time I’m outside my hotel is to go to Gold’s Gym. That’s a center of attraction right there. They’ve got movie stars, porn stars that work out there. That’s temptation right there.”

There is strength in resistance.

“Out in the woods, I’d probably go crazy, fight everybody in camp.”

As if he doesn’t do enough of that anyway.

They say Toney has simmered. The birth of his daughter, now 23 months, was an important step. Toney also plans to marry in the spring.

“I’ve changed a lot, because I’ve wanted to change,” Toney says. “I don’t fight as much outside the ring as I used to. I have a daughter--that’s a lot of responsibilities right there.”

Says Miller, his trainer: “He’s 100% better than he used to be, but he’s got to get 100% better.”

Axiomatically, Miller says Toney’s ring success is related to his temper.

“Once that fire goes out, that’s it for James Toney as a fighter,” Miller says. “That’s his makeup.”

Miller puts up with Toney’s rages because he recognizes the fighter as one of the best.

“He takes a better punch than Tommy Hearns,” Miller says. “Tommy was just as vicious in the ring. He didn’t have as many outbursts as this kid, but when that bell rang he was a different guy. But Tommy would have had big problems with this guy.”

Kallen has a game plan to ease Toney back into society once his career is over. She hopes to work Toney into her husband’s construction business. She thinks he will have spent most of his anger by then.

“His rage, it sort of mellows with age,” Kallen says. “You can only be so mad for so many years. He’s getting a lot of it out through boxing, so hopefully by the time he retires, he’ll be physically sated, kind of like an overeater. He’s tasted everything, what more can he taste?”

Until then, Toney rumbles on, plowing through his rages and sparring partners, while others debate who’s going to play him in the movie.

“I want the media to say James Toney was a great fighter before everybody who’s an honest person,” he says. “That he never ducked nobody. That’s all I want you to say. I’m delighted the media says I’m like LaMotta, Ray Robinson, that I’m a throwback.

“I’m not saying I’m better than them or anything like that. I’m just happy to be named in that class. Those guys, they were great fighters. I just wish I could have seen them fight live.”