Down for the Count?

The scar is visible the moment Tony Ayala Jr. takes off a T-shirt soaked from a workout in his sweltering gym. The dime-sized mark rests on his thick chest just beneath his left collarbone.

On his back is another scar, where the bullet fired from the trembling hands of an 18-year-old woman exited.

“Forty-five caliber, the biggest around, and I didn’t go down,” said Ayala, a touch of fighter’s machismo in his voice.

The wounds of the former junior middleweight contender have healed. The women he sexually assaulted aren’t as lucky.

One was a teenager beaten and raped while using the restroom at a drive-in movie theater. The other was a neighbor in Paterson, N.J., tied up at knifepoint and raped on New Year’s Day 1983.

Nancy Gomez didn’t wait to find out if she were about to become another victim. The high school senior shot Ayala as he stood in the kitchen of the rented house she shared with two other adults and two small children in the early morning hours of Dec. 12.

“Baby, I’m here to talk to you,” Ayala told Gomez just before she pulled the trigger.

A few hours earlier, the boxer known as “El Torito” was chasing tequila with beers in a strip club with his wife and a bodyguard. Now, at 3:45 in the morning, he was inside the darkened home of a woman he met at his gym and had over to his house for dinner a few times.

If it sounds familiar, it was. But 16 years in prison was supposed to have taught Ayala a lesson about entering the homes of women in the middle of the night.

At his first trial, Ayala testified that the sex in New Jersey was consensual, admitting years later that he had lied. Now he insists he’s telling the truth--that he was there only because he needed to talk to someone.

“Everybody’s assuming I was there to do something,” Ayala says. “I wasn’t, but they think I was. They want their pound of flesh.”

Indeed they do. Prosecutors plan to try to introduce his past when he goes on trial next month on charges that could put him back in prison--this time for life.

First, though, the 38-year-old boxer will go back into the ring July 31 for what could be his final fight. Strapped to his ankle will be a monitor to make sure he doesn’t go where he shouldn’t.

It’s a precaution that might have been better when Ayala was released from prison in April 1999.

“Sometimes you just have a gut feeling about people,” said Marilyn Zdobinski, a New Jersey prosecutor who was in the courtroom for the first trial. “I believe he will always represent a danger to women.”

Tony Ayala was as fearsome a fighter as the sport had ever seen. At 19, he was undefeated in 22 fights, a mass of uncontrolled fury in the ring and out.

Robbie Epps found that out after questioning Ayala’s manhood, only to get knocked down and then hit again on the canvas before the referee could break things up. Ayala knocked another fighter out, then spit on him in disgust.

He was Mike Tyson before Mike Tyson. Ranked No. 1 at 154 pounds, he signed for a title fight with WBA champion Davey Moore that was to pay him $750,000. His boxing future seemingly had no limit.

“He was wicked, vicious,” fight promoter Lester Bedford said. “When he walked into the ring you knew something dramatic was going to happen.”

Like Tyson, though, Ayala had demons he couldn’t control. Molested by a family friend for several years in grade school, he began drinking young and was using heroin by age 12. Inside the ring was the only place he felt in control, and even there he sometimes couldn’t control himself.

“I grew up with a lot of dysfunction and I had a lot of anger as a result of my molestation,” Ayala said. “Boxing was a way of proving my manhood, my strength and my dominance. I saw in an opponent someone who was challenging my manliness.”

Ayala was only 15 but had been fighting 10 years when he beat and sexually assaulted a girl in a restroom in San Antonio, leaving her with internal injuries and a ruptured spleen. He pleaded guilty and received 10 years’ probation.

A few years later, he was arrested on charges he ransacked a neighbor’s house after he was found drunk inside.

Ayala, who would later admit to shooting heroin before three fights, was put in rehab by his handlers and moved to New Jersey to get him away from the temptations back home in San Antonio.

A few weeks later, he tied up and raped a 30-year-old schoolteacher neighbor, then threatened her roommate with a knife when she came to help.

“Many men drink to excess and it would never occur to them to rape someone,” said Diana Scully, a sociology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of a book on sexual violence. “Being molested as a child is yet another excuse that is significantly overused.”

A jury took only three hours to reject Ayala’s claim that the sex was consensual, and a judge sentenced him to 15 to 35 years in prison.

A few hours later Ayala was on his way from ring riches to inmate No. 69765 at the state prison in Rahway, N.J. While there, he was counseled by prison psychologist Brian Raditz, who, in a bizarre twist, would later become Ayala’s manager and sometimes drinking partner.

If there were still demons, Ayala didn’t show them publicly. He said all the right things and vowed never to repeat his mistakes.

“The pain I put the victim through will never be forgotten. It’s something I want to keep speaking out on,” Ayala said upon his release. “It was a terrible thing to do.”

There seemed only one thing left to prove--whether he could still fight. It didn’t take long to find out.

Ayala’s return to the ring on Aug. 20, 1999, was a time for celebration in this city’s large Hispanic community.

About 10,700 packed the aging Freeman Coliseum near downtown to see if the “The Little Bull” was anything like the feared fighter of years past. On the day of the fight there were lines stretching 100 yards from 10 ticket windows.

The fans weren’t disappointed. Ayala, though balding and thickened around the middle, thrilled them by stopping Manuel Esparza in the third round to win his first fight in 17 years.

In the crowd, two women carried around a banner that said, “Hispanic women for better justice support Torito.” Others partied the night away, waving yellow signs that said: “Torito . . . heee’s back.”

The slogan of his return was “To Hell and Back.” It seemed to fit.

“It was an ongoing 17-year soap opera while he was in prison, but the people of San Antonio still loved him,” Bedford said. “The sense of drama was still there.”

Ayala would go on to fight six times, making about $700,000. He remarried his common-law wife, Lisa, who divorced him while he was in prison, and they bought a three-acre spread with a swimming pool.

Ayala helped his father buy the gym where he trained, and there was talk of a fight with Hector Camacho that might make him $500,000. Fueling it all was a sense of urgency to make up for 16 years of lost time in a sport where age plays no favorites.

“I’m a 38-year-old man competing in a sport of 20-year-olds,” Ayala said. “It’s a lot harder than I remember it was before.”

Being a hometown hero, though, brought temptations Ayala couldn’t resist. He began going out on the town, often with Lisa in tow, and partying at bars and strip clubs.

Sixteen years in prison had built a big thirst.

“You have no idea what the transition was like,” Ayala said. “Going from a very controlled environment where they tell you every move you make to having total freedom was a shock. There were a lot of people making bets on whether or not I’d fail.”

Among them was the former head of the New Jersey State Parole Board, who voted to deny Ayala parole in 1998.

“I remember thinking he might do well for a while,” Andrew Consovoy said last year. “But I told my colleagues if he lost a fight no woman should be allowed within 50 miles of him.”

That loss finally came last July 28 when Ayala, dehydrated from trying to make weight, broke his hand in the third round and took a beating from Yory Boy Campas.

The night he was shot, Ayala was drinking heavily at a strip joint called Babe’s Men’s Club. He argued with his wife and walked out with a stripper.

Ayala showed up a short time later at a modest wood-frame home where a couple and their two children shared space with Gomez, a girl who befriended Ayala and his wife while she was taking self-defense lessons.

Gomez was sleeping on a couch in the living room when she opened her eyes to see a dark figure standing across the room. She ran to another room, shaking her friend and saying, “Somebody’s in the house!”

The women confronted Ayala in the kitchen, ordering him not to move. When he began coming forward, Gomez fired the gun.

Ayala was indicted on charges of burglary and intent to commit assault and sexual assault, charges that could bring a life sentence when he goes on trial Aug. 13.

Ayala continues to train in the small gym west of downtown where fight posters speak of happier times. He’s broke, owes money to the IRS, and needs his July 31 fight to help pay bills.

Lisa left him after the arrest and filed for divorce again, and he wonders if the fans in San Antonio still care.

“I’m toiling on the edge of losing everything,” he said.

Ayala goes to AA meetings daily and has his urine tested several times a week. He must wear the ankle monitor as a condition for his release on $100,000 bail.

He trains for a fight that could determine his boxing future. A much bigger fight, though, looms in the courtroom.

“I don’t fear going back to prison, but I don’t want to,” he said. “I enjoy my freedom and I’m willing to fight and die for my freedom. But if I go back I’ll survive one way or another. I did it for 16 years, and I can do it again.”