His story is one worth revisiting, not just for the grandeur and the fame it offered, but also for those common truths.
Al Bernstein
Las Vegas
July 2018
Prologue
Cox-Lyle Youth Center, Denver, Colorado
The bell ends the first round, and José Roybal, a wiry sixteen-year-old, walks slowly to his corner. Ron Lyle reaches up through the ropes with a damp rag and nods at the boy to blow his nose. Then blow again. The bell sounds, and the sparring match resumes, both José and his opponent demonstrating the moves they have practiced for months under Lyle's watchful eye. At the end of three rounds, José holds his arms up in a sign of victory, and Lyle, seated against the wall, points to the folding chair beside his own. Breathing hard, José drops down next to his mentor, and Lyle lays his hands on the boy's shoulders. “You want to get better, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you need to keep working, José. I'll set you up with matches, but not if you don't work. Right?”
“Right.”
“Why?”
“Because you don't want to see me get hurt.”
“You got it.”
Ron touches his right fist to José's and waves him away, then turns to a volunteer assistant. “You gotta be alert to their needs. I know what they need because I was there once. I had the same needs.” He adds with a smile, “They don't know it yet, but what they need the most is self-discipline.”
Lyle typically wears a wool cap over his shaved head and dark glasses in public, but he effectively expresses his sentiments to the kids with big smiles and light touches. He lives his axiom that a trainer has to respond to his fighter's moods—detect any interference with their focus.
How do we reconcile this soft-spoken, gentle man with the “toughest heavyweight who never won the title”; the guy who served hard time for second-degree murder before he even started his amateur boxing career; the third-ranked fighter who had Muhammad Ali beat for ten rounds in their title fight; the guy who fought George Foreman in a legendary brawl with four knockdowns; the guy who was arrested for murder a second time?
Ron Lyle is one of those names you almost remember, but not quite—until you see him. The sixty-seven-year-old former heavyweight carries his weight upright on his six-feet-three-and-a-half-inch frame and looks two decades younger than his age. He still runs regularly, and even though he can no longer do his famous one thousand push-ups an hour, he still does sets of a hundred. But when he takes off his glasses, it's the intensity in those black eyes that brings it all back. He has always looked his interviewers straight in the eye.
Ron is a philosopher. He talks about being true to the game and about life being a test and about not blaming anyone else for your troubles. He says you can't straighten out until you make a commitment. He says you always have to prepare for the unexpected and never look back. He says he would live his life over just the same—that he had to learn from his mistakes. He says he is a God-fearing man.
It's time to go, and the kids line up along the side of the ring. Ron moves along the line and touches each of them—a clap on the shoulder, a fist-to-fist, or a high five. They seem reluctant to leave and linger for a few minutes until one boy leaves first, and then the others begin filing out of the gym. Another Saturday morning.
Ron teaches his kids to think smart, to believe in themselves, and to practice self-discipline—characteristics he epitomized in the 1975 World Heavyweight Championship fight against Muhammad Ali.
■ ■ ■
Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. May 16, 1975
Going into the tenth round, Ron Lyle has Ali beat. Most observers and two of the three judges have him far ahead on points.
The champion has tried to use Ron up with the “rope-a-dope” strategy that worked so well on George Foreman in Zaire, but as Ali's own physician, Ferdie Pacheco, says after the second round, “Lyle is too smart to go for it,” and Ali finds himself alone on the ropes or covering up in the center of the ring for most of the fight. Even Howard Cosell, always Ali's advocate, admits, “Lyle has no fear of this man.”
In the seventh round, with screaming Lyle fans in the background, Lyle dominates from bell to bell, Cosell noting that “Ali must be concerned.” Round eight, which the champion had called for his win, comes and goes.
In the ninth round, Ron's greater commitment to intense physical conditioning shows as a weary Ali heads directly for the ropes, moving out only after Ron gestures to him, then returning to his corner after a few desultory shots. He stays there, covered up, for most of the round.
Seconds before the bell for round ten, Ron's trainer, Chickie Ferrara, is sponging down his fighter's brow when he glances up to see Muhammad Ali's glazed stare from across the ring. The trainer tells Lyle that Ali is desperate and that all he has to do is stay with it through the remainder of the fifteen-round fight, and he will be the next heavyweight champion of the world. Ron nods, certain his long-held dream is about to be fulfilled.
The bell rings and both fighters travel slowly to the center of the ring.
Then Ali backs off and raises his gloves to his face. Lyle goes in low with a hard shot to the midsection and pulls back, circling the champion until both push off and Ali grazes Lyle's shoulder with an ineffective left. Ron pushes him back, and Ali bends down with his guard once again flat against his face.
Ron throws a hard right to Ali's left side, and the fighters exchange light shots until Ali covers up for the third time, backing up until he is once again leaning on the ropes. Ron gets in some punches to his head, forcing Ali to break free and step across the ring only to fall against the ropes on the other side and resume his covered-up position.
Lyle goes to the body, pummeling Ali with a right, then a left, then a right again. Ali's guard is tight against his face, but Ron manages a left uppercut, then a punishing right to the side of Ali's head. He thrusts his face against Ali's guard, then leans back to land another left uppercut. Ali remains covered up on the ropes.
Ron pushes off and backs into the center of ring, waiting for Ali to follow. Cosell tells viewers, “I must say that although Ali continues to talk to Lyle—he's talking right now—he is doing nothing. Lyle is paying no attention. Lyle has not lost his composure.”
In the final few seconds, Ali starts to throw, but with every harmless punch Lyle comes right back. The bell rings to end the round and both fighters move slowly to their corners.
Ron knows he has Ali on the ropes. And he knows exactly what it has taken to get him there.
1
Beginnings
One early morning in May, Ronnie Lyle sat on the curb in front of his house with his best friends, Roy Tyler and Russ Perron. They were folding their delivery copies of the Rocky Mountain News, preparing for their daily door-to-door route, a routine that included not only dropping papers on their customers’ porches, but grabbing rival copies of the Denver Post off other porches to sell on the street in the Five Points area a couple of miles north of the neighborhood. They figured that was okay, because the kids that delivered the Post did the same thing with the News when they got there first.
Ronnie packed the papers in his bag and stood up just as Joe Willie White went flying by on his bike.