The Olympic cauldron is lit during the Opening Ceremony at the 2012 Summer Olympics, Saturday, July 28, 2012, in London.
Associated Press
LONDON — I love the Olympics. Always have. Mostly because it was a big part of my dad's master plan. Immigrate to America where we'd have access to proper training, nutrition and, most of all, competition. Train me to fight.
Represent the U.S. in the Olympics. Turn pro. Become the heavyweight champion of the world. Live happily ever after.
Dad's plan was that simple. He's neither a complicated nor an educated man.
But he was laser-focused on achieving it. We got as far as fighting in a pre-qualifying Olympic tournament that featured all five of the gold medalists in the '76 Montreal Games — bantamweight Leo Randolph from Washington state; welterweight Sugar Ray Leonard from Maryland; super middleweight Howard Davis from California; and two brothers from east St. Louis, Mo., who were Marines — Michael and Leon Spinks, the light and heavyweight champions.
I was only 14 and was eliminated early; Sugar Ray, four years my senior and only 18, won my division. Dad was disappointed but not discouraged; he pinned his hopes on Moscow 1980, accurately predicting Sugar Ray would turn pro after the Montreal Olympics and I'd have four years of national and international experience to dominate the welterweight or middleweight division.
By then I was running five miles every morning before school and sparring five nights a week under the tutelage of an old African-American trainer named Gene Lewis in a municipal gym under Rendezvous Park, the Oakland A's spring training home. Football sidetracked us when I started high school, but the seven years of boxing in musty gyms across the Southwest prepared me in a unique way for American football. I was never scared. Never intimidated. Never felt overmatched, even when I was. I was always supremely confident. Because of boxing.
The 1972 Munich Games were the first Olympics I ever watched and the first after we arrived in America. Without training film, Dad insisted we watched every evening hoping we'd see boxing. The best fighter of the tournament was the Cuban heavyweight, Teofilo Stephenson, who looked eerily like a bigger and stronger Muhammad Ali. Stephenson dominated the U.S. heavyweight, Duane Bobick. Dad would point out strengths and weaknesses of each fighter, as we watched. Had Tonga had television, my father would've been their boxing analyst and would've been a good one. Dad's favorite fighter in the '72 Games wasn't Stephenson, whom he regarded as stiff and slow, but simply overpowered and overwhelmed opponents because of he was 6-foot-7. He loved welterweight Ray Seales from Tacoma, Wash., because he was technically sound.
