kid was there.
The next day, the young convict was back in the gym when Ron arrived, sitting on the floor closer to the court this time. He gave a half-wave when Ron walked over to the ball rack.
What the hell. “Wanna learn how to play?”
“Sure.” The kid jumped to his feet with a big smile, and Ron lobbed the ball to him. The second real friendship Ron formed in prison began that day. He worked out with the kid every day they both had recreation privileges, and before long they were playing on the same team, even though the kid was on the bench as a backup guard most of the time.
“He got out of the joint long before I did,” Ron remembers. “But I'll never forget the letter I got one day while I was still in prison. It was from him. He said he had married, found a job and was going straight, and that I was his idol. Nobody ever told me that before. I had such a great feeling that I had helped somebody and he appreciated it.”
Ron never forgot that feeling. For the rest of his life, he has sought opportunities to help kids that need something from him. But he doesn't see himself or want others to see him as some kind of do-gooder. “I just never got tired of feeling appreciated, of being somebody's idol.”
■ ■ ■
Ron had seen his first prison boxing match a few months after he arrived at Cañon City. Lt. Maddox had asked him if he wanted to be a part of the boxing program, but he was just starting to get into the rhythm of playing on teams and wasn't particularly interested in the rigors of boxing—not then. Not until something happened that once again turned his world wrong side out.
A little over a year after Ron entered prison, he still found it difficult to confide in anyone. He had begun to appreciate Maddox in the same way the kid he mentored in basketball appreciated him, but he couldn't bring himself to trust the men at Cañon. Except for Doobie, even his teammates were suspect, because anyone could be bribed or paid off by anyone else in prison, inmate or guard. After practices, he kept to himself as much as possible. It was almost worse after he had gained some success during athletic contests, as several of the inmates took to pestering him, sometimes during meals and sometimes in the yard.
“Some days it seemed that everyone in prison was mean,” Ron said years later. “At least in the beginning, it felt that way.”
One guy in particular was on his back almost every day, and Ron kept shoving him away. He didn't want fighting to get him back in the hole. Finally, one morning at breakfast, the guy challenged him to meet in the laundry room, and Ron, sick of the confrontations and knowing his own superior strength, took him up on the dare.
They had barely squared off when the guy pulled a homemade shiv out of his pants and shoved it to the hilt into Ron's abdomen. The tip of the knife pierced an artery near his spine, and by the time the guards got him into the hospital wing, he had bled out a dangerous quantity of blood.
The doctors took him into surgery just before ten o’clock, laboring to find the artery and stop the bleeding. When they rolled him out seven and a half hours later, Ron Lyle had received thirty-five pints of blood transfusions and had twice been declared clinically dead. His death certificate had been signed.
Years later, asked if he survived the stabbing in prison because of his physical strength and “hard-nosed attitude,” Ron smiled and shook his head.
“I survived because my mother saved me.” He said that when he woke up after surgery, the first thing he remembered was “. . . sliding down a long tube. Then my mother reached down and pulled me back. That's why I'm alive. She wanted me to live.”
The devastating prison assault turned out to be the defining moment in Ron's life, and not only because he learned to believe in his mother's power to save him. Two other extraordinary events pointed him in the direction the rest of his life would take. It started with his first visitors.
When he fully awakened the next morning, he opened his eyes to his mother holding his left hand and on his right, Lt. Clifford Maddox, bending over him and asking how he felt. It wasn't until Maddox began to cry that Ron knew the old guard cared about him. “He didn't have to come to the hospital and see me. After all, Maddox had been depending on me for the baseball team, and I knew I had let him down again, just like other times before.”
Ron finds it difficult to describe how that visit made such a change in his outlook on life. “They were both there together, my mother and Clifford Maddox, both caring about me. I knew then that Maddox was a good man, and I figured there had to be other good people out there, too. I started to believe that day, not only in my mother's faith, but in the decency of others.”
And then there was the dream.
Vivid dreams in the Lyle family were often seen as visions, messages from God, and beginning with William dreaming of building a church near the mountains, life decisions were sometimes made based on those dreams.
Ron's vision happened while he was still in the hospital. He had barely closed his eyes one night before he found himself in a vivid dream, fighting for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. When he woke up he remembered every round, every punch.
For years after his boxing career was over, Ron told people about that dream—how he fought for the title, how he didn't know his opponent, but how the fight he eventually had with Muhammad Ali was exactly the fight he had dreamed about. In the dream he knew he had all the punches and could put them together. He remembered a hard jab to the head, a right uppercut, and a left hook to the body. He just didn't know how the fight ended.
With that vision, Ron began to dream of becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. Every day he lay in the hospital, he became more convinced that boxing was the path chosen for him, the way to redeem himself in the eyes of the mother he had caused so much pain. Then he remembered the white prison guard who was wearing a badge when he bent over the hospital bed, his face filled with concern, the second thing Ron saw when he woke up in the hospital. And he knew how he was going to live his dream.
When Maddox had talked to him a couple of times before about joining the boxing team, Ron had been far more interested in improving his team skills, especially in basketball. But after the stabbing and the dream, he knew what he wanted, not only in athletics, but in life.
“I had a lot of time to think, and I wanted something out of life better than I had up to this time. I wanted a way to beat the system that society puts on you when a con gets out of the pen.”
That way would be professional boxing. But he had a very long way to go.
■ ■ ■
Pastor Sharon sums up her brother Ron's experiences by quoting Proverbs 24:16, “A good man will fall seven times and get back up,” then adds her own wisdom, “Each time he gets back up, he'll be stronger.” And so it seemed in the fall of 1963.
First, Ron had to achieve full recovery from his grave injury. Then, after weeks of hospitalization, unbelievably, he was placed back in solitary confinement as punishment for the fight that could have killed him. After ninety days in the hole, he was sent to the rock gang on the hill above the prison for another ninety days because an officer thought he had instigated the fight when he followed the other inmate to the back of the laundry room. But Ron doesn't make much of all that. He remembers spending his time in the hole with the exercise regimen Maddox had assigned—doubling, tripling, and quadrupling the numbers until he was doing a thousand push-ups an hour, one every 3.6 seconds. Long after his professional boxing years were behind him, he would continue to demonstrate
