had told him that boxers have to be in better shape than any other athlete, and to get there, he had to work harder than he'd ever worked in his life. And so he did; most of his waking time during the locked-in twenty-three-hour days was spent in gaining strength and stamina, but because he could do little more than stretch out his body the length of the cell, he limited his initial workouts to mostly push-ups, sit-ups, and running in place.
Ron learned more lessons and passed more tests during the rest of his prison years, but it was in that last term of solitary confinement that he developed both the desire to reach a maximum level of physical fitness and the self-discipline it takes to get there.
When Ron entered Cañon City, Sonny Liston was World Boxing Association Heavyweight World Champion, but by the time he got out of solitary confinement in 1964, a young Cassius Clay, remembered vaguely by Lyle as the Rome Olympics light heavyweight gold medalist, had won the title. It was time to get to work—to go after the dream.
Lyle started, not by sparring, but by getting into the best shape of his life. He invented his regimen from a variety of sources, mainly from Maddox and from a couple of inmates who had boxed pro for a time. He also did his own research. “I would read Ring magazine from cover to cover every month and try to pick up ideas by reading about the top-ranked fighters. I never tried to copy their styles because I fight my own way, but I did pick up some good training tips.”
Whenever Maddox could get him permission, he watched fights on television, always thinking he could do better than what he saw on the screen. And when he knew he was ready, he started working out in the ring. Before long, he had mastered the basic skills, and Maddox set him up in his first fight.
Ron did not make a very auspicious debut behind prison walls, losing big to a fellow inmate by the name of “Texas” Johnson, but as he continued to do for the rest of his life, he learned by his mistakes. He beat Johnson soundly in a rematch and didn't lose to another inmate again.
Maddox had never seen anyone work as hard as Ron. The increasingly promising fighter worked out on bags in the gym when Maddox could get him in, ran whenever he was in the prison yard, and continued his daily thousand push-ups an hour, discovering in the process his own rhythm, which he would later describe to newscaster Peter Boyles as “bada-bing, bada-boom.”
Before long, Ron was considered the scourge of Cañon City, and it got so that no one within the walls would take him on. Maddox had to bring in boxers from the outside, mainly from Fort Carson Army Base, thirty miles way.
Jimmy Farrell fought middleweight on that Army team and remembers the first time they traveled to Cañon City. “Our heavyweight was a highly regarded boxer named Howard Smith who went on to become ranked professionally. We were surprised this convict could beat him so easily. That was the first time I ever saw Ronnie Lyle.”
Ron won every one of the frequently scheduled fights against the Fort Carson team, and his reputation, along with the Cañon City Rock Busters team, grew, reaching Denver and the notable boxing supporters in that city.
By the summer of 1966, Ron had used up almost every conceivable opponent, and Maddox was looking to Denver and the Rocks, an amateur boxing team that had just become a charter member of the now-defunct International Boxing League. He contacted the club's owner, Bill Daniels—a prophetic move, as it turned out.
Daniels was a cable television magnate, enormously wealthy and an avid sports fan. He had been the undefeated Golden Gloves Champion of New Mexico, but he had also invested in automobile racing and an American Basketball Association team, the Los Angeles Stars, which he later moved to Utah. He served as president of the A.B.A. and was a founder of the United States Football League. Daniels was one of the first cable owners to focus on sports programming, a pioneer in what is now of course a multibillion-dollar industry.
Beyond all that, Daniels was a war hero and a humanitarian. In World War II and the Korean War, he was a naval fighter pilot, serving for a time as the commander of the “Blue Angels.” Later, he helped found Cenikor, a nonprofit rehabilitation center for drug addicts, alcoholics, and people with criminal behavior problems. He donated his seven-million-dollar mansion, “Cableland,” to Denver so the city would have an official mayoral residence.
In 1966, Ron could barely hope to be released from prison in time to develop a professional career and was dependent on whatever good boxers Maddox could scare up. That year, it wasn't to be the top heavyweight for the Denver Rocks.
Dennis Nelson, who was training his brother, Rocks light heavyweight Donnie Nelson, remembers that Barnell Stidham, their best heavyweight, refused to box the formidable Ron Lyle. “Ronnie scared the ‘you-know-what’ out of him,” Dennis says. “He was that good. In fact, the first time my dad and I saw him box, he told me we had just seen the next heavyweight champion of the world, but neither of us could figure out how a twenty-five-year-old guy with at least eleven more years to serve in prison could even get a chance to try.” The answer was Bill Daniels.
As an expression of his belief in Cenikor and its dedication to the rehabilitation of convicts, Daniels frequently visited the Colorado State Penitentiary. It was on one of those visits that he first heard of Ron Lyle, and he arranged for his next Cañon City trip to coincide with one of his fights.
From the first time he saw Ron box, Daniels wanted to help the young convict. He began almost at once to exert his considerable political influence throughout the state in hopes of winning Ron parole. But even for Bill Daniels, it wasn't going to be that easy.
He managed to obtain a parole hearing in 1967, but Ron's devotion to his dream of a professional boxing career was a major obstacle. Despite positive testimony from Maddox and others, the parole board turned him down; members were not accustomed to releasing prisoners to become professional boxers.
“I went to the parole board, and they sent me back for a year, two years,” Ron says. “They said boxing's not a parole plan. The head of the parole board said he didn't think I could fight my way out of a wet bag. They didn't think I'd make it. I told them that this is what I'm going to do when I get out. They said, ‘Prove it to us.’”
Ron didn't get angry, and he didn't give up. He just kept working, sparring, and getting fights when he could. Maddox kept after him, prodding him to work harder, squeezing the best out of him. And they both kept learning—the art of defense, throwing punches in combination, and rhythm. Ron got better and better. And because Bill Daniels and Clifford Maddox believed in him, he started to believe in himself—that boxing would give him a second chance at life.
Ron grapples with the difference between street fighting and boxing. “In high school, boxing didn't interest me much, mainly because I was always having to fight my way out of a lot of after-school scraps. When I had to fight, I didn't enjoy it,” Ron said in an interview. And the fights he had behind bars, “personal squabbles,” he called them, had been a continuation of his life on the streets, only more meaningless and disheartening. Boxing was different. It not only became the controlling force of his life in prison, it continued to guide his life long after he was released.
After he had entered the professional arena years later, he told a reporter, “Fighting is something that I need, an individual competitiveness, the supreme battle of man against man. Whatever it is, I need boxing, because in prison it gave me the will and determination to constantly better myself during the times when it was rough.”
Ron also remembers 1967 and 1968 as a time for focusing on what he had learned was most important: “My father tried to teach me things I couldn't understand at the time. In prison I started to know what he was trying to do. I learned how important self-discipline is. And my mother taught me how to believe God was there with me in prison. I had to have faith.
