style="font-size:15px;"> The hardest lesson for Ron Lyle was learning respect: “Respect was something that took me a long time to get used to. In fact, I think the first person I ever respected outside of my family was Lt. Maddox. He changed my entire outlook. And he didn't do it by conning me—he did it by respecting me as a person. To him, I wasn't another prison number. I didn't always keep my nose clean, even then. But all the time I was in the joint he never once asked me about another convict. He kept me out of trouble a lot of times that he could have just as easily put me in the hole. He treated me fairly.”
Some years later, Clifford Maddox was quoted as saying, “I don't like to take any credit for what happened, but Ron turned into a real gentleman.”
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Life moves on, even for families with a loved one in prison. While his mother did all she could to lift Ron's spirits during her weekly visits, and his sister Joyce wrote letters of encouragement, Ron found it increasingly difficult to be away from the Lyle home during the years of so much change.
He had missed Bill going off to college at the University of Denver in 1961 to study accounting and business administration, Michael joining the Army in 1963 and being assigned to Bravo Company, Kenneth being hospitalized in 1964 with what is now recognized as bipolar disorder. The worst was in 1966 when Michael was killed in Vietnam.
Maybe because Michael was considered a war hero, or maybe because his brother Ron was starting to gain the respect of the prison powers-that-be, Deputy Warden Fred Wyse made it possible for Ron to go to his younger brother's funeral, an unusual privilege in those days.
Ron remembers being driven by the Fremont County Sheriff himself from Cañon City straight to the Denver City jail, where he was kept overnight. He was driven to the funeral the next day, and his handcuffs were removed before he stepped into the temporary company of his family and Michael's friends, but he wasn't allowed any socializing. Right after the service, he was delivered straight back to Cañon and incarceration.
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Weddings and new babies, trade schools and jobs kept happening to the Lyle family, faster than Ron could keep track. Boxing kept him going. But even as he trained, sparred, and knocked out the opponents Maddox could muster, that world, too, was changing.
After Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston in early 1964, an immediate rematch was set, a violation of W.B.A. rules, and in June that organization withdrew its recognition of Clay, who had changed his name to Muhammed Ali as part of his conversion to Islam. The World Boxing Council continued to recognize Ali as champion until he refused to go into the United States Army after being drafted for Vietnam in early 1967, at which point all sanctioning bodies withdrew recognition of Ali. So, in 1968, Joe Frazier, champion of the W.B.C., and Jimmy Ellis, recognized by the W.B.A., became the guys to beat.
Ron read articles about Angelo Dundee, Ali's trainer, in The Ring magazine and decided to write him a letter. To his amazement, Dundee not only wrote back but encouraged Ron not to lose hope. He answered some of Ron's basic questions about training and offered to meet with him whenever he was released. Dundee's letter was just one more reason to keep going—another person to trust. The trainer did, in fact, have several conversations with Ron in the years following that letter—another promise fulfilled. Ron remembers Dundee this way: “He really held the door open for me on the professional end. He's a very special person. I love him. He's a good man.”
By late 1968, Ron began to believe that he would be released. The faith Nellie had instilled in him took hold, and he told Lt. Maddox that he knew that he was meant to go to prison, to pass the tests, to learn the lessons, but that the time had come to live the dream.
Ron is quoted by Stephen Brunt in his book, Facing Ali: “Having the misfortune to be incarcerated, it taught me patience, but it also taught me how to look ahead, to plan ahead and to be able to see the dream when it appears. If I don't pursue it, I miss the boat. That's the way I approached it. . . I think that's the route that God intended me to travel. He's the one that gave me the dream, so obviously that was the route. I had to follow the route. And I did.”2
Ron probably could have been paroled earlier if he had told the parole board he would take one of the low-paying jobs offered to him by some members of his growing fan base in Denver, but as he later described it to a reporter, “I was firmly convinced that I could succeed as a pro boxer and I wasn't going to lie to them.”
Finally, in November 1969, Bill Daniels provided the parole board with the assurance they required. He testified that he would guarantee Ron a regular job as a welder with a firm he owned while the parolee worked on his boxing career.
On Saturday, November 22, 1969, Ron was paroled from Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City. The day he left prison, he followed the advice of an old bank robber named Tom Johnson, who told him to never look back. “Even on the bus, I never turned around to look at the place where I had been for so long.” He never dreamed he would return to Cañon City again and again in the years to come.
Ron had served seven and a half years behind bars. He was two months away from his twenty-ninth birthday, the peak age for most professional boxers, and he had yet to pay his dues as an amateur.
3
Denver Rocks
Shortly before Ron was released from prison, his parents purchased a six-bedroom house on Hudson Street in Park Hill, about three miles east of the Curtis Park Projects. Everyone in the family had contributed to the down payment, including Ron, who put in all the money he had inherited from being named a beneficiary, along with his mother, on his brother Michael's Army life insurance policy.
After a separation of seven and a half years, Ron gratefully moved back in with his family. The house was one of the largest in the neighborhood and provided plenty of room for the Lyles, comparatively speaking. Only ten children were left at home, including toddler Karen, the last of Nellie and William's nineteen children. A step up from the projects, Park Hill had wide, tree-lined streets with an assortment of mostly wooden bungalows topped off by gently pitched gable roofs.
The year before, Denver had experienced its own version of the race riots consuming larger cities. Skirmishes between black youths and police in Five Points had spread to Park Hill, where an eighteen-year-old was shot by police in a shopping center. Within a few months, both black and white activists in the predominantly black neighborhood agreed to join forces to fight segregation, and the white membership of the Park Hill Action Committee merged with the black-dominated Northeast Park Hill Civic Association to form the Greater Park Hill Community, Inc. Again the Lyles found themselves living in a mixed, generally harmonious community.
The volatile 1960s had appeared and reached their peak while Ron was locked away. John Kennedy had been assassinated; the Vietnam War had begun and was still raging, as were war protesters on the streets and college campuses. Malcolm X had become the national minister of the Nation of Islam and a champion of African-American black separatism and pride. In 1963, more than two hundred thousand people had marched on Washington D.C., the largest civil rights demonstration ever, and had heard Martin Luther King Jr., give his “I Have a Dream” speech, but the brutality continued as four African-American girls were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act, and Dr. King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ron didn't fully realize his frustration
