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.
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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.
“Hey, Joe Willie,” he called.
The other boys piped in, “Where ya goin’?” “Where's the fire?”
Every few days, Joe Willie brought by chocolate and orange milk after the other boys finished their deliveries and returned with their Denver Post profits. Some days he even had doughnuts. Funny thing, they never asked where he got the food, just took it for granted as part of the weekly routine. But that morning, all came clear as the milk truck, followed closely by the Dolly Madison truck, came racing down the same street headed in the same direction as Joe Willie. The driver of the milk truck stopped in the middle of the street, the pastry truck pulling up behind, and called out, “You see a kid come by here on a bike?”
Ronnie pointed up a side street. “That way,” and the other boys pointed in the same direction, the opposite direction from where Joe Willie had taken off.
The driver leaned out his window and gestured to the driver of the Dolly Madison truck to follow, then hit the gas and headed up the street where Joe Willie had disappeared.
Russ said, “He knew you would lie. That's why he asked.”
Ronnie laughed. “Next time we tell the truth.”
Fifty years later, the men who were there still laugh about that day and Joe Willie White. Ron's older brother Bill roars with laughter as he learns for the first time where all those doughnuts came from.
Somebody mentions the old Easter Sundays, another memory that amuses the old “group of brothers.” Ron tells about how they used to dress up in the best clothes they had and proceed to make the rounds at as many sunrise services as they could jam in.
“We were after the free breakfasts,” Russ chimes in. The only time he could remember getting caught was when Reverend W. T. Liggins from the Zion Baptist Church shooed them away, shouting, “You boys ate up all the sausage last year. That isn't going to happen this morning.”
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