Columnist Dean Juipe: Add Bowe to unsavory roll call

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2003 | 9:02 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Boxers, as a rule, are not Rhodes scholar candidates. They're tough guys, oftentimes from tough streets, and they live their lives accordingly.

Yet most professional fighters are much nicer and more pleasant than their collective persona would indicate. They tend to be pretty decent on the whole.

Riddick Bowe seemed to be just such a fellow during his heyday, which included a reign as heavyweight champion. Trained by the brilliant and dignified Eddie Futch, Bowe came across as not only good-natured but as something of an overgrown kid.

Futch had a great influence and Bowe, who retired in 1996, was fun to be around.

But there was a dark side to Bowe that, in retrospect, wasn't all that apparent when he was an active fighter. And that dark side has contributed to Bowe becoming the latest of the heavyweight champions from the 1980s and 1990s to have found his way to prison or to have met with misfortune.

He was sentenced last week to 18 months in the slammer in Charlotte, N.C., for what amounts to a spousal abuse charge. He kidnapped his estranged wife (and child) and only released her after her sister was able to notify the police.

Bowe made $75 million as a fighter, yet today -- given where he's going -- that wealth seems meaningless. He has lost his most precious commodity, his freedom.

So has Trevor Berbick, who, somewhat coincidentally, has been jailed as well. He was a heavyweight champion in 1986, but just this past weekend he was arrested in Jamaica and charged with breaking and entering.

Bowe and Berbick have added their names to an unsavory roll call that also includes ex-champions Michael Dokes, Pinklon Thomas, and, of course, Mike Tyson. Dokes is still in prison (at Indian Springs), Thomas was an admitted heroin addict as a teen who frequently found himself skirting trouble, and Tyson is, well, a guy with a lengthy rap sheet.

Still another heavyweight champion from that era, former Las Vegas resident Greg Page, is the victim of a cruel turn of fate. Fighting in Kentucky vs. Dale Crowe in 2001, Page was knocked out and slipped into a coma when medical help was slow to arrive.

A benefit for Page (and for former middleweight champ Gerald McClellan, who was severely injured in a 1995 fight with Nigel Benn) is scheduled for Feb. 22 in Rockford, Ill., and those of us who knew these men in better times can only hope for the best. They deserve our sympathies.

Bowe, however, does not.

Strangely, his attorney is presenting a scenario in which Bowe, who is now 35, will return to boxing upon his release from jail. "My thinking is that he will fight again," remarked Robert Altchiler.

Well, I hope not. Fighting at such an advanced age is not what Bowe is going to need, although there's something humorous in picturing his return. Maybe he and Berbick, Dokes, Thomas, Tyson and a couple of other ex-heavyweight champs from that downtrodden era -- such as Buster Douglas, Tony Tubbs, Tim Witherspoon, Bonecrusher Smith and Tony Tucker -- can capitalize on their infamy and have a round-robin tournament of sorts.

Just don't expect "Those Were The Days" to be playing in the background.