Ron Lyle | A Memorial To Greg Cox

Griego: Ex-con boxer gets kids to fight for future

When Ron Lyle was in prison, before he became a heavyweight boxer both famous and infamous, a fellow inmate stabbed him in the gut.

“I had to have 36 transfusions. I died twice on the operating table.” Lyle says.
He survived, however, and was put in solitary confinement, where one night he had a dream. In the dream, Lyle, a hotheaded youth out to prove himself to the world, finally did. In the boxing ring. It was glorious. People cheering. Flash bulbs popping. “Champ, champ, champ.”

 

“The thing is, I never knew how the dream ended because I woke up,” Lyle says.He’s telling me this over breakfast at Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax Avenue. He’s back in town from Las Vegas, back in his old neighborhood, in the gym. It’s his gym this time, a partnership with the Salvation Army Red Shield Center and Bob Cox, a businessman who is helping to pay for the program in memory of his son, Greg, who idolized Lyle. Lyle is teaching kids from his old neighborhood of Whittier-Cole how to box. Helping boys (and a few girls) avoid the mistakes he once made is his way, he says, of repaying a community that always supported him.

“My hope is that I can make a difference,” he says. “Can I change a person’s life? Is it possible? I’m hoping so.” There’s always a story in the hometown hero who overcomes obstacles and returns, older and wiser, to help guide the young and foolhardy. But this isn’t Hollywood. There are no tidy resolutions. It doesn’t take long to see that Lyle, now 60 years old, is a person who has never stopped fighting. For respect. Against his darker past. He wants to be known as more than the man who kept trading boxing gloves for handcuffs. He wants to be remembered as the man he promised his mother he would be. An honorable man.

If this is a tale of sin and redemption, Ron Lyle is still fighting for salvation.
“You know how they say every family has a black sheep?” Well, I guess I was the black sheep of mine,” he says. “For some strange reason, I was the only one in my family to go that way. “Some of us take the low road, some of us take the high road, we all end up at the same place, you know what I’m saying? I find myself asking a lot of questions I have no answers for, you know? Why? Why did I have to go that way?”

If you were here in the 1970s, you probably know Lyle’s story. The third of the 19 children, he was a 20-year-old basketball star who entered prison and came out nearly eight years later to become a contender for the heavyweight title. Lyle, 6-foot-3, 220 pounds, 43-7-1, 32 knockouts, one of Denver’s most famous and infamous athletes.

He was the preacher’s son with the devil’s punch, the man who courted trouble like a lady he couldn’t get enough of. Lyle fought against the best, he was ranked at the top of the World Boxing Association, came this close to taking the title away from Muhammad Ali. He also killed two men: one, the revenge killing that landed him in prison; one, years later, in self-defense. He traveled the world bathed in glory only to come home to a series of troubles, domestic disputes, a brawl with business partners, a home foreclosure.
“You know the saying, ‘adversity building character’? I have to believe that,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of adversity in my life.”