Lamont Peterson: Still fighting, in the ring and out

“Y’all got something in y’all that I wish I had,” he told them.

“What the hell do we got that you could possibly want?” Anthony remembered thinking. “You a grown man, got your own business, got a beautiful family.

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Professional boxer Lamont Peterson grew up on the streets of Washington D.C. and in foster care as a child. On Dec. 10, he'll fight for a world title.

“It didn’t dawn on us until now: The stuff that y’all been through, y’all supposed to be crazy or in jail or dead somewhere. How did you have a sense of humor to come out of all that and still smile and say, ‘It’s okay’?”

‘My whole life’s been hard’

It’s okay. That’s essentially how Lamont Peterson handled this long, involuntary layoff. In the fall of 2011, with his first fight against Khan less than two months off, Peterson felt tired. He grew dizzy when he rose. Something wasn’t right, and according to doctors and Peterson himself, a battery of tests showed it: low testosterone.

Searching for a solution, Peterson turned to a doctor with whom he had worked extensively in the past, John A. Thompson of Las Vegas. Thompson’s approach, according to Peterson, Hunter and letters from Thompson and others obtained by the boxing Web site www.RingTV.com: surgically insert a soy-based testosterone pellet under the skin in his hip to deal with a problem that wasn’t athletic, but of an everyday person.

“I was comfortable with the procedure,” Peterson said.

It cured him of the fatigue, yet ended up causing headaches and heartache. With what Thompson described as a slow-releasing testosterone in his system — an amount Thompson’s letter contends could not have enhanced his performance, but was aimed at merely returning him to normal levels — Peterson fought Khan in a thriller, and won by a split decision.

But one day in April, as he was well into the preparations for the rematch, he received a letter from the Voluntary Anti-Doping Agency, which was conducting pre-fight testing. He opened it. A test Peterson took in March had come back dirty.

Peterson’s immediate thought: “This’ll all get cleared up,” he said. Yet in May, 10 days out, as Peterson was preparing to climb onto a treadmill and work off his final few pounds, Hunter called him. The fight was off.

“It hurt,” Peterson said. “Couldn’t sleep.”

As the weeks passed, he drifted in and out of the gym, spent time with his 4-year-old daughter Sommer, spent time by himself, took quick trips to New York or Ocean City, Md., trying to digest it all. He and his camp said they pursued opinions on what could have happened, both locally and nationally — endocrinologists from Penn State, from the University of Louisville, from George Washington. They saw specialists in Washington. The experts came back with the same opinion as Thompson, his original doctor in Las Vegas: that nothing about his physical condition suggested the use of testosterone to enhance performance.

In a letter to one of Peterson’s attorneys dated May 8, 2012, according to RingTV.com, James F. Mackin, an endocrinologist in Bethesda, wrote that Peterson’s condition was “not compatible with anabolic-androgenic abuse. Testing has showed no evidence of illicit drugs use.”

Adisa Bakari, one of Peterson’s attorneys, declined to release such letters for this story. But unbeknownst to Peterson’s camp, the International Boxing Federation, who awarded Peterson one of the two belts he took from Khan, hired its own endocrinologist to consider the case.