When Middendorf called Lake Charles this time, the elder Daley's description of Yul as an ex-Marine who had been away from boxing for some time, but was both big and strong, seemed about right. "He knows the odds are stacked against him," Daley said later by phone.
Now came one of the first moments of truth. The fighters were called to the scale.
Yul Witherspoon, a heavyweight boxer brought in to face young fighters on the rise, puts up with long journeys and hardships to stay in the sport.
(Jonathan Newton - The Washington Post)
|
| __ On Our Site __
• More photos of Yul Witherspoon's journey from Louisiana to his bout against up-and-comer Chazz Witherspoon.
| | |
|
Chazz Witherspoon . . . 221 1/2 pounds. He posed and flexed his muscles.
Yul Witherspoon . . . The man at the scale kept sliding the bar. A shirtless Yul revealed a thick midsection. Assorted analysts of the fights leaned forward . . . 260!
Boxing publicist Fred Sternburg rolled his eyes.
To dinner. It was almost eight o'clock by then and the Louisiana visitors had had nothing but airline peanuts all day. Each fighter had a $25 voucher to eat at the Rose, a restaurant next door to the Sleep Inn where the fighters stayed. When asked his age during the walk across to the Rose, Yul said he was 37 -- which was one more year than advertised. He was cold, he was hungry, but at least his vision had cleared.
For dinner he had bread, then chicken and spaghetti. And he told the following stories.
He had grown up in San Jose, moving to Louisiana about four years ago. He was divorced, the father of three, and there were two older children his wife had brought to the marriage. "I don't like to call them stepchildren," he said, because he loved them all the same. They were on the West Coast, but he expected at least his 12- and 11-year-old sons to visit him this summer at his home in Eunice, La., where he had settled because his grandmother had lived there before she died. "I'll put the gloves on them," he said of his boys. He had built a small boxing room behind his house, and trains people there. He gave out his card: "Spoon's Amateur Boxing Club, Coach Yul L. Witherspoon, personal trainer."
He told a harrowing tale of what originally was to have been his first professional fight. He was in a certain town when there was a knock on his hotel room door. He answered it, and a man with a wad of hundreds stepped in. "A wad this thick," he said, his hands wide apart. The man wanted Witherspoon to lose the fight. Witherspoon talked him out of the room, notified someone in authority and high-tailed it home to Eunice.
Witherspoon spent time in the Army as well as the four years in the Marines.
He has worked as a certified nursing assistant.
He is studying automotive technology at a technical college.
Last year he showed up at Phil Daley's gym and told him, "I want to get back to boxing."
So how old was he, really?
