A Heavy Weight
Before he was convicted of rape and hauled off to prison in 1983, Tony Ayala was one of pro boxing's most prominent stars.
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To the chagrin of the promoter, the press conference then turned into a din of shouts about Tony's feud with Leija. Esparza took a chair, staring thoughtfully at his sneakers. "When I'd get in trouble," he told me, "my dad used to say, 'You're gonna wind up just like Tony Ayala.'"
Tony Ayala, Sr., was an ex-marine who found work as a mechanic at Kelly Air Force Base. He wanted his four boys to be able to defend themselves, so he started teaching them to box in his back yard. Soon other kids joined in, and before he knew it, he had a boxing team sparring in the dust. The elder Ayala eventually opened and ran a respected downtown gym that kept a lot of poor kids off the street. His San Antonio teams were a dominant force in Texas amateur competitions, and his most gifted pupils were his sons. Mike, Sammy, and Tony Ayala were the first and only trio of brothers to win national Golden Gloves championships. (The fourth son, Paulie, also had a successful amateur career and went on to win his share of pro fights; he is not the Paulie Ayala who now holds the world bantamweight title.) To some Chicanos, Tony Senior has earned the community's esteem and affection for the credit he brought to their young people and the city of San Antonio. But to others, it is an article of faith that the Ayala boys succeeded in the ring because their father raised them like pit bulls.
Mike and Sammy got in trouble with drugs too, but neither fell as far and as fast as Tony. By age twelve, Tony has said, he was smoking dope, boozing, and using heroin. Yet at fourteen he volunteered to spar with world welterweight champion Pipino Cuevas, a superb fighter who was notoriously hard on partners. Cuevas snarled that he wasn't going to go easy on Tony just because he was a kid. The kid knocked him on his can, and legend has it that Cuevas had to be assisted from the ring.
Tony's first encounter with the law came a year later. At a drive-in theater in San Antonio he wandered drunk into a women's restroom and beat a college coed savagely—he allegedly tried to rip out her genitals with his hand. Officials charged him with aggravated rape and certified him to stand trial as an adult. But the victim, who acknowledged receiving a $40,000 payment from the Ayalas, asked the judge to grant leniency after Tony pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. Tony got off with ten years' probation.
Two years later he turned pro, and now he had enough money to do all the drugs he wanted. He might shoot up two or three times a day while pouring whiskey or tequila. Yet he wasn't always like that. One Sunday afternoon, Tony saw a girl with dark wavy hair and a broad flashing smile sitting on the hood of a car in Brackenridge Park. She was friendly enough that the next day, when she came home from school, she found him sitting out front in his '76 Ford. Lisa Paez was no submissive good girl or boxing groupie from the wrong side of town. Her dad owned a small trucking firm, and she would graduate from Holmes High School a year early. Still, when she turned seventeen, she moved in with Tony.
He bought a house on the northwest side of town. One night he broke into a neighbor's house; police officers arrested him inside and charged him with burglary. Tony's excuse was that he was so drunk he didn't know where he was: He thought he was in his own house. The matter went away when the homeowner, who also received money from the Ayalas, decided not to press charges.
The criminal justice system had every reason to lock him up then, but the Ayala name carried much weight in San Antonio. Plus there was Tony's youth and the reflected glamour of his imminent world title. Whatever the reasons, the judge and the district attorney blinked. To avoid having his probation revoked, Tony agreed to undergo a month of drug and alcohol rehabilitation in California. He spent his time there finding ways to get drunk and high. The other condition of his freedom was to leave the state of Texas. In New Jersey he would presumably be under the stern watch of his manager, Lou Duva, a streetwise former bail bondsman. So there was an element of communal guilt in San Antonio's response to Tony's return seventeen years later. The city had foisted off its problem on an unwitting New Jersey town, and on a math teacher who never saw it coming.
A few months into his incarceration at Trenton State Prison, Tony hit bottom. "I'd been smoking dope," he recalls the night, "and was watching M*A*S*H* on TV. Very funny show; I was laughing my ass off. Then I thought, 'Man, look at you. You're in this hellhole, this dungeon, and you're enjoying yourself!' I decided then, 'You've either got to change or die.'"
At first he was inclined to opt for the latter. Unable to face endless years in prison, he called his father in San Antonio and asked for permission to kill himself. "That's right," Tony Senior says, confirming the story. "I said, 'Son, you have my blessing. But you should know I'll be coming right behind. Because I don't want to live in a world without you.'"
Tony made it to the office of Brian Raditz, the prison's director of psychology and psychiatry. Raditz had played small-college football well enough as a safety that the Washington Redskins invited him to a training camp, but he loved boxing. "Tony could relate to me because I'd been an athlete," says Raditz, "but what really brought us together was our closeness to our fathers. Sometimes, when things really started to happen for him in therapy, I'd see Tony four to six hours at a time. I'd never seen anyone work at it like he did. He read everything he could get his hands on. He was into theory of psychology, group therapy. And at some point we became close enough that I could say, 'Tony, what's really wrong? What really hurts?'"
Tony told him that when he was nine years old a friend of the family had sexually abused him, and as it often happens, the abuse was coerced seduction. It went on for a couple of years. Here was a boy born into a family in which machismo was the ultimate value, and he had not only fears but also evidence that he was gay. (The New Jersey State Parole Board would discount this story, in the only year Tony was eligible for parole, because he refused to name this person, thereby leaving others vulnerable to abuse.) "When he finally opened up and talked about the abuse," says Raditz, "the pressure was off him. He could begin to deal with himself constructively." The psychologist became Tony's confidant, but also his friend; he and his wife opened their home to Lisa. She arrived from Texas thinking she'd stay with the Raditzes a couple of weeks, until she got settled, but she lived with them for three years.
Tony and Lisa had married—in the prison chapel—because they thought it was important to make it official. But bars weren't the only obstacle between them. Foremost was the essential matter of honesty. "He was my husband and that's just how it was," she says. "But for two or three years I went on believing in his innocence—that he'd been wrongly convicted. I couldn't bring myself to believe that he had done this horrible thing. Finally I asked him. And he said, 'Yes, Lisa, I did it.'" She was driving back and forth between Philadelphia and Trenton. On weekday visits they could talk through a plate of glass; weekends, they could be in the same room and sit beside each other. "It's an awful life," she says. "Six years of that was all I could handle. I wanted to go to a movie with a companion. I wanted a normal relationship. So I divorced him."
The papers were delivered to Tony on his birthday in 1989. She had a good job by then, working as a sales rep for an orthodontics company. She also had a boyfriend. She didn't want to marry him, but she enjoyed his company, and the relationship lasted three years. For Tony those years were long and bitter. "It had always been a struggle," he says. "Lisa managed to keep it going. To have love in that kind of situation, you really have to be committed. The only place I could see her was in that hateful prison. So some years down the line, we split. That was bad enough. But she's a young, attractive woman. I knew about this other guy. I'd lie there in lockup thinking about him making love to my wife."
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