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.
Early on the morning of New Year's day 1983, Tony Ayala threw away his youth, his promise, his honor, and his family's good name. The nineteen-year-old San Antonio boxer was training in West Paterson, New Jersey, for a world title fight in which almost no one gave the junior middleweight champion, Davey Moore, a chance to win. Undefeated in 22 pro fights, Tony was poised for lucrative bouts with Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy Hearns, and Marvin Hagler—some of the biggest names in boxing—and he might have beaten them all. Except that his strongest bent was for self-destruction.
He lived in an apartment with Lisa Paez, his nineteen-year-old common-law wife, also from San Antonio. The day before, he lay on the couch in a bad mood. Okay, Lisa finally said, she was going to a movie by herself. He told her to let him get dressed so that he could go with her; they had a shouting match when she wouldn't wait. She returned to an empty apartment. After a while the phone rang, and he said in an eager-to-please voice, "Lisa, get ready. I'm coming to get you. We're going out." The blithe tone was a tip-off to Lisa; he had scored some cocaine and heroin. When he was on drugs, he would often become very affectionate and attentive. He would cling to her like a coat of paint.
Tony and Lisa were always fighting about his drug use. She'd move out, he'd swear he had quit, she'd come back—then the cycle would start again. But Lisa didn't want to spend New Year's alone or quarreling, so she accompanied him to a ferryboat that had been converted into a restaurant and bar. Many people there treated him like the celebrity he was, wishing him well in his big fight. But he was manic and surly, throwing down bourbon-and-colas, and he got into a brawl that had to be broken up. The doorman, a friend and fellow boxer, said later that he had never seen Tony acting so crazy. Lisa spent the evening sitting by herself at a table, sipping a screwdriver. Around three-thirty in the morning, she finally got him to go. He nearly got into another fight on the way to the car. Then he insisted on driving and almost steered them into a head-on collision. "Tony, you're all over the road," she told him. "Please let me drive us home."
It was past four when they reached the apartment. He told her he was going back down to the car to get his cigarettes. He was gone long enough that Lisa went outside and yelled for him. Tony came lurching up the stairs with a crazed look in his eyes. "Lisa," he gasped, "you're not gonna believe it! I just saw the Devil!" Exasperated, she dressed for bed. He followed her but found that the events of the night had not exactly left her feeling amorous, so he went back to the sofa and turned on the TV.
At about five, while Lisa slept, he again went downstairs to the car in search of cigarettes. It was parked in front of an apartment rented by a thirty-year-old schoolteacher. Tony had seen her before and perhaps admired her looks, but he didn't know her. He broke into her apartment, entered her bedroom, blindfolded her, tied her hands, threatened to kill her with a knife, and held a pillow against her face while he raped her. Happy New Year.
The trial four months later followed the familiar, dreary pattern of so many rape cases: Impugn the victim and claim the sex was consensual. Tony contends that his attorney taught him to use certain Yiddish words because the victim was Jewish and a Chicano's knowledge of them would imply intimacy. Lisa, for one, believed he was innocent. Seated in the courtroom near Tony, she gaped and her heart raced when the jury came in and guards surrounded the defendant's table. At the judge's words—"Guilty." "Thirty-five years." "Fifteen without the possibility of parole"—Tony's mother raised wails of anguish.
Nobody cared that he had been projected as boxing's next superstar; all that vanished with the snap of handcuffs and the slam of an iron door. Steel and stone, Tony would often say—that's all prison is. He did fifteen years and "maxed out" at sixteen; New Jersey kept him locked up until April 20, 1999, as long as its penal regulations allowed. At 36 most people are considered young. Their lives are full of possibilities. But what can life hold for Tony Ayala now? He can still make some money using his fists, but can a person capable of so vile an act return to the community that knew him best and somehow redeem himself?
In August, waiting nervously in San Antonio's Freeman Coliseum, he was beginning to find out. The foyer of the aging venue had been adapted for a press conference. A sign behind the podium sported a stylized charging bull and the words "Torito II: To Hell and Back." (Tony's boxing nickname used to be Torito, or Baby Bull. In the past few months his ring name has changed to the full-grown Toro, and the slogan has grown more contemporary: "He's BAAAACK!") Tony wore a long-sleeved shirt and slacks and dark sunshades. His mustache was neatly trimmed and his thinning black hair was combed straight back. When he was young, he always looked a little soft and flabby. On this day he looked dapper and extremely fit.
Things had not gone entirely well since his release from New Jersey's Bayside State Prison. Lisa Paez Ayala had matured into a polished middle-class woman. They had been married and divorced while he was imprisoned; their relationship had been off and on—always a little tortured, oftentimes stormy, but she'd waited for him all these years. Uncertain how they would be received in San Antonio, they had talked about living in Philadelphia, but Tony wanted to be near his family, especially his father. They were greeted back home by a San Antonio Express-News poll that found people evenly divided on whether he was a changed man; 54 percent felt that it was not in his or boxing's best interest for him to resume his career. Interviewed by the paper, Andrew Consovoy, the chairman of New Jersey's parole board, piled on with some street-corner psychology: "I could see a scenario where, if he lost a fight, maybe felt he got robbed by the decision, and he ran across a female who wanted to be nice to him . . . I'd be very afraid. Is it likely to happen again? I'd have to say yes." Great start with the media.
Nor had the comeback fight come together smoothly. Tony had been sued by a group that claimed it had bought his promotional rights more than a decade ago. Also, Tony had gotten in a silly ego spat with "Jesse" James Leija, a former world champion from San Antonio. Leija, Tony had heard, had quipped that a suitable first opponent for him would be the alleged serial killer Rafael Resendez-Ramirez—if true, a tacky remark. Tony's response, on the record, was to rip his promoter and to call Leija a "coward" who "laid down" in a knockout loss to Oscar De La Hoya.
In the coliseum foyer, alternately slumping in his chair and then squaring his shoulders, was Tony's opponent, 21-year-old Manuel Esparza. A native of Oklahoma City, Esparza wore baggy, low-slung denim shorts, a sports team jersey, and a couple of brads in his right eyebrow. Esparza's dad had turned him pro at fourteen and he'd built a record of 19-4-1. When the press conference got started, the youth, whose sharp, handsome chin long ago earned him the nickname Pretty Boy, stood before the reporters and said confidently, "He's old and flat-footed. I got the speed, I got the shots, and come August twentieth, I'm gonna give him hell."
At the podium, Tony flashed a smile and nodded at his impertinent foe. "I was once where you're at," he said. "I just hope we don't have a lot of ballroom dancing. All you gotta do is stand and fight the old man. We'll see about it on the twentieth. May the best man win."
