“Some days it seemed that everyone in prison was mean,” Ron said years later. “At least in the beginning, it felt that way.”
One guy in particular was on his back almost every day, and Ron kept shoving him away. He didn't want fighting to get him back in the hole. Finally, one morning at breakfast, the guy challenged him to meet in the laundry room, and Ron, sick of the confrontations and knowing his own superior strength, took him up on the dare.
They had barely squared off when the guy pulled a homemade shiv out of his pants and shoved it to the hilt into Ron's abdomen. The tip of the knife pierced an artery near his spine, and by the time the guards got him into the hospital wing, he had bled out a dangerous quantity of blood.
The doctors took him into surgery just before ten o’clock, laboring to find the artery and stop the bleeding. When they rolled him out seven and a half hours later, Ron Lyle had received thirty-five pints of blood transfusions and had twice been declared clinically dead. His death certificate had been signed.
Years later, asked if he survived the stabbing in prison because of his physical strength and “hard-nosed attitude,” Ron smiled and shook his head.
“I survived because my mother saved me.” He said that when he woke up after surgery, the first thing he remembered was “. . . sliding down a long tube. Then my mother reached down and pulled me back. That's why I'm alive. She wanted me to live.”
The devastating prison assault turned out to be the defining moment in Ron's life, and not only because he learned to believe in his mother's power to save him. Two other extraordinary events pointed him in the direction the rest of his life would take. It started with his first visitors.
When he fully awakened the next morning, he opened his eyes to his mother holding his left hand and on his right, Lt. Clifford Maddox, bending over him and asking how he felt. It wasn't until Maddox began to cry that Ron knew the old guard cared about him. “He didn't have to come to the hospital and see me. After all, Maddox had been depending on me for the baseball team, and I knew I had let him down again, just like other times before.”
Ron finds it difficult to describe how that visit made such a change in his outlook on life. “They were both there together, my mother and Clifford Maddox, both caring about me. I knew then that Maddox was a good man, and I figured there had to be other good people out there, too. I started to believe that day, not only in my mother's faith, but in the decency of others.”
And then there was the dream.
Vivid dreams in the Lyle family were often seen as visions, messages from God, and beginning with William dreaming of building a church near the mountains, life decisions were sometimes made based on those dreams.
Ron's vision happened while he was still in the hospital. He had barely closed his eyes one night before he found himself in a vivid dream, fighting for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. When he woke up he remembered every round, every punch.
For years after his boxing career was over, Ron told people about that dream—how he fought for the title, how he didn't know his opponent, but how the fight he eventually had with Muhammad Ali was exactly the fight he had dreamed about. In the dream he knew he had all the punches and could put them together. He remembered a hard jab to the head, a right uppercut, and a left hook to the body. He just didn't know how the fight ended.
With that vision, Ron began to dream of becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. Every day he lay in the hospital, he became more convinced that boxing was the path chosen for him, the way to redeem himself in the eyes of the mother he had caused so much pain. Then he remembered the white prison guard who was wearing a badge when he bent over the hospital bed, his face filled with concern, the second thing Ron saw when he woke up in the hospital. And he knew how he was going to live his dream.
When Maddox had talked to him a couple of times before about joining the boxing team, Ron had been far more interested in improving his team skills, especially in basketball. But after the stabbing and the dream, he knew what he wanted, not only in athletics, but in life.
“I had a lot of time to think, and I wanted something out of life better than I had up to this time. I wanted a way to beat the system that society puts on you when a con gets out of the pen.”
That way would be professional boxing. But he had a very long way to go.
■ ■ ■
Pastor Sharon sums up her brother Ron's experiences by quoting Proverbs 24:16, “A good man will fall seven times and get back up,” then adds her own wisdom, “Each time he gets back up, he'll be stronger.” And so it seemed in the fall of 1963.
First, Ron had to achieve full recovery from his grave injury. Then, after weeks of hospitalization, unbelievably, he was placed back in solitary confinement as punishment for the fight that could have killed him. After ninety days in the hole, he was sent to the rock gang on the hill above the prison for another ninety days because an officer thought he had instigated the fight when he followed the other inmate to the back of the laundry room. But Ron doesn't make much of all that. He remembers spending his time in the hole with the exercise regimen Maddox had assigned—doubling, tripling, and quadrupling the numbers until he was doing a thousand push-ups an hour, one every 3.6 seconds. Long after his professional boxing years were behind him, he would continue to demonstrate that incredible feat.
Maddox had told him that boxers have to be in better shape than any other athlete, and to get there, he had to work harder than he'd ever worked in his life. And so he did; most of his waking time during the locked-in twenty-three-hour days was spent in gaining strength and stamina, but because he could do little more than stretch out his body the length of the cell, he limited his initial workouts to mostly push-ups, sit-ups, and running in place.
Ron learned more lessons and passed more tests during the rest of his prison years, but it was in that last term of solitary confinement that he developed both the desire to reach a maximum level of physical fitness and the self-discipline it takes to get there.
When Ron entered Cañon City, Sonny Liston was World Boxing Association Heavyweight World Champion, but by the time he got out of solitary confinement in 1964, a young Cassius Clay, remembered vaguely by Lyle as the Rome Olympics light heavyweight gold medalist, had won the title. It was time to get to work—to go after the dream.
Lyle started, not by sparring, but by getting into the best shape of his life. He invented his regimen from a variety of sources, mainly from Maddox and from a couple of inmates who had boxed pro for a time. He also did his own research. “I would read Ring magazine from cover to cover every month and try to pick up ideas by reading about the top-ranked fighters. I never tried to copy their styles because I fight my own way, but I did pick up some good training tips.”
Whenever Maddox could get him permission, he watched fights on television, always thinking he could do better than what he saw on the screen. And when he knew he was ready, he started working out in the ring. Before long, he had mastered the basic skills, and Maddox set him up in his first fight.
Ron did not make a very auspicious debut behind prison walls, losing big to a fellow inmate by the name of “Texas” Johnson, but as he continued to do for the rest of his life, he learned by his mistakes. He beat Johnson soundly in a rematch and didn't lose to another inmate again.
Maddox had never seen anyone work as hard as Ron. The increasingly promising fighter worked out on bags in the gym when Maddox could get him in, ran whenever he was in the prison yard, and continued his daily thousand push-ups an hour, discovering in the process his own rhythm, which he would later describe to newscaster Peter Boyles