Then she came into my life. Her name was Juanita Wilkinson, and, like my father when he met his future bride in South Carolina, I knew right away that she was the one.
However, unlike the more assertive Cicero Leonard, I waited and waited and . . . waited. Day after day passed as I stared at Juanita from around the corner while she boarded the bus for school. Whenever I got anywhere near her, I began to shiver. Her face was that of an angel, and she sported a cute, curly Afro, and there was no way to diminish another part of her appeal, the size of her breasts. They were enormous, beautiful. I got the break I needed when her girlfriend Bobbi Massey gave me her picture and number. Of course, I waited several more weeks to get up the nerve. What could this goddess possibly see in me? She could have had any guy in school. Finally, one afternoon, I made the call. I was more apprehensive than I'd been before any fight. I was relieved when one of her sisters said Juanita wasn't home.
A few hours later, she called back. I must have become more comfortable than I realized because after I asked her if she had a boyfriend and she said she'd had a few, I told her: “You met your match this time.” I called back later that evening, and we were on the phone for ten straight hours, except for short bathroom or food breaks, till about six in the morning, often whispering to make sure our parents didn't catch on. Juanita fell asleep at one point and started snoring softly, yet I stayed on the line until her father came on and hung up the phone. With the light of dawn peeking through the window, I lay awake, still not quite believing that I'd talked to the girl I'd admired from afar for months. We'd brought up every subject two teenagers could possibly think ofâmusic, school, friends, parents. The next night, exhausted, we did it again, starting a romance over the phone. Toward the end of one of those early calls, I boldly asked Juanita if the long chats meant we were officially boyfriend and girlfriend. She paused. I wished I hadn't asked.
“I suppose we are,” Juanita said.
“Okay, then, you're my girlfriend,” I said. I was in heaven.
Three days later, we met in person. It happened by accident the first time as I ran into her on the street when she was hanging out with a niece and cousin. I asked if I could walk her home and she said yes. I was anxious again, to say the least. What if I wasn't as smooth as I was on the phone? The chemistry between a girl and a boy can't be faked. If I screwed this up, I would never get to first base with her, and it might go down as the shortest love affair in the history of Palmer Park.
There was nothing to be anxious about. Juanita and I walked down the street hand in hand. For the record, I did make it to first base that night, and it was fantastic. From then on, we saw each other almost every day. I would arrive around eleven thirty at night to greet her in the street when she returned from working at the gas station her father and cousins owned. After hours of pumping gas and changing oil and tires, Juanita's face was smudged with black smut and she smelled like grease. I didn't care. All I saw was the girl I loved and I could not wait to hold her in my arms. I often stayed until the sun came up. We kissed and talked and kissed some more.
One night in late August, it happened.
With my house to ourselves, she stopped by to hang out. We were sitting on the couch watching TV when, with her typical bluntness, she blurted out: “You know, I did not come over here to sit!”
It took me a few seconds to understand what she was hinting at, but once I did, I was terrified. I don't recall exactly what I said. I am certain it was something stupid. I thought I was going to hyperventilate.
I was no virgin, mind you, having done the deed sometime earlier at the local drive-in on the dusty backseat of Coach Pepe's station wagon with a girl whose name I've never been able to remember. It didn't matter. As far as real sex was concerned, I was very inexperienced.
A birds-and-the-bees talk from Cicero and Getha Leonard? You've got to be kidding. The only advice on the matter came from my brother Kenny, and, believe me, he was no Dr. Ruth. He made one point, and one point only: “Ray, whatever else you do, make sure you get out quickly,” and then he cracked up. Well, when the time for me to perform arrived that evening, my whole body shrunk.
Everything
shrunk, if you know what I mean. The important thing was that I did my manly duty, although I ignored my brother's advice and the subject of protection was never discussed.
In no time, Juanita and I were having sex on a regular basis, and we never used a rubber or any other method of birth control. We did it everywhere. In the car. In my house. In the woods lying down on my jacket. Everywhere.
The inevitable came next: Juanita was pregnant. When she told me the news, one might assume that my first reaction had something to do with her physical well-being or what decisions we needed to make, as a couple, about our new, important responsibility.
Not me, not the selfish, insensitive Ray Leonard. My juvenile mind raced to
my
accomplishment, the pride
I
felt:
Damn, I'm a fucking man!
I thought.
It was not until my ego was sufficiently massaged that I focused on
our
next move. Because Juanita didn't show for four of five months, we kept her pregnancy a secret from everyone, including our parents. I was no Rhodes Scholar, but I knew Cicero and Getha Leonard would not exactly be thrilled with the idea of a surprise grandchild. At no point did Juanita and I seriously contemplate getting married, as that would have derailed my path to the 1976 Olympics. Nor did we investigate how much it would cost for Juanita to have an abortion. In any event, it soon became too late for that option, and, as I suspected, my mom and dad weren't pleased to hear the news. Incensed was more like it. They should have blamed me, but they didn't. They blamed Juanita.
The most painful example of their disapproval came on the day of November 22, 1973, when my son, Ray Jr., entered the world. After driving around eighty miles per hour to the hospital, I hung out in the waiting room with the other nervous fathers-to-be. While they smoked cigarettes, I chewed gum, a baby myself at seventeen. For several hours I watched as one new dad after another received the official word and rushed to the phone to call his loved ones. They were all crying and screaming. I never saw grown men act like that before. I would probably do the same, it occurred to me, when my turn came. It soon did, and once the nurse told me that both mother and baby were doing fine, I phoned my parents. Regardless of their initial reactions to Juanita's pregnancy, I assumed they would be excited to hear from me.
“Momma, we just had a baby boy!” I shouted into the receiver. “A boy!”
I was wrong. There was no excitement at the other end. She muttered a cold reply and promptly hung up. I couldn't believe it. My happiness turned immediately into anger.
To this day, when I reflect back on that conversation, I become hurt and confused. I don't understand why she couldn't have shown the slightest joy on such a glorious occasion for Juanita and me, the birth of our first child. She couldn't accept Juanita, and she wasn't the only one in the family who was mean to her. So was Roger. If he was on the porch when she came over to the house, he would call her a bitch or a motherfucker, and warn her to never show her face there again. Saddest of all was my own unforgivable role. When Juanita told me what Roger said to her, I never asked him to stop. I avoided confrontations. That's who I was. Juanita went out of her way to break down the barrier between her and Momma, but when Getha Leonard made up her mind, there wasn't a thing anybody could do.
I'd like to say I was a model father, paying regular visits to be there for Juanita and Ray Jr. in every way, but that was not the case, then or ever. Even during Juanita's pregnancy I was absent, sometimes for weeks.
Perhaps the responsibility was too great. Or perhaps I resented the possibility of anyone holding me back from my quest to win the gold. Whatever my reasoning, I was gone, physically and mentally, too busy in the gym and in the sack. I fooled around quite a bit, including with Dave Jacobs's two teenage daughters. My father went berserk when he found out about this particular fling, dragging me out of the Jacobs daughters' place one morning at five o'clock and forcing me to run fifteen laps across the street from our house. I couldn't be sure whether Pops was more upset that I was cheating on Juanita or that I wasn't training hard enough for my upcoming duel with Dale Staley. In any case, I got back to work, and after I beat Staley, I resumed my affair with the Jacobs sisters and the other women in my life.
To cheat on my girl, the mother of our child, who dropped out of high school to care for Ray Jr. and, for two years, gave me half of the forty dollars a week she earned at the gas station while I trained for the Olympics, was shameless beyond belief. At the time, I didn't confess a thing to Juanita, but she knew. She always knew. After every extended absence, I would come back to see our son and renew our romance. That she knew as well. I wish I could admit that I harbored deep regrets about my conduct, but that, too, wouldn't be the truth. I felt I was entitled to do anything I pleased in those days, from destroying other men to bedding other women, and nobody would dare try to stop me.
Yet during these times of great promise, I was also feeling great pain, and it's difficult to know where to begin. I will simply tell two stories, both similar, both equally disturbing, then and forever.
The first has to do with a prominent Olympic boxing coach. I got to know the man, who was in his late forties, when he accompanied me and another fighter to an amateur boxing event in Utica, New York, in 1971. One night, he had the two of us take a bath in a tub of hot water and Epsom salts while he sat on the other side of the bathroom. We sensed that there was something a bit inappropriate about a grown man watching two teenagers in a tub, but because he was a male authority figure, we did not question him and eventually forgot about it.
A few years later, I was sitting in the man's car one night in the deserted parking lot across the street from the rec center when he started to tell me how important the Olympics could be to my future and how I stood an excellent chance of winning. To hear a major force in amateur boxing offer such high praise was a huge ego boost, which was maybe why it took me forever to see the real reason he had me in his car. Before I knew it, he had unzipped my pants and put his hand, then mouth, on an area that has haunted me for life. I didn't scream. I didn't look at him. I just opened the door and ran. I ran as fast as I could. He was lucky I didn't have a gun or a knife because I would have killed the man and simply accepted the consequences. By the time I got to my house, which was only a few minutes away, I was drenched in sweat. I hurried to my room and stayed there for the rest of the evening. I did not want anyone to see my tears.
When I first decided to share that incident in these pages, I didn't tell the entire story. I couldn't. It was too painful. Instead, I told a version in which the abuser stopped just as he reached my crotch. That was painful enough. But last year, after watching the actor Todd Bridges bare his soul on Oprah's show about how he was sexually abused as a kid, I realized I would never be free unless I revealed the whole truth, no matter how much it hurt.
In the years following the incident, whenever I saw the man around the neighborhood, I didn't say a thing and neither did he. I looked at him and he looked at me. We both knew.
Not long afterward, maybe five or six months later, it happened again, and again with someone I trusted.
He was a short, bald elderly white gentleman with huge lips whom I became friendly with in Hillcrest. A respectable member of the community, he always wore a tie and sport coat. On about a dozen occasions, he handed me a wad of cash. The total was probably close to five hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in the early 1970s.
I didn't ask why. I didn't care why. I didn't wonder for a second if he was setting me up. All I knew was that the cash he gave me was, besides the twenty dollars a week I received from Juanita, the only spare change I would have, with every other penny going toward my boxing expenses. It took money to go to the amateur tournaments around the country, tons of it, and the only reason I went was due to the extra funds raised through bake sales and donations from folks in Palmer Park. I was grateful to him, and didn't tell a soul.
Every visit was during the day, when others weren't far away. Then, for the first time, I went to see him after dark. In his upstairs office, between puffs of a cigarette, he gave me a pep talk about my boxing prospects.
“It's going to be okay, son,” he said. “Your credentials are going to be off the charts. You are going to be one of the greatest fighters of all time.”
I loved to hear the praise. It was one thing to hear it from my parents, and quite another from a white man. I was also excited, as I knew more cash would shortly be in my possession. Except the man had something else in mind. He touched me on the shoulder, then moved toward my crotch.
The nightmare was back.
I wanted to scream, but didn't. I wanted to kick his ass, but didn't. Fortunately, my body grew so tense that he stopped in time, but barely. I ran out of his office. Once I was safely in my car, I started to shake uncontrollably. I don't know how I made it home without getting in an accident.
I never confronted the man, just as I had never confronted the first abuser, both of whom passed away decades ago. What would have been the point? The damage was done. As life went on inside and outside the ropes, I buried these memories as deeply as I could, as if nothing ever happened. There were too many good ones to put in their place.
Except something did happen, something horrible, something words can never describe. For years, flashbacks to these two attacks disturbed me greatly, especially when I had too much to drink, which was quite often. The defenses I worked hard to construct would come crashing down, and I would not be able to stop the tears. I'd ask myself what every victim of abuse does: Did I do anything wrong to cause these men to take advantage of me? Each time I arrived at the same conclusion: absolutely not. If I experienced any guilt at all, it was that I didn't destroy them right then and there.