(3 of 4)
This devotion to old-fashioned family values makes Bowe an ideal champ for the puritanical 1990s. So far, the closest he has come to scandal has been a charge by a former girlfriend that he is the father of her son. Bowe immediately agreed to support the child, until blood tests revealed he wasn't the father after all. "You might consider it a pressure ((to be a role model)), but it's no pressure for me," he says. "I'd be privileged to help someone out. And look where I came from. If it weren't for Muhammad Ali, where would I be?"
Where he came from is a housing project in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where battles for drug turf were so regular that residents called it Gunsmoke City. Bowe was the 12th of 13 children raised by a single mother who worked the graveyard shift at a plastic-bottle factory and held weekend card games to earn money for a few extras. Even so, "we'd have to eat the same meals -- like beans and rice -- four times a week," says Bowe's brother Darryl Wright, 27.
Despite Dorothy Bowe's strong talk and strong arm, several of the brothers and sisters got caught up in drugs and ran into trouble with the law. Riddick never did. A seventh-grade English teacher helped set him on a different path. When she brought in a video about Ali, Bowe was so impressed that he got into a fight with another boy in the class who liked Joe Frazier better. After breaking them up, the teacher told Bowe he was pretty good with his hands and should consider boxing himself. Within four years, he had won his first Golden Gloves title. He would go on to win that amateur title three more times.
He also hoped to win a gold medal at the Olympics, as Ali had. But in the four months before the 1988 Games, Bowe suffered several blows. His favorite sister, Brenda, was killed in a mugging. A brother, Henry, went into the hospital with AIDS. The young boxer, recovering from hand surgery and a foot injury, made it through the semifinals and tried holding on in the final bout against Lewis, but the referee stopped the fight in the second round, giving the victory to the British boxer. Managers and promoters who had wooed the young hopeful before the Games were no longer as eager to sign him up. "It was my goal to win the gold medal and come back and have everyone love me," Bowe says now. "But my wife and my kids were the only ones who met me at the airport. I was crushed. I wanted so badly to do what Ali had done."
Rock Newman, a fast-talking assistant to boxing promoter Butch Lewis, thought Bowe was getting a bum deal. When Lewis stopped pursuing the young fighter, Newman decided to manage Bowe himself. His first priority was to recruit Eddie Futch. The legendary trainer, who had heard the "Riddick- ulous" rumors, wasn't interested in the job. At 78, he told Newman, he didn't have the time to waste. But a meeting with Bowe changed his mind. "He was big and he looked like a man," says Futch. "But he was only 20, and I realized something that the others didn't: he was a boy and what he needed was guidance."