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A Boxer's Tale: Dreams of Fame End in Death
By EDWARD WONG
Beethavean Scottland in a classic boxing pose five years ago. He died last week from head injuries at age 26.
APITOL HEIGHTS, Md., July 8 — The gym called Round One Boxing is home to a certain breed of men. They are fit and disciplined and used to talking with their fists. They spend more time with a punching bag than they do with the women in their lives. Above all, they are hungry.
They are starving for a purse that pays more than $10,000, or a televised bout, or a shot at a championship belt. This gym in suburban Washington is a way station for dreams as bruised as the faces of those who cling to them. The philosophy of Round One is epitomized not so much in the faded barbells or the dangling speed bag, but in a slogan scrawled across a wall poster: “Champions never take the easy way out. Pay the Price!”
Never have those words weighed more heavily than now. One of the fighters who trained here, Beethavean Scottland, known as Bee, died last Monday night from injuries he sustained in the ring. He had been in a coma since being knocked out on June 26 on the deck of the U.S.S. Intrepid, a World War II-era aircraft carrier that has been turned into a museum and docked on the Hudson River off Midtown Manhattan.
Scottland was facing a light-heavyweight fighter from New Jersey named George Jones, who knocked him out in the 10th and final round. Scottland lay on the mat, breathing but unresponsive, and was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center. Doctors determined he had a subdural hematoma, or a rupture of the veins between the brain and the skull. Scottland, 26, was the fourth boxer since 1979 to die in a bout in New York State.
Scottland was a left-hander who had called Round One his home for more than a dozen years. He was one of six or seven fighters trained by the gym's 57-year-old owner, Adrian Davis.
“In the professional field, it's really hard to make it unless you have a sponsor, a promoter or a very, very rich manager,” said Davis, who has one good eye and one made of glass, a result of his own ill-fated boxing career. “He really thought that with his abilities, he could make it up through the ranks. He thought he could go all the way.”
Scottland was no different from other fighters, many of whom train in this or any other dark, sweat- soaked gym. He did not have an extraordinary career, although his 20-6-2 record was respectable. He did not have a contract with a big promoter or a cable network like HBO or Showtime, which broadcast high- profile bouts. He did not, as Davis put it, “come out of the amateurs with bright, shining colors,” meaning he did not win an Olympic medal.
There are fighters at Round One who have beaten the odds. Hasim Rahman recently won two heavyweight championship titles from Lennox Lewis in an upset in South Africa. A white banner above the gym entrance now proclaims it “The Home of the Heavyweight Champion of the World!”
But most of the fighters here are still struggling to get noticed in a sport that an HBO executive once likened to “Dodge City.” It is arguably the world's least glamorous professional sport, and it is dying partly from self-asphyxiation. Once run by the mob, the industry is still widely believed to be rife with corruption. It has no central governing body, no credible method of ranking fighters and no way to regulate contracts often written to exploit young fighters.
“If you can't get into the clique of boxing, with the Don Kings and the Cedric Kushners and the Lou Duvas, you can't make it,” Davis said from his office, referring to the biggest promoters in the sport. “You can't take a fighter no matter how good he is and say `move over, my boy is going to get a shot at the title.' ”
Gary Jones, a fighter who was wearing a trash bag this afternoon to sweat off some pounds, said that he was “going through the same problems now that Bee was in — finances.”
Scottland's purse for the fatal Intrepid fight — $7,000, with an additional $1,000 for expenses — “was a robbery,” Jones said.
“For a 10-round fight, I think he should have gotten much more than that,” Jones said. “He was killed in the ring, and he got robbed.”
Like most fighters, Scottland did not see a lot of money growing up. His mother was a corrections officer in Washington and his father a classical pianist. They had six boys and two girls, with the names of three of the eight children inspired by classical composers. Though spelled differently, Scottland's first name was pronounced Beethoven.
At age 12, Scottland met Derek Matthews, a former boxer once trained by Davis. Matthews ran a dog-training school from his row house in Brentwood, Md., as well as a basement gym with a small ring for local boys. He became a mentor to Scottland, who moved into his house and began training there.
“Some of the kids got good,” Davis said. “Bee got extra good. He got so good he outgrew Derek.”
Within a year or two, Matthews turned Scottland over to Davis, a renowned trainer who had opened Round One in 1980.
Davis had boxed for 16 years. But his career had ended abruptly in a bout on Dec. 5, 1972, in Philadelphia. His left retina had become detached from a head-butt in an earlier fight, and a doctor recommended he let it heal before stepping in the ring again. But Davis said a boxing commissioner and promoter both told him, “As good as you are, you only need one eye.”
“Like a fool, I took the fight,” he said. His eye was permanently damaged in that 1972 bout and later removed.
“I know what the risks are in this sport, and I can take my eye out right now and show you,” he said. “If you go to war, you can expect not to come home. If you go into boxing, you can expect to get hurt.”
Under Davis, Scottland won several Golden Gloves bouts and fought in regional and national competitions. He fought in 77 amateur bouts, with about a dozen losses, Davis said. He never went to the Olympics and turned pro in 1995, after graduating from high school.
Scottland was what one local trainer, Gary Russell, called “a classic southpaw with a beautiful body.” He usually fought in the supermiddleweight division, which has a weight limit of 168 pounds. Championship fighters like William Joppy and Keith Holmes sparred with him at Round One, where he trained for two hours every evening.
But Scottland's purses were never more than several thousand dollars, forcing him to scrape by working as an exterminator. He had married Denise Lewis, a childhood friend, in 1996, and they were rearing an 8- year-old daughter and two sons, ages 2 and 6.
“He would talk about wanting to make it up there,” said Bach Scottland, an older brother. “He really wanted a better life, a way of getting a house, a better way to raise his family.”
Even in victory, Scottland had a “very bad disposition” about his career, Davis said. “Every time he won, instead of jumping up and being happy, he wanted it to be a championship fight.”
Several years ago, Scottland and Davis were in a hotel in Virginia Beach, training there after a prominent promoter had agreed to put Scottland on the undercard of a bout to be shown on cable TV. Davis said that Scottland had called his friends and family from the hotel, boasting that he was getting his first shot at the big time. But five days before the fight, Davis got a call saying that the promoter was pulling Scottland.
Davis walked out that night onto their fifth-floor balcony overlooking the ocean, trying to figure out a way to break the news to Scottland.
“What you doing out here?” Scottland said, as Davis recalled.
“I'm just checking out the sights,” Davis said. “Did you know that the tides, the water from the tides, is what keeps us from drowning?”
“Man, why you talking about that?” Scottland said, slipping an arm around his trainer. “I already know I'm not fighting. I know what's going on. I raised myself. We'll get the next fight. We'll get the championship belt.”
About two years ago, Scottland signed with a manager, Von Dwayne Patterson, who bought him boxing equipment and lent him money. He moved his family from a cramped apartment to a two-story town house in New Carrollton, Md.
But the big-money fights kept eluding him. On June 20, the night before Scottland was to fight for a Maryland State belt, his opponent, a supermiddleweight named Dana Rucker, withdrew because of a pulled hamstring. Scottland, who had been training for months, had not fought since last August. He had even begun to take classes to drive a truck for something to fall back on.
By coincidence, the opponent whom George Jones was scheduled to fight aboard the Intrepid had pulled out at about the same time with a broken nose. Lou Duva, the fight's promoter, made some calls that eventually reached Scottland.
Jones weighed 174 pounds, and Scottland had been training to fight Rucker at 168. But the offer was too tempting: the $8,000 purse was larger than any Scottland had ever had, and the fight would be shown on ESPN2. He reasoned that this could be a springboard to a fight on HBO or Showtime, where undercard purses can be $25,000 or more, Davis said.
Those same thoughts probably were still running through Scottland's head when he stepped on board the Intrepid on the evening of June 26, beneath a blood-red sky.
In the seventh round, Scottland took a flurry of hard punches from Jones. After the bell rang, Scottland slumped in his corner, a cut over his right eye, as a doctor and the referee examined him.
“Bee, what the hell is wrong?” Davis recalled saying. `I'm going to stop the fight.“
”No, no, please don't stop it,“ Scottland said. ”Please, Adrian, don't stop the fight. Don't do this to me."
The bell rang for the eighth round. A hot wind blew off the river. Scottland rose to his feet to finish the fight of his life.
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