Great Article on Henry Tillman

TROUBLED TILLMAN ON PATH TO PEACE AFTER HIS "LOST YEARS"

From Olympic heavyweight hero to convicted killer Henry Tillman has experienced more of life's extremes than most. Here he maintains his innocence to FIONA MANNING, tells how he extracted positives from his time inside and looks forward to the future

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[/FONT] In 1984, Henry Tillman was the man. He'd defeated Mike Tyson to get to the Olympics and brought the U.S. home a gold medal as a result.
Tillman had it all: talent, style and looks. He seemed poised to have a major say in the ranks of the heavyweight division.
Instead, Tillman's career was lacklustre, peaking with the North American Boxing Association's cruiserweight title in 1986.
He retired six years later with a 25-6 record (losing once to Tyson, whom he had defeated twice to make the 1984 Olympic team).
Despite a marriage to long-time sweetheart Gina Owens, granddaughter of the legendary Jesse Owens, wedded life, fatherhood and a settled career were no match for the party circuit.
"The type of guy I was then, if I couldn't go to the latest night club, then my life was a disaster," said Tillman.
He fell from grace in the business of boxing, eked out a living as a "professional celebrity". Golf, sailing, baseball, basketball - it didn't matter much: Tillman could be relied upon to turn up at a moment's notice. Inevitably, his career and marriage suffered.
And then he was arrested for murder.
Tillman's ugly plunge into the abyss came as a shock to all who knew him.
On a busy weekday evening in 1996, Tillman was "in the wrong place at the wrong time". Police say he stood on the sidewalk outside a (now-defunct) downtown L.A. night club, leant into a car and shot dead Kevin Anderson and seriously wounded Leon Milton, who, at the time, was a suspected drug dealer.
The Los Angles District Attorney's Office portrayed Tillman as a cold-hearted killer who shot a man at point-blank range outside a nightclub over a drug deal gone wrong.
"The only thing I am guilty of is being in a nightclub," asserted Tillman.
Gina, who divorced him during this time, still says she loves Tillman. She just didn't love his lifestyle. She never believed Tillman was capable of murder but, despite a complete lack of physical evidence, nobody seemed able to help him.
"I blame the D.A.'s office at the time," said Tillman. "I believe Gil Garcetti, who was running for re-election, felt stung by the Rodney King trial and the O.J. Simpson case. Garcetti wanted to show the public he was up to the challenge of putting a professional black athlete in his place.
"Look, I can't compare myself to O.J. but I am a well-known black athlete."
Tillman's two-week trial would make dense fodder for a TV movie of the week.
The saga includes the recanting of testimony by two witnesses who said that Tillman fired the gunshots that killed.
All along, Al DeBlanc, Tillman's attorney, contended this was a case of mistaken identity. No fingerprints on the weapon, or the roof of the car, which contained a massive palm print where the gunman leant to reach inside the vehicle to shoot, matched Tillman's. Not one single print matched his.
Tillman was denied bail. In what sounds like a bad B-movie, he spent six years locked up, all the while proclaiming his innocence.
Now free, Tillman spoke exclusively to Boxing Monthly about what he calls his "lost years."
"I was in prison six years. 72 months to be exact. I can tell you the exact days, hours, minutes [he checks his watch] and even the seconds because I kept count."

 

Tillman, looking almost as good as he did in his "heyday", is planning a comeback. So far, his steps are small. The lure of the gym is not as exciting now as it once was. Some days he trains, other days he still runs, but finds excuses not to hit the treadmill, not to spar.

"It's hard to explain what prison was like to somebody who hasn't been there," said Tillman during a lull in his evening job as "host" at an Egyptian restaurant in Los Angeles.

Tillman, dressed in a green tracksuit, his massive hands adorned only by his Olympic Games ring, scanned the crush of sidewalk traffic at Habibi's, an Egyptian cafe - one of many which has taken over an entire block in the city of Westwood.

Habibi's sports live, hypnotic music and belly dancers as well as aromatic hookahs and chichas. Tillman is planning backgammon tournaments (his other big love apart from boxing), sports nights and live boxing telecasts.

Well-heeled patrons cram the outside tables to sample rose, cherry, apple, jasmine, melon and even banana flavoured tobacco. All of them are seemingly unaware the big fellow with the ready smile has, setting aside the issues of innocence and guilt for a second,0 been inside for attempted murder and voluntary manslaughter.

"I hate cigarettes but I love the smell of this tobacco because it's pure," said Tillman who meets, greets and seats the diners. He's not kidding. The scent wafts over you, the sweet tang of molasses at the base of all the tobaccos.

Tillman is the perfect person to host Habibi's. He loves the restaurant, loves its owners Saad Fathi and his son Mickey, even more.

"I knew Mickey when he was a little boy," said Tillman of the slight young man who manages the restaurant. "My big regret is that I missed out on six years of his life by being in prison. I know the whole family. I've slept in their house. I wanna get Mickey in the gym and teach him some boxing moves."

Tillman isn't bitter that so many friends disappeared during the tough years.

Ironically, every boxing person he knew turned their backs. It was the non-boxing- related Fathis who not only kept the faith of friendship but helped out with Tillman's legal fees.

"What I found in prison," said Tillman, surprisingly, "was peace. Every soul has to taste death. Every person, every ant, every leaf, every tree has to taste death. I tasted it and what I have achieved is peace. I live each day as if it were my last."

Over coffee, more details of the dark years emerged: "The judge declared a mistrial after it was revealed the prosecutor failed to disclose the complete criminal record of a police informant scheduled to testify against me," he said.

In fact, court documents show that Lauri Meadows, the star prosecution witness, recanted her own previous testimony at a 1996 hearing, saying that Tillman was not the gunman.

Meadows also revealed under cross-examination that she was in Federal custody awaiting a charge of cocaine possession with intent to deliver and testified she hoped deputy District Attorney Michael Duarte could help her when she was sentenced for that case.

Though the District Attorney's office planned to file fresh charges - they also offered him a plea bargain. Tillman refused.

During the trial, Tillman had been in jail - not prison - for four and a half years. That meant 48 hours in his cell, 30 minutes out of it. Back in for another 48 and so on. All without the benefit of much human contact.

There was no TV, no radio, no music. "I was white when I came out jail," he said. "I mean, white. I didn't go outside for all that time.

"When I was in there, I decided right there and then, this was not my cell. This was my window to my whole life, a window on the world. I could use my time to read and to learn and to grow. I read, I wrote letters, I did some serious thinking there."

Some deputies, who came to know and like Tillman, started smuggling boxing magazines to him in his cell. He read them from cover to cover before returning them.

"It gave me back the boxing bug," he said. "I was seeing all these stories on Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson, man I beat that guy! It made me wanna come back in a big way."

When he took the plea bargain, he was transferred to Delano State Prison.

"Once I was in prison, I got to watch TV and I listened to music. I listened to whatever I could get my hands on and I told my family, bring me books. Whatever you do, when you come to visit, bring me books. I read everything. I read every single book I could get. I studied the scriptures."

He also started to shadowbox in prison to prepare himself for his comeback. "I never wasted my days playing Ping-Pong or basketball or what's that stupid card game they play. . . pinnacle.

"Guys used to joke with me that I was a man on a mission and I was. Some guards had no problem with me shadowboxing. A couple of guards had problems with it, I guess because they were scared, so I learned not to do it on their shift but a few were fans and they would come to watch me."

Tillman's attorney advised his client to plead "No Contest" and with time already served, spent only another 10 months in prison.

"I refused to plead guilty because I am not guilty," he said. "But the thought of going through another trial . . . I couldn't do it. I am not very trusting of the jury system so accepted no contest.

"My attorney told me: 'You can scream I'm innocent for the rest of your life in prison or you can scream I'm innocent for 10 months. You run the risk of going to jail for life by going up against 13 people again in another trial."

Tillman had already lost so much: He was also worried about losing more time away from boxing. Some might say he got the legal equivalent of a shellacking.

Ahead of him now, he hopes, is a resurrected boxing career. He has found support slowly. "People are curious, suspicious maybe. But mostly, they are just waiting to see what I do."

He is training at a couple of L.A. gyms, trying to find the right fit. "Cool" Vince Phillips is a stablemate and Tillman appreciates Phillips's ease with him.

"There's a reason they call Vince 'Cool'," he said. "You know what I like about him? He's a man. He's straight up. He takes you as you are. He is very professional at work and he is very friendly away from the gym. It don't matter what I did or didn't do.

"We are both working our asses off! I do my roadwork very early in the morning. The running is everything. If you run, you get your confidence and your conditioning going. You prevent injuries. You fight much better."

Once seduced by good times, Tillman has put the past behind him. "I don't hang out with the same people. Believe it or not my best friend is my dad. I'm staying with him right now and he is incredibly supportive, incredibly strong."

His 16-year old son, who lives in Dallas, is itching to fly to Los Angeles for his dad's comeback fight, tentatively scheduled for June.

"He wants to spend time with me. I'm still the biggest and the best to him," said Tillman with a rare, indulgent smile.

"When you are inside you have a lot of time to think. I still think about the guys inside. I wonder what they're doing and what will happen to them.

"In six years, everything on the outside has changed so much. I sometimes wonder how guys who are for 20 or 30 years can cope with coming back into society. It's rough."

The biggest change was "people are nicer to each other now. I've honestly noticed that. It may have a lot to do with September 11. Of course we watched it on TV in prison. Guys like me who weren't in for very long were very shook up. The lifers were very . . . ambivalent about it all. None of it really affects them."

Tillman, who had always read the Koran during his religious readings before jail, took the oath and became a Muslim in prison.

"The thing about Islam is that everybody sits on the floor," he said. "Doesn't matter who you are, who your family is. If you get there early, you get a good seat, if you don't, you just have to sit further back."

He appreciates the order of the faith. He has questions and asks at the appropriate times. "There are three religions," he said. "Christianity, Judaism and Islam. They all have importance. There is something to be learned from all of them."

As a Muslim, he has an interesting take on the terrorist attacks, carried out in the name of Allah on September 11.

"God didn't order those attacks," he said. "They were not the work of God. They were the work of us, of people. God knows everything, so he knew of the attacks but we can't question God's plan, why he didn't intervene.

"There is a story in the Koran about a catastrophe that could have been averted but when God doesn't stop it, it's because intervention would have caused something worse. The people who died on September 11 might have saved us all."

 

Tillman has had plenty of time to think about all this.

He may have lost a lot, but has achieved so much more. "I came up with all sorts of plans while I was in there," he said. "I came up with ideas for work release programs for prisoners. Programmes for kids.

"I started writing a book. I have all sorts of titles for it but I want to finish it. I also got my driver's license when I was in prison. I had no access to computers, so I used an old-fashioned pencil and paper. I wrote to the Department of Motor Vehicles and stated my case and when I came out, I paid the fees and got my licence in three days."

He now has a spanking-new SUV with a TV in it. Years of deprivation don't persuade him to stare at it whilst he is driving. "It's for my passengers. I would like to get a DVD player in it though," he said with a chuckle.

Tillman is supplementing hosting duties with acting work. He played an attorney - "it was so nice to be on the other side of the fence" - on the TV series Philly.

"They keep calling me in at least once a week," he said. "One of my friends said they may be thinking of giving me a regular role."

Whatever happens, he won't give up on his dream of returning to the ring. "I am so dedicated," he said. "Very few people know this but I wasn't ever supposed to walk. My legs were crooked when I was little and I had to wear steel braces. Yeah.

"My dad carried me everywhere for the first five years of my life. I used to crawl around, too, which made my upper body strong. Then I got the use of my legs. I am still knock-kneed.

"I am the only one in the family who is. But I figure if I overcame that, I have to keep going. I have constantly surprised people. I figure I'm supposed to keep doing that. I have so many dreams, so many plans and today sitting here, I know that they are real."
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