sick of hearing what an all time great he could have been. the truth is he was nothing, a nobody , who never fought anyone, if he had have done he would have got his ass kicked. i was one of the people who thought he should be let out, and how he was so changed, and deserved another chance. the end of the day he is a overated coward, who can beat women up, big deal, shame that women never killed him, anyway the ****** is in prison, just lets hope he dies soon, and i can have a good laugh all day long. rant over,
Back in 1983,a 19 year old Ayala was on the verge of fighting either Davey Moore or Roberto Duran.Tony hadn't fought anyone of real contention but had captured imagination with his brutal kayos of second raters.More than once , he had spit upon downed opponents.Unknown to most, Ayala was already on probation for assaulting a female in Texas.Then came the incident in New Jersey that landed him in jail for 17 years.By the time he got out , he talked like a reabilitated man, but broke into another womans house.This particular woman refused to be his victim however, and shot this low life.Now he will spend the rest of his days incarcerated, no one caring a good Goddamn about this psychopath again.
He was a frontrunner coward, who impressed alot of people by spitting on an opponent after ko'ing him, and other displays of undisciplined fury. He would have been schooled ultimately had he met Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns, Marvin Hagler or Ray Leonard.
He broke in to a girls house and assaulted here. She suffered from multiple injuries including a ruptured blatter or spleen(spelling)
I think the guy really was overrated. He might have beaten Davey Moore, but Duran would torn him to pieces. When Ayala's people were mentioning Duran as an possible opponent, most people thought Duran was washed up, as did Davey Moore's people. As a person, I think you guys have covered that part accurately. He was ans is a piece of ****.
Tony had gotten away with a slap on the wrist earlier for attacking a girl in the bathroom at a drive-in when he was 15. Talented guy, but scum. Too bad he wasn't the one who ended up taking a beating from Duran and then died by getting run over by his own car. Or maybe Luis Resto should've beaten him with no padding. Someone just kill this guy, he's a waste of human life.
There was also speculation of him fighting John Mugabi at 154lbs. Ayala would have got demolished, steam-rolled in a round. I remember Ayala actually spat on one of his opponents while he was on the canvas.
He's a joke of a human being, but I believe he had the potential to become a great fighter...however, it just wasn't meant to be and that's that.
Wednesday, July 18, 2001 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal BATTLE SCARS After 16 years in prison, boxer Tony Ayala finds himself in trouble again This content is protected </B>SAN ANTONIO -- The scar is visible the moment Tony Ayala Jr. takes off a T-shirt soaked from a workout in his sweltering gym. The dime-sized mark rests on his thick chest just beneath his left collarbone. On his back is another scar, where the bullet fired from the trembling hands of an 18-year-old woman exited. "Forty-five caliber, the biggest around, and I didn't go down," said Ayala, a touch of fighter's machismo in his voice. The wounds of the former junior middleweight contender have healed. The women he sexually assaulted aren't as lucky. One was a teen-ager beaten and raped while using the restroom at a drive-in movie theater. The other was a neighbor in Paterson, N.J., tied up at knifepoint and raped on New Year's Day 1983. Nancy Gomez didn't wait to find out if she were about to become another victim. The high school senior shot Ayala as he stood in the kitchen of the rented house she shared with two other adults and two small children in the early morning hours of Dec. 12. "Baby, I'm here to talk to you," Ayala told Gomez just before she pulled the trigger. A few hours earlier, the boxer known as "El Torito" was chasing tequila with beers in a strip club with his wife and a bodyguard. Now, at 3:45 in the morning, he was inside the darkened home of a woman he met at his gym and had over to his house for dinner a few times. If it sounds familiar, it was. But 16 years in prison was supposed to have taught Ayala a lesson about entering the homes of women in the middle of the night. At his first trial, Ayala testified that the sex in New Jersey was consensual, admitting years later that he had lied. Now he insists he's telling the truth -- that he was there only because he needed to talk to someone. "Everybody's assuming I was there to do something," Ayala says. "I wasn't, but they think I was. They want their pound of flesh." Indeed they do. Prosecutors plan to try to introduce his past when he goes on trial next month on charges that could put him back in prison -- this time for life. First, though, the 38-year-old boxer will return to the ring July 31 against Santos Cardona for what could be Ayala's final fight. Strapped to his ankle will be a monitor to make sure he doesn't go where he shouldn't. It's a precaution that might have been better when Ayala was released from prison in April 1999. "Sometimes you just have a gut feeling about people," said Marilyn Zdobinski, a New Jersey prosecutor who was in the courtroom for the first trial. "I believe he will always represent a danger to women." -- -- -- Tony Ayala was as fearsome a fighter as the sport had ever seen. At 19, he was undefeated in 22 fights, a mass of uncontrolled fury in the ring and out. Robbie Epps found that out after questioning Ayala's manhood, only to get knocked down and then hit again on the canvas before the referee could break things up. Ayala knocked another fighter out, then spit on him in disgust. He was Mike Tyson before Mike Tyson. Ranked No. 1 at 154 pounds, he signed for a title fight against World Boxing Association champion Davey Moore that was to pay him $750,000. His boxing future seemingly had no limit. "He was wicked, vicious," fight promoter Lester Bedford said. "When he walked into the ring you knew something dramatic was going to happen." Like Tyson, though, Ayala had demons he couldn't control. Molested by a family friend for several years in grade school, he began drinking young and was using heroin by age 12. Inside the ring was the only place he felt in control, and even there he sometimes couldn't control himself. "I grew up with a lot of dysfunction and I had a lot of anger as a result of my molestation," Ayala said. "Boxing was a way of proving my manhood, my strength and my dominance. I saw in an opponent someone who was challenging my manliness." Ayala was only 15 but had been fighting 10 years when he beat and sexually assaulted a girl in a restroom in San Antonio, leaving her with internal injuries and a ruptured spleen. He pleaded guilty and received 10 years' probation. A few years later, he was arrested on charges he ransacked a neighbor's house after he was found drunk inside. Ayala, who would later admit to shooting heroin before three fights, was put in rehab by his handlers and moved to New Jersey to get him away from the temptations back home in San Antonio. A few weeks later, he tied up and raped a 30-year-old schoolteacher neighbor, then threatened her roommate with a knife when she came to help. "Many men drink to excess and it would never occur to them to **** someone," said Diana Scully, a sociology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of a book on sexual violence. "Being molested as a child is yet another excuse that is significantly overused." A jury took only three hours to reject Ayala's claim that the sex was consensual, and a judge sentenced him to 15 to 35 years in prison . A few hours later Ayala was on his way from ring riches to inmate No. 69765 at the state prison in Rahway, N.J. While there, he was counseled by prison psychologist Brian Raditz, who, in a bizarre twist, would later become Ayala's manager and sometimes drinking partner. If there were still demons, Ayala didn't show them publicly. He said all the right things and vowed never to repeat his mistakes. "The pain I put the victim through will never be forgotten. It's something I want to keep speaking out on," Ayala said upon his release. "It was a terrible thing to do." There seemed only one thing left to prove -- whether he could still fight. It didn't take long to find out.
-- -- -- Ayala's return to the ring on Aug. 20, 1999, was a time for celebration in this city's large Hispanic community. About 10,700 packed the aging Freeman Coliseum near downtown to see if the "The Little Bull" was anything like the feared fighter of years past. On the day of the fight lines stretched 100 yards from 10 ticket windows. The fans weren't disappointed. Ayala, though balding and thickened around the middle, thrilled them by stopping Manuel Esparza in the third round to win his first fight in 17 years. In the crowd, two women carried around a banner that said, "Hispanic women for better justice support Torito." Others partied the night away, waving yellow signs that said: "Torito....heee's back." The slogan of his return was "To Hell and Back." It seemed to fit. "It was an ongoing 17-year soap opera while he was in prison, but the people of San Antonio still loved him," Bedford said. "The sense of drama was still there." Ayala fought six times, making about $700,000. He remarried his common-law wife, Lisa, who divorced him while he was in prison, and they bought a 3-acre spread with a swimming pool. Ayala helped his father buy the gym where he trained, and there was talk of a fight with Hector Camacho that might make him $500,000. Fueling it all was a sense of urgency to make up for 16 years of lost time in a sport in which age plays no favorites. "I'm a 38-year-old man competing in a sport of 20-year-olds," Ayala said. "It's a lot harder than I remember it was before." Being a hometown hero, though, brought temptations Ayala couldn't resist. He began going out on the town, often with Lisa in tow, and partying at bars and strip clubs. Sixteen years in prison had built a big thirst. "You have no idea what the transition was like," Ayala said. "Going from a very controlled environment where they tell you every move you make to having total freedom was a shock. There were a lot of people making bets on whether or not I'd fail." Among them was the former head of the New Jersey State Parole Board, who voted to deny Ayala's parole in 1998. "I remember thinking he might do well for a while," Andrew Consovoy said last year. "But I told my colleagues, if he lost a fight no woman should be allowed within 50 miles of him." That loss finally came July 28 when Ayala, dehydrated from trying to make weight, broke his hand in the third round and took a beating from Yory Boy Campas. His father and trainer, Tony Sr., stopped the fight at the end of the eighth round, with tears streaming down his son's swollen eyes. "It's OK," the elder Ayala whispered to his son. Later, slumped in his dressing room, the boxer vowed to come back and said he was determined to become even better. "You're not going to see any nonsense. No arrests," he vowed. Ayala had been drinking for some time before the loss. Waiting for his hand to heal, he began partying even more. Raditz warned Ayala he was drinking too much, though he would often join him on his trips around town. "I thought it would be safer at times for me to be there," Raditz said. "He fooled himself with the drinking and he let it get away from him. We talked about it, but sometimes people can't recognize they have a problem." The night he was shot, Ayala was drinking heavily at a strip joint called Babe's Men's Club. He argued with his wife and walked out with a stripper. Ayala showed up a short time later at a modest wood-frame home where a couple and their two children shared space with Gomez, a girl who befriended Ayala and his wife while she was taking self-defense lessons at his gym. Gomez was sleeping on a couch in the living room when she opened her eyes to see a dark figure standing across the room. She ran to another room, shaking her friend and saying, "Somebody's in the house!" The women confronted Ayala in the kitchen, ordering him not to move. When he began coming forward, Gomez fired the gun. Ayala was drunk but he remembers it clearly. There was a burning in his shoulder and blood streaming down his back. He sat down on the floor, waiting for police and an ambulance. Ayala was indicted on charges of burglary and intent to commit assault and sexual assault, charges that could bring a life sentence in prison when he goes on trial Aug. 13. "What's crazy is these charges of intent," Ayala said. "Nothing ever happened. How do you show intent as I was walking out? I was shot at the rear of the house while I was leaving." Raditz said if Ayala had intended to hurt Gomez, he would have. "If he had a need to do an assault, he would have done it. Nothing ever stopped him from doing it before," Raditz said. "But he resolved his demons many years ago. The need to attack and hurt doesn't exist at all." Don't be so sure, others say. "I think she was damn lucky to have a gun," Zdobinski said. Even those like Bedford, who promoted many of Ayala's fights, aren't so sure anymore. "I'm wanting very badly to think he was just there for another reason other than to commit a crime," Bedford said. Ayala, meanwhile, continues to train in the small gym west of downtown where fight posters speak of happier times. He's broke, owes money to the IRS and needs his July 31 fight to help pay bills. Lisa left him after the arrest and filed for divorce again, and he wonders if the fans in San Antonio still care. "I'm toiling on the edge of losing everything," he said. Ayala goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings daily and has his urine tested several times a week. He must wear the ankle monitor as a condition for his release on $100,000 bail. He trains for a fight that could determine his boxing future. A much bigger fight, though, looms in the courtroom. "I don't fear going back to prison, but I don't want to," he said. "I enjoy my freedom and I'm willing to fight and die for my freedom. But if I go back I'll survive one way or another. I did it for 16 years, and I can do it again."
Of course i know who pipino cuevas was, seen him fight loads of times, and as for the story you ask me to read, just shows what a ***** the author was, comparing Mozart to ayala , mozart wrote and arranged, and played some of the best classical music around, and will be remembered forever that, OK ayala is a peice of **** that did nothing, imagine if mozart played the piano when he was 5 . which he did amazingly, and then did **** all else, who would have , heard of him, and still remember him "oh him he COULD have been a great" means nothing, could have been great ,means you were not a great, ayala was , and is a piece of **** , end of story, not a all time great, he did nothing, do you know who Mozart is.
