Boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard wrote a memoir, The Big Fight: My Life In and Out of the Ring, and in it detail sexual abuse he encountered with a former boxing coach.
In 1971, when Leonard was 15, a “prominent Olympic boxing coach” took advantage of him and another fighter while they were in a hot tub. He sat on the other side of the room and did “something a bit inappropriate.”
A few years later, a the coach made a bolder move.
Wrote Leonard:
“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.”
The book also goes into Leonard’s problems with drugs, alcohol, marital infidelity and domestic problems.
Boxers seem to always live intense lives!
[Image via WENN.com/FayesVision.]