Season 2: #4 Leroy Caldwell

Boxing Life Stories

Tris Dixon

Sports

5 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2019

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At 73 years of age, Leroy Caldwell can be found in the City Boxing Gym in Las Vegas waiting for the break he never had as a fighter. He fought the best heavyweights of the 1970s and 1980s and caused a few upsets. He's been to prison, he's been screwed and now he's trying to claim a debt he feels boxing owes him for services rendered. He sparred the likes of Muhammad Ali, Bob Foster and Sonny Liston and fought Cleveland Williams, Oscar Bonavena, George Foreman, Earnie Shavers, Ron Lyle, Pinklon Thomas and countless others. He also worked as a bouncer in Las Vegas nightspots, let an underage Mike Tyson in to one place, and he talks about life on the road as a heavyweight outsider.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to a world of Christmas celebration at Aldi. Six-pack deep-filled minced pies only £1. Good housekeeping taste approved winners too. Scallop Gratans only $3.99 and a large whole frozen British turkey from just $3.5 a kilo. On sale now, all from the
0:15.6	which cheapest supermarket of the year. Aldi, share the love this Christmas.
0:20.0	If I'm on, if I'm gonna be a fighter, if I don't make the money, at least I walk away with my brain.
0:25.6	I always looked at it like this, you know, I said, I know I could be a world champion if somebody
0:31.3	come along, you know know and take a chance
0:33.3	with me you know why I wouldn't have to try to worry about paying bills and you know
0:38.1	jobs and all this can not you know places to live you know I found I had that I know I could have been a
0:44.3	world champion.
0:45.1	Ernie is the only one that ever knocked me out and I didn't know what was going on.
0:54.0	When I got up there and taken my gloves off and I thought I was a fight just beginning, but it was over.
1:00.0	I feel that I wouldn't be sitting up here broke.
1:04.7	Like I am now. I felt that I would have something. I would have money.
1:08.0	To show for it all, yeah.
1:09.0	That's all the guys I felt, you know, I should never have to worry about anything but I was taking
1:13.7	fights you understand for a little or nothing for I was taking breakfast money
1:16.8	while he ate half dinner money you know.
1:19.2	I want to you know I want to get something out of boxing I want to and I feel that I feel that
1:26.2	Boxes hold me something you know I could be wrong but I feel that it does you know and the only way I'm going to get my, just is training other guys and making them,
1:37.0	making them become somebody in the box game. So, Oh, Hello and welcome to Boxing Life stories I'm Trist Dixon. My guest this week is
2:09.0	former heavyweight Leroy Coldwell. Leroy fought the best of the best of the
2:12.9	the 1970s and the cream of the 1980s.
2:16.0	He spared the likes of Mohammed Ali and Sunny Liston
	...

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