Nothing in this small, silent living room hits harder than a picture. Hanging on a wall in the corner, above the recliner, the old painting keeps vigil over a blind fighter who has never seen it.
Perhaps Gerald McClellan doesn’t even know it’s there. But he has been told parts of its story, many times, and the details usually drift to unreachable places.
And so he sits in his chair, same as always, oblivious to what’s in the faded gold frame and only loosely aware that we are in his house, in Freeport, Illinois, 6,400 miles west of a demolished arena in London. The arena where everything went dark 30 years ago this week.
‘What your name?’ he asks.
‘It’s Riath, Gerald.’
‘Rio, what your height?’
‘I’m 5ft 6, Gerald.’
‘What your name?’
‘Riath.’
‘Rio, what your height?’
‘Not as tall as you.’
Gerald McClellan is now blind, brain damaged and confined to an armchair in his Illinois home
McClellan suffered a serious brain injury during his final fight, a defeat by Nigel Benn in 1995
He slumped to the canvas after the bout and was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery
And he laughs at that. It’s a warm, kind laugh, and the man in the painting was never warm or kind. He was the middleweight champion of the world and the most destructive puncher in boxing, to go by Mike Tyson’s view. He was mean and vicious, in the ring and out. The G-Man.
That was a different life, of course. In this one, there are only fragments in a damaged brain to tell McClellan who he is, what he was, and where the money went. Why there’s a colostomy bag under his tracksuit.
But there’s still some power in his 57-year-old body, which now weighs 250 pounds, so when he lashes out, for whatever reason he pulls from the fog, the thump-thump-thumping against the armrests can be heard from the wheelchair ramp that leads to his back porch.
‘This recliner, we only got it last month,’ sighs Lisa McClellan, his sister, carer all hours of the day, and voice to the outside world.
‘We need to find a new one every couple of months – he has been on a different treatment and the improvements have been good. But he can get aggressive. The chairs get real bust up.’
Mail Sport travelled to visit McLellan almost 30 years on from when everything went dark
His home is decorated with old paintings portraying McClenan at his destructive best
Her brother isn’t doing any real busting today. He’s calm, mellow even, lost to endless recitations of random words beneath a picture that reaches down and squeezes your heart.
It shows McClellan’s world the way it was for a specific moment in time – the first 30 seconds of the opening round in a super-middleweight title fight at the London Arena. It’s February 25, 1995.
The acrylics are set against a black backdrop and you can see McClellan in his prime, having just landed a humdinger of a right hand, sweat shining off his biceps.
To his left in the frame is Nigel Benn, the Dark Destroyer, and he is folded at the waist in crisis; a sitting duck for the next hits that will launch him through the ropes.
That’s just how it happened, too. It’s a fine piece of artwork, one that screams off a wall in a still and sad room.
But, goodness, has a painting ever left so much unsaid?
Houses stand on the site of the London Arena on the Isle of Dogs today, because times change, but not for everyone.
Occasionally, McClellan informs Lisa that he is still the middleweight champion of the world, and mostly he believes he is 27, riding in on a 31-2 record, 29 knockouts, 10 of the previous 13 in the first round.
When his sister brings up the fight that came next, six hours into our visit, there is an exchange as jolting as that painting.
McClellan was counted out after being stopped by Benn and spent 11 days in a coma in hospital
‘I stop him?’ McClellan asks.
Lisa chooses her words carefully. ‘You knocked him out of the ring in the first round,’ she says back.
Gerald: ‘Did I bully him?’
Lisa: ‘No, I wouldn’t say you bullied him. You were more active the first round.’
Gerald: ‘What weight?’
Lisa: ‘Super-middleweight.’
And around they go again, McClellan and the one person who never left, living out boxing’s most painful truths.
When the fight happened, Lisa McClellan, 55 now, was home in a different part of Freeport. The US broadcast wasn’t being shown until hours later, so she was busy in her own life and planning to be nurse. Of five siblings, Lisa and Gerald were the least close back then.
To this day, she has never watched the footage in its entirety.
But she knows how it went – the first-round knockdown, the generous, slow count Benn received from a French referee who spoke no English, and the way the local fighter came thundering back.
She has also seen a few clues, same as the rest of us, but she knows them better. So she is aware her brother’s gumshield was repeatedly dangling from his mouth, and she has theories about that, and there are questions about the blinking. About the eccentric trainer in McClellan’s corner, about the chaos of their preparation, and whether a towel should have gone in early.
But it never did, and on went a brilliant and brutal fight, maybe the most brilliant and brutal of all. It gave us what we wanted, as Benn would later say.
He had walked back to his corner and slumped onto the canvas, next to his stool
It was the eighth when Benn hit the deck again, the ninth when an accidental headbutt sent McClellan down, and the 10th when his world caved in.
The first time McClellan took a knee, the un-deux-trois made it to sept. The second, Alfred Asaro got to dix and it was all over. The commentators on ITV were shouting to 17 million viewers that McClellan simply quit, that his heart wasn’t in it, and a good while passed before any of them realised he had walked back to his corner and slumped down onto the canvas, next to his stool.
Lisa won’t ever forget the two phone calls.
‘The first came from one of the guys in the corner, saying Gerald lost and was going to hospital for observation,’ she says.
‘We hadn’t seen it – we were on tape delay here. The second call was bad. They said that when they were doing the brain scan, Gerald slipped into a coma and we had five minutes to give him permission to do surgery or he was going to die.’
It took three and a half hours for the surgeons at the Royal London Hospital to remove the blood clot, and McClellan spent the next 11 days in a coma. After six more months, he returned to the United States, and those recliners have been the boundaries of his world ever since.
Tommy Hearns, his old gym buddy from the Kronk days in Detroit, is a regular caller, and McClellan’s three grown-up kids come by from time to time. The most frequent is Gerald Jr, 36, and he is a boxer, too, as it happens. Joe Frazier stopped in regularly when he was alive.
But the trail of visitors to Freeport has largely dried up, because it’s a sobering trip to make.
‘Gerald mentions the fight sometimes,’ Lisa says, and as she speaks, McClellan is in front of a television he cannot watch. Some daytime show is debating how best to care for your baby.
McClellan occasionally mentions the fight, saying he took a knee as ‘everything went dark’
On the morning we arrived, Lisa had given her brother his daily bath at around 9am. It was during the same routine shortly before Christmas that a breakthrough was made.
‘It came completely out nowhere,’ she says. ‘When I’m getting him out of the bath, he goes, “Do you know why I took a knee? Everything around me went dark. I couldn’t hear nothing”.
‘It blew my mind when he said it – that was one of his own memories, not something I gave him. But I changed the subject. I guess I was afraid what else he would remember. I wasn’t prepared for it.’
That was among the biggest leaps McClellan has made in 30 years, and there is hope that a new treatment protocol across the past 12 months, featuring daily injections of peptides, testosterone and other hormones, will generate more. Lisa says his words are getting clearer, but she remains the only person fluent in his language.
To those of us who drop in, it’s harder. The way his short-term memory works now, information doesn’t seem to stick for longer than 30 seconds.
On this day, he’ll ask Lisa ‘where’s daddy?’ She’ll tell him their father is in Mississippi and that he has been for 12 years. That he’ll be back in May, as he told McClellan himself on the phone an hour ago.
But then he’ll ask again, four or five times, or about Uncle Cornelius, or about his own kids and their ages, height and weight. Or Lisa’s grandson, an undefeated wrestler.
‘He finishes them quick like you,’ Lisa tells him, and how her brother loves that. He clenches his fist and beams a smile, before heading down a different path.
Gerald: ‘Lisa, how old Don King?’
Lisa: ‘In his nineties.’
Gerald: ‘He my partner.’
Lisa: ‘No, he was your promoter.’
Gerald: ‘Lisa, you like him?’
Lisa: ‘No.’
McClellan received $63,000 from the bout but his sister says there are unanswered questions
Lisa is his carer all hours of the day and voice to the outside world (pictured: the two siblings)
McClellan squeals a long, high-pitched ‘awww’ when he hears it. But those thoughts also disappear and next he wants to know if Hearns, 66, is still fighting.
These are the loops of their lives, circling until 9pm each night, when Lisa will walk him a few steps to his bed, this man whose hobby used to be dog-fighting. She keeps a baby monitor in her room.
Lisa doesn’t talk to McClellan about the specifics of his condition, because it might cause more traumas, and he hasn’t mentioned anything about the 10th round since that morning in the bath.
But he knows the Benn fight left him blind. And he knows he was in a hospital. Mostly, he just gets by, happy in his way, and vacant in others. There and not there, like the painting.
If you’re wondering, his purse on that night was $250,000, and by the time Don King had allocated the deductions, McClellan received $63,000, so £103,000 in today’s money. The price of a life.
‘There’s no sadness in him,’ Lisa will say over and over, and her own anger is well buried by now. But there are an awful lot of unanswered questions, and she is not about to stop asking them.
It’s been 15 years since Lisa McClellan last heard from Don King.
‘I wrote to his people six months ago,’ she says. ‘I wanted to film us talking so I could ask him: “You have taken from so many fighters – when are you going to make good?” I haven’t had a reply.’
Their battle was all over the news for a while, but that’s an old story about fallen boxers and the speed at which a sport can turn its back. An untold one concerns Benn and a phone call in 2007.
They had their only reunion that year, when McClellan travelled to London for a fundraiser. Elements of it have been shown in documentaries, especially the moment Benn crouched next to his former opponent’s wheelchair and held his hand.
Benn has always denied taking any performance-enhancers ahead of the fight in London
It wasn’t only McClellan’s life that changed and Lisa is desperate for some answers
If you watch those pieces of footage back, you can hear McClellan tell his sister: ‘This man almost took my life.’ He asks her if Benn ‘looks sad’, and Benn does, truly. He walked away and broke down in a corridor.
That fundraiser generated around £100,000 for McClellan. It’s more than he ever got from an insurance payout, or anything else that was sold to fund his ongoing care, including one of his two world title belts for around £2,500.
But Lisa has other details to share with us about that gathering. One is a claim that the evening actually generated more than £1m; when she requested a detailed breakdown of where it all went, an organiser allegedly told her their computer had crashed.
She also recalls being present with one of the organisers when a call came in from Benn, who by that stage in his life had become a Christian preacher.
‘He called to complain because he found out we were in the same hotel,’ she says. ‘He had some very severe words that would not have been said by a pastor and wanted to be moved immediately.’
Lisa insists she bears no ill will to Benn. For years, her views were harder, but she made some level of peace with him when she left London.
‘I had to move on,’ she says, and yet many thoughts have lingered with her.
Some involve Stan Johnson, the shambling, inexperienced figure in a sailor’s hat who was in charge of McClellan’s corner that night. ‘He shouldn’t have been,’ says Lisa, and it remains an indictment of Johnson that her brother didn’t even trust him to wrap his hands.
Had McClellan not split from the late Emanuel Steward, a trainer of 40 other world champions, who knows if all that blinking would have passed by without intervention? ‘The fight wouldn’t have been in London for a start,’ she says.
It was Johnson once claimed he had evidence from a blood-stained boot that suggested Benn was on steroids, and few took him seriously, including Lisa.
But she asks: ‘Why didn’t Nigel have a drugs test that night?’ Benn has always denied taking any performance-enhancers, and has pointed to his own collapse on the walk back from the ring for why he wasn’t tested.
Thirty years on, that question blends into others. She fires them out about the referee, his 13-second count, and why he was chosen if he couldn’t speak English. More conspiratorially, she wonders about the loose mouthguard.
‘It was only handed to him on the way to the ring,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t his.’
Mail Sport’s Riath Al-Samarrai poses for a photo with Lisa and McClellan next to his recliner
She leaves a bit unspoken there, and you have to sympathise. With all of it. Because it wasn’t only McClellan’s life that changed one night in 1995.
‘I just want to know why this happened to my brother,’ she says.
His care used to be shared with another sister, Sandra, but when she died shortly before Christmas, it all fell on Lisa, 24/7, propped up on state grants of around $1000 per fortnight.
The medications alone cost $2,200 each month, and that has been covered by donations from Mauricio Sulaiman, the president of the World Boxing Council. Other well-wishers and the occasional boxer chip in, usually through the laudable Ring of Brotherhood Foundation that Lisa set up for struggling fighters, but it’s a hell of a slog. And one she has taken on for other families.
Currently there are 16 fighters she is helping through the foundation – applications for financial support, access to medical specialists, the kind of know-how you master after a couple of decades.
Her next dream is of a sport where one per cent of boxing revenues are funnelled towards the many men like her brother. ‘They need it,’ she says. ‘Boxing can’t look away.’
But it has form for doing just that, sadly.
Maybe it will take a saint to change it. And perhaps Lisa will find the time to pull it off, but before then she has to get dinner on. Same as every night.
‘He’s my brother,’ she says in the kitchen as we get ready to leave. ‘We weren’t putting him in some care home.’
A few metres away, Gerald McClellan is muttering to himself in his corner of the living room, beneath the painting that screams.
If he is fortunate for anything, it is that he was never the only fighter in his family.
To donate to Ring of Brotherhood, visit: www.ringofbrotherhoodfoundation.org
