Name: ______
Miss Jordan
English Essentials – Period _____
Date: ______
Profile Essay
Looking at Some Profiles
Profiles are common pieces in popular magazines because readers like to read about interesting people and places. In a profile from Esquire, Mike Lupica portrays the boxer Riddick Bowe and, using an interesting rhetorical strategy, compares Bowe’s experience to that of another famous boxer, Mike Tyson. As you read, think about the view of Bowe emphasized by Lupica.
The Other Kid from Brownsville
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Mike Lupica
He stood at the end of Maher Drive in Fort Washington, Maryland, his huge boxing hands pointing all over the empty lot, quick and busy as jabs. “This is my property,” he said. There was nothing to see, really, just red ribbons attached to trees, marking the start of the five acres he had bought before he beat Evander Holyfield to become the heavyweight champion of the world.
Riddick Bowe saw plenty, though. He pointed with his great left hand and said the gym would be over there. On the other side of the house, he would build a garage big enough to fit his Jeep Cherokee, a red BMW, and eight other cars. The whole complex would sit behind an ornate gate with BOWE FAMILY written across the front.
He stood patiently in front of the black Cherokee and showed me what until now had been only a landmark of imagination. After a while, he reached into the jeep and pulled out the blueprints. He showed me the master bedroom – with two television sets, a Jacuzzi, and even a small kitchen – and the master bathroom, which on paper looks more like the site of the 1994 Super Bowl.
“Long way from eleven o’clock in the night on Lott Avenue,” he said, tracing in his mind the route he had taken from Brownsville, Brooklyn, to the end of Maher Drive.
Bowe is twenty-five years old, the twelfth of thirteen children. His mother worked the midnight-to-eight shift as a machine operator at a place called Admiral Plastics on Avenue D, a twenty-minute walk away. On weeknights when Bowe was a teenager, she would wake him at 10:30 and he would walk her to work.
“I didn’t want to get out of bed some nights,” he said. “I didn’t have much, but I had that warm bed.
“The scary part was getting out of the building. The elevator didn’t work and we had to walk down six flights. It seemed like there was a drug deal going on on every landing. Which meant an automatic weapon on every landing. Every night, I’d be afraid of the same thing: Somebody’d mistake us for the police and we’d be shot for nothin’.”
He looked out at the empty lot and the trees beyond it. The car windows were down and you could hear Phil Collins on the tape player. Riddick Bowe tried to remember all of the old geography, the geography that took one of his sisters – a mother of four, stabbed to death for a welfare check.
“New Lott Avenue to Rockaway Avenue,” he said. “Then left on Rockaway Parkway to Avenue D and maybe another quarter-mile from there. Back to our building and up those stairs. They’d hear me on the landing and I’d say, ‘Not a cop, not a cop. Riddick Bowe from the sixth floor.’ I was trying not to be a damn statistic.”
His new geography is worlds away. To get to this spot, Bowe had driven past well-tended houses with fancy red brick made to look old, past streets with suburban names like Ambrose Lane and Sero Estates. A pair of miniature boxing gloves bounced from the Jeep’s rearview mirror. Phil Collins screamed from the cassette deck.
I can feel it coming in the air tonight.
“That’s the song I used going to the ring,” Bowe said, singing along.
I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.
Kareem Muhammed, his training-camp coordinator, nodded in agreement from the backseat, his eyes closed.
Growing up in Brownsville with crack cocaine, guns, and death all around him, Riddick Bowe had always lived large in his dreams. Today, the undisputed heavy-weight champion ofthe world, he could see mansions reaching to the sky.
I first met him in South Korea, in a section of Seoul known as Itaewon. All the Olympic athletes went there for the shopping deals. Bowe was just a big New York kid with a smile, charming and all mouth.
“I’m a businessman,” he told me then. “I’m in the business of doing all the right things to be champion of the world.”
Now his manager, Rock Newman, runs the heavyweight division, which for as long as your man wins is the same as owning the hottest studio in Hollywood.
Newman comes out of northwest Washington, D.C. He once sold cars and did some radio before entering the boxing business. He became Bowe’s manager in 1988 after Bowe lost to Lennox Lewis in Seoul. A lot of people had given up on him then. Rock Newman saw a six-five kid who had made it to the gold-medal fight with a bad hand and a bad foot, not long after his sister was killed. He went to Brownsville, walked up those six flights of stairs, and told Bowe he wanted to represent him.
“I didn’t have any idea what I was getting myself into,” he says. “I drove over there in my brand-new BMW. There was this gate outside his building, and I saw a couple of guys sitting there. I gave them each ten dollars and told them there was more where that came from if the BMW was still there when I came out.”
Newman swears he told Bowe that very day, in December 1988, that he would get him a title shot in September 1992. He delivered Holyfield to Bowe on November 13. “So I was off by a couple of months,” he says. “Sue me.” It took skill and moxie, but Newman was ready for anything. One night, when fighter Elijah Tillery started kicking Bowe after the bell, Newman jumped into the ring, put a headlock on him, and tossed him over the ropes. After the decision in the Holyfield bout, he was involved in a brawl with an Associated Press photographer.
Newman’s scrappiness and persistence paid off when Bowe was declared champ after one of the best heavyweight title fights in years. If Mike Tyson hadn’t been convicted of rape, things might have worked out differently. But Tyson was in prison when Bowe and Holyfield produced the brutal majesty of the unforgettable tenth round, and unless something happens on appeal, he is there a long time.
“We went to the same school for about six months,” Bowe tells me. “P.S. 396, on Chester Street in Brownsville.”
He is always concerned with the geography of things.
“A long time after that, a friend said, ‘You remember a guy named Mike Tyson?’ I didn’t remember anybody by that name. ‘He’s a boxer now,’ he said, ‘starting to knock out guys twenty-three, twenty-four years old.’ I still said no. Then my friend said, ‘They called him Bummy Ike.’ That’s when I knew who he was.”
On the morning of the Holyfield fight, the biggest day of Riddick Bowe’s life, Tyson called from prison to wish him well. Afterward, Bowe took some post fight hits for dedicating part of his win to Tyson.
“People can come from the same place but be made different,” Bowe says. “All I’m saying is, I know where he’s coming from. Doesn’t mean I want to turn out like he did.”
Right now, Riddick Bowe is living in a modest house in Fort Washington, on a street called Lourdes, like the town in France known for miracles. There is a painting of the Last Supper on his dining-room wall, framed color photographs of his wedding, and pictures of the children. Bowe sits in the cool basement – a few miles from the empty lot where he will build his dream house – and talks about the first day he ever got into the ring.
He was in the seventh grade. “Skinny little nothing,” he says. But he had beat up this kid at school because he dared to bad-mouth Muhammed Ali. The school principal told Bowe about a gym in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. She suggested that he try fighting under supervision. Bowe took the bus over there, walked up to the first trainer he saw – all this Ali in him – and announced that he could whup anybody in the place. Before the afternoon was out, he was given head-gear and a mouthpiece and sent into the ring.
“The other kid’s name was Willie,” Bowe says. “He beat the hell out of me. But I stayed around. They gave me some pointers, and the next day I beat the hell out of Willie. Then they put me in with another kid. Beat the hell out of me. Day after that, I beat the hell out of him.”
Before long, Bowe was getting up in the morning to run in Betsy Head Park. After school he’d go to the gym. Then he’d return home, go to sleep, and wait for his mother to wake him.
“Ali’s my idol,” he tells you. “My mother’s my hero.”
“She told me a lot of things,” he says. “Told me that Ali had finished high school and that I was gonna finish, too. She told me I was gonna use my head for something other than being a greaseball. And she told me this: ‘If you ever go to jail you can cancel Christmas.’ That meant she wasn’t ever gonna visit me.”
Dorothy Bowe retired from Admiral Plastics two years ago. Riddick moved her to Coney Island. She now lives in a small apartment, third floor, in an area with pleasant-sounding street names like Neptune and Mermaid.
“Riddick always told me that someday he was going to make so much money I wasn’t gonna have to do nothin’,” she says.
Dorothy Bowe’s youngest son likes to show you what success has brought him, too: the black Jeep he calls Old Betsy; the BMW he calls The Show; twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of exercise equipment in the basement; and the video arcade for his son and two daughters.
In his backyard, there is a small blue Everlast heavy bag for Riddick junior. “I watch him get going on that thing sometimes and it lights up my whole day,” the father says. “Maybe ‘cause I see myself in him.”
He throws a neat left hand into the small bag now and you can feel the neighborhood move. Bowe smiles.
He says he wants to be champion long enough to fight Mike Tyson, and who knows if things will work out that way? That is his dream, though, and Riddick Bowe has always been a champion in that area.
“Let’s go see where the new house is gonna go,” he says, leading the way to the Jeep. Kareem Muhammed tosses him the keys. The heavyweight champion gets in and wrestles with the antitheft bar on the steering wheel.
“You sure you got the right key, Bowe?” Muhammed says cautiously.
Riddick is all business. “I got the right key,” he says.
“You want me to help?” Muhammed asks.
“I’ll get it,” Bowe says.
The key turns finally. Bowe puts on the Phil Collins tape and steers the Jeep toward the future.
“You’re from Brownsville and you can’t handle an antitheft device?” I say.
Riddick Bowe, dead serious, eyes straight ahead, as always, replies, “I never stole anything.”
He earned his way to the end of Maher Drive.
CONSIDER…
- What would you say is the dominant impression of Riddick Bowe created in Lupica’s essay?
- Without looking back at the essay, jot down a few memorable details about Bowe. What do these details suggest about Bowe’s personality?
- Find a place where Lupica reveals something about Bowe’s past. How does this information contribute to the dominant impression of Bowe?
Barbara Jordan was a person who was listened to. Read this New York Times Magazine profile of her by columnist Molly Ivins for the dominant impression.
She Sounded Like God
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MOLLY IVINS
Finding Barbara Jordan in the directory of distinguished Americans is easy. She was always a First and an Only.
First woman, only black; in the Texas Senate, in the Texas Congressional delegation, from the entire South. She served on the Judiciary Committee during the decision on Richard Nixon’s impeachment. Her great bass voice rolled forth: “My faith in the Con-sti-tu-tion is whole, it is com-plete, it is to-tal.” She sounded like the Lord God Almighty, and her implacable legal logic caught the attention of the entire nation.
The degree of prejudice she had to overcome by intelligence and sheer force of personality is impossible to overestimate. She wasn’t just black and female: she was homely, she was heavy and she was dark black. When she first came to the Texas Senate, it was considered a great joke to bring racist friends to the gallery when B.J. was due to speak. They would no sooner gasp, “Who is that nigger?” then she would open her mouth and out would roll language Lincoln would have appreciated. Her personal dignity was so substantial even admirers hesitated to approach her. No one will ever know how lonely she was at the beginning.
Her friend Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton justly reminds us that B.J. was not effective solely because she sounded like God. Born and raised in the fifth ward of Houston, the biggest black ghetto in the biggest state, she graduated magna cum laude from Texas Southern University and went on to Boston University law school. Jordan was so smart it almost hurt. Lord, she was a good legislator, never wasted a minute on a hopeless cause. Ask those cornered-cottonmouth, mean-as-hell-with-the-hide-off conservatives. Fought her on the floor in head-up debate, fought her in the back room over Article 53, Subsection C, Part II: Jordan always knew what she was talking about, and almost always won. She traded some public suck-up with the Texas Democratic establishment – Lyndon Johnson, Ben Barnes – and got the first black Congressional district drawn in Texas. Smart trade.
As it happened, the night B.J. spoke to Congress in favor of impeaching Richard Nixon was also the last night of the Texas legislative session. Came B.J.’s turn to speak and everyone back in Austin – legislators, aides, janitors, maids – gathered around television sets to hear this black woman speak on national television. And they cheered for her as though they were watching the University of Texas pound the hell out of Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl.
She cut her Congressional career short; it seems likely that she knew she had multiple sclerosis. Of course, she wanted a seat on the Supreme Court. If there is one thing I would ask you to accept on faith, it is that Barbara Jordan had Judicial Temperament. Her faith in the Con-sti-tu-tion was whole, it was complete, it was to-tal. I consulted her about appointments from Robert Bork to Clarence Thomas and never found her less than fair. George Bush the Elder will tell you the same.
In the last 14 years of her life, B.J. was a magnificent teacher, at the L.B.J. School of Public Affairs. The only way to get into her classes at the University of Texas was to win a place in a lottery. For many students, she was the inspiration for a life in public service. No perks, no frills, no self-righteousness: just a solid commitment to using government to help achieve liberty and justice for all. Her role as a role model may well have been her most important. One little black girl used to walk by Jordan’s house every day on her way to school and think, “Barbara Jordan grew up right here, too.” Today Ruth Simmons is president of Smith College.
Jordan was a helluva poker player. And before M.S. twisted her poor hands so badly, she loved to play guitar. It was like God singing the blues. “St. James Infirmary” – Let her go, Looord, let her go.
But let’s not let her go without remembering that the Woman Who Sounded Like God had a very dry sense of humor. One time, she invited Ann Richards, then a mere county commissioner, over for dinner. Jordan lived down a dirt road and had a troublesome neighbor who kept locking the gates on it. Jordan, never one to miss an opportunity to Make Government Work, asked the Commissioner to do something. Richards made some phone calls, to no avail.
Time went by and Jordan again invited Richards, by then Governor of Texas, to dinner. Richards inquired idly: “Barbara, whatever happened to that dreadful neighbor of yours? Did she ever quit lockin’ the gates?”
Jordan said: “I am pleased to report that the woman in question has since died. And gone to hell.”