Don’t be put off by the opening of this post on a book about a bad man. The story on offer here isn’t pretty or uplifting but reviewer Bob Ingram has written a truth-attack that stands as its own justification…
This is a book that perhaps shouldn’t have been written. Indeed, El Torito, the true story of Tony Ayala Jr by Ben Doughty with Mike Ayala, strains at actually being a book. At 297 pages, 30 are given over to photos – mostly one to a page – and the book is set in type as big as what you see in Readers Digest Large Print editions with very generous margins all around. Too, nowhere did a thorough search discover the price of this “true story.”
It is difficult to take seriously a book rife with as many typos and just plain missing words as El Torito (“Little Bull”). The book is dedicated to three deceased members of the Ayala family and the last sentence reads: “May rest in eternal peace” not “May they rest in eternal peace.” Later in the book, it reads “Bravely, Ayala bravely beat the count … .” The book was “edited by Natalie Bleau” and I hope that’s an alias. It’s like nobody read El Torito before it went to press. The impression is of a hurry-up job, however well-intentioned.
Turn the page from the truncated dedication and you have the prologue, whose second sentence characterizes the late Bert Sugar as a “largely self-appointed guru.” Jeez, I’ve been around Bert Sugar, who I found to be a gracious man, who created for himself with his fedora and stogie a modern Runyanesque persona of the sweet science. Hell, he was good for the game.
Ben Doughty did the writing of El Torito. He’s a reputable trainer in England. Who he ain’t is F.X. Toole, the pen name of the late American trainer, Jerry Boyd, who wrote a superb collection of short stories called Rope Burns, Stories from the Corner, one of which was “Million Dollar Baby.” When Anjelica Huston read it, she went to Clint Eastwood and said he should make a movie of the story. He did and won an Oscar. Anjelica’s father, the legendary director John Huston, had been a professional fighter in his early years and his daughter knew a great boxing story when she read one.
The young “Little Bull” is on the cover of El Torito, in a fighting stance, and his lightly mustached face bears a look of doubt, hesitancy, questioning, his eyes almost pleading, as if he is staring into the darkness that will be his life. He had his first shot of heroin at the age of 12 and the last – the one that killed him – at the age of 52. Tony Ayala Jr. spent more than half his life in prison after that fateful first hit.
A significant part of El Torito actually melds the life and career of Tony Jr.’s older brother, Mike, who collaborated on the book, with Tony Jr.’s story. Here, as in the rest of the book, Ben Doughty uses British slang that can leave a Yank scratching his head. At one point, Tony’s father concocts a yarn to hype his son “early doors” (early on) to television execs. Doughty also refers to Tony’s “short lived pomp,” meaning “glory.” The American reader is mostly left to define the British phrases in their context. It’s cool for Anglophiles, though, I guess.
The young Mike Ayala, “El Ciclone,” was no day at the beach himself. He shot another boxer, Gilbert Galvan, “El Machete,” in the face with a .22 caliber pistol over an insult to his mother and got away with a suspended sentence. Days before and even the night before his title shot with Danny “Little Red” Lopez, Mike Ayala shot heroin and was stopped in the fifteenth and final round. He eventually straightened his life out as a husband and father, according to the book.
Tony Ayala Jr. was a natural fighter, aggressive and powerful, from the go. He was also damaged goods from the go. Tony Ayala Sr., father and trainer to his four fighting sons, dispensed his version of hard love in a blind, cruel way that was basically abuse. It was Big Tony’s way or the dreaded, unspeakable highway of life outside his narrow community of demimonde San Antonio.
The same Bert Sugar that Ben Doughty bad-mouthed as “the largely self appointed guru” had this to say about the young Bull even after things went all to hell: “Tyson, at his peak, was not half the fighter that Ayala was. Ayala was a man eater.”
There is a 46-minute documentary called “The Rise and Fall of El Torito” that is mostly fight footage that shows Ayala to be every bit Sugar’s man eater, a lethal-minded, jackhammering left hooker whose ring arsenal included spitting on a downed opponent, as he did to Jose Luis Baltazar.
The man eater was also a self-destroyer. Little Bull said that heroin made him feel his version of “normal.” It was alcohol that released his violent, aberrant demons in all their dark fury. “Tony had always had chaos on speed dial,” Doughty says.
Two days before Christmas in 1978, the 15-year-old Tony Ayala Jr., drunk, raped an 18-year-old woman at a San Antonio drive-in movie. “Precise details of the attack vary but there seems little doubt that it was excessively violent and entirely random,” Doughty says. “The victim’s bladder had been ruptured, presumably by Ayala’s fists, and one gruesome account even alleged that the fighter had attempted to rip out her genitals with his bare hands.”
Significantly, Ayala’s ring mentality was the following: “I would imagine it’s the closest thing to being like God – to control somebody else. I hit the guy and it’s like, ‘I can do anything I want to you. I own you. Your life is mine and I will do with it what I please.’ It’s really a sadistic mentality but that’s what goes on in my mind. It’s really evil – there’s no other way to put it.”
Rape is about control, not sex. Drunk, Tony Ayala’s ring evil – “to control somebody else” – became vicious rape. The woman was bought off and Ayala got ten years of probation. Doughty points out correctly that he was already a valuable boxing commodity.
After turning pro in 1980, in two years Tony Ayala Jr. was 22-0 with 19 KOs, grinding up all the middleweights they put in front of him. He was nineteen. There was a rumored fight with a faded Roberto Duran that would be a $750,000 payday, when on August 15, 1982, Ayala, drunk, was arrested for burglary when he was found in the home of a young woman neighbor. She didn’t press charges, and the court sent Ayala for a month of rehab in California.
“I was born an alcoholic,” he said afterwards. “Any amount of alcohol in my systems throws it off. And I didn’t know which way I’d react if I’d drink. Would I be happy? Or go into a rage. Now I know I cannot drink at all.”
In December of 1982, Ayala signed to fight WBA middleweight champ Davey Moore in Madison Square Garden for $700,000. On New Year’s Eve, now living with his future wife Lisa in West Paterson, New Jersey, Ayala broke into the apartment of a 30-year-old schoolteacher neighbor and raped her at knife-point. He was drunk.
On June 21, 1983, Tony Ayala Jr, was sentenced to 35 years with 15 years to be served before parole eligibility. On April 29, 1999, Ayala, now 36, was released from Bayside Prison in deep South Jersey. Andrew Consovoy, chairman of the New Jersey parole board, warned, “I could see a scenario where, if he lost a fight, maybe felt he got robbed of the decision, and he ran across a female who wanted to be nice to him … I’d be very afraid. Is it likely to happen again? I’d have to say yes. I remember thinking he might do well for a while but I told my colleagues, if he lost a fight, no woman should be allowed within 50 miles of him.”
On the comeback trail, Torito knocked over a few tomato cans to an adoring San Antonio crowd, despite the women’s rights groups picketing the fights. Then came ex-champ Luis Ramon “Yory Boy” Campas, who gave Ayala all he could handle, busting him up good around the eyes, until Tony Jr. stayed on his stool after round 8, his father claiming he had broken his left hand in round 3.
Four and a half months later, on December 11, 2000, Ayala, drunk, broke into a small house in San Antonio where an 18-year-old woman woke on the couch and ran into the bedroom and alerted her landlady, who produced a .45 caliber Glock and trained it on Ayala. She handed the weapon to the woman while she went to check on her children, and the woman shot Ayala in the left shoulder when he moved toward her.
Afterwards, Passaic County New Jersey Prosecutor Marilyn Zdobinski, who had opposed Ayala’s parole, said, “There was something about him, you just knew the violence was never going to end. We fought his parole as long as we could. You could have almost predicted this was going to happen based on his background. I hope they prosecute him to the max. He is an habitual, vicious criminal and he’s not going to change.”
Ayala copped a surprise plea deal of 90 days in jail and ten years’ probation. He served the time at home, not too surprisingly. He fought on until at age 40 he was stopped in a weary Oklahoma casino by a guy who worked at K-Mart. His final pro record was 31-2 with 27 knockouts.
He was arrested for probation violation on December 4, 2003, and was sentenced to ten years. He got out of jail in 2014 at 51 and overdosed the next year in the gym he and Mike Ayala ran in San Antonio.
The “true story” of Tony Ayala Jr. that Ben Doughty and Mike Ayala have told is mostly one of unalloyed misery. It is not a tale of instruction or redemption. The evils or drugs and alcohol are self-evident. In the prologue, Doughty says his purpose in El Torito is to determine why Tony Ayala Jr.’s life turned out as it did. He touched on most of the possibilities, but probably hit closest to the truth when he simply said Tony was a tortured soul.
Sometimes it’s better to let the dead rest.
Originally published in Ringside Seat.