Following long injustice, Dewey Bozella will get his fight
Baku, October 3 (AZERTAC). On October 15, Bozella will get to live his dream.
Bozella, who was released from Sing Sing (N.Y.) prison in 2009 after being wrongfully imprisoned for 26 years for a murder he did not commit, set out to realize that dream.
He just wanted to be able to say he had one professional fight under his belt.
Tough dream for a 52-year-old man.
But Dewey Bozella is not your run-of-the-mill 52-year-old.
He was just a teenager in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., when he was first suspected of killing a 92-year-old woman in her home in a heinous crime. Despite a lack of any physical evidence that he had been in the woman's house, six years after the crime was committed he was arrested, tried and convicted for murder. He got 20 years to life. With the kind of horrific life he grew up around, prison was probably where most expected him to end up, anyway.
Bozella was 9 when he saw his father beat his pregnant mother so badly she later died. His father ran away and never returned. One of his brothers was stabbed to death, another was killed by a shot to the head and a third died of AIDS. As your basic street thug, Bozella looked like the perfect suspect.
Boxing became Bozella's salvation in the big house. He rose to undefeated light-heavyweight champ of Sing Sing before they shut down the gym in 1992. His boxing life was gone, but the dream remained. He earned a bachelor's degree and master's degree in prison and was a model prisoner, knowing he never committed the crime they said he did.
After his conviction was overturned and he was freed, with the help of the Innocence Project and some serious digging by his lawyers, Bozella returned to Poughkeepsie a free man with his wife, Trena, whom he had met in prison while she was visiting another inmate.
He had every right to be bitter. But he wasn't.
An ESPN producer learned of his story and helped make him the recipient of the 2011 Arthur Ashe Courage Award for never giving up hope.
Bozella gave an inspirational speech at the ESPY Awards about not letting fear hold you back. Golden Boy Promotions and its 46-year-old light heavyweight champion and boxing legend, Bernard Hopkins, reached out to Bozella through Maura Mandt, an executive producer of the ESPYs.
If Bozella could pass the rigorous California Boxing Commission test to get licensed to box in the state, Golden Boy would try to get the 52-year-old a fight on the undercard of the Hopkins-Chad Dawson fight at Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Bozella trained on his own and then took the test about six weeks ago.
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