![]() ![]() The world will never know what he might have become because he was dead before he ever had a chance to really live. He used to run them every day back when he’d been a fighter with enough talent to go 101-9 as an amateur and 14-0 as a professional in just 15 months of prize fighting. On the evening of MaCollins, by now both destitute and depressed, drank too much Jack Daniels and then drove his 1972 Olds Cutlass into a concrete abutment at 68 mph, hitting an aged hackberry tree and flipping over into a dried up creek bed that bore his family’s name off Old Franklin Road, not far from his parents’ house.Ĭollins knew those winding roads well. They continued to do that even after they were convicted 3 ½ years later of two counts of second degree assault, conspiracy and fourth degree criminal possession of a weapon (Resto’s hands) with Lewis also convicted of tampering with the outcome of a sporting event.Įach was banned for life from boxing and sentenced to prison for their actions, actions that sentenced Collins first to half-blindness due to a torn iris that could not be repaired and later, his friends and family still believe, to death by his own shattered mind. Resto always denied he knew anything about it and Lewis still proclaims his innocence. Until Resto left him half blind after Lewis removed two of the four ounces of horsehair padding added to his boxing gloves to soften the blows in the locker room before they left to fight. was a proud dreamer of a kid from Antioch, TN., undefeated in 14 fights and sure it would always be that way. You just remember the darkness after a guy named Panama Lewis conspired with a possibly unsuspecting journeyman fighter named Luis Resto to beat the life out of Collins that night. You don’t remember any more how bright the lights were that night at the Garden either. They know he died at Madison Square Garden on June 16, 1983. You remember the tear drop that rolled down her cheek when she said, “I asked him when he got home from New York, ‘Why didn’t you tell your daddy to stop the fight?’ He said, ‘Mama, I’d of died in that ring first.’’Įven though a coroner’s report says Billy Ray Collins, Jr., age 22, died from too much alcohol and too much speed 24 years ago last month on a backroad in Tennessee, his parents know otherwise and they still want to prove it. ![]() as clearly now as you do his sad-eyed mother, Bettye, sliding her wedding band nervously up and down her ring finger over and over again as she tried to talk about her lost boy. You don’t really remember Billy Collins, Jr. ![]() Why else would the ring on her finger stand out so? Maybe you remember the little things because the enormity of the larger one that caused all the pain is just too much to fathom, even 25 years later. ![]()
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