"The Fighting Frenchman" Scott LeDoux
By Ben Tighe

Former heavyweight boxer Scott "The Fighting Frenchman" LeDoux, a contender in the heavyweight division during the late 1970s and early '80s, announced in January of 2009 that he had been diagnosed with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease) in August of 2008. LeDoux, now the Minnesota State Combative Sports Commissioner, recently took some time to reminisce about the past and to talk about the present.

A self-described farm kid from Crosby-Ironton, Minnesota, LeDoux was already an athletic 220 pounds when he graduated from high school in 1966. As a 17-year old freshman at UMD (University of Minnesota Duluth), LeDoux took up boxing after the end of football season. I asked him whether he was displayed a gift for the sport right away. "No, I wasn't good right away. Not until I started learning from [coach] Sammy Gallup to shorten up my punches." Like a lot of amateurs, LeDoux kept closer track of his tournament wins than his overall record, but when pressed he guessed: "36-6?" And how was he discovered? "Nobody discovered me. I just started thinking about turning pro, and I watched Rodney and Duane Bobick, who were also heavyweights from Minnesota. They were successful, and I decided to give it a try."

Upon turning pro in 1974 LeDoux hooked up with Minneapolis boxing manager and personality "Papa Joe" Daszkiewicz, and the two worked together to chart the course of his prizefighting career. "We managed together, talked things over, and made decisions together." LeDoux recalled with a laugh that for his first pro fight, a third-round knockout of Arthur Pullens in February of '74, he was paid $100 plus a ten dollar bonus for the knockout. After reeling off twelve straight wins, LeDoux would lose for the first time in March 1975, to 18-19 veteran Roy "Cookie" Wallace. LeDoux recalls that the fight was stopped due to a headbutt-induced cut, "the first time I was ever cut. And I ended up with 250 stitches in my face!" After compiling six wins and a draw in his next seven bouts, LeDoux dropped three straight to fighters with a combined record of 103-1 - the last being George Foreman back when he was angry. With a record of 18-3-1 at that point, LeDoux recalls, "Lots of people were saying that I should retire. But Papa Joe's philosophy was that if you don't fight people who are better than you, you'll never learn anything." Instead LeDoux would remain active, taking on all comers and winning more often than he lost.

In time the strategy of doing things the hard way paid off, LeDoux fighting his way through the heavyweight ranks to put himself in position for two world title shots before his 1983 retirement. I asked "The Fighting Frenchman" to tell me about some of his most memorable moments in the ring, and to confirm or dispel a couple of longtime rumors.

On the best fighter he ever faced: "The best guy I fought, but not at the time that I fought him, was Ali. When I boxed him it was a five-round charity event, and I had him bleeding out of the mouth and nose after two rounds, and I had big gloves on. The 'rope-a-dope' was a con. You could hit Ali at will. George Foreman was the hardest puncher I fought. Oh, did he hit hard. In the third he hit me with a right hand, and I got up at the count of eight, but they stopped the fight because of the gash under my eye. Twelve stitches. He would punch through the target, not to the target. George was the best fighter I fought, at the time that I fought him."

"When I fought Gerrie Coetzee in Johannesburg, [Stanley] Christodoulou was the commissioner down there, and at the press conference he said that Coetzee would be the heavyweight champion someday. I said to him, 'Screw you!' Then the next night Christodoulou was the referee! Christodoulou was such an unscrupulous person to me." [Note: Chrisodoulou stopped the fight in the eighth round, citing cuts.] "And then Ronnie Lyle, when I fought him, I knocked him down twice and lost the decision. Afterward Papa Joe hugged me and told me 'You won this fight.' And I said 'Yes I did.' Then he turned around and said 'Oh shit.' And there was Don King hugging Ron Lyle. Afterwards we talked, and we agreed that we didn't get paid enough money. That was a tough fight, in Las Vegas, at Caesar's Palace."

"Mike Weaver could hit. Ooh, could he hit! I went twelve rounds with him in 1979." On the other hand, "Larry Holmes was a good boxer, but he couldn't hit. No power, but he had a lot of heart. Larry, he stuck a thumb in my eye and tore my retina. Holmes fought Leroy Jones before me, and thumbed him in both eyes. Afterwards Jones was just crying because both his eyes were swollen shut, and he never fought again." [Note: Jones did indeed fight again, but only one more time, defeating Jeff Shelburg by 2nd-round TKO after a 2.5 years of inactivity caused by a detached retina]

"I had signed to fight Joe Frazier [during Frazier's aborted comeback in 1981] and then he didn't sign. I read his book and it said that his family had talked him out of fighting me. It would have been a great fight, and it would have helped me straighten out my nose, because he had a great left hook. [laughter] Joe Frazier was a warrior. Then I was supposed to fight Jimmy Young and three days before the fight he pulled out, so I got a substitute, some guy named Joe Brown [actually James Brown]. I fought the first round and came back to the corner and Papa Joe was doing this [LeDoux looks down at his lap and shields his eyes from view]. I said, 'Papa Joe, this guy is left handed!' And Joe said, 'Yeah, I noticed that too.' He hadn't done his homework. He was so embarrassed!"

"And then I fought Frank Bruno. I got frequent flyer miles in the ring. Hit me hard and I flew through the air. Then the British press asked me after the fight, 'could you have beaten him when you started?' I glared and I said, 'I would have killed him when I started.' 'Why's that,' they asked. I said, 'Cause he was five years old when I started!'"

In 1991, eight years after retiring, LeDoux found himself back in the ring - this time with Mike Tyson. "I had a good jab, good body punches, and I was always in shape. I was never out of training. Three weeks after my last fight (with Bruno) I ran in Grandma's Marathon in Duluth. And I was in a 520-mile triathlon in 1991. We biked more than 400 miles from Luverne to Eveleth, Minnesota in two days, ran 52 miles to Cook, Minnesota, and then canoed to Crane Lake. After that I got a call from Payton Shear in Kansas City asking me to come spar with Mike Tyson. I said, 'I'm 42 years old, what does Tyson need me for?' And he said 'Tyson doesn't know how to train, and you do. He needs to see how you train.'" A persistent rumor about that encounter is that Tyson's gloves were altered when the two worked out together, and I asked LeDoux about that. "Yeah. I sparred with him for ten weeks. My second time in the ring with him he cut me. I looked at his gloves afterwards and they had cut 'em and taken the stuffing out. From that point on I boxed defensively." Did that change things? "Yep. I feinted and moved a lot. That changed things. Rich Giachetti was the trainer. He altered the gloves. Mike was a man's man. He wouldn't have done a thing like that. He didn't need to anyway."

"One of the guys I sparred with was in 2001 when I was working for ESPN, was Lennox Lewis, and he hit me from across the ring! He had the longest reach, and he had the best balance. I couldn't knock him off his balance, he was just a very big, strong guy. I mean, I was 52 years old, but anyway…yes, he had arms like telephone poles."

"Kenny Norton, I saw him a few years ago in Vegas, and I said 'Hey Kenny!' And he looked at me like this [LeDoux frowns darkly] and he said, 'You beat me up!' And my wife was there, so she got to hear that."

"I was a booster of Joey Abell until he left his trainer, Ronny Lyke. He went to Ron Peterson, and Peterson never was a boxing guy. He never was a fighter or trainer, and you've got to understand the game. Ron is a good promoter and a nice enough guy, but he doesn't understand the game. That was evident when Joey got knocked out, lost a few times, and lost his confidence and his attitude. You've got to have an attitude. Whenever I was at a weigh-in I would talk trash. When I fought Ron Lyle, at the weigh-in the commissioner said, 'someone get on the scale,' and I pushed Lyle out of the way and I said 'I'll be first, and I'll be first after the fight.' When Joey Abell was with Lyke he was very confident, and now he's back with him. By the way, I sparred with Ron Lyke thirty years ago. Boy, could he hit. A left-handed middleweight with a strong right. Joey is big and strong and fast, and a very smart guy. I boxed two hundred rounds with him. I'd like to see Joey fight [fellow Minnesotan] Raphael Butler. That'll be a good fight and a good draw. But it hasn't been built up as much as it should. They need to fight on the same card so people can see 'em. And then Raphael doesn't talk much, and Joey doesn't talk trash."
The subject of an illness like ALS is an awkward one to broach, but LeDoux has come to terms with his situation. Part of the reason may be that he has dealt with terminal illness before, when his first wife struggled with cancer for a decade. "Ten years, eleven surgeries, two experimental treatments. Melanoma to begin with and at the end, and breast cancer in between. The breast cancer wasn't related to the melanoma. Sandy got sick in May of '79 and died in November of '89…I raised my kids alone because my wife died. It was tough. I was a disciplinarian, just like my dad was."

The onset of LeDoux's ALS may have begun as much as two and a half years prior to the diagnosis. "We thought it was arthritis. It started in my hands, and I thought it was arthritis in my shoulder. I couldn't button my shirts anymore. My wife Carol had to button them for me. Carol noticed that my hands were shrinking and she said 'Something is wrong.' She got me to see a neurologist. I went to see the doctor and he said 'I have diagnosed you with Horn's Disease. Now don't go home and look it up.' So we went home and looked it up, and it was ALS. I had also noticed last summer that I had a throbbing in my hip, that came from two bulging discs in my back. They put me on Vicodin for that. That stuff blurs your speech, if you know what I mean! Everybody thinks it was the ALS I was struggling with, but I went to the pain clinic in November and they burned off the two Facet nerves and the pain went away. Went away completely. It was a miracle."

LeDoux has learned to look on the bright side of things. Since the announcement, he's pleased to say that he has reconnected with a number of friends and former colleagues. "My old sergeant from the army emailed me and I called him up and said, 'Where are you?' He says, 'I'm in Florida.' It turns out that we were ten minutes apart. So we got together for the first time since '71. He came to my hotel room and we had a real nice time visiting. I've been in touch with ten or twelve guys from my army days."

Often overlooked when an illness like ALS strikes is the effect on the caregiver. But LeDoux's experience caring for his first wife, Sandy, has given him an unusual perspective on the issue. "My wife Carol and I have come up with an idea: 'Hope for the Cure, Help for the Caregiver.' You know, people say 'If there's anything you need, call me.' But caregivers don't call because they're as proud as any other person. But if you call and say, 'I'm at the grocery store, what can I bring you?' That's real help. Don't make the caregiver call you for help, you call them when you're in a position to help them, and see what they need."

Having stolen a couple of hours of Scott LeDoux's time on a pleasant Saturday afternoon, it seemed to this writer that it was time to wrap things up. When I asked the big heavyweight whether there was anything he had wanted to talk about that we had missed, he paused for a long moment. His response was typically reflective. "I'm very blessed to have the life I've had and to have traveled the world, seen the things I've seen. I'm blessed to have had the career that I've had."

You can follow more of Ben's work at www.fisticmystic.wordpress.com