Rehabilitation is the narrowest and most difficult path out of prison. Recidivism, the trip that becomes a U-turn back to the cellblock, is the broader and more traveled road.
Michael Bennett has stayed on the route less traveled since he was released from Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg, Ill., on July 28, 1998. He has followed it to the threshold of the Olympics.
He earned a college degree in general education while in the penitentiary. But his rehabilitation was shaped in a different “classroom,” learning a manual skill that is as violent as it is scientific.
Where there once were teams of practicioners and instructors, boxing has been dropped from Illinois prison programs. Bennett’s teachers were three inmates convicted of murder or attempted murder and serving sentences of 60 to 200 years.
When he was convicted in 1991 of the armed robbery of a toy store, Chicagoan Bennett was a student at North Park College and a first-time offender. Imprisoned for 7 years, he has spent the last two fighting his way literally and near meteorically to a berth on the U.S. Olympic team.
At 29, he is the heavyweight contender and co-captain of the American team going to Sydney next week for the 2000 Olympics.
He is nearing the climactic fights of his short amateur career. As he does, the three men who were in his corner, who taught him to box and coached him in competition when he was an inmate, are straining to see, hear and read what is happening to him.
They want to keep him a loud and clear blip on their mental radar even though he is far beyond the walls, the barbed-wire fences and the locked doors that now separate their world from his.
For each of them, he remains a telepathic connection, affirming that they did something good and right and that the boxing program had some value.
Michael Bennett is gone from their midst, and so is boxing. Even as Bennett prepares for Sydney as an ambassador carrying the skills he learned in the Illinois prison system, boxing’s violent side has led officials to eliminate it from the list of programs offered to inmates.
The road Bennett followed out of prison has been closed behind him. He knew his teachers only by their nicknames. Mongoose, Papasan and Pharaoh. Their name for him was a simple “Mike B.”
The 200-year realist
Pharaoh is 42-year-old Harry Jenkins. He began serving a 200-year sentence for attempted murder and intent to kill when he was 18.
“People like me can’t describe the feeling of seeing Michael out there,” he said, acknowledging that he didn’t mean the last verb literally. Even if the Olympics were held just outside the walls of the Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton, where he is incarcerated, Jenkins couldn’t see Bennett fight.
“I didn’t even know Michael was out of prison until I heard about it from the media,” he said. “But now, a few guys off the streets in Chicago keep me informed about Mike B. on the phone.”
In a world where identities sometimes go no further than the likes of “Pee Wee,” “Silver Dollar” and “Image,” Jenkins couldn’t remember the nickname of the “loudmouth” who first cajoled Bennett into the ring. (Bennett says his name was “Hooch.”)
What everybody does remember is that Bennett knocked him out in the first round. And in so doing, he ignored Jenkins’ instructions to work the body first and find out what his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses were.
But after that first fight, he was a stellar pupil, Jenkins said:
“When he wasn’t doing workouts in other gym time, he wanted to practice boxing.”
Jenkins was happy to oblige.
“All my life I’ve been into boxing,” he said. Having found a student with a high threshold for discipline and pain, he worked Bennett relentlessly, exhorting him to “erase the word `tired’ from your vocabulary.”
He would put his prize protege into the ring against boxers who could hit him while he could only slip and move without retaliating. Jenkins would have him fight rounds throwing only body punches. He would have him go enough rounds with three different opponents to get “a little tired, then I was the last guy he had to face,” Jenkins said. “He got me when he was tired.”
The ritual, featuring the coach’s instant and harsh criticism of Bennett’s mistakes, became grist for other inmates’ conversation, Jenkins said.
“I knew his friends outside boxing would ask Michael, `Why do you let Pharaoh talk to you like that, abuse you like that?'” Jenkins said.
If they can make the connection between those days and the imminent ones in Sydney, they will see the answer, Jenkins said.
He hasn’t decided whether he will watch Bennett’s Olympic bouts on TV in the dayroom or “in my house,” as he euphemistically terms his cell. Shaking his head, swinging the wiry braids that hang at the back, Jenkins added, “I’ll be right there with Michael, throwing punches and moving around, yelling. … If he wins, when he wins, I’m going to pat myself on the back.
“Can you imagine what this institution will be like? A lot of people in here will be yelling for him. He’ll feel us, all the way from Australia.”
It was a rare display of emotion from a realist who talks about his long odds of ever leaving prison. “I never get excited about nothing,” he said.
He allows himself to think he might see Bennett after the Olympics “because I haven’t told him face-to-face how proud of him I am. … I’ve had other fighters with talent like him, but Mike B. is the only one who went out on the streets and used what he learned in prison.
“I thank him for not forgetting me, and if I could tell him anything going into the Olympics, I’d tell him, `Don’t forget the body. Punch to the body.'”
That’s a lesson Jenkins learned in prison two decades ago “from the No. 1 master himself–Mongoose.”
Meet the `Mongoose’
“Michael Bennett isn’t what you’d call my best student,” Earl Good was saying, seated at weightlifting apparatus beside an indoor basketball court at Logan Correctional Facility. “But he’s the best at keeping my dream alive.
“He was unique as far as being hungry. He just didn’t know how to get what he wanted. He always has had that dream of winning an Olympic gold medal, and he wasn’t afraid to talk about it.
“I share the dreams of my fighters, but I can’t walk out of here with them.”
Like Jenkins, Good has been in prison since he was 18, when he was sentenced to 180 years for murder. He’s now 53.
His lips intercept the line where his thin, white-haired goatee and downcurled mustache would meet like prongs of a fork. His head is clean-shaven. He is “Mongoose.”
He spoke the language of his hard-time fraternity, a narrative blend of fact and mythology. It connects his inside world, which is sometimes apart even from his prison peers, with the outside world he hasn’t occupied for 35 years.
Sometimes he rambled and sometimes he read thoughts he committed to paper, but he also could be surprisingly terse and concise. He thanked family members and his wife, Valerie, whom he said he married in prison eight years ago, for “helping me fight my spiritual war.”
His nickname, he said, was bestowed on him by Archie Moore, who was the original “Mongoose” when he was the light-heavyweight world champion in the 1950s. Good said he earned a share of the handle as a teenager by knocking Moore down when they sparred at a Chicago gym.
“I am somewhat of a living legend,” he said unabashedly, adding that most Illinois inmates who learned to box in prison “learned from me.”
Among them was Bennett. But he put others on Bennett’s level, rattling off the names of several fighters who could have made it, or could still make it, as boxers on the outside.
He only recently learned of Bennett’s success, but Good insisted he wasn’t surprised, and he won’t be if Bennett wins the Olympic gold.
“A lot of other fighters had penitentiary dreams,” he explained. “Michael had a larger dream.”
Cuban Felix Savon is the defending Olympic heavyweight champion and likely the ultimate test for Bennett, Good said. “But like Muhammad Ali, Mike B. is going to shake up the world.”
When Bennett’s fights are televised from the Sydney Games, Good said he will be in his cell “watching it by myself. To connect with him, I have to be in complete solitude.”
But as he watches, he said, he will think of fellow inmates who coached, trained and fought with Bennett, men who will root for “Mike B.” as their Olympic representative.
“When he throws that first punch, we are all imbedded in that punch,” said the man called Mongoose. “If he gets hit, we all get hit.
“Am I worried? Nah. Do I have any doubts? Nah.”
`It’s Papa Sun’
Isaiah Spann was a fellow boxing coach with Harry Jenkins at Danville Correctional Facility and refereed that first Bennett fight, against “Hooch.”
It was a way to settle disputes without breaking prison rules, and this one did not take much of the referee’s time. “The bell rang, they went at it, Michael went to the guy and knocked him out,” recalled Spann, 49, who is now at Dixon Correctional Center serving out a 60-year sentence for murder and armed robbery. He has been incarcerated since 1976.
He began boxing as a 13-year-old in a youth detention center by “slap boxing, two guys hitting each other with open hands while everybody else formed a circle around them.
“It was embarrassing to get a real good, loud slap. You learned to move and duck,” Spann said. He corrected Bennett’s recollection of his nickname: “It’s not Papasan, it’s Papa Sun.”
Spann’s special coaching talent is “the mitts,” a drill in which he holds padded mitts up during sparring, offering moving targets for the boxer to hit with accuracy and power.
Echoing Good’s assessment, Spann said, “Other inmates boxed to pass time and stay in shape. Michael saw a goal the others didn’t.”
He compared Hooch’s disrespect and consequent beating to Savon’s walking out of last year’s world championships before he was to fight Bennett in the finals. Although it was part of a Cuban team protest over the scoring of bouts and it gave Bennett the amateur world title by default, Spann believes Savon “disrespected Michael” and will pay for it.
“Considering where Michael’s come from, here comes Savon and he’s going to get knocked out. Mike B. is going to disrespect this man on worldwide TV because Savon stiffed him at the world championships.”
Spann is already looking beyond the Olympics, to Bennett’s professional boxing career. “If he clears this hurdle, doors open for him,” he said. “We’re talking million-dollar contracts.”
For himself, he envisions some involvement with coaching boxers. That said, he admitted he had violated a hard rule of the insiders by talking about the future. One of prison’s lessons is don’t look too far ahead. Spann has taken it to heart, even as the only one among Bennett’s inmate-teachers whose prison days are numbered. Spann is scheduled for discharge in November 2001, and he could be released earlier by the parole board.
“I’m not thinking ahead to that,” he insisted. “It’s a discipline of the mind in here that if you can’t control a situation, don’t think on it. Don’t make your bed hard.”
Good, Jenkins and Spann–Mongoose, Pharaoh and Papa Sun–are part of a smaller subgroup of about 500 Illinois inmates. They are “C-numbers.” They have Cs before their inmate numbers, meaning they were imprisoned before 1979, when state law mandated determinate sentences for all inmates.
Spann has a fiance in Rockford waiting for his release. He met Diane Murphy in 1993 at Danville Correctional Center, where she came accompanying a friend who was visiting another inmate at a prison dinner. Spann introduced himself and the conversation built into a long-distance relationship.
“He has a great sense of humor and smile,” Murphy said.
She is a single parent of a 12-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son, and she believes in the prison system.
“I believe it works, and he got what he deserved,” Murphy said. “But I believe he has learned a lot. … “
Spann was convicted of fatally shooting a customer during a grocery store robbery.
“If he had killed my father, I wouldn’t want him out,” Murphy acknowledged. “But then I wouldn’t have wanted to get to know him like I have.”
Her late father was a police officer in St. Paul.
“I don’t follow boxing, but I’ll watch Michael Bennett now because Spann is part of this,” Murphy said. “I’m proud of him. He deserves this. Not that much good has happened to him.”
The telltale tattoo
When he was in prison, Michael Bennett got a tattoo on his chest. It is an angel amid the words “Honor thy friends.”
He has close friends whom he has always known far better than by nickname only. But Mongoose, Papa Sun and Pharaoh are included in the message on his chest. He gave them credit a year ago, when he began his Olympic quest.
And now that he knows their real names, he concurs with their wish that they see each other again. Until then, he said, “I give them much love for helping me with boxing.”
