Resto and Lewis were both subsequently sent to jail, serving two-and-a-half and one-year sentences respectively.
Less than a year Collins – son, brother, husband, father and promising fighter – was dead, crashing his car into a creek near his house after drinking. He began to struggle with drink and depression. Collins was told he could never box again due to his eye damage. In the aftermath Resto and Lewis were suspended indefinitely by the New York State Athletic Commission. Then, as Resto went to congratulate Collins, he shook hands with Billy Senior – who immediately noticed that the glove was missing padding and called for the Commissioner. With the doctored gloves he had stayed as close to Collins as he could, round after round, and had tried to hit him as hard and as often as he could. There had been no hint of mercy from Resto, no relenting. The height of gameness, Collins was still swinging that left hook until the final bell. And it was no ordinary swelling: by the last rounds not only were the eyes puffy and closing, but the whole area around the eyes, cheekbones and forehead, was grossly swollen. What, in normal circumstances, would have been classed as a very good, brisk undercard fight becomes a spectacle in brutality when watched with the knowledge of what was really going on. “Resto walked into the ring that night with a loaded gun,” says Sacks.
Resto walked into the ring with approximately one ounce of padding removed from each of his gloves and plaster was also allegedly put on his wraps. Collins was expected to win but some boxing insiders thought Resto was capable of an upset. In his corner was Panama Lewis, one of the era’s big-name trainers. Luis Resto was 20-8-2, the underdog but no pushover. This was his first fight on the big stage.
He was trained by his father, also named Billy. The night of June 16, 1983, Billy Ray Collins and Luis Resto met in the ring of Madison Square Garden as the co-feature to Roberto Duran-Davey Moore.Ĭollins was a pale kid from Tennessee, promoted by Bob Arum and 14-0. That’s because we both knew we had to talk about the gloves.” This interview wasn’t going to be that easy for either one of us. As Steve Farhood put it back in 2000: “We enjoyed shooting the bull about the good old days, but it was just prelim chatter. If his name comes up, it’s not in connection with his Golden Gloves wins, the respectable victories on his record or who he knew or sparred with. He hit me, but I hit him, too.”īut everything Luis Resto has done or will do is secondary – and always will be secondary – to the part he played on that night 34 years ago. Then there were the numerous times sparring with a prime Roberto Duran, not least before the first Leonard fight: “He liked me because I wasn’t scared of him.
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When he arrived in the Big Apple he was amazed by “the tall buildings and the pizza,” so much so that he ate pizza every day until he couldn’t take it anymore.Ī shy man, once he opens up he’s full of interesting stories: from the fun he had working with the incredible Saoul Mamby prior to his win over Esteban De Jesus for the WBC belt, to his foreign jaunts in Italy sparring Vito Antuofermo before his title-winning bout against Hugo Corro, and in France in 1990 doing the same job with Christophe Tiozzo ahead of his fight with In-Chul Baek. He remembers how much he cried he didn’t want to leave his stepfather and home in Puerto Rico. Luis Resto lives in the Bronx, as he has done – apart from a two-and-a-half-year stint in prison – since he came to New York as an 11-year-old to join his mother, sisters and brother. Court cases or no, the family’s loss remains. Court cases, vain attempts on the part of those nursing their loss at some kind of compensation, have cropped up periodically, had some publicity in the press, dragged on and then been dismissed. Meanwhile, down in Antioch, Tennessee, the Collins family still bristle with grief and anger. He admits, “It was a very big part of my life.” Randy Gordon was covering boxing at the time and later became chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission and has written about it sporadically up until the present day. They introduced the referee for the night as Billy Collins Snr and the guy next to me says, ‘Do you know anything about him?’, and he told me this whole story and I never forgot it.” They sent me to cover a local fight at the National Coliseum or wherever it was. He remembers: “I wrote for a newspaper in Nashville, my first job out of college. Jeff Pearlman wrote a fine article about the fight and its aftermath for Sports Illustrated.
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