'i Have Never Been So Wrong In My Life'

He had never been a cautious man, and that may have been part of his appeal. A big and reckless guy, he careened through life with the kind of abandon that tends to get celebrated in the popular press. That he happened to be blond beefcake was considered a box office plus. But that didn't entirely account for the public's persistent fascination with him, a boxer who all too often couldn't win the big fights or, maddeningly, even the small ones. America always holds out hope for the human torpedo, the full-speed-ahead guy who is born without the kind of wiring that causes the rest of us to slow for stop lights, to keep our mouths shut when we're mad, to live our small lives in safety behind closed doors.

The stories they tell about Tommy Morrison : Cut as a senior from the high school baseball team in little Jay, Okla. , Morrison returned to the diamond hoping to scorch an obscene message into the infield grass; instead, the fire got out of control and the field and outfield fence burned down. In 1994 he got arrested on assault charges for a fight outside the Kansas City police department; he had gone there to post bond for a friend. How about this one: Before his October 1993 bout against Michael Bentt, the one that was supposed to set up a $7.5 million fight with fellow heavyweight Lennox Lewis (until Morrison was KO'd in the first round), he posted a map of Tulsa that was divided into quadrants, marking the location of the four girlfriends he was importing for prefight preparations. Whereas the little-known Bentt could be taken lightly, Morrison didn't feel he could afford to be confused in this particular application of geography.

It's true that, often enough, things went wrong. And at 27, because of his poorly timed stumbles, he remained little more than a hard-hitting contender of a certain promotional appeal, while his peers were garnering titles and standing in line for the huge paydays that fights with Mike Tyson could generate.

Yet there's always room in boxing—room everywhere, really—for that explosive personality, the kind of person who swings large enough to make victory possible and defeat entertaining. So it was, coming off a bloody loss at the hands of Lewis last October, that Morrison 's career was being rehabilitated by promoter Don King . Morrison was scheduled to fight Arthur Weathers on Feb. 10 and then two more opponents by the middle of March, with the possibility, down the road, of a bout with Tyson .

Then, last Thursday, less than a week after he had been told that he'd tested positive for HIV—thus forcing cancellation of the Weathers fight—and less than an hour after he had been told that the retest confirmed that result, he faced the country in a press conference from a Tulsa hotel. Staring somewhat vacantly into the abyss that now formed his future, he said, in a surprisingly eloquent seven-minute address, that he had become, by his own unchecked desires (he's 95% sure he got the virus through sexual activity), a disaster area, a danger not just to himself but to the entire communities of women he had slept with, including his girlfriend, Dawn Freeman. Life without consequences? He looked into the blinking lights in the hotel ballroom, his voice trembling but his knee unbuckled to the end. "I have never been so wrong in my life."

The news occasioned a brief debate in the press, the usual columnistic cross fire that boxing always inspires, concerning the routine testing for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Up until Morrison 's announcement, only eight U.S. boxing commissions—in Arizona , Georgia , Nevada , New Mexico , Oregon , Puerto Rico , Utah and Washington—mandated HIV testing for professional boxers. Politics and concerns of privacy and cost have prevented other jurisdictions from requiring the exam, even though it's a quick and reliable test that can be done for $25. But last week New York announced plans to start HIV testing of boxers, and other states may follow suit, if only to avoid becoming a refuge for fighters who carry the virus (at least seven boxers worldwide have tested HIV-positive, including Morrison and one other in Nevada , which has been testing fighters for the virus since 1988).

Ultimately, though, this is not a boxing story, except that, as usual in the fight game, arrogance and ignorance are rewarded in outsized tragedy. It's mostly the story of a young man who was reckless and irresponsible, who now wonders if he has "five, 10, 15 years to live," and, suddenly more important, if he has endangered anyone else. It's the story of a young man who, because of a blood test, has been totally deconstructed and who must, in the glare of the public's leering interest, recover whatever parts of his personality might survive.

Here is who Morrison was: a relentless partyer, a determined womanizer who took advantage of every possible sexual opportunity. And there was always opportunity, especially after he appeared in Rocky V as Sylvester Stallone 's hunky foil (the film role was masterminded by his former manager Bill Cayton, the same man who handled the much-publicized launch of Tyson 's career—a career that also disintegrated in sexual calamity). "It was unbelievable," says Morrison , finally alone, sitting in the home of co-promoter Tony Holden last Thursday in Tulsa . He had just finished subjecting himself to the demands of celebrity journalism—Dateline, Larry King Live, PEOPLE magazine—and was ready to duck into seclusion on his 100-acre spread in Jay. "It was all right there. You could feed yourself as fast and as much as you wanted."

His trainer, Tom Virgets, who once called him a "bimbo magnet," remembers autograph sessions during which Morrison would receive the most astounding proposals, so frank, Virgets says, "that you just couldn't repeat them."

Morrison 's attitude toward women was, at best, hopelessly juvenile. His hard-scrabble youth—he was illegally entering toughman contests by the time he was 13—seemed to him an entitlement to the so-called good life that was at his feet by the early '90s. Leaving Jay for Kansas City , where he lived off and on from 1988 to 1994, the small-town boy was, by his own admission, "a kid in a candy store."