Tommy Morrison is famous for three things: He was briefly the WBO heavyweight champion, he is one of the few well-known athletes that has tested positive for the HIV virus, and he had a co-starring role in Rocky V.
Boxing is littered with rough stories, fights out of poverty and away from bad family situations. Morrison's childhood is hardly storybook, or anything even close to it. From all accounts, it was a nightmare.
But no rough upbringing can be blamed for Tommy Morrison insisting that the HIV virus is impossible to pass sexually between a man and a woman, which is bound to offend, oh, I don't know, just about everyone.
Said Tommy Gunn in a chat with Boxing Talk, "You can't pass it during sex from man to woman anyway. It cannot happen, I don't care what people tell you, it cannot happen. It happens from man to man because that's forbidden of God. You know, it's an abomination, you're going to pay the price. What causes AIDS is drugs."
Morrison, of course, has served time in prison for drug and weapons charges, and has admitted to injecting himself with steroids.
His views on HIV don't begin or end with the homophobic comments he has recently made. "HIV is just a dead piece of skin, that's all it is. Every time your pierce yourself with a needle, you are putting the microbes in you body, these little pieces of dry skin ... That's exactly how I got it," he told ESPN in 2000.
I'm not a super-PC type of guy. I didn't get all up in arms when Bernard Hopkins called Joe Calzaghe a "white boy." I don't really care about most things like that.
But Morrison is ignorant, possibly insane, and a proven moron. This is a guy who had such little respect for the wellbeing of his opponents that he juiced himself up for a competitive edge. I'm not saying he's the only guy that's ever done it, but this isn't baseball -- we're not talking about home runs or career longevity, which stains the game but in the end doesn't really hurt anyone. It's a violent sport where people can get hurt, or worse. Performance-enhancing drugs take on a different role in boxing, mixed martial arts, kickboxing, or any other combat sport.
Nevermind the fact that all medical science is against Tommy Morrison and his idiotic views on a virus he tested positive for that derailed his career, and nevermind that he's bragged at length about his promiscuity and massive sexual activity back when he was someone that mattered. Since he's not a homosexual, he can't get HIV from his sexual life.
He could, I guess, get it from the drugs he squirted into his system, as he figured on eight years ago.
But, now, if you recall, he's never had the virus, and should be allowed to box again. And any time now, he'll go out to Nevada and get re-licensed. Seriously, that's going to happen. Just you wait and see.
Morrison is a washed-up criminal who can't do anything more with his life than box, because he's never gotten over his glory days. This is true of plenty of fighters, but not all of them wind up in prison, and not all of them go borderline nuts with delusional ideas about dead skin microbes giving them the HIV virus.
We won't even get into Morrison claiming that he tested positive for HIV because it would keep the heavyweight title out of a white man's hands, a purpose serving Don King, in Morrison's warped mind. It was always Morrison who had race on his mind as a fighter; "The Great White Hope" of the 1990s heavyweight division repeatedly dogged black fighters, and has even said, "I really don't like black people."
The man is a thug, an almost-was that never really would have been, HIV or not. He was a cheater, a scam artist, and now he's just a shell of a cheating scam artist, still trying to beat the system and gain every advantage he can.
If it involves HIV as an invented virus that makes the drug companies money, then so be it.
Calling Tommy Morrison a redneck or a hillbilly is a nasty insult to the many good-natured rednecks and hillbillies I know. Morrison is your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill whackjob. He just happens to have once been a contender in professional boxing. And we're better off without him -- always have been. I don't wish anybody the ill will that the HIV virus brings, but Morrison is a scumbag. Absence will never make the heart grow fonder in his case.