LIFE DEALS NASTY BLOW TO BOXING CHAMP CHUVALO

George Chuvalo never went down. The best-known boxer Canada ever
produced took every shot that Muhammad Ali could unleash, but stayed
on his feet for 15 rounds -- twice.

In fact, in 97 pro fights, nobody ever knocked George Chuvalo to the
canvas -- not Ali, not George Foreman, not Joe Frazier, nobody.

No, the blows that took Chuvalo to his knees came later, outside the ring.

He lost three sons to drugs, and his wife to a broken heart.

Chuvalo is a legend: Canadian heavyweight champion from 1958 to 1979.
Knocked out 70 opponents. Fought Ali twice, first in 1966 in Toronto,
then in Vancouver's Pacific Coliseum in 1972 -- didn't win on the
scorecard, but did some damage. "Muhammad Ali went to the hospital
with bleeding kidneys and me, I went dancing with my wife," he says
in Facing Ali, a documentary film released last year.

He's 72 years old now, but still has a mostly black leonine head of
hair and beer keg for a chest. He's in town for the B.C. Golden
Gloves boxing tournament that continues today at the Eagle Ridge
Community Centre in Langford. His right arm is bigger than your
thigh. Voice like a gravel pit. A microphone disappears in his paw.

He used the mike at Belmont Secondary yesterday, and told a gym full
of students not about boxing, but about the way his Toronto family
was devastated by drugs.

The story is beyond tragic.

A dirt-bike crash landed Chuvalo's 20-year-old son, Jesse, in
hospital with a messed-up knee in April 1984. He was still
complaining of the pain the next month when he went to a party. Tried
heroin. Ended up hooked. So, by that September, were his older
brothers, George Lee and Steven. Life descended into a series of jail
sentences and overdoses, the father often trolling the streets of
Toronto in search of his sons. One of the boys OD'd 15 times in two months.

Jesse was the first to die. He was in the "despair of addiction" when
he took a .22 rifle and shot himself through the mouth in the family
home in February 1985.

Then it was George Lee. He was found dead of an overdose in a hotel
room, the syringe still in his arm, four days after getting out of
jail in 1993.

The pain of losing a second son was so great that Chuvalo and his
wife Lynne couldn't even look at each other without crying. Four days
after George Lee died, Chuvalo saw Lynne rummaging through a hope
chest. He didn't know what she was looking for. It turned out to be
pills that one of the boys had stolen. Chuvalo found her dead on
Jesse's bed, clutching a Bible. Jesse's cremated remains and a
suicide note were there, too.

Finally, it was Steven who, 11 days after getting out of jail in
1994, died of an overdose. They found him wearing just his
underpants, slumped in a chair in his sister's apartment, a syringe
in his left arm, an unlit smoke in his right hand. That's how fast
the drugs hit: "Before my son could light a cigarette, he was dead."

Chuvalo relates all this without notes, just sits in a chair in a
black T-shirt and blue jeans and rasps out the names and dates. He
might have told this story 1,400 times since 1996 -- in schools,
prisons, on reserves -- but you can tell it still hurts. This is a
man who loved -- still loves -- his family very much.

He says the strongest reaction to his talks comes in juvenile jails
like the Victoria Youth Detention Centre, where he is to speak today.
Best to impart this lesson when the listeners are young and making
life-changing decisions. People don't suddenly choose to start
drugging or drinking or smoking at 40 or 50.

Respect yourself, he tells them. Tell those you love that you love
them. Don't be fooled into thinking that it's just bad people who
make those bad choices that so easily leave them in a trap from which
they cannot escape.

"What happened to my family shouldn't happen to any family," Chuvalo
says. No, it shouldn't, but it does -- perhaps not to the extent it
hit the Chuvalo home, but often enough nonetheless, albeit to
less-public families. And none of them deserve to be brought down by
that kind of blow.