Hurricane: The Life of Rubin Carter, Fighter

Carter also lacked discipline. During training, he would get bored at night, sneak out of camp, and go to Trenton or another town to meet women and carouse. He never drank in front of his trainers, but Parks thought he knew when Carter had been tipping the bottle. His skin seemed to grow yellow and his eyes were in soft focus. Carter once had a sparring match in Newark with a tough but unaccomplished fighter named Joe Louis Adair. Carter had been drinking the previous night, and he was sluggish in the ring. Adair knocked him down in the first round, and a newspaper published a story about the Hurricane’s improbable pummeling. “Rubin was a Mike Tyson with heart,” Parks said in an interview years later. “But drinking was the bane of his career.” Carter, asked about that assessment, agreed.

Parks specialized in working with troubled kids, but he was removed as Carter’s trainer in 1963 because the boxer’s manager wanted a white trainer to improve Carter’s marketability on television. But the change hurt in the ring. Carter preferred black trainers like Parks and said his subsequent white trainers varied in effectiveness. His own effectiveness may also have been diminished because he stopped scaring opponents. His invincible armor, once cracked, gave his competitors more confidence. Carter’s image and tenacity still made him a crowd favorite, though, and at the end of 1965 he was ranked fifth among middleweights by Ring

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