BY DAN McGRATH
For the Sun-Times
FREEPORT, Ill. — Lisa McClellan considers herself her hometown’s most knowledgeable fight fan. But she passed on purchasing the Pacquiao-Mayweather pay-per-view for reasons more philosophical than economic.
“I’m not going to support a sport that refuses to take care of its own,” she says.
The mostly subdued, occasionally agitated man in a beige recliner in the living room of a small, well-kept frame home on a quiet dead-end street fuels Lisa’s disillusionment. He is Gerald McClellan, “the G-Man,” her brother, older by a year, a former middleweight world champion and casualty of a blood sport that Lisa believes has abandoned him.
On Feb. 25, 1995, British champion Nigel Benn knocked out McClellan in the 10th round of a super-middleweight title bout still remembered for its savagery. After collapsing in his corner, McClellan was taken by ambulance to a London hospital, where emergency brain surgery saved his life.
He was kept in a medically induced coma for two weeks while bleeding and swelling subsided, but irreversible brain damage left the G-Man a lesser man. McClellan, 47, is blind and 80 percent deaf. His speech is an alternating pattern of low murmurs and high-pitched shrieks. He feeds himself but requires assistance with all other basic functions.
Lisa and her older sister Sandra are his caregivers, sharing 24/7 responsibilities. After 20 years at his side, Lisa remains as attentive to her brother as a mother to a newborn. The commitment cost her a marriage when her former husband insisted she place McClellan in a nursing home.
“He didn’t understand my priorities,” Lisa says. “Gerald wouldn’t do well with strangers caring for him. It has to be family.”
A devastating puncher, McClellan had a 31-3 record as a professional, with 20 first-round knockouts. His reputation for ferocity outlasted his career. In 2007, in the furor over Michael Vick’s dog-fighting escapades, McClellan was written up as another athlete with an affinity for this shadowy brand of barbarism.
Twelve years into near-total incapacitation, he couldn’t defend himself. Lisa does, dismissing the stories as lies.
“Gerald loved dogs,” she insists.
The backlash, though, was severe. Protesters demonstrated outside a London fundraiser organized by Benn’s manager. Hate letters arrived at Lisa’s Freeport home, some suggesting McClellan’s condition was retribution for his depravity. She had to move her brother’s trust account after animal-rights activists proposed a boycott of the bank she had been using. Not that it mattered, donations to the fund stopped coming.
As Zaryigha, his 3-year-old grandniece, climbs aboard the recliner and snuggles against McClellan’s chest, those once feared hands tenderly embrace the toddler in a protective cocoon.
“Her favorite resting place,” Lisa says.
This image doesn’t square with the outrageous brutality depicted in the dogfighting stories. But Lisa can’t undo the damage.
The McClellans live on Gerald’s $1,800-a-month disability check from Social Security. Lisa and Sandra draw a small stipend from the state of Illinois as his caregivers. The World Boxing Council has provided a $10,000 assistance grant. Ring 10, a New York-based charity established to aid indigent fighters, maintains an account at a local grocery store.
Don King, notorious for his manipulation of fighters’ finances, has contributed $25,000, Lisa estimates. Emanuel Steward, before he died, outfitted the McClellans’ home with new appliances. Executives at HBO and Showtime made substantial donations, as did British promoter Frank Warren.
But nothing from the boxers themselves, the fellow warriors who called themselves the G-Man’s “brothers.” Lisa is particularly miffed at Thomas Hearns, who committed to appearing at a fundraiser, only to no-show after she’d bought his plane ticket. So many fighters failed to appear at a March event that it wound up losing money after Lisa had to cover their meals.
“I’ll never reach out to boxing again, ever,” she says, sad resignation in her voice. “I’m so tired of asking those people for help and not getting anything.”
The cozy, dimly lit room where McClellan spends most of his time could be a shrine to him.
The pictures and plaques displayed tell a story of an impishly smiling kindergarten tyke growing into a prizefighting terror. Lisa isn’t troubled by the progression.
“I don’t blame boxing for what happened,” she says. “Boxing was everything to Gerald. It made him who he was.”
Who he is, too.
