We media types tend to be such suckers…
And we were all so very fascinated and easily won over by boxer Tommy Morrison and his many eccentricities…
The serial bedding of women, the pet mountain lions and leopard, the tattoo of Elvis on his butt that he gave a closeup of to Channel 9’s Karen Kornacki.
Then there was the episode in Springfield where Morrison and his entourage befriended a college kid late one night at a bar and ended up shaving off his eyebrows and cutting a hair highway down the middle of his head.
Cute, right?
Or so we thought at the time.
Syndicated radio personality and KC export Erich Mancow Muller saw through all of that and into Morrison’s darker side.
He was a young man who hid behind a smile and acted nice enough when needed but in reality was little more than a vile, evil sociopath.
“He seemed like really dumb kid with a violent undertone,” Mancow says. “People kept telling me this guy was gonna be a big star because he had been cast in a Sylvester Stallone movie. Not just any Stallone movie but a Rocky movie. I mean, look at what happened to Mr. T, a bouncer from Chicago after he was in Rocky 3. We all thought Tommy might be the next big deal.
“I interviewed him several times and found him completely charmless. And some of the stories that I heard about him from various women, all by the way unsubstantiated, were pretty vile. I was hitting the clubs and DJing at the same time he was out carousing. I was single and loved the ladies as much as any guy. I wasn’t exactly a feminist but the stories about Tommy were brutal.
“Seems he had real anger issues. I hope He has finally found peace. Then there was the story about him having AIDs. Still very mysterious to me when he got diagnosed. This was when we really didn’t have a grasp of what it was. He claimed he was misdiagnosed or something. This was because he wanted to fight. He was on my radio program several times denying he had AIDS.
“Really though, what keeps coming to my mind today is: what a waste. Such big dreams such potential what a waste. But to me even when he smiled there was always an undercurrent of nastiness.”
A dark undercurrent many of us seemed to miss while reveling in Morrison’s boxing successes and over-the-top idiosyncrasies.
“Look, I was a kid and those Rocky movies were huge,” Mancow muses. “When we heard about this real boxer being cast it was wild. I thought, he must be pretty special. He was younger than me! A kid! Then I met him and Thought, ‘He has very little personality. What am I missing?’ And as it turns out his movie career didn’t happen. I just saw darkness. A big, corn fed goofy smile is what others saw but I just saw darkness.”
Off the record:
mancow…has no qualifications to discuss anyones movie or personal
career.
Have you seen the mess of the show he’s got on tv now.
WORST EVER.
the guy tries too hard to be something he’s not.
He has no facts to back up anything he says about tommy.
Just more garbage and b.s. from a guy who’s time has past.
His show should be immediately sent to dvd. Wow..what a mess.
Just another attempt at trying to spreadlies and hate…he never
knew tommy.
He never could verify his b.s stories. Time for another
has been to move on.
KCC must really be struggling to get writers because boycow
story is so full of bull!!!!!
In your humble opinion…
Of course, your stories and anecdotes are the gospel.
Mancow is on solid ground stating his opinion, his feel for Morrison after several encounters and interviews.
several encounters and interviews…that’s
what gives him the right to do this man
after he’s passed.
come on hearne…get real.
for those of us who knew the guy the comments
by boycow are really horrid.
Plus..lets be honest…for a guy who has ashow
as bad as “cars/god/crapola” that’s so bad it would
never make a youtube reel…he’s not one to
be examining another persons life.
Easy, Big Guy…
We’re not talking about St. Tommy here.
We’re talking about a dude who was a convicted felon, left behind a legacy of bad deeds.
The fact that you and however many other kisser-uppers had some good schmoozes is of little import.
I remember talking to dawn a few years back about how horrible Tommy behaved towards her and his son.
Your point being, Morrison was far too good a man to deserve any negative scrutiny.
Prove it
where were you when the guy was alive?
where were the stories during the “days”
you andtommy were so close.
you wait for the man to pass til you
unfurl dirt on him.
go back and find a negative story you did on
this man…knowing for all these years the
dirt youknew on him. dare ya.
you idolized this guy like the rest of the
“stars” you wrote about.
You’re the journalist…always banging on
the star for mistakes…your facts were wrong..
your stories were like geraldos safe cracking
and your attempt to discredit the man
after death …not knowing facts or even
close to facts…using poor sources….not being
ableto support the crap you put on…all
this points to as the owner/headwriter that
you’re not even handed.
I never said tommy didn’t deserve any
negative scrutiny. I said why did you wait
until the man passes to bring upthe dirt.
why? probably because you were
scared shitless to take on the guy.
uh….a felon….left behind a legacyof
bad deeds….doesn’t that sound familiar
to the guy yousupport and quote at least
once a day.
did you ever quote tommy here.
Never said the man doesn’t deserve to be
looked at for his decisions both good and
bad.
Just said that after he passes the false
accusations you bring up…the unfounded
claims…all after he passes away…conveniently
come out of hearne christropers mouth.
Never said he was asaint…anyon who knew
him or saw him knew the man was not
a saint.
what’s gonna happen when glaze passes
(god forbid)…you gonna lay the sh*t down
on his dark past too? gonna show and tell
all the horrible thingsthe guy did?
let the man and his family grieve in peace.
thanks.
I always thought that the Glaze was the convicted felon. am i wrong
the guy tries too hard to be something he’s not.
He has no facts to back up anything he says .
Just more garbage and b.s. from a guy who’s time has past
You have to be talking about yourself when you utter those words. You have not ever backed up anything you have ever said. So now lets see you do some backing up with your facts before you make any attempts to trash talk another persons opinion.
Well, being stupid and having the full blown AIDS might make you a little angry, maybe.
Did boycow think of that?
As I responded a few days ago. I knew Tommy, he was not mister outgoing, no, but he was generally polite and had a big smile, lots of warmth when need be. The guy is dead, he had a shooting star rise and a huge fall. Morrison was THE GREAT WHITE HOPE, and the only American to do that in decades, there still isn’t one.
In knowing the guy, I liked him, I heard all the bad stories, but hell every ‘bad boy’ had them. As Hearne mentioned during his run and long after he was one of our cities most famous people. Up there with Brett and Dawson. Tommy had his good side, I think the dark side came out when he was high and mostly after his fall. When I asked him to do charity work for Westport like Red Fridays, he was happy to do so…the man was far from all bad.
Tommy paid a super high price for his fame, none higher. He was tortured for it for nearly two decades til he died. Give the man a break.
So it is your view that it was his FAME that lead him to copulate without a condom?
When you see a young very beautiful woman on the Plaza, well dressed and upwardly mobile – does it ever enter your mind she has HIV? No. But if you see a streetwalker that looks ill, do you think about HIV? Yes. Tommy and the rest of society think the same way. People depend too much on appearances, not statistical facts.
Probably not to a great extent anyway.
More likely the FAME lead him to a position where he could bed just about anybody and everybody (within reason) and people didn’t know that much about HIV yet.
I don’t know about you, Hearne…but I knew enough about disease to use rubbers in the late 80s.
Why bother you couldn’t get laid in a house of ill rpute with a fist full of fifties. Give me a break boy. Morrison and I did more 9’s in a month than you did 7’s in your life.
Well, I got married in 1989 and that was right around the time Herpes and then AIDS became front page news.
However at that time, there were a lot more myths and incorrect assumptions floating around about how you got it, etc.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that perhaps at that time, in Tommy’s world, there wasn’t as much awareness about the condition that there was a few years later and now.
Just a thought
Uh, the klitchkos have held all the hw titles for going on a decade. You don’t get any whiter than those 2.
Hello they are not American’s, thank you.
Well, now that you have revealed exclusively that the world of boxing has a seamy underside…and an overside….well really all sides, it turns out…I become irrevocably disillusioned. In retrospect, we can regret that Tommy chose boxing instead of heading off to one of those Ivy League schools that must have been recruiting him.
Morrison made many mistakes, mostly self-inflicted. Thank goodness we have moral beacons like Mancow and Craig to guide us toward the path of virtue.
+1
You are worse than those two.
Amen, Brutha Bostock, amen.
Your welcome you lazy, good for nothing never were punk. But you’re welcome.
The only thing square in boxing is the ring.
This story, Tommy’s reasoning behind the denial and everything connected, like anything else, has to be put in context. In ’89 it was still pretty rare for AIDS to be connected to someone outside the gay community. Heterosexual AIDS wasn’t as common as today in the US.
It was just a year after this that an employee on my staff came to be with the same story, but acquired HIV from her then ex-husband. You want to talk devastated and taken totally off guard, here’s someone playing by the rules, doing it ALL right, then finds out not only is she getting a divorce she wasn’t counting on, dealing with the stress of that, but then finds out, quite by accident, she’s also been awarded a death sentence at the time, along with the divorce decree.
I can remember the suspicion she came under by other staff members. Was it drugs, was she gay (like that had anything to do with it), all the how’s and whys that went with it, when in reality, she was nothing more than a wife to someone who was a bad actor and she never had a clue till it was over.
She’s still alive, diminished in several ways, but alive. Makes you wonder if Tommy denied his diagnosis to himself and refused any treatment, because even in the late 80’s, it was far more easily dealt with through medications than it was 10 years prior.
What a sad story. Thats the ultimate betrayal and crime. Its so important to really evaluate a person your dating. Look for any small faults that may grow. I had a librarian in middle school who dated a “bad boy”. One day she didn’t arrive at school. When checked on, friends found her stabbed to death by her man. She had so many chances to date boring men who would have treated her with respect. She could be alive now if she would have skipped the excitement that bad boy offers…..
What made me puke back then was how so man people said it was a punishment from God. How they puffed out their chests and flaunted their twisted-moral superiority.
Then came Ryan White. And Elizabeth Glaser. Both infected through blood transfusions. But many still clung to the notion is was God’s way of punishing the evil ones.
At the same time respectable Republican, Rock Hudson, was having unprotected sex with young men knowing he was infected with the virus.
And Republican Roy Cohn, political advisor to Nixon and Reagan, died of AIDS while pushing the Republican anti-homosexual bandwagon. Pretty sure he didn’t get it from having sex with green monkeys.
Reagan and Hudson had been friends in Hollywood. It wasn’t until the disease struck on of his friends that Reagan began to support research and treatment for it.
Everytime I hear anyone, especially a Republican, spout their moral superiority, I throw up in my mouth a little. OK, a lot.
Denial is not just a river in Egypt.
I remember the far right’s solution; Zip your FLY, you wont DIE.
Not just the wingers, many liberals too who were homophobic.
Only in America was the AIDS epidemic primarily confined to gay men. Cuban soldiers returning from Angola with AIDS were treated with honor rather than disgust and shame.
Those damn evil Republicans. Let’s make it all political. Gimme a break.
Aids : a punishment from God? This theory has roots in the story of the Garden of Eden. The world was peaceful with no illness and people never died. People didn’t have to work, God provided all. It was a party! God was right there with everyone. It was basically “heaven” on earth. It would have stayed that way but mankind rebelled, sinned, destroying God’s planned perfect world. It didn’t help that 1/3 of the Angels were in on this backstabbing and they were cast from true heaven, to this earth. Then all hell broke loose on earth. I blame all the problems on mankind’s rebelling. This is not the world God wanted.
+1
Martin told me that the HIV drugs Tommy was taken were very expensive and that towards the end he had a hard time affording them.
As he denied he had it?!?!?
What a dirtbag.
I don’t think he denied having it back then – he even admitted having it as first in 1996 – I think he just kept it under his hat
While exposing other people to it potentially.
WHAT. A. DIRT. BAG.
Boxing is a brutal, ego centered, competitive, extreme, sometimes even fatal sport. You expect a boxer to be a nice guy? You expect him to have a charming personality? Be kind to others all the time and be an angel while in public? Tommy’s goal in life was to beat his opponent. Nothing more. Between matches be was just “passing time”. Would you expect a Roman Gladiator to be a kind soul? We are talking about an excellent boxer, not a customer service rep.
mancow? wow….is he still around….I thought he was going to take howard stern down….so be it for blow holes…..
boycow couldn’t carry stern’s jockstrap..
he was nowhere near as good as dare or even randy miller.
he ripped off lots of material..
and as far as his tv show….what a mess!
hearne…please take down the word uncensored on your site.
thanks…
Harley
Yessir
Three bags full, sir
Anyone personally know a girl that hooked up with Morrison? I don’t. I am 46 and used to go to Westport and saw Tommy often.
he dated my best friend., We were both ring girls for his fights in KC.
She is now dead from AIDS.
Yikes.
That’s very tragic. When did your friend pass? I ask because frankly I was surprised Tommy lived such a long time after diagnosis. Did he help her in any way or take responsibility for her plight?
She died on sept 12,2006. She lost her insurance and couldn’t afford her medicine. He had the money to afford the medication. I contacted him back in 2006 and he did not help her in any way..
DIRTBAG.
The story about your friend dying is so very sad. I can’t even begin to imagine how rejected she must have felt. And to have him apparently not care (he cared about himself however) about her, even knowing she would pass away. Maybe there is nothing she could legally do either. I hope she had friends close to her to help out. Sad that she is not here to enjoy life all because of a misplaced trust. I wonder if there are other women in the area that were infected by Tommy?
With all kind due respect, and sincere empathy for you and your best friend…..is it at all possible that since she didn’t take precautions, another person might have passed HIV to her? Is there that chance? I ask because someone once blamed / named me for passing a STD. When I was tested it was found I was innocent and healthy. The girl then remembered an isolated encounter she had -it was proven to be the source of her STD. She was wrong and I accepted her apology. Maybe your friend could have been mistaken. There are millions or HIV people in the USA………
Bill Nigro does.
He told me earlier today that when Tommy’s HIV Positive story broke there were a bunch of hotties – regulars at the original Beaumont Club – that went in and got tested.
she was a regular at Beaumont Club. That was our hang out. Unfortunately I was the only person by her bedside in a cold, lonely hospital room as she was dying of AIDS. I had to decide whether to turn her life support equipment off or not.
I contacted Tommy back then in 2006 and ask him to help me and he threatened to sue me and my family for slander.
Its sad how life ends up. He could have done the right thing and admitted the truth and helped people. Now all I have left of my best friend is a container of ashes by my bed.
Tommy Morrison is responsible for her death. How many more women are out there??
I am very disappointed, Hearne. Instead of taking a swipe at one of your many enemies over Tommy’s corpse, you use the occasion to give Mancow a tongue bath.
Disappointed, my ass.
You live to chart my so-called enemy swiping, but hold it right there, Mysterious.
A tongue bath? Get your mind out of the gutter!
Im just glad to see someone ELSE get a bullet from time to time! Thank you, Mysterious.
Attaboy
Well you are right. Your remarkable pettiness, particularly on the occasion of someone’s death, is absolutely a guilty pleasure of mine…I won’t deny that Instead, you use Tommy passing to declare Mancow (someone who hasn’t lived anywhere near KC in 20+ years) a KC expert? Give me a break!
Silly Goose~
Easy Mysterious One, I called Mancow a “Kansas City export” not EXPERT.
Sheesh
Ok, I am man enough to admit when I am WAY off base. I can also give credit where credit is due: in the most recent story you make up for your lack of pettiness in Tommy coverage with salaciousness. Your salacious side is also a guilty pleasure of mine, so bravo!
Tommy Lied. The truth eventually comes out. I knew him personally. He dated my best friend in the early 90’s. She contracted the HIV virus from him and I laid to rest my best friend in sept. 2006.
Im tired of keeping this secret and listening to all the lies. You reap what you sow.
RIP T.E.
I am so sorry to hear about your friend’s passing. It must be hard to post here, but it may prevent a repeat of this event someday. People need to be very careful. Did Tommy help her at all, or ignore her saying he didn’t have AIDS?
no. he didn’t help her…
He peaked in that one fight with a nearly 50-year old Foreman for one of the Alphabet Soup titles, but was only as big as he was because of his skin color and an admittedly devastating left hook. He beat past their prime journeymen on his way up and was nearly murdered in the ring by another in Ray Mercer. He played the central role in by far the worst Rocky movie and tore through the skanks of Westport/Plaza/Senor Phrog’s like it was his job. Too bad he got the AIDS and died from it and I won’t badmouth the guy so soon after his passing, but it seems some on this site might want to get themselves tested considering all the Tommy slobbin’ I’ve read the last few days. My god, wrong to trash the guy now, but should the alternative be turning this guy’s story into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie?
I’m with PB
Not sure what there was to admire in this sociopathic piece of crap. He knew he had HIV and used his penis as a deadly weapon. No telling how many women he killed.
Bingoooooooooooo.
And that my friends is what Mancow was trying to say.
After having him on several times over the years, he could feel – somehow sense – a darkness beneath Tommy’s veneer of politeness and faux friendliness.
Tommy risk his life each time he got in the ring. He had a warrior personality. If he he would have lost an arm to cancer, he would still be out there boxing. If he would have lost a leg, he would be out there boxing. So is it any surprise that HIV didn’t stop him from continuing his life? Due to the common herpes explosion from 1980, those women knew they should use a condom. Doubt the girls were ignorant about sex or inexperienced. It takes 2 people, both refusing to use a condom to spread HIV. So I think both parties are equally responsible, and its their business if they want to risk catching something. Lets not blame just Tommy. One of those girls had HIV already – that’s how he got it. He was a victim too!
Equally responsible? Srsly? Did those girls consent to being murdered? TM knew he had HIV, the girls didn’t.
I bet you think OJ was innocent, too.
Its a fact that one of those girls had HIV, and Tommy didn’t. Then the girl gave it to him. The girl had HIV and didn’t tell him. Maybe some of those girls already had HIV, so Tommy could not have infected them.
Did Tommy consent to being murdered? No. Did the girl tell him she had HIV? No. Who is the victim?
OJ was a cold calculated murderer. Tommy was a kid who couldn’t say no to women throwing themselves at him. Very different situation. And if he really believed HIV could be cured like a cold being fought off, then he never thought it could kill someone. His ignorance has been disasterous. But remember, at one point he didn’t have HIV. Someone gave it to him.
Yeah, some warrior. You say that cancer and HIV wouldn’t stop him, but yet it was simply his immaturity and excesses that did him in. In that respect, he’s really no different than an Amy Winehouse, Ken Caminiti, Chris Farley or countless other famous or not so famous people that have partied their way to the morgue. I feel bad for those who loved him, but his recklessness and selfishness didn’t make him special, it just made him the typical cautionary tale.
I read the post that claimed Tommy passed HIV to a Hooters girl. Don’t really believe it. How do we know she didn’t pass it to him? Its like trying to figure out who gave who the flu. I went to Hooters Metcalf all the time. One waitress tried to sell me printed pictures of herself in a bikini. Guess she didn’t realize that in 1999 there were a lot of pictures of women on something called the internet? Many waitresses were dating bad boys or married men. Went to a party in Gardner in 2000 hosted by a Hooters girl. Had a nice pool, but it seemed many people there were drinking excess amounts of booze. Could be that clouded judgement has something to do with people’s memories 10 years ago. Did the waitress that sadly died of HIV ever have unprotected sex with any other men in her whole life? Could someone else have given it to her? All it takes is one time. Or was T.M. the only man in her entire life she had sex with unprotected? HIV has been around since the 1950’s, first identified in a woman in Detroit. Check that fact out on Gooogle. Many people may have died from it in the 40’s and 50’s before it because an epidemic. Its been lurking around for a while and can be 100% prevented.
Exactly, Debbie Miller, how do you know your friend didn’t give it to Tommy?? Someone had it first and if your friends were sleeping around with every guy that came in Hooters & Beauregard, what do you expect? Before you accuse someone of murder, you better have proof or a lot of money to bail yourself out of a lawsuit. That is to you Debbie. And to the washed up Mancow & his self righteous booty buddies.