Ring of Redemption : Comeback: Boxing took Henry Tillman from the California Youth Authority to a gold medal in the ’84 Olympics. Now facing a criminal trial, he wants to return to the sport.

At first it was a raw, angry thing--fighting made your reputation and your neighborhood’s. In the California Youth Authority, boxing could earn you a better meal or even an early parole. And in the Olympic Games? Well, that was a pure dream, a ticket to a gold medal and a life that was supposed to be beyond reach.

Henry Tillman was always fighting to get somewhere--out of a detention camp, onto the Olympic team or up on the medal stand at the Sports Arena that summer in Los Angeles.

Now--more than a decade after his Olympic gold medal triumph, 34 years old and a little soft around the middle--the hometown hero of the 1984 Summer Games says he is ready to fight again. This time, it is for redemption.

Before he can lace up the gloves, Tillman must beat a rap for allegedly passing bad credit cards, a phony ID and a bad loan application. If he fails--in a trial that has been scheduled for mid-March--he could spend as much as eight years in prison.

Tillman says he is not guilty of nine counts that range from fraud to forgery and grand theft. And he is making plans to move on--scheduling a trip to a Tampa, Fla., training camp later this month.

“I’m going to fight just to stay out,” Tillman said. “I’m going to fight with all the tools that are necessary to stay out of the institutional system. I can’t let it get me down and worried.”

Tillman’s arrest and decision to return to boxing are a pointed reminder of the difficulty involved in the transition from professional athlete to average citizen.

In South-Central Los Angeles over the last decade, Tillman has made a name for himself as much more than just another jock. His years working with troubled young people and organizing community events had many people marking him for much wider horizons, perhaps in business or a nonprofit group. He seemed to have grown beyond boxing and its uncertain rewards.

“He is a guy you can tell has worked really hard on himself and made an improvement in his life,” said Bernard Kinsey, former co-chair of the riot recovery agency RLA. “I just hope (the charges) are not true about him. If guys like him cannot pull themselves out, it doesn’t bode well for all the other kids we have who are struggling.”

Tillman conceded that growing up around 89th Street and Central Avenue in South-Central, he and his running mates “had a notorious name throughout the neighborhood” as “guys who didn’t take no crap from nobody.”

Before he was out of his teens, Tillman was convicted and served short stints in jail for drug sales, grand theft and battery. He finally landed himself a serious sentence, four years in the California Youth Authority, for armed robbery--part of what he says was an attempt to defend himself in a fight over a crooked dice game.

What seemed like an inevitable downward spiral ended, though, when Tillman met Mercer Smith at the CYA’s Youth Training School in Chino. The plain-talking retired featherweight, just 5 feet 3 inches tall, became a giant in Tillman’s life.

“Smitty” ran Chino’s boxing program, demanding discipline and extreme effort in return for encouragement and even a little love. In the 6-foot-4 Tillman, Smith found a pupil with fast hands and a willingness to get up when he was knocked down.

After serving less than half his term, boxing helped Tillman earn his freedom.

Tillman was fighting to make the U.S. Olympic team less than two years later. His biggest obstacle was a fierce teen-ager named Mike Tyson. Smith still remembers gasping in sympathy during a qualifying bout, when Tyson landed a thundering shot in Tillman’s ribs. “My God, I felt sorry for Henry,” Smith said. “But he came back and boxed his butt off and beat him.”

It was one of two decisions that Tillman scored over Tyson to make the team.

The Olympic heavyweight final was more storybook stuff: Tillman fighting at the Sports Arena, not more than a training run away from the old neighborhood. The favorite for the gold medal was Canadian Willie DeWit, who had beaten the American fighter twice before. But, in the final, Tillman used his superior speed and his jab in a championship performance.

In the history of the American Olympic team, only heavyweight George Foreman had made a faster ascent from novice to champion.

“I’m always the 1984 Olympic heavyweight gold medal champion, even when I die,” Tillman said the other day over rice and beans at a health food restaurant.

The Olympic victory was just part of what suddenly seemed like a charmed life. Not only did he have an Olympic title, but a new girlfriend, Gina Hemphill, who was a Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee staff member and the granddaughter of Jesse Owens.

The refined and college-educated Hemphill opened doors to a world of business and society that even a heavyweight champion might find closed. And in a nascent professional boxing career, Tillman was off to a fast start, winning 10 fights without a loss.

But to fail to advance in boxing is to be in decline. And the demise of Henry Tillman in the ring began in 1987, when he lost badly to his former Olympic teammate and friend, Evander Holyfield.

His career was up and down from there--plenty of victories but too many losses to people no one outside of boxing had heard of. His last fights, in 1992, were not in arenas but in hotel ballrooms. At one such forgettable event, Tillman was sluggish at 33 pounds over his amateur weight, and the crowd booed and derisively hummed the theme from “Rocky.”

His professional career ended in 1992 with a record of 25-6.

The rest of the U.S. Olympic team’s boxing class of 1984, which won a record nine gold medals, met with wildly varying fortunes in the pro ranks. Several became champions, including his friend Mark Breland, who held the welterweight title for a while before retiring in 1992. In contrast, welterweight Jerry Page retired after just 15 fights and now is coaching in Columbus, Ohio.

When Tillman was interviewed last summer for an article marking the 10-year anniversary of the 1984 Games, he said that he had no regrets and that it was “time to move on.” That was good news to friends and acquaintances who hoped that his work in the community would guide the rest of his life.

He had been a fixture at the Community Youth, Sports and Arts Foundation on Crenshaw Boulevard in Southwest Los Angeles, which works with young people who might be prone to trouble. “Every time he would fight, he would give some money or equipment to the center. He was always there,” said Chilton Alphonse, the center’s founder.

And when he was out of fighting, Tillman helped launch a boxing program and was a daily presence as a counselor and boxing trainer at the Crenshaw center. He would take kids to fights, basketball games or to his two-story home in suburban Diamond Bar.

Every summer for several years, he would organize and host Henry Tillman and Friends--a pep rally encouraging kids to stay in school that included gifts from corporations and visits by sports stars.

Tillman had since married Gina, who had moved into a career as a television producer.

After the 1992 riots, the former boxer became active with Rebuild L.A., the riot recovery agency.

No task seemed too small for Tillman, who had an easy rapport with people RLA was trying to reach, said Joel Rubenstein, an RLA executive. Rubenstein saw in Tillman someone “who didn’t need the glamour, glitz and glory” and was prepared to find a job.

Rubenstein tried to help Tillman get a position managing a shuttle bus fleet in Downtown Los Angeles, but that company never got off the ground. Other jobs fell just out of reach. “It was, ‘I think you are well-spoken and we could use somebody like you,’ ” Gina Tillman said. “But then there is always that but . But you don’t have a college degree . . . or this or that.”

The first sign of trouble came a little more than a year ago, when Tillman turned up at a card club in Gardena, passing a credit card and a driver’s license not in his name. He pleaded no contest to using the bad card. A Superior Court judge, persuaded that the event was an aberration, gave him probation and 500 hours community service.

But last fall, Tillman allegedly tried something similar at the Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood. He told a hostess there that he

would share his winnings with her that night. But despite the fact that the woman knew his name and that “Tillman” was stitched across the back of his jacket, he again tried to pass a counterfeit credit card, to obtain $800 in cash, authorities said.

When there was a delay at the teller’s window, Tillman fled without the cash--but a subsequent police investigation turned up another allegedly fraudulent credit card and an illicit cellular phone that was running up charges on someone else’s account.

In his defense, Tillman’s lawyer noted that he never got the cash from the casino and that the second credit card had been paid in full, until the time Tillman was jailed. Now the fighter is free on bail and has been instructed not to talk about the specifics of his case.

He knows some friends think that a boxing comeback is not a great idea.

But he is bolstered by the recent ascendancy of 46-year old heavyweight champion George Foreman, and the memory that boxing made his life better once before.

“We all criticize ourselves,” Tillman said. “At a certain point, that makes us push harder to prove something, not only to everybody else but to yourself. Basically, that’s what I’m doing now.”