Hulond Copeland sits at a table barely able to contain his excitement. His right eye wanders uselessly to the side. His face is a relief map of lumps, divots and lines – battle scars, he calls them – from his long-gone boxing career. He has come to send a message to Colorado: He’s sorry for being such a jerk. And, boy, was he.
Copeland went to prison in 2003 for selling drugs to an undercover cop and taking bribes in exchange for falsifying records for criminals sentenced to community service at his boxing gym in Colorado Springs.
Back then the prosecutor called him “a con man.” The judge was disgusted with him.
Copeland insists he has changed.
“Prison got my attention.”
It was a long time coming.
Copeland grew up in Detroit in the 1960s. “As a kid I wanted to be an anesthesiologist,” he said. But in his neighborhood, nobody went to college. “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Most of the kids I grew up with are dead.”
Instead of medicine, he took up boxing, and by all accounts, he was good at it.
He trained at the legendary Kronk Gym in Detroit and was a promising amateur until a detached retina ended his career.
Still, he did all right for a while. He married a girl from high school – Wilson Pickett’s daughter Veda – and the couple had two girls. He started coaching, worked in the U.S. Olympic program and moved in 1994 to Colorado Springs, where he opened Copeland’s Gym, a place for troubled kids to fight their way back to productive lives.
For a while he did well. He got grants from El Paso County. Kids were winning titles, finishing school, going off to college, joining the military.
“A lot of my kids did real good,” he said.
Then he messed up.
In 1999, Veda left him.
“I thought I didn’t need her,” he said. “Boy, was I wrong.”
Left on his own, he developed an attitude, a cocaine habit and the rap sheet to go along with it.
“I don’t like to make excuses,” he said. “I have to own up to what happened and the choices I made. But my life went into a downward spiral real fast.”
In prison it hit bottom.
He found drug rehab and religion, and he said he behaved himself. “I didn’t have a single write-up. Not one.”
He was paroled in February, moved to Denver and started over.
“The only job I could get was telemarketing, cold calls,” he said. “I made myself good at it, but I didn’t like it at all.”
In April he got a job at King Soopers. “When they hired me, I was so happy I cried,” he said.
Now he’s working, going to school to become a certified addictions counselor, talking a mile a minute to anyone who will listen to him, trying to get somebody to believe in him, and trying to believe in himself.
“I mentor guys at the halfway house,” he said. “I tell them, ‘You don’t want to go to prison. You think you’re tough, but you’re not. They use young boys there. Behind that wall, there’s no job, no nothing. And there’s no end to it.”‘
He tells the kids the story of when he was 20 years old and thought he was tough.
It was August 1983, and he was boxing at the Ohio State Fair National Invitational Tournament in Columbus.
He was big and quick and cocky, but he wasn’t the only talented boxer there.
“The first night of the tournament, I would look over at this guy, Mike Tyson, in the other ring,” he said. “He was knocking guys out. I’d heard about this kid. Everybody was talking about him. I thought I was going to teach him a lesson.”
Copeland scored a knockout in the preliminaries and started talking trash. When his turn came to face Tyson, he was pumped.
“In the first round, I hurt him and he was down for eight counts,” Copeland recalled, smiling, knowing that his next line always brings a big laugh.
“Then the second round started and the bell is the last thing I remember.”
It was a knockout. His right eye has never been worth much since.
Copeland knows it’s Hollywood material. All it needs is a happy ending.
He’s trying to write it. It’ll take time, he says. He can do it.
It starts with the scene of the former tough guy bagging groceries.
With tears in his eyes.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
