Jim Souhan: LeDoux paid ultimate price to trade jabs with greatest

Scott LeDoux was Minnesota's "Rocky."

Except that real people run out of sequels.

LeDoux paid for the audacity he displayed in his choice of opponents, the audacity he showed in leaving the Iron Range for a canvas ring.

He paid with busted cheeks, copious blood and a fear of failure belied by his bravado.

"There was never a time when Scott wasn't frightened," Sandy, his first wife, once said.

After Ronnie Lyle beat up LeDoux, a friend recoiled in his dressing room, after seeing red streaks in the toilet. Sandy shrugged and said, "It's been coming out of him for three fights."

By the end, LeDoux was stuck in a wheelchair, victimized by the sport that made him more than just another miner's son.

Thursday, LeDoux -- the Crosby, Minn., native and former Anoka County commissioner -- ceased feeling pain. He died at his home in Coon Rapids after a lengthy bout with ALS, which also claimed the life of Kent Hrbek's father. LeDoux was 62.

He stood toe-to-toe with Larry Holmes in a heavyweight title fight at Met Center. He fought 11 champions, plus an exhibition against the great Muhammad Ali.

He stood toe-to-toe with Leon Spinks and Duane Bobick, and Mike Tyson and Ken Norton. He took beatings until he had no choice but to retire.

At his first desk job, he said, "I wanted to use my head for something other than a hat rack."

The problem with old boxers, though, is that they die, and they fade away, and not in that order.

LeDoux fought ALS but he might as well have been asking for a rematch with Ali in his prime. The last few years LeDoux kept showing up, to promote boxing, to work for the county, to champion his favorite charities, and the words kept getting harder to form.

The miner's son made it to Madison Square Garden, but we learn more every day about the price athletes in violent sports pay to entertain us.

The brain cannot withstand the beatings that boxers take. Even light head slaps to a football helmet build cumulatively toward brain damage. LeDoux didn't know that when he started punching as a kid.

He was just over 6 pounds at birth, and his mother, Mickey, called him a "bleeder." She was shocked to see him go into boxing, but he fought in the Golden Gloves and turned pro in 1975. He would fight his way to the big time, no matter the cost.

LeDoux had a puncher's chance to win the heavyweight title in 1980, when he fought Holmes at Met Center. Holmes thumbed his eye at the end of a punch, and LeDoux insisted on fighting. In the next round, when LeDoux's face banged into Holmes' shoulder, his eyelid split open and started to tear from his skull.

The referee stopped the fight. LeDoux protested.

"Ma," he told his mother after the fight. "He never laid a hand on me."

He also said: "Nobody put a gun in my back and told me to enter the ring. I fight of my own free will. What I do is my responsibility."

Someone asked, "Even if it costs you an eye?"

"Even that," LeDoux said. "What did it cost me to get this far? It cost me plenty. An eye would have been worth the trouble. A thumb ain't gonna kill you. I been around long enough to know that a thumb ain't gonna kill you."

The accumulated thumbs and fists cost him plenty, and we'll never know if, in the end, he would have approved of the deal he made with life: "I'll take as many punches as I gotta take to get to the big time."

He left a few hints, though, this guy who called himself the Fighting Frenchman.

"For a guy with no talent and a big smile, I did OK," he once said. "I did OK."

Star Tribune researcher John Wareham contributed to this report, which cites work drawn from Star Tribune archives. Jim Souhan can be heard Sundays from 10 a.m. to noon and weekdays at 2:40 p.m. on 1500ESPN. His Twitter name is SouhanStrib. • jsouhan@startribune.com