FIGHTING FOR HIS LIFE

by Ron Borges

Kassim Ouma had no idea what the soldiers wanted when they walked into his classroom 22 years ago, their big guns and loud voices booming. When you are six years old loud noises can be fun and so he thought these men had come to take his class for a ride in the big truck. They had but it was a ride to hell.

How could he have known they had come to end his boyhood even though it had barely begun? How could he know, at six years old, what a kadogo was? Or that soon he would become one, become a child soldier who would serve the rebel army that eventually overran the government of Uganda by becoming a gun-toting, grenade throwing little tyrant himself?

Why should a child have such thoughts? Far worse, how can he forget them?

How can the mind erase the pictures of what he saw and what he did in those 10 lost years? Can a boxing championship erase those memories? Can two? Can anything?

Sadly, not really, but Kassim Ouma fights on. More than 22 years after he was first kidnapped and pressed into the life of a miniature soldier firing a gun taller than he was, he will fight in a far different way on Dec. 9. He will fight Jermain Taylor for the middleweight championship of the world. He will fight his heart out over a belt, fight as if he's fighting for his life but unlike most men who ply his violent trade he will know what that really means because he has already done it.

Long ago, in forgotten Uganda, where he fought his heart out to survive.

"You couldn't even look outside,'' the soon to be 28-year-old Ouma recalled when asked about that long, dark past. " I was 5 or 6. They took girls. Boys. People ran. They put us all in the garbage truck. Later on, we did it, too, when I was in the government army. Sometimes we'd come to a house and tell the parents, `Somebody's son has got to go.' You like [it] or you don't like, what does it matter? They take you either way. They got to get the kids for the army.''

In the garbage truck that day, Ouma saw what happened if you made the mistake of thinking you had options. If you looked outside someone yelled at you or struck you or pointed a gun at you. If you cried too long, you got shot. Or worse, they made you do the shooting. When he awoke the next morning on the ground he knew not where, there lay the classmates who cried, piled in a heap inside a wooden enclosure. None of them moved and Kassim Ouma knew, even at the age of six, that they never would move again.

Soon you learned not to look. That was lesson two on Day 1. The first lesson, learned when the guns went off in the schoolyard, was that you do not cry. It has been 22 years. Kassim Ouma still cannot cry. Not that he hasn't had many reasons to.

Life goes on, but you do not forget seeing some of your schoolmates run away in tears and hearing the guns explode and watching them fall, blood soiling their school uniforms. Who shot them when they cried? Was it the soldiers? Or was it you?

Pushed into a garbage truck with his surviving classmates, Ouma disappeared into the high grass outside of Kiboga, the Ugandan town where his sister had sent him to boarding school to live with his grandmother. He didn't see his family again for four years.

A child disappears. When he returns he is a child no longer. He is a little boy with dead man's eyes. A little boy with a stone for a heart.

Ouma learned his life and death lessons from the rebel army of Yoweri Museveni, who was fighting to overthrow the violently oppressive regime of Milton Obote. Obote was the Ugandan president whom Museveni had once served as a minister before retreating into the bush with 26 men to create the National Resistance Army that would eventually seize power from him in 1986. When members of the NRA came, they took away Kassim Ouma's innocence, and he soon understood they would take away his life if he didn't follow orders. If he didn't get that message on the first day he got it the day they learned he'd lost three of his bullets.

Someone pays when even three bullets are missing but not a hard warrior like Kassim Ouma. His friend paid instead. The one they ordered him to shoot for his transgression. You do not forget such a thing done by your own hands but, if you survive, you fight on because while they can turn your heart to stone they cannot take away a fighter's heart completely.

Kassim Ouma was a fighter then. He's a fighter still.

He intends to remind the world of that come Dec. 9, when he will be a decided underdog against Taylor, who stands five inches taller and is by far the naturally bigger man regardless of what the scales say when they weigh in. Taylor's promoter, Lou DiBella, has described the match as, "Really a light heavyweight against a small junior middleweight who's moving up. We have a lot of respect for Kassim but this is an opportunity for Jermain to look spectacular.''

Underestimating Ouma is easy to do if you don't quite understand where he came from and the fires he walked through just to get to Little Rock to step in with Taylor. He knows what it means to be an underdog because one can argue no fighter has ever been more of one than he was that morning when he disappeared into the bush in Uganda not to be seen again by his family for a long, long time.

According to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and UNICEF estimates, there are more than 300,000 children under age 16 being exploited as child soldiers in 30 conflicts around the world. In Uganda, there were about 3,000 in Museveni's NRA 20 years ago. Today, a new rebel army led by Joseph Kony is believed to have kidnapped more than 15,000 children into his Lord's Resistance Army in the north of the country and they have launched a savage campaign of violence that has forced more than 800,000 people from their homes, according to Museveni's government. Regardless of who rules, it seems, children disappear.

But a few return to do bigger things. Kassim Ouma, somehow, is one of them. He has long been called "The Dream,'' a nickname he wears proudly on his robe but his life has not been a dream. In many ways it has been a nightmare so, just for accuracy's sake, he should be called something else.

He should be called "The Exception.'' Or maybe just "The Survivor.''

"The first time I shot I was not as big as a gun,'' Ouma recalled, his legs always bouncing nervously when he talks about this thing he wishes not to remember. "I fell right to the ground. I had to learn not to fall so I put a stone behind my foot. I figured it out. If you didn't, you died.

I became a guerilla. A soldier for my country. A corporal. Nobody can mess with that. I was mean.''

What does it mean to be mean at 9 or 10? You take someone's lunch money? Not in Uganda. There you take someone's life.

"Kassim is a great guy,'' said Tom Moran, his long-time friend who, along with Jim Rowan, manages Ouma's career. "He smiles all the time. But sometimes he can't sleep. Then he has a different face. He's not Kassim.''

Actually he is Kassim, just a different Kassim from the guy Moran knows. Hard eyed. Hard face. Hard child, back in Uganda.

"I did a lot of things,'' he said. "I always had my gun half cocked.

That was a warning. Trigger No. 1. I was a child no more. I was about business! If I don't like you, I spit in your face.

"I'd arrest people and take them to the police and tell them to hold them until I came back. The police knew if the guy wasn't there when the little kid came back I'd shoot up the police station.

"I seen so many people blown up. Women. Children. You do things or you die. So much stuff went on. It wasn't until I was 10 that I began to understand. I was always careful not to lose my gun. I had a SMG, a machine gun made in Yugoslavia. It came with three magazines.''

Three magazines but not ones like J-14, Teen People or Sports Illustrated. Different magazines. Ones without pages.

"Ninety rounds,'' Ouma said. "I could carry 90 and the gun. Before I had a gun, when I was little, we would dress in school uniforms to go by the government army and see what they were doing. Or we'd carry a bookbag.

Who knew if it had bombs or not? I close my eyes a little bit and I'm right there. That's why I don't talk about it. When I tell deep stories it don't feel good. I see things and I cannot sleep.''

He closes his eyes for a minute, then excuses himself. His memory needs a break.

"Reporters come around before the fights and want to talk to him about it,'' Moran says, "but he doesn't want to talk. He's opened up about it some the last few years but before a fight he wants to focus on boxing.

Those things can distract him. The discipline of training is an escape from it.''

At times, though, Ouma admits he arrives at the gym too tired to push himself the way he'd like because he hasn't slept. The memories have come back. Or the worry about his family members still in Uganda, a country he has not returned to since he left when he was only 18 to seek a new life in America under cleverly suspect circumstances.

But you cannot leave everything he has experienced behind quite so neatly. Your body may take you somewhere else but your mind? Oh, your mind will take you where you do not want to go sometimes. Your mind will take you back.

There are reminders of that all the time, the latest being a son named Umar Ajambo, who 11 days before Ouma is to face Taylor is scheduled to arrive in Philadelphia, where Ouma has been training at the James Shuler Gym for the Taylor fight. It is a hard place for hard guys and Ouma fits the description but he will not be quite so hard when he sees Umar, the 10-year-old he has not laid eyes on since 1998. The boy was nine months old then. He has never seen his father, nor his father the son, since.

A daughter remains behind still, paperwork, red tape, visa problems and other issues delaying her reunion with a father she has only known on the telephone for the past decade. But they are what he has been fighting for all these years, what he will be fighting for anew on Dec. 9 when the world believes he has little chance to win. He is an expert on having little chance, of course, and an expert on what boxing can do for you if you are talented and willing and most of all brave because if ever was anyone who was saved by boxing it is Kassim Ouma. The streets of every city are littered with broken kids trapped on the fringes of society who find boxing and through it learn discipline and see a chance to find a new life but none more than he for boxing saved Ouma not just from the ravages of poverty and despair, but from a government's brutal army.

Rebellion raged on even after Musevani's child soldiers marched with him into Kampala, Uganda's capital, in victory so for several more years young Ouma remained in the bush, moving from place to place, "chasing bad guys,'' seeing his family of 11 brothers and sisters and his parents sporadically at best. Finally, he saw a way out. He joined the army judo team and traveled to tournaments and became a national champion but quickly he figured out there was another sport that could make his life even better.

"I was 14,'' Ouma said of his first day in boxing gloves. "Boxers went to tournaments all over Africa. It was a good deal if you made the national team. The whole purpose was to get on a plane.''

Ouma weighed 55 kilograms when he started, about 121 pounds. He was a bantamweight with little experience in boxing but a lifetime of experience in fighting. There was much he didn't know, but he knew how to win.

"I fought for the street kids' school in Kampala for a while,'' he said. "Then I got on the national team. I beat our lightweight champion in 1996, but they didn't take me to the Olympic Trials because there were other guys with more experience. That's how it worked.''

By November 1997, Ouma had the experience. He had become one of Uganda's top amateurs, a three-time national and East African champion with a 60-3 record. It was then that his chance for escape came when he was issued one of the most valuable pieces of paper in third world countries with harsh rulers like Uganda. It was a travel visa to go fight at the World Military Games in San Antonio in 1998. Ouma knew the team lacked the funds to go, but there was something special about this piece of paper.

Something he didn't fully understand but something his survival skills told him demanded deeper consideration because people kept offering him money for it. One even offered him a house. Those offers screamed out to him.

"I didn't sell it because everyone was trying to buy it,'' Ouma recalled directly.

Realizing this was a moment that would determine the rest of his life, the 18-year-old Ouma began going from business to business asking for money to help pay his way to the competition. He picked up a little here, some there. He was Uganda's finest boxer, after all, and the national sportsman of the year, so who wouldn't help? Soon he had enough to buy a plane ticket.

"I knew of someone living in Richmond [Va.] and they told me if I got the money to get to Washington, there would be people to help me,'' he said.

On Feb. 8, 1998, an ex-child soldier landed in Washington, with no intention of going to San Antonio. He got off the plane, walked outside and . . .wait a minute!

"It was soooo cold,'' Ouma recalled. "I stepped right back inside. I had no jacket. I asked somebody if this is how it would be. If it was, I was going home.''

In the end, Kassim Ouma didn't go home. He knew better. Instead, he went homeless.

Things get lost when you travel under stress and Ouma had reasons to be stressed. Maybe that's why the piece of paper with the address in Richmond disappeared. Whatever the reason, when he finally ventured into the cold, he tried to get a cab, but the drivers refused take him anywhere without an address, so he got to the highway and started walking, figuring someone would stop just like they did back home when someone was strolling along the road alone.

Miraculously, someone did, a cab driver from Africa who sensed why this boy was trudging along alone along a highway from the airport with no jacket in the frigid weather. He took Ouma to a cheap hotel in Alexandria, Va. and the next day Ouma made his first purchases in his new land.

"I went to K-Mart and bought a bike and a leather jacket,'' Ouma said. "I still got the jacket. I got on the bike and started looking for a boxing gym. I was riding on [Interstate] 95. I knew if I could find a gym I'd be all right.''

At first he couldn't but he soon found work handing out flyers door-to-door for a local pizza parlor. Every door that answered he asked one question. "Do you know where there's a boxing gym?'' Mostly the doors slammed in his face, like a long jab you can't slip. But he walked on or rode his bike until the flyers were gone. Then he'd return to the pizza joint to wash trays and eat scraps left on dirty plates.

"Chicken wings, pizza slices people didn't eat,'' Ouma said. "I got tired of that so I got a job as a laborer, but I was running out of money. When I didn't have enough to pay the hotel they threw me out.'' For a brief time he lived with a woman who put him to work, but soon he was back on the street until he found a homeless shelter. They took him in but after a few days they asked for his social security number. He had no idea what they were talking about and he was back on the street, a lost soul with little understanding of American ways. What he had was confusion, frustration and a blind faith that if he could find a gym where he could box, everything would be all right. After all, hadn't boxing saved him from worse circumstances?

"I didn't know how to use a phone,'' Ouma said. "I was giving away quarters and keeping pennies because they were so shiny I liked them more.

My life wasn't so good, but I found a gym when I met a manager at a fight card. There were two professionals I could spar. I was an amateur kid from Uganda, but I was giving them hell.

"I didn't speak good English. They made fun of me. I didn't care. I said what they said. All I wanted to do was fight one pro fight and go home. I thought you got to pick who you wanted to fight. I wanted to fight Oscar De La Hoya, make a million and go home. I didn't know nothing.''

Nothing except how to fight well enough that after he found the Alexandria Boxing Club he was able to get in touch with 77-year-old Hall of Fame trainer Lou Duva, who offered him $300 plus room and board for 10 days of sparring in Florida. He hasn't often left the state since, except to train in West Philly or to visit Moran or to go with him to Washington, D.C. to lobby congressmen like Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Mike Fitzgerald (R-Pa.), two politicians who have helped him get first his mother and now his young son to America. Two days after the Taylor fight he will attend a green card hearing they helped arrange that may make him a permanent guest in his adopted country rather than what he is now, which is a fighter living in limbo.

The young man who will stand in front of Taylor and two days later stand before a government hearing board that will decide his fate is not the one Lou Duva saw that first day in Florida though. Not in the ring at least.

"He was raw but you could see he had something,'' Duva said. "This kid has drive. You hear his story, you understand why. This is a beautiful kid. He's seen some bad things but all he does is smile. And he can fight.''

Five months after he first came to America, on July 10, 1998, Ouma got his first chance to prove that, knocking out Napolean Middlebrooks in his pro debut in Fort Lauderdale. Five months later, he married a 31-year-old American girl and sought political asylum. The marriage barely lasted a year, and some hint it may have been an arrangement not unfamiliar to immigrants or the Immigration Service. But on Dec. 7, 2000, he was granted his request. It was the same year his father was beaten to death and shot back in Uganda for what he now fears were political reasons surrounding his refusal to return to his country. He sees it, he has told documentary filmmakers who are chronicling his life, as the result of bad karma. He did things he wishes he hadn't when he was a child who had no other options and so now he pays the price.

His father's death was a grim reminder of what Ouma realized in those early months in Virginia, when he had no place to sleep. They reminded him of the day the soldiers came for him and what they made him become.

"I thought about going home some times, but I knew what would happen to me if I did,'' he said. "I'd go to jail or be killed. So I stayed.''

In the eight years since his professional debut, Ouma has built up a 25-2-1 record with 15 knockouts. Briefly he had a grasp on the International Boxing Federation version of the junior middleweight title but that is gone now, just like his undefeated record. His first loss came, Moran says, because he was overconfident and began mugging for a girl in the crowd and got clipped by a guy who should never have touched him and the fight was stopped. The second loss was a more stunning defeat, a loss of both a fight and the 154-pound IBF title to Roman Karmazian in Ouma's first fight for his new promoter. Coincidentally, that promoter is Oscar De La Hoya, the guy he wanted to fight in those early months in the United States to make his fortune and then go home.

When Karmazin beat him 18 months ago it was by a wide margin. Ouma was shocked that night. So was Moran. But looking back on it, the manager claims he and everyone involved made enough mistakes in preparation to last a lifetime. They were mistakes made by the overconfident and the ill-prepared. The kind of mistakes Kassim Ouma would never have made in Uganda so many years ago because he would have understood he could not have survived them.

"We were humbled,'' Moran says of that loss. "We made all the dumb mistakes you could make. But Kassim has won four fights since then (including a decision in August over another DiBella prospect, Sechew Powell). He's earned this shot at Taylor.

"Everyone will assume a size and strength advantage for Jermain but I believe Kassim has the fight of his life in him. This is a career defining fight for him. Kassim knows what's at stake. He's got to fight a really, really smart fight but I've always felt he had an amazing fight in him.

This is it. It's an enormous challenge but Kassim is used to that.''

Ouma understands challenges because he has walked a hard road to glory, although nothing like the road that led him to America long before the crowd first roared his name or learned of his life. Yet even here, wrapped in the safety of freedom and his growing celebrity, he still could not avoid the blast of gun fire one more time.

Everything was going well for him in the new life he had begun to make for himself until Dec. 1, 2002 dawned like any other day in West Palm Beach, Fla. It was hot and sunny, the way he liked it, and he was a fighter with a future and a job as a host at a local restaurant. Then a car pulled up, a gun went off twice and Kassim Ouma was on the ground, gut shot by a co-worker over a lady. Even to a child soldier it made no sense.

"We'd had words,'' Ouma admitted. "I said, `You suck.' I don't think that's something to get shot over.''

Serious damage to his lower abdomen had him and Moran thinking his career was over, but six months after surgery to remove a segment of his intestine, he defeated Angel Hernandez in a elimination bout for the No. 1 ranking at 154 pounds. He threw 1,190 punches that night and landed 374, over 200 more than Hernadez. The decision was closer than the fight but either way Ouma had survived in the only way he knew how. He fought.

He had beaten six world-rated fighters to get to No. 1 but then found himself trapped again, stuck in that slot for 13 months. He was unable to get an opportunity to fight then champion Winky Wright but eventually that wait appeared to be a blessing after Wright shocked the boxing world by outpointing the division's other champion, Sugar Shane Mosley, before he was to face Ouma. Now Ouma would not only get his shot but one for a unified title it seemed. But this is boxing, which is a jungle all its own.

To get the first Mosley fight, Wright had to agree to an automatic rematch if he won, meaning his next fight would not be with Ouma after all.

As soon as the date for the rematch was announced, the IBF stripped Wright and Ouma was told to fight Verno Phillips for the vacated IBF championship.

It was a fight that never happened because Ouma woke up less than a week before the match with tightness in his chest that turned out to be a pulled muscle so painful he couldn't breath when he moved. Not even a child soldier can fight like that so Moran pulled him out knowing it could be months before another chance like that appeared.

It was but less than a year later, Oct. 10, 2004, Ouma's opportunity finally came and he was dominate. He was a child warrior free to fight for himself and the result was a victory long pursued. One over Phillips but one that was much more than that.

Now a world champion, Ouma successfully defended his title once and was pursuing then middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins with no luck when he settled on the little known Karmazin and his life took another painful turn. It has been a long road back from that loss but not as long as the one he'd walked to get it. The road into the tall grass that swallowed him up outside Kiboga when he was a boy and spit him back out as a little soldier with a big gun and a bad reputation for torture and mayhem was a road that could have led him anywhere. Perhaps the least likely destination was Little Rick, Ark. on Dec. 9. But he will be there with his talent and his heart and with the memories he has buried deep inside that percolate to the top from time to time, late at night when he is alone.

Then the sweat begins to run down his face and he remembers things he wants to forget. Sleep refuses to come on those nights. Ouma has begun telling documentary filmmaker Kief Davidson about those nightmares and about his life and Davidson has gotten it all down on film and hopes to tell his story. The idea is the story ends in Little Rock, one way or the other. Win or lose, Ouma will go on trying to bring his daughter to America to join a 10-year-old son who once said to his aunt who still lives in Uganda, "Why do the other kids have real Daddys and I have a phone Daddy?''

That's a long story his father will try to explain to him one day, after he's done with Jermain Taylor. It is a story of pain and suffering, but a story of perseverance and triumph, too. A story with many chapters, some of which only reveal themselves in the dark hours when a boxer tries to sleep and sees a boy with a knife staring back at him.

"That is a time I do not want to remember,'' Ouma said. "I was fighting but I didn't know what I was doing. I don't like what happened to me, but I don't blame the government for what happened. It was bad I got picked, but it was good for my country. I helped to free my people.

"Child soldiers were the freedom fighters. Now I'm just hoping the politicians will help me. I was never a child. Can't I see my children grow? I miss my babies. I would like to see them here forever.''

The strength he draws from the life he has led and the children and family he left behind in Uganda will buoy him, carrying him into the ring that night in Little Rock like a soldier. A child soldier no more but a soldier who knows this time what he's fighting for.

"On Dec. 9 I'm coming up with something the whole world will get to know,'' Ouma said. "This is a dream come true. After I lost to Karmazin it seemed like the end of the world but I got a second chance and I'll make the most of it.''

Win or lose, most people would say he already has.