“I didn’t send you down there for that” is how Jeff recalls Bill Daniels’s reaction. Eventually he became a regular at Dallas’s Pike Park gym and entered the city’s Golden Gloves tournament. The injury wasn’t debilitating, though he pitched for the Mustangs baseball team and took up boxing to stay in shape. A return to the gridiron, he was told, just wasn’t possible.
When Daniels tried out for SMU’s football team as a freshman in the autumn of 1964, he aggravated a serious knee injury that he had suffered during a high school game. His decision to attend college more than a thousand miles from home was just the first of his small rebellions. But he was always eager to set out on his own. They did the family owned a number of local businesses that were started by their grandfather, and Terry could have eventually assumed a managerial position in one of them. The five Daniels children, of whom Terry is the oldest, were often asked by friends if they had any connection to the green Daniels Fuel trucks that drove through town. But the greatest night of Terry Daniels’s life pushed him in another direction-six more years of full-time boxing, with few victories to show for the brutal pounding taken by his head.Īs a young man, Daniels was an unlikely candidate for a life in the ring.
The predictable path for someone of his background and education would have been to fight for a few more years at most and then settle into a conventional career. Before that night, Daniels was a talented young boxer who had put college on hold, but he was hardly a major contender. But the night when Daniels faced the world’s heavyweight champion in New Orleans is intimately connected to his present circumstance.
It’s a long fall from cloud nine to a ground-floor unit in Breckenridge Village. “I stumble from one chair to the next,” he says with a sheepish grin. Terry says he uses a walker when he’s alone in the apartment. During our visit, Jeff often helps his brother walk, gently placing a hand on his arm.
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