Early Life
Lalonde was one of four children. His father, a salesman, left the family when he was three. When his mother remarried, Lalonde accepted his stepfather immediately. However, when he was eleven, his stepfather started to become abusive. It began when Lalonde saw him beating up his mother. "I jumped on his back to stop him, and he hit me," Lalonde said. "After that, it just seemed easier and easier for him to do that."
When Lalonde was fifteen, he ran away from home. He was tired of school and tired of the beatings. He worked odd jobs around Kitchener and Winnipeg. He first walked into a boxing gym when he was seventeen. He got into boxing "to try to reestablish self-esteem, respect, pride," he said. "Boxing is a way of doing that." Lalonde had an amateur record of 11-4 and turned professional in 1980.
Read more about this topic: Donny Lalonde
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)