The Knockout Punch
Chapter 30

Those first nights of his imprisonment in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, Danny Croce couldn't settle into sleep. Couldn't even come close. He watched and listened as his fellow inmates muttered and the building's old pipes complained. The prison itself seemed restless. Vapory shadows swirled around the bare concrete ceiling, jaundiced by the low light in the hallway.

Wide awake on his bunk, Danny kept descending into deeper shadows, reliving the night that had brought him to this cell. A "village boy" from Brockton, Massachusetts, home of the famous middleweight fighter Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Danny had fought professionally himself. Now the scenes from that night hit him like short punches with plenty of leverage. A pounding he couldn't fend off.

Once again he saw the bus swinging into his lane, its high beams lighting up the curtain of falling rain. He swerved to the right. His car suddenly heaved into the air, the engine racing as the tires spun free. The night's quiet was sheared by the sound of scissoring metal. Danny peered into the sudden blackness, trying to search his way through it. What's blocking my vision? The Chevy Nova's wheels touched down at last, thumping into soft earth. The steering wheel played wildly in his hands. Still he could not see. What is that? He hit the interior dome light, which only intensified the nearness of the thick black covering across his windshield. His blindness lasted a moment's full horrible eternity before the windshield suddenly cleared and he skidded to a stop.

Stumbling out of his car, he saw a splintered police barrier and a man crumpled on the ground. He asked onlookers what had knocked the man down.

"You did," they said.

He looked again and felt a horrible stab of recognition. The man on the ground was police officer John Gilbert. The same John Gilbert who played pool with him in the bar and teased him about keeping in shape for the ring.

Danny's car had carried Gilbert thirty yards, they said. Splayed across the windshield in a black oilskin raincoat, it was Gilbert's body that had blotted out Danny's vision.

Remembering the episode, Danny felt as if that raincoat were covering his own face like a shroud, the rain running down like tears of remorse. Through the nights, the scene played over and over in Danny's head as if God, or maybe the devil, had looped the tape, setting it to replay without end. It was his own hell, which he knew he deserved. And in hell the "if onlys" go on forever.

If only he had left the bar after the first time he nodded off. If only his ironworker friend Sully hadn't been juiced up worse than he was and had been able to drive. If only it hadn't rained that day and he and Sully had been able to stay and finish out the eighth floor of that building they had been working on. If only they had been able to follow the motto of the ironworker:

Look where you want to go, and let your feet follow. If only he had been able to see the consequences, he would never have followed where that day led. But he hadn't seen a thing.

Danny often wondered whether the freebasing had started the whole chain of events. That was something else he saw in the darkness. The pure white cocaine crystals left after the ethyl ether evaporated. The first of a series of bad choices that had landed Gilbert spread-eagled across Danny's windshield.

When Danny turned in his bunk to stare at the opposite wall, he saw Gilbert's family-his wife, his two kids, the empty chair at their dinner table. He had wanted to apologize to Jeanie Gilbert a thousand times before the sentencing, but his lawyers had said no. So he remained their ghost ... and they remained his nightmare.

The video began to replay ... midnight ... 2:00 A.M. ... 4:30. Sometimes it felt to Danny as if he were directing the scenes, looking for that undiscovered bridge to a different ending. Sometimes he could only cover up against the assault, both fists clenched over his brow. The memories swung at him-roundhouses, overhands, uppercuts.

Even before Danny got Sully's call about John Gilbert's condition, he had expected the bad news. The same way he had known how the bout would end that time he fought Tommy Rose. Tommy had been the number fourteen-ranked bantamweight at the time, and the matchup was Danny's one moment of boxing glory. Tommy Rose was a fighter going places.

At first Danny thought he had Tommy cornered, and he kept trying to cut him off. He tried to make Tommy think the right was his best shot; that way Tommy would counter weakly, and Danny could step through it and deliver his bomb of a left hook. He did connect with a few shots, but by the end of the third round-or was it the second?-Danny's arms and legs were gone. He kept standing, like a cow too stupid to fall after the slaughterhouse jolt, as Tommy gave him the most vicious beating of his life.

That's what Sully's telephone call was like: knowing his legs were gone, knowing what was coming.

"It's bad," Sully said.

"He's dead, isn't he?"

"Yeah, he's dead."

Except there was a difference. Danny couldn't remember Tommy's punch that put out his lights, but he would never forget the impatient way Sully said "dead"-as if he couldn't wait to clear out of Danny's life.

DURING DANNY'S FIRST week in prison, he was assigned to a work detail out in the fields, cultivating the hard New England soil, still almost frozen in April. At the end of one shift, as the men drifted toward the water tower to be recounted and escorted back to their cells, Danny heard someone calling him.

"Hey, Croce! Come over here!" A guy by the hay cart. Danny didn't know him, so he kept on walking toward the water tower. But the guy moved out to block his way. He was big in the upper arms and thick through the gut. Danny saw other inmates glancing over their shoulders at the guards in the distance, then converging on the two of them.

"So, Croce, I heard you fought Tommy Rose. Heard you were tough. But the thing is, I don't remember: any Croce fighting Rose."

"The promoter called me Rivaro for that one."

"Why? You ashamed of your name? Your wop name-Cro-chay.

That's why your family says it's 'Crose,' I bet. Your whole family's ashamed, with a killer like you in it." The guy turned to grin at the onlookers. "A killer everywhere but in the ring."

Danny had known he would have to use his hands in prison. He was surprised only at how soon. "I know the game well enough," he said. "Get out of my way."

"I'm in your way, you puke. A real killer, you are. As long as you're driving a car."

The guys around them laughed, and the man rocked his weight back like a Goliath. Then he rushed Danny, throwing a looping right toward his temple.

He threw it as if he had a wrench in his hand, which gave Danny enough time to decide against the typical crossing counter. He didn't want any extra time tacked onto his sentence, so he hoped to take this guy down without marking him too much. He threw a triple combination into the guy's gut -bm, bm, bm- and the man's face drained.

He came back at Danny, though. This time he faked with a jab, or threw it so weakly Danny couldn't tell the difference.

Danny popped him in the side of the head with the right, then jabbed him with a left hook, lifting the oaf clean off the back of his heels. He fell dead out like concrete-not even a bounce.

Usually when a fight ended, whether in a bar or in the ring, there was cheering and shouting. But Danny's fellow inmates kept this one quiet. Then something even stranger happened. The onlookers began crowding closer. For a moment Danny thought he was going to have to fight them all. Then he understood. They were walking him away, protecting him.

"The water tower's got a spigot," someone said. They shielded him from view as he washed the blood from his hands. Then they all lined up for the count.

"O'Brien," the guard called out.

"He fell down," someone said. "Back by the hay cart." "Always sleeping, that mick," the guard said. Everyone laughed, hearty and false.

At least I won't have to fight again for a while, Danny thought.

UNABLE TO SLEEP at night, Danny was groggy during the day. He had to find a way to rest, or one of the new arrivals would challenge him, and he would lose his reputation. He dreaded the guards' call of lockdown, the haul and clang of the closing cellblock doors, and time slowing once more as the black moments in that car drained the sweat out of him.

One night, about three months into Danny's sentence, an inmate named John Dunn poked his head into Danny's cell just before lockdown. Danny was not overjoyed to see him. He knew Dunn thought of himself as spiritual.

"We're starting a vehicular-homicide group," Dunn said.

"Like an AA group?" asked Danny.

Dunn nodded. ''You get 'good time' for it-time off your sentence," he added. "A day for an hour."

Danny thought about the eighteen-month stretch still ahead of him. "I guess you'll be seeing me, then," he said.

Eventually Danny told his story to the group. When he finished, several of the men said, in one way or another, "It was his time. Everyone's ticket gets punched."

The process was supposed to provide some relief, but Danny felt none.

It wasn't John Gilbert's time. That was the whole point.

Afterward, a longhaired hippie type came up to him. "Have you ever prayed to God?"

Danny hadn't prayed since he was a kid. He hadn't even thought much about religion. But later that night, back in his cell, he found himself begging, more out of desperation than anything else, "Please, God, let me sleep."

That was the last thing he remembered. Suddenly it was morning, and for the first time in months, he had an appetite for breakfast.

The insomnia returned, though. He waited it out for several nights, then prayed once more, just as simply. "Please, God, let me sleep."

Again, the next thing he knew, it was morning.

This was so curious that he felt compelled to talk with the longhair. Danny knew almost nothing about religion. He knew only that whether it was Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, or the Four Squares, when they talked at you or handed you a tract, they were carrying "that Book." So he asked the hippie if he had a Bible, and the man loaned Danny his New Testament.

As Danny read the Gospels, he discovered that the Jesus they described appealed to him. Jesus was straight with everyone, and although he was always being set up, he stood his ground. He told people so clearly what was in their hearts that he knocked them out with his words, without throwing a punch-unlike Danny, who had been fighting ever since his family moved into the town of Brockton. "So you think you're too good for us." one of the bigger kids would shout. Or they would yell nasty things about his mother, Anything to start a fight. The first time, he had refused to fight, and they had dropped him into a garbage bin. So he had learned to use his fists, Now, reading the Bible reminded him of how he had become such a tough guy-and what an act it was.

The more Danny felt drawn to Jesus, the more he saw himself in a new light. He was used to comparing himself to the guy on the next bar stool, and that way he usually didn't look so bad. But when he compared himself to Jesus, he started to feel afraid. This man who never raised his fists scared him as nobody else ever had.

He also read the passages about people being "cast into outer darkness," where there was "weeping" and "gnashing of teeth." Danny knew something about darkness, In his mind, he was shut in that car, unable to see, unable to change directions, carrying death along with him-not only John Gilbert's death but also his own.

Lying on his bunk at night, Danny began to review his whole life, horrified by the person he had become. He saw himself living for his next drink, his next coke party; he saw himself using women. His last girlfriend had been good to him, but he would have thrown her away for the next quarter ounce of coke. In fact, he probably had.

That next Sunday, when the guard called out for people who wanted to be let out of their cells to attend chapel, Danny shouted, "Cell 16." But he sat like a stone through the service, hearing little. He was there to ask a question. Afterward, he approached Chaplain Bob Hansen and asked him if the passages he had read about outer darkness were really about hell.

"Yes," said the chaplain.

"Then I'm in big trouble," Danny said.

"When you get back to your cell, get on your knees by your bunk," said the chaplain. "Confess your sins to God, and pray for Jesus Christ to come into your heart."

Danny did just that. In his cell, he knelt, confessed that he was a sinner, and asked Christ to be his Lord. As he did, he kept remembering horrible things he had done, and the memories brought both pain and an eagerness to be forgiven. Talking to God seemed like carrying on a conversation with someone he had missed all along without knowing it. He could almost hear God replying through a silence that echoed his sorrow and embraced it. Danny not only felt heard, he also felt understood, received.

He slept that night. And every night afterward.

DANNY BEGAN WEARING a cross. He walked the cellblocks with a spiritual strut, a pugnacious witness to the truth he had found. He pumped along with a new confidence, asking everyone he met to come to chapel. Some prisoners even. took a step back when he passed, as if he would slam them against a wall if they didn't become Christians.

Inside, Danny resolved that he wouldn't take any abuse for his new convictions. They could call him a Jesus freak, but no one was going to get in his face. He prayed that no one would touch him. He could control himself if they left him alone.

The only fights that broke out were the ones inside him-a war between his new convictions and his old habits.

One day when he was playing Ping- Pong, Danny flipped his usual cigarette into his mouth and flicked his lighter. Suddenly, something said, "Stop." The filter no longer tasted clean. He slipped the cigarette back in the pack and wondered what was going on.

Chaplain Hansen always said to look to the Bible for answers, so Danny actually did a concordance search that night. He found only one passage that said anything at all about smoking; it was in Isaiah and had to do with "smoking flax." Yet he didn't doubt that he had heard a voice say ~'stop."

Eventually, he discovered 1 Corinthians and gained an understanding that his body was God's house. He shouldn't deliberately damage it. So he prayed for the willpower to stop smoking. The first day he had to pray twenty times ... as he sat in the mess hall having coffee ... as he worked in the fields ... as he played cards at a table in the yard-all the places and times that prompted him to light up again.

The next day he prayed nineteen times. The smoking battle kept him on his. knees for weeks.

Danny soon heard that same voice countering most of his lifelong habits. It was a patient voice and said stop to only one thing at a time, but the list was long, beginning with smoking and drinking, then going on to using dope and swearing. He discovered that when he began to dean up his language, he lost half his vocabulary. He also discovered that his first victories produced an overconfidence born of spiritual pride.

One day while playing cards, he said to another Christian inmate, 'What are you putting that cigarette in your mouth for, brother? Don't you know that God will deliver you from that if you ask?"

"Well, I believe it, Danny, but I'm riot there yet," his friend said.

Not too long afterward Danny cruised by the showers, where guys smoked dope during the day, back in a hidden area. He could smell the sweet, heavy scent. An inner yearning taunted him, What would it be like to take just a few more tokes? He couldn't resist finding out.

When Danny ducked back out, the first person he saw was the brother he had just jumped on for smoking. "Hey, Danny," the guy grinned, gesturing with his cigarette, "guess you're not so perfect either."

Danny went to his bunk and cried out to God for strength. These inner battles with himself were tougher than anything he'd faced in the ring.

Eventually, though, after umpteen prayers a day, the old habits started to fade, and Danny began to feel something like the "new creation" spoken of in the Scriptures.

Then, just before he went into chapel one day, while he was still out in the yard, one of the new inmates started ragging a frail nineteen-year-old called Squeaky. The nickname was apt. The kid, who was in the joint for writing bad checks, really was a mouse. He even looked like one, with his colorless hair and flappy ears.

In contrast, the new inmate looked like a real bad boy, slim but muscled, with things to prove. He pushed Squeaky's shoulder hard with the butt of his hand.

Squeaky did nothing but grab for the place where it hurt.

"You're a tough guy," Danny said, stepping in.

"This punk's been looking at me like he's queer or something."

"He hasn't been looking at you. Squeaky never looks at anything but the ground."

"You calling me a liar?"

"You want to fight someone, fight someone who knows how. Me."

"This shrimp's your whore?"

Danny made no reply.

"Well, I'll fight you, you queer freak. You ... " He loosed a flood of curses, working up a fighting rage.

His first jab snapped out with greater skill than Danny expected. It went through the block Danny put up and caught him on the side of the head. For a moment Danny anticipated another left, a right, whatever combination the guy's rhythm dictated.

But the newcomer just threw one and stepped away. Threw another and stepped away. Danny blocked and feinted.

When the newcomer yawed the next time, Danny stepped forward quickly and caught him with three close-in shots to the head-bm, bm, bm. That left the guy's face a blank, with blood trickling from the brow. The old fury rose up within Danny, and he cleaned the guy with a crossing right. Totally pure. The guy fell an the seat of his pants, bleeding heavily from the mouth. He didn't get up.

"Squeaky's one of Danny's boys now," someone said. "You're gonna have to get born again, Squeaky."

"You don't owe me nothing, Squeaky," Danny said, suddenly feeling as if he had lost the fight.

The buzzer sounded; Time for chapel.

Danny sat through the service, preoccupied with his own thoughts.

Afterward, he went up to Chaplain Hansen and asked what he should do. ''You know what you have to do," the chaplain said. 'When you offend your brother, you have to make it right. You have to go to the guy."

When Danny appeared at the newcomer's cell, the guy snarled at him, and Danny could hardly bring himself to put his hand forward. "I came by to see haw you're doing. I'm sorry for laying you out. I know what I'm doing -too much to hit you like that."

"You proved it," the newcomer said. His mouth was swollen and distorted.

"You don't need to make your rep on guys like Squeaky. Now that you fought me, people will leave you alone. You landed that first shot."

"Didn't slow you down much."

"Like I said, I know what I'm doing. We square?"

"Square," the newcomer said. He stood and shook Danny's hand quickly, then scrambled back to his bunk.

Danny thought of asking the guy to chapel, but he knew that was not the moment for invitations. He'll be asking about me, Danny thought. There'll be other times.

Back in the dormitory, where he had been permitted to live for the last several months, Danny stood and looked out the window. He could see the water tower and the fields beyond. The rows were filled with lettuce heads, the back fields with waist-high corn. The day was settling down as night came on with a watery blue sky, the clouds blushed with sunset.

All at once, Danny felt free. Standing in the middle of the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, with months still to serve, he felt unfettered as he never had on the outside. There, he had made a prison of his world. Here, in prison, God had set him free. Look where you want to go, and let your feet follow. He now saw where the old ways would lead him, and he was free to turn and walk the other way-free to choose the good, even when his old ways still called to him.

Looking at the water tower, he remembered his first fight here, remembered washing the blood off his hands after hammering O'Brien. But it had taken more than the whole water tower to wash John Gilbert's bloodofft his hands. It had taken Christ's blood-the living water.

TEN YEARS AFTER his release, Danny Croce once again entered th, Plymouth County Correctional Facility. Although the government hady closed the old building and built a new one, the Plymouth facility was essentially the same.

He stood in the lock, between the double doors operated by security.

The first door had closed behind him. The second refused to open. He' buzzed again. 'Who are you?" a voice said over the intercom. , For a panicky moment he wondered. He remembered being in the o1d prison. Was he the man who had killed John Gilbert? Yes.

Who else was he? Faces and events rushed through his memory like video in fast-forward. The day he was released from prison. His marriage, His five children. The years working with troubled kids in Boston. Then the big break: being accepted at Wheaton College and receiving the Charles W. Colson Scholarship for ex-offenders. His graduation. His ordination. Ye he remembered. Both who he had been and who he now was.

"Who are you?" the voice repeated. "I'm the new prison chaplain," Danny answered.

Saved to What?
Chapter 31

Danny Croce’s “wake-up punch” is the perfect punch line for this book. Not because it’s a heartwarming conversion story – though it is that – but because of what Danny did after his broken life was redeemed. It’s the kind of wake-up punch that contemporary Christians urgently need, as well as an apt metaphor for the theme that will be woven through the rest of this book.

When Danny Croce became a Christian, he embarked on an adventure to change the world. First to be transformed was his own life: He cleaned up his act, got out of prison, got married, settled down into a respectable life, and earned a college degree. But changing his own life wasn’t the end of things for Danny. After his graduation, he didn’t tuck his Wheaton diploma under his arm and head off for the comfortable life that his education might have given him. No, he set out to transform the world he had known. He went back to prison.

And transform he did. The Plymouth County Correctional Facility houses fourteen hundred inmates in twenty-two units, four of which are the “holes”, the dreaded segregation and protective – custody units. In each unit, Danny located an on-fire believer, or else he preached and witnessed until God converted someone. Danny then appointed these men to function as elders to help and lead others; to equip them, he continues to disciple and teach them, giving courses on theology and doctrine, often using seminary-level materials. He also hold weekly Bible studies throughout the prison, assisted by Prison Fellowship volunteers. And every day Danny talks with inmates one-on-one, teaching, encouraging, and helping them with personal problems.

He helps inmates like Peter, who received a letter from his wife telling him she was filing for divorce. Danny prayed with Peter, then drove sixty miles to meet his estranged wife. Many meetings later, Peter and his wife were reconciled, and they are now growing together in Christ.

When God makes us new creations, we are meant to help create a new world around us, and Danny Croce’s work at the Plymouth prison, offers a striking example. Again and again, I have witnessed this kind of transformation within a rotting prison culture and the results are measurable in terms of reduced disciplinary problems and reduced recidivism.