How A Professional Boxer Wrongly Accused of Murder Can Teach us a COVID-19 Lesson for Living Life

We are never confined so long as our minds are free. That is the lesson I received from the below story, which comes from Ryan Holiday’s inspiration book ‘The Obstacle is the Way.’ Holiday’s story, and the analogy to the times we are living, speaks for itself — I won’t belabor the point. But I will say that reading it helped me feel less of a prisoner to the COVID quarantine and focus on things I can still do — which are both meaningful and far too many to count. Every day I have an opportunity to learn, to run, to listen, to better myself. I hope this story has the same impact on you.

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Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a top contender for the middleweight boxing title, at the height of his career in the mid-1960s was wrongly accused of triple homicide. He went on trial, and a biased, bogus guilty verdict followed, along with 3 life sentences. Carter reported to prison in an expensive, tailored suit, wearing a $5000 diamond ring and a gold watch. And so, waiting in line to be entered into the general inmate population, he asked to speak to someone in charge.

Looking the warden in the eye, Carter proceeded to inform him and the guards that he was not giving up the last thing he controlled: himself. 

In his remarkable declaration, he told them, in so many words, “I know you had nothing to do with the injustice that brought me to this jail, so I’m willing to stay here until I get out. But I will not, under any circumstances, be treated like a prisoner — because I am not and never will be powerless.” 

Instead of breaking down — as many would have in such a bleak situation — Carter declined to surrender the freedoms that were innately his: his attitude, his beliefs, his choices. Whether they threw him in prison or threw him in solitary confinement for weeks on end, Carter maintained that he still had choices, choices that could not be taken from him even though his physical freedom had been.

Was he angry about what happened? Of course. He was furious. But understanding that anger was not constructive, he refused to rage. He refused to break or grovel or despair. He would not wear a uniform, eat prison food, accept visitors, attend parole hearings, or work in the commissary to reduce his sentence. And he wouldn’t be touched. No one could lay hands on him, unless they wanted a fight.

All of this had a purpose. Every second of his energy was spent reading: law books, philosophy, history. 

They hadn’t ruined his life; they’d just put him somewhere he didn’t deserve to be, and he did not intend to stay there. He would learn and read and make the most of the time he had on his hands. He would leave prison not only a free and innocent man, but a better and improved one.

It took nineteen years and two trials to overturn that verdict, but when Carter walked out of prison, he simply resumed his life — he filed no civil lawsuit to recover damages; he did not even request an apology from the court. 

Because to him, that would imply that they had taken something of his that Carter was felt owed. That had never been his view, even in the dark depths of solitary confinement. He had made his choice: this can’t harm me — I might not have wanted it to happen, but I decide how it will affect me. No one else has the right.

We decide what we will make of each and every situation. We decide whether we’ll break or whether we’ll resist. We decide whether we’ll assent or reject. No one can force us to give up or to believe something that is untrue (such as, that a situation is absolutely hopeless or impossible to improve). Our perceptions are the thing that we’re in complete control of. 

They can throw us in jail, label us, deprive us of our possessions, but they’ll never control our thoughts, our beliefs, our reactions.

Which is to say, we are never completely powerless. Even in prison, even in solitary confinement, deprived of nearly everything, some freedoms remain. Your mind remains your own (if you’re lucky, you have books), and you have time, lots of time. 

Carter did not have much power, but he understood that that was not the same thing as being powerless. Many great figures, from Nelson Mandela to Malcolm X, have come to understand this fundamental distinction. It’s how they turned prison into the workshop where they transformed themselves and the schoolhouse where they began to transform others. 

If an unjust prison sentence can be not only salvaged but transformative and beneficial, then for our purposes, nothing we’ll experience is likely without potential benefit.

In fact, if we have our wits fully about us, we can step back and remember that situations, by themselves, cannot objectively be good or bad. This is something—a judgement—that we, as human beings, bring to them with our perceptions. 

To one person a situation may be negative. To another, that same situation may be positive. 

“Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” as Shakespeare put it.