Fiifi Anaman tells the tall tale of Steve Dotse, a brave firefighter and prizefighter, whose meteoric rise in the latter meant he was next in line to become Ghanaian boxing royalty on the global stage…until the dark side of the sport all but consumed his legacy.
Prologue
Daniel Ayiteyfio was in a dilemma.
The Atlanta, Georgia-based boxing manager had just received a call from his matchmaker, Jim Troy, who was then based out of Boston, Massachusetts.
It was around 2pm in the afternoon of Thursday, October 19, 2000.
“Hey, so there’s this really good slot that has opened up,” Troy had told Ayiteyfio. “But there is a problem. The guy is heavy. He’s 130 (pounds), and our guy is 118. What are we going to do?”
“The guy” was American Bobby Tomasello, and “our guy” was Ghanaian Steve Dotse, whom Ayiteyfio had signed in 1998 and had been managing since then.
The story: Bobby Tomasello had been scheduled to fight on the night of Friday, October 20, 2001 at the Roxy in Boston — but his original opponent had gotten a last minute injury, and so the promoters had begun a frantic last-ditch search for a replacement.
Matchmaker Jim Troy had been tipped off about the search, and had immediately gotten in touch with his colleague Ayiteyfio, with whom he worked to secure fights for Atlanta-based Ghanaian boxer Steve “The Destroyer” Dotse.
So, what were Ayiteyfio and Troy going to do?
The problem wasn’t only the weight class difference — the fact that Dotse was at Bantamweight and Tomasello was further up at Junior Lightweight — but also that Dotse had fought literally just five days prior to the call.
On Saturday, October 13, 2000, Dotse had fought Marty Robbins in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Per Dotse’s standards, he normally took one or two weeks off to relax before getting back into training, and months before getting back into a fight. To fight again close to a week after a fight was unthinkable — not just by his own standard, but by every boxing standard.
But Ayiteyfio thought of the unthinkable as possible. For him, though his boxer Dotse had just come off a fight, he was confident Dotse was in shape. Again, Ayiteyfio was drawn to the fact that the Tomasello fight was going to be on television (on ESPN 2’s “Friday Night Fights”), which would be good exposure for Dotse.
Ayiteyfio thus decided to get in touch with Dotse to convince him to fight, but there was yet another problem: Dotse was nowhere to be found.
After knocking out Robbins, Dotse had gone away to celebrate with his friends, going off his manager’s radar. “I didn’t know where he was,” Ayiteyfio admitted in an interview later.
It took about six hours before Ayiteyfio finally got hold of Dotse. It was 8pm on Thursday October 19, and the fight was 23 hours and 945 miles (via flight) away.
Still, Ayiteyfio needed to convince Dotse, because he was the one whose opinion and decision on the dilemma would matter the most.
“F**k that shit,” Dotse told Ayiteyfio. “I can fight. I’ll take it!”
Dotse recalls that he told Ayiteyfio not to worry about the weight, because his walking weight at that time was around 126 to 127 pounds.
He also explained that because his last fight had not gone the full distance — he had knocked Robbins out in the third round — he didn’t feel drained of energy.
The last reason Dotse gave? The money. The Tomasello bout was offering a cool $25k for Team Dotse, alongside that juicy TV opportunity.
Dotse was sold. “That was good money!” he recalls.
Ayiteyfio immediately got in touch with Troy. “We’ll take the fight!”
Game on.
Now, how were they going to get to Boston on time for the Thursday night weigh-in?
“I said, ‘Pack your things!’” Ayiteyfio recalled telling Dotse immediately.
The duo were lucky to get the last two seats on the last flight from Atlanta to Boston that night.
Two and a half hours later, they were in Boston. The official weigh-in for the bout had been scheduled for 7pm. Ayiteyfio and Dotse arrived at 10pm, three hours late.
But the organizers, desperate to make sure all their expensive investment for the Tomasello bout wouldn’t go to waste, made a concession for Dotse and his team, allowing Dotse to step on a scale as a formality for the official paperwork.
“I stepped on the scale around 11pm,” Dotse remembers. “I weighed 128 that night.”
Ayiteyfio and Dotse then went to grab something to eat at a restaurant and went to bed.
The next morning, Dotse was up early. He went for a walk and came back to relax ahead of his big night. He recalls being calm and “doing all I had to do” to stay focused.
There was no sense of tension. No heaviness. No ominous feeling.
In the evening, a limousine pulled up to his hotel to transport his team to the arena, the Roxy.
“I went into the dressing room, got dressed up and everything,” Dotse recollects.
Despite the hurried preparations, Dotse still had reason to be confident.
At 30, he had a record of 18–3–1 (18 wins, 3 losses and 1 draw), which meant he was the more experienced fighter. Standing at 5ft 6, he also had an impressive arm reach of 71 inches.
His kit for the night, interestingly, was minus his actual trunks, which he had forgotten to pack in the rush to catch a flight to Boston.
And so for that Friday night, Steve Dotse had to improvise with basketball shorts.
But it was never going to be about who had on the correct shorts, but about who was going to get the correct results on the scorecard at the end of 10 rounds.
It was the main event of the night, scheduled for 9pm under the bright illumination of ring lights and the scrutiny of TV cameras.
When the fight started, it was clear that the weight of having fought just six days before, and of having rushed into the fight from just the night before, was having a toll on Dotse. He was only the Destroyer afterall, and not Superman.
Tomasello had the upper hand right from the first round.
This was the 25-year-old’s first 10-round bout, his “first major test” as a newspaper put it, and he was determined to make the most of it.
He was the poster boy for the organizers and the local hero of the state of Massachusetts (he’d lived all his life in Saugus, Massachusetts.), a situation that handed him support both from the establishment and from home.
This advantage reflected in how Dotse was “wrongly cast as the underdog despite having fought far superior opposition and having a great amateur pedigree” (according to veteran boxing writer Ted Sares).
That said, Bobby “The Force” Tomasello was dynamite in his own right. He had an undefeated record of 14–0, and for most of the early rounds against Dotse, looked set to make it 15–0.
In his article “A Boxing Writer’s Reward”, Ted Sares remembers that Tomasello engaged in “fierce, head-snapping, back-and-forth exchanges” to build up an early lead against Dotse.
But Dotse, as it turned out, was only warming up to ‘destroy’, as his moniker suggested. The pendulum swung in the middle of the fight, ushering in Dotse o’clock.
“As the rounds went by, I kept wearing him out. I kept working on him, kept punching him, and kept growing stronger,” Dotse remembers.
Dotse grew so strong, with Tomasello growing so weak, that the imbalance became dangerous. As Sares described it, Tomasello “faded against the physically stronger Dotse, who came on late and meted out extremely heavy punishment”.
That heavy punishment was epitomized by a straight right hook that felled Tomasello onto the canvas in the penultimate round.
But the young boxer was not ready to let go of his unbeaten record. He chose resilience, rising to his feet, refusing to give in. “He never lost his courage,” wrote Boxing247 in a review. “He never quit.”
“The count beat him, but the referee manipulated things to allow him to make it,” Dotse claims of his first knockdown of Tomasello.
“He (Tomasello) was then 14 and 0, and they wanted him to be champion, and so the protection was there.”
The bout resumed, but for Tomasello, it was a resumption of a rout.
Yet, he still would not throw in the towel.
“His fighting heart would not allow him to quit and that may well have been his downfall,” Ted Sares observed.
It was an accurate observation, as another knockdown followed in the 10th round. “I intensified my punches and he (Tomasello) went down again,” Dotse remembers.
And it was quite the going down. Tomasello missed Dotse’s head with a right hook, and the very weight of his own missed punch sent him wobbling on his feet, his balance and consciousness all but gone.
From their corner, Bobby Covino, Tomasello’s trainer, Norman Stone, his manager, and Tomasello Snr, his father, all had to painfully watch as Dotse instinctively shoved off their boy when he (Tomasello) tried to hold on to Dotse to stay on his feet. The rest of that sequence was a heartbreaking sight: Tomasello slammed into the ropes and onto the canvas, helpless.
It looked like the final nail in the coffin, as Tomasello looked utterly drained. “The referee should have stopped the bout,” Ayiteyfio opined later.
But it wasn’t over just yet. Like the Terminator, Tomasello remained tenacious — getting back up again to finish the fight.
In the end, Dotse was sure he had won the bout. The final rounds had been so brutally one-sided that the announcement of his name as winner had become almost inevitable.
Almost.
It was indeed announced Dotse had won the fight, and his corner erupted in celebration.
But…
The two boxers were in their dressing room when they were suddenly called back for a review of the announcement.
Ayiteyfio smelled a rat, and ordered Dotse not to go back, because “nothing good was going to come out of it.”
Ted Sares: “The bout was initially scored a win for Dotse, but after some confusion it was changed to a draw when it was discovered that a judge’s scorecard had been read incorrectly.”
“The change drew a big smile on Bobby’s face,” Sares continued, “and a roar from the partisan crowd. Everything seemed fine at that point. Bobby was still undefeated.”
Dotse could not process the outcome — but what would follow would be even harder to process.
After the second announcement, Tomasello walked back to his locker room “proud, grinning and certain of his future as a prize fighter”, as reported by Boxing247.
As soon as he got to the locker room, he had a soda. Later, he told his father that he did not feel well.
Shortly afterwards, Tomasello complained of a headache to his manager Norman Stone. He then experienced a spell of nausea, compelling him to throw up.
Eventually, he collapsed. “I was yelling at him,`Bobby, don’t you fall asleep,’ …I know what happens to boxers who do. . . . Oh God. I knew. I knew.” Tomasello’s father recalled.
Tomasello was immediately rushed to the New England Medical Center, where he underwent an emergency surgery the next morning.
It would later emerge that his collapse in the locker room was actually a slip into a coma. Doctors revealed chillingly that early in the fight, Tomasello had been hit with punches that had caused his brain to shift, resulting in the rupturing of a small blood vessel which leaked for the rest of the fight, finally shutting his body down into that coma.
The surgery had been to remove a blood clot, relieve swelling, and stop the bleeding in his brain.
The revelation by the doctors made many wonder if Tomasello’s brain injury could have been detected early enough had he given up under the conspicuous pummeling by Dotse.
“The referee understandably was reluctant to stop the fight, bearing in mind that it was nearly over,” ESPN’s Graham Houston explained in a review seven years after the bout. “Those final, heavy hits from Dotse simply proved too much for a desperately tired fighter, as Tomasello was that night, to be able to make it.”
But Tomasello miraculously (and in hindsight, unfortunately) braved the odds by refusing to back down, even as blood dripped in his brain, slowly soaking up his consciousness.
As Sares observed, Tomasello “fought his heart out”, emptying himself. “Bobby kept swinging back, thus preventing the referee from halting the action.”
“You start to wonder, should I have done this, should I have done that?” said Norman Stone. “It’s too late, it’s too late. The fight went on…”
Coincidentally, Tomasello refused to walk away from danger on a night that featured a very famous walk-away: many miles away in Auburn Hills, Michigan, that same night, Polish boxer Andrew Golota walked away from his own danger — Mike “Iron Mike” Tyson.
Golota had been battered by headbutts and blows from Tyson, quitting the fight at the end of the second round. He was later diagnosed by a Chicago neurosurgeon as suffering from a concussion, fractured left cheekbone and herniated-disc neck injury.
Ayiteyfio later told House of Boxing in an interview that he believed Tomasello should have gone straight into an oxygen mask and then to a hospital, instead of continuing the bout. “Maybe…” added Ayiteyfio, without another word.
Maybe if Tomasello had quit, like Golota had done?
It is easy to suggest that the combination of Dotse’s punishing punches and Tomasello’s tenacity was to blame for the latter going comatose. But it is not as simple; not as straightforward, because one cannot fault a professional boxer for reacting to pain with resilience. It is almost second-nature.
Had Tomasello walked away like Golota, he would have probably also ended up being described as “a coward in boxing terms”, as the Irish Times later labelled Golota. Indeed, the last noun to ever use for a boxer is “coward” — it is as derrogatory as it is incongruous, like calling a professor unintelligent.
As Anthony Cardinale, Tomasello’s mentor and promoter, explained in an interview with AP, what happened with Dotse’s punches and Tomasello’s brain was “a pretty freak thing”.
“In the final analysis, no one is culpable and certainly no one is to blame,” Boxing247 soundly suggested. “It was simply a tragedy.”
“Unlike some other ring tragedies, there was no clear place to put the blame in this instance,” added a review from Ring Side Report.
On Tuesday, October 24, 2000, four days into his coma and three days after his surgery, news emerged that Bobby Tomasello’s condition had worsened.
“We’re just hoping for a miracle now,” said Tony Cardinale. “He is in grave condition.”
“This is very hard for the family,” Cardinale added.
And it was about to get harder for the family, who would soon have to release a statement thanking doctors and staff in the neurosurgery department of the New England Medical Center for their efforts in trying to save Tomasello.
This is because Robert Benson “Bobby” Tomasello, fifteen minutes before noon on Wednesday, October 25, 2000, surrendered — not in the ring as he had been expected to, but in his hospital bed, as he had not been expected to.
He died after five days on a respirator. “He was in the fight of his life and then he fought for his life,” Norman Stone aptly summarised. “It was an awful, awful tragedy to all involved.”
Tomasello died undefeated, but his victory that Friday night in guarding his unblemished record proved to be a pyrrhic one.
After the fight, Dotse and his team stayed in Boston for two more days before flying back to Atlanta. Three days into their return, the call came in that Tomasello had died.
“You don’t want anyone to die in the ring,” Dotse said in response to the news as it broke. “I can’t tell you how sad I am.”
Dotse then asked Ayiteyfio to convey his condolences in writing to Tomasello’s family.
“The family replied,” said Ayiteyfio. “They were impressed by our concern and wished Steve well.”
In a documentary by Skyline Cinema titled Ring of Fire, which aired a few years later, Dotse revealed he had been invited to Tomasello’s funeral.
“When they made arrangements to bury him, they were talking about flying me over to Boston for the funeral,” he said. “But I was scared to go over there…cos you never know…I was scared. Somebody could have killed me, you know?”
The funeral was attended by Tomasello’s family and friends, as well as the people of Saugus.
Bobby Tomasello had been a popular young man in Saugus, not only for his boxing prowess, but also for his personality. A devout Roman Catholic, he reportedly went to church almost every day. “He would hold his crucifix if he ever uttered a curse, so Jesus wouldn’t hear it,” Tony Cardinale said.
“The Bobby Tomasello tragedy is a sobering reminder of the risk all boxers take each time they step into the ring,” wrote Ring Side Report.
““In the larger sense, it is also a reminder that we are all mortal and our time on this earth is limited.”
“Men who kill in the ring never forget. They never forget the final punches that led to a fellow boxer’s collapse or the final words they spoke to their opponent before he disappeared and collapsed. The one thing that they are never allowed to forget is that they were in the opposite corner when so-and-so fought for the last time.”
– James Reed, “Fighting Memories of Death”, The Independent, January 1996.
Death and boxing have been bedfellows for almost as long as the sport has existed. The Sweet Science, as the sport is fondly called, has ironically produced way too many sour signs of tragedy over the course of its history. In fact, available records suggest that boxing related deaths date as far back to the 1700s, and as recently as April 2021, when 19-year-old Jordanian boxer Rashed Al-Swaisat lost his life at the AIBA World Youth Championships. Al-Swaisat was taken to a hospital in Poland after suffering an injury to his head in the third round of his under-81 kg fight against Estonia’s Anton Vinogradov on April 16. He died 10 days after undergoing emergency brain surgery. Al-Swaisat became one of the thousands of young men who have “fallen prey to the dangers of boxing”, as an HBO anchor once put it. Manuel Velazquez is a late American archivist who spent most of his life justifying his opposition to the violence of boxing by keeping a database of the sport’s many injuries and deaths. From Velazquez’s database, which started in 1934 and has been regularly updated even after he died in 1994, it has been recorded that 1,876 boxers lost their lives between 1890 and 2019 as a direct result of injuries suffered from bouts. This works out to an average of 15 deaths per year. A report by the Independent from February 1995 claimed that 22 boxers died in 1953 alone — one of the deadliest years in boxing history. Within the sport, boxers who get blood on their hands are not considered to have committed a crime. Instead, the deceased are often considered to have died “by misadventure” — that is, killed while engaged in a legal activity (boxing). This arrangement of boxing taking responsibility for its own tragedies, though, does little to erase the stigma that “survivors” have to go through.Death by Misadventure
Some of the deaths have had dramatic backstories that could give the Tomasello-Dotse saga a run for its money.
Take for instance, this one from over 70 years ago. On the night of June 23, 1947, boxing legend Sugar Ray Robinson dreamt that he had killed Jimmy Doyle, whom he was to fight the next night for a world title, in the ring. Fearing the worst, Robinson attempted to pull out of the fight, but a Catholic priest and a charismatic minister talked him out of it.
Eerily, Robinson knocked out Doyle with a left hook in the 8th round of their bout, with the 22-year-old Doyle dying 17 hours later largely due to “blows to the jaw and face”, according to a coroner. This was the first ever death suffered by a professional boxer in a world championship bout, a situation Robinson described as “very trying”.
Later, at a congressional hearing about that fatality, Robinson boldly argued that hitting his opponent was what he was paid to do. Subsequently, having learnt that Doyle had planned to use his money from the bout to buy his mother a house, Robinson graciously gave up money from his next four bouts to enable Doyle’s mother buy a house.
Fifteen years after the Robinson incident (March 24, 1962), 25-year-old Cuban Benny Paret was subjected to a ferrocious flurry of punches that left him dead from brain injuries 10 days later. This occurred after Paret had made gay taunts at his opponent, Emile Griffith, at their weigh-in before their welterweight championship bout.
Just under a year later (March 1963), Mexican Sugar Ramos produced a punch that threw American Davey Moore off his feet and into an awkward landing on his neck. Though Moore strangely rose to finish the fight, he later fell into a coma after the bout and died.
This tragedy provoked high profile reactions: Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan wrote a song about it (“Who killed Davey Moore”); Pope John XXIII condemned boxing as a “barbaric sport”; and California Governor Edmund Brown called for the sport to be banned. Fascinatingly, it was Ramos’ second encounter with death in the ring: five years before the Moore bout, Cuban boxer Jose Blanco had died from injuries sustained from a bout against Ramos.
In September 1980, another Mexican, Lupe Pintor, made headlines for being involved in another boxing casualty. This time, it was a young Welsh boxer named Johnny Owen who was pounded to death, in an infamous bout made famous by the masterful storytelling of the great, late Scottish sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney.
“No fighters in the world are more dedicated to the raw violence of the business than Mexicans,” McIlvanney wrote in his iconic review of the bout. “Pintor comes out of a gym in Mexico City where more than a hundred boxers work out regularly and others queue for a chance to show that what they can do in the alleys they can do in the ring. A man who rises to the top of such a seething concentration of hostility is likely to have little interest in points-scoring as a means of winning verdicts.”
McIlvanney also further wrote of Owen, known to be a shy, unassuming young man: “it was boxing that gave Johnny Owen his one positive means of self-expression. Outside the ring he was an inaudible and almost invisible personality. Inside, he became astonishingly positive and self-assured. He seemed to be more at home there than anywhere else. It is his tragedy that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language.”
Two years after the Owen tragedy (June 14, 1982), Irish boxer Barry “The Clones Cyclone” McGuigan (whom Dotse’s hero Azumah Nelson once infamously called a “girl”) knocked out Nigerian Young Ali.
Ali, who was 21, and whose real name was Asymin Mustapha, collapsed with the knockout, later falling into a coma. He died of a blood clot two days later.
“I hit him right on the nose,” McGuigan recalled in an interview with boxing writer Elliott Worsell for his book Dog Rounds: Death and Life in the Boxing Ring. “His eyes just rolled back. It was a haunting moment. I knew he wasn’t going to get up from that.”
In 1985, when McGuigan won the WBA Featherweight title against Panama’s Eusebio Pedroza, he wept afterwards, remembering Ali. “I dedicate this fight to the young lad who died when we fought in 1982,” he sobbed.
Ali had been boxing to support his wife, who was pregnant with a child he would never meet.
“I really didn’t want to box again, I felt so guilty,” McGuigan would later say. “It was so hard for me because it had been me who’d thrown the punch. So, of course, it was my fault.”
There’s also the story of American fighter Al Seeger, a fellow Atlanta resident and a friend of Dotse.
Seeger’s opponent in an April 2009 bout, Benjamin Flores, suffered brain injuries during their fight and died five days later. Seeger, who has worked with Dotse before, said of that incident: “I just had a feeling something might happen…We are all scared a little bit of death. When you sign that waiver at the weigh in and you see that line that says ‘In case of death, this is what we are going to pay you…’ your heart starts to race…”
“Death was the last thing I’d want to happen, to either me or my opponent.”
One of the most bizarre stories happened in July 1978, when opponents Angelo Jacopucci (Italian) and Alan Minter (British) both went out to eat together after a gruelling bout, only for the former to fall into a coma and die later on as a consequence of injuries from the bout. “I was gutted,” Minter said. “I couldn’t even speak.”
InGhana, where boxing deaths have not been a familiar phenomenon, Dotse is interestingly not the only native to have been involved in a dramatic Sweet Science-related demise.
In March 1955, when Ghana was two years away from independence and was then still known as the Gold Coast, a boxer named Casino Sawyerr died 13 hours after his fight was stopped in its 13th round, due to him taking a serious beating from his opponent, Armstrong Janney. The bout and its fatal outcome made the front page of the country’s biggest newspaper, the Daily Graphic, on Monday April 2, 1955.
Sawyerr, a highly talented 24-year-old nicknamed Blue Tornado, had been named the Gold Coast’s Fighter of the Year in 1954, and that bout which claimed his life had been scheduled to be his farewell act before jetting out to the UK in May 55’ as Ghana’s most highly rated boxing prospect ready for greener pastures. But his dream of emulating the likes of Roy Ankrah, Ghana’s most celebrated pugilist in that era who was also based in the UK, was ended calamitously.
In an interesting stroke of fate, Armstrong Agbana, a fellow boxer and friend of Sawyerr, who announced Sawyerr’s demise to the boxing fraternity and the general public from the Kumasi General Hospital, would many years later be the one to train Dotse in his fledgling years as a boxer. Dotse says Agbana was “my father, my everything.”
Life by Adventure
Like Sawyerr’s, Dotse’s story is barely known in Ghana. This is strange, because the small West African nation has a huge boxing history and is expected to have properly archived such historic, albeit tragic, tales.
Dotse is not surprised he is not that well-known in Ghana, as he himself has barely connected with the country for most of his adult life due to his nomadic lifestyle. “All my life, since I was 16/17 years old, it has been plane, plane, plane…travelling, travelling, travelling…and so although I am from Ghana, I’ve not known Ghana as much,” he admits. “I’ve been to over 29 countries in the world.”
Ghana is the continent’s second most successful boxing nation, producing nine world champions. The country is only behind South Africa, who have produced over half of the continent’s world champions.
Most of Ghana’s champions, including world boxing hall-of-famer Azumah Nelson, have either been from the Ga tribe or been resident in Ga communities. Gas are the ethnic residents of Ghana’s capital, Accra, and are known to be a factory for the production of boxing talents.
Stephen Dotse Kobla Ahialey, although ethnically an Ewe, from Ghana’s Volta Region, was born and raised in Adenkpo, a Ga community in Accra, on January 8, 1970.
He was the last of seven siblings, born to parents he describes emphatically as “poor”.
“God was always on my side, holding me,” Dotse says of his success despite his impoverished background. “It was all God.”
It must have been, given how things happened quickly and dramatically in his life.
Dotse was introduced to boxing by his friends around age 14. It was 1984, the same year Azumah Nelson rose to global prominence by eventually winning his first world title against Wilfredo Gomez, causing boxing to explode in popularity and influence across Ghana.
Dotse had gone to play football with friends after school, and had curiously followed them to a gym afterwards, not knowing what to expect. The gym, called Sparta, located in the heart of Swalaba, another Ga community, turned out to be the River Jordan of Dotse’s baptism into pugilism. “As I stood and watched my friends train, I decided that I wanted to box too,” he remembers.
He followed up the next day, and told the trainer there, a well-known Accra boxing personality called Surpriser Sowah, that he wanted to box. That was it. Sowah immediately took Dotse under his wings and helped hone his skills.
After about a year of training and massive improvements, Dotse was part of a group of young amateur boxers from Accra who participated in a tournament in Kumasi. On the way back to Accra from that tournament, at which he won silver, he met and befriended fellow young boxers Ike Quartey and Alfred Kotey, both of whom would go on to win world titles.
Dotse also recalls meeting one Wutor, the coach of Quartey and Kotey’s gym, Bukom Boxing Gym. Wutor advised Dotse to leave Sparta, as their fight philosophy was not helping his skillset and physique.
After discussions with his elder brother, whom he describes as his helper and biggest fan, Dotse joined the Bukom Gym, and saw a transformation in his style — even changing from southpaw to orthodox within a year.
In 1987, he attended a boxing tournament in Liberia, where he was the only boxer on Ghana’s team (out of nine) to win in his weight class.
In 1988, he became the amateur champion of Ghana’s Greater Accra Region, earning a Government scholarship to Kiev, Soviet Union — an experience which would prove pivotal. “I received really great training during those 10 months or so in Kiev,” he says.
Off the back of that Kiev boost, he won the national flyweight belt at a national championship, and from there, his career took off.
In 1990, he attended the Commonwealth Games in Auckland, New Zealand, where he was eliminated in the quarter final. The following year, he went to the Africa Games (then All Africa Games) in Cairo, Egypt, and won gold, graduating from prodigy to superstar in the process.
“Cairo 91’ changed my life,” he says. “I became so famous.”
He fought in tournaments in Canada and America after the Cairo games, before proceeding to the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona (the boxing tournament was in Zaragoza). There, although he was eliminated in his third bout, his profile had already become very attractive, garnering the attention of many pro scouts and promoters.
As it turned out, it was the Acaries Brothers in Bordeaux, France, who would win the race to sign him, on the recommendation of his friend Ike Quartey. The Brothers opened the doors of professional boxing to Dotse in February 1993, when he had just turned 23 — marking an end to his eventful amateur career.
“I had a fantastic record as an amateur…even more than Ike and Alfred,” Dotse boasts. “Nobody had my kind of success and medals at amateur level at that time. Everywhere I went, I would get a medal. And if I wasn’t available for a trip, the government would cancel it. I’m not bragging….I’m just telling you the facts.”
After two losses in his first three professional bouts, Dotse fell out with Ike Quartey, and by extension, with the Acaries Brothers. “You know how Africans are,” he sighs. “You are African and I am too; and I tell you the truth: jealousy…greed and so on. You know.”
That break up signaled the start of a strange retrogression for Dotse, who had to start from scratch. He was inactive for the whole of 1994, the year both Quartey and Kotey won world titles, before returning to put 11 Ghana-based fights under his belt in three years — 1995, 1996 and 1997.
During the time he fought in Ghana, he worked as a firefighter — a job that further defined the spirit at his core: bravery. “I have a strong heart and I am a stubborn person,” he says, laughing.
In 1998, Daniel Ayiteyfio signed up Dotse, and the 28-year-old moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to begin that glitzy professional career that he had always dreamt of, the same one that had had a false start with the Acaries Brothers five years prior.
After a baptism of fire which saw him lose against American Pete Frissina in Tampa, Florida, he won his next two bouts, and on the third bout, which was televised, he drew against Colombian Jorge Otero, at the same time drawing the attention of legendary promoter Don King, who was impressed enough to table a deal.
“My manager (Ayiteyfio) lied to me about the Don King deal,” Dotse reveals. “I understand Don King offered me $25k, but I was told it was $10k. They were using me. If you are not smart, they will use you. That’s just life.”
“My manager (Ayiteyfio) was a crook,” he continues. “He teamed up with my matchmaker to swindle me. Anytime a fight came around, the two of them would dictate to the promoter as to what to put on the contract. And they would fax the contract to me and I would believe the figures.”
Epilogue
Twenty-one years since Bobby Tomasello died, Dotse is ready to open up about the internal conflict he battled during that period of pain.
(A few years after the bout, he spoke briefly — not deeply — about the tragedy in the Ring of Fire documentary.)
Gone are the days of his fame, when American commentators and announcers would confidently scream “DART-SEE” instead of the correct pronunciation, “DO-CHAY”.
These days, he lives a quiet life in Savannah, Georgia, where he has been since 2002.
“My life is just about my two children and my mum…that’s it,” he says.
His mother is 88, and lives in Ghana. (His father died when he was 14 — sadly just when his boxing journey was about taking off).
Dotse is unmarried, but has a daughter and a son. The daughter, Alberta Yawo Ahialey, inherited his sporting genes — she is a professional footballer based in Russia. Alberta helped Ghana’s Under 17 female national team, the Black Maidens, win bronze at the 2013 FIFA U-17 World Cup in Azerbaijan.
Alberta inherited sporting genes from her mother too — former sprinter Mercy Addy (holder of the Ghana national 400m women’s record).
Dotse dated Addy after they got acquainted at the 1991 All Africa Games, but they have since grown apart. She lives in Washington now. “She doesn’t like me,” he says, “And I don’t like her either.”
Many journalists, Dotse says, have been chasing him for years to talk about his career, but he has never quite been able to muster the courage and the serenity of mind to confront his past — his complicated, confusing past.
Until now.
“You are very lucky,” he tells me. “My mind is fresh now. You caught me at the right time. I am surprised I am even talking to you and opening up. Some people have been trying to get hold of me for like eight years now.”
In the wake of the Tomasello bout, Dotse says he made a decision to quit boxing. “I became mentally disturbed and didn’t want to box again,” he recounts. “My heart..I just didn’t have faith in boxing anymore. This was a human life we were talking about…it was serious.”
To clear his head, Dotse moved back to Ghana for a few months. He turned to his family to help him through that dark, difficult period of his life.
“My older brother talked to me a lot to help me deal with things,” he remembers. “In the end, I think I accepted it as an accident. Yes, I felt bad, but it could have happened to anybody, you know? I told myself, ‘It happens,’ and decided to move on with my life.”
The season of self-pity came to an abrupt end when Dotse’s team managed to get him a shot at a world title — the IBF Bantamweight title — against Tim “The Cincinnati Kid” Austin, in June 2001.
Suddenly, a rare leap from tragedy to triumph was on the cards.
Only five men had won world titles in Ghana’s history at that time, (including his friends Ike “Bazooka” Quartey and Alfred “The Cobra” Kotey), and Dotse had a golden opportunity to join this elite league of national heroes.
But he would “stupidly” mess up the chance. He says his preparation for that bout was a fiasco, having himself largely to blame for most of it.
Instead of preparing with the intensity and longevity required of a championship bout, he had been inactive in Ghana, depression eating away at his confidence.
Between the Tomasello and Austin fights, there were eight months of…..nothing. “My mind was off boxing,” he explains. “I didn’t have the conditioning, and I also felt discouraged.”
At the time he was alerted of the Austin bout, Dotse recalls that it was about two weeks to fight night.
By then, Dotse had been training for at least eight weeks under his new trainer Johnny Gant. This came months after he had returned to Georgia from Ghana in January 2001, but that length of preparation was still not enough.
Dotse had been up close and personal with Austin, sparring for 40 rounds straight at a training camp owned by Don King (who promoted both boxers) in Orwell, Ohio.
He knew the champion was no push over; not the type to face on the back of inadequate training. “I did okay,” Dotse said regarding his sparring with Austin. But for an actual fight, okay was not going to be enough, because Tim Austin was then considered to be one of the best fighters in the world.
Dotse says he drank all sorts of “roots” — obscure traditional medicinal concoctions — to make up for his lack of preparation. To add insult to injury, his management, he accuses, failed to invest in his preparation. “He (Ayiteyfio) was stingy about spending money,” Dotse says. “But I have no excuse…it already happened, and that’s life. I get mad sometimes and I beat myself up a lot…but I conclude that that is life.”
Johnny Gant, himself a former welterweight who was active in the 70s, (famously fighting Sugar Ray Leonard in 79’), believed at the time that Dotse’s mind was clear from the Tomasello tragedy; that he was ready for Austin.
Gant, training boxers since 1991 after racking up 63 bouts as a pro’, had replaced Dotse’s former trainer, Xavier Biggs. He was confident Dotse was not going to be held back by the ghost of Tomasello.
Usually, boxers whose opponents die after bouts are never able to move forward, always looking back, and having their talents ruined by regret.
Beyond depression, some are even haunted by visions and nightmares. It is said that Mexican Gabriel Ruelas, after his Colombian opponent Jimmy Garcia died 13 days following their May 5, 1995 title bout (from a blood clot in the brain), became so tormented that when he fought Azumah Nelson seven months later, he had visions of Garcia in the ring.
Dotse, Gant believed, was not going to experience similar haunted visions of Tomasello against Austin. In fact, he said, he had seen no signs of Tomasello-related mental agitation in Dotse. He instead felt Dotse was being overasked questions about Tomasello; that the impact of Tomasello’s death on Dotse was being overestimated.
“Steve is a fighter,” Gant praised. “It (what happened to Tomasello) is the nature of the game. Steve knows his job, he knows the dangers. In sparring, I have seen no difference in how he punches.”
Austin, who confessed to knowing Dotse’s potential, called him a “strong kid”. “He’s good,” Austin admitted, “but I can beat him. There’s a lot of things I can do.”
And so beat him he did, with a Technical Knockout (TKO), a loss that marked the beginning of the end of Dotse’s career.
A recording of the Tim Austin vs Steve Dotse bout in Cincinatti, June 2001
After close to a year off, Dotse returned to the ring, losing against Mexican Marcos Bardillo.
Four straight wins followed, reviving his confidence, but another loss in a pay-per-view bout in Las Vegas (2nd Round TKO against Mexican Cruz Carbajal) would send him back to square one — depression.
He would return to Ghana for the usual: family support.
Two months later, he dragged himself back to the US for another shot at picking himself up, but he arrived to more tribulation.
A drug test revealed that there was an unusual substance in his system. Apparently, the “roots” he had gotten used to taking since the Austin bout contained illegal substances, and so he got suspended.
Five, six months later, he did another test and was given the all clear.
Though he had been released to fight, he decided to turn down the opportunity, because a friend of his had found him a stable regular job in Savannah, Georgia — which he had enjoyed doing during his suspension.
“It was a well-paying job,” he admits. “I was then 32 and I had to make a tough call, to stay with boxing or to walk away into a regular life.”
He chose the latter.
“I said, ‘f**k that! Sh*t…I gotta enjoy the rest of my life,” he says. “I can’t stay in boxing forever. Nah. F**k that! And, money is money! Whether it’s making 10k for one fight or earning 500, 600, 1000 bucks a week (at a regular job) is still the same. It’s still money. That’s why I am stuck here (working a regular job). F**k boxing!”
Thus at 32, “The Destroyer” hung his gloves. He had been involved in 30 professional bouts across six countries and 14 cities worldwide, with a record of 22–6–2.
“I was still young,” he says. “I could fight, but I just didn’t feel like continuing. Besides, I had been at it for years — since about 14,15 years, when I became national youth champion. I’d been making money for so long. So I told myself, ‘what now?’ Why do I have to waste my time any further? Sh*t. So far as I have something going, some money coming in, why do I have to worry about anything?
“F**k that. I used my own ‘stupid brain’ and thought for myself,” he continues.
“I thought; this is my life! As I am growing, I have to be the one controlling my life. I have to be the one calling the shots. Because if I die, I die — not anyone else.
“Sh*t. Me, I am a brave person. I don’t give a damn about anybody. I have been brave since I started out, and till now, I am still making it. I know what is wrong, and I know what is right. I always try to be fair. I don’t let no woman or man control my life. I mean, you can advise me, but I have to think about it for myself and decide.”
Today, Steve Dotse is 51, and is at peace within himself, living his best life.
“Just talked to my mum and she’s doing good,” he says. “I sent her money. She’s alright. Nothing wrong with her. That’s all I want. That’s all I do. I’m doing the best I can for my mum and my two children. As long as they are good, and I am good…still breathing…that’s it!”
“It’s life!” he continues. “I’ve gone through a lot in life but I am still here…still making it. If one day I die and I’m gone, I can boldly say I did my best. I can boldly say I gave my all.”