After Boxing
After retiring, Watkins went back to Texas to work as a fumigator. He remained in obscurity there for many years.
In 2003, the American military, needing personnel to work rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, contracted him as a fumigator to work on Iraqi homes that had been decaying and infected with insects during Saddam Hussein's presidency. The military did not know of Watkins' background as a boxer.
In 2008, writer Suzy Pepper, a former neighbor of Maurice Watkins, released "Termite", a biographical book about Mr. Watkins . Also in 2008, a movie based on the book was announced .
Read more about this topic: Maurice Watkins
Famous quotes containing the word boxing:
“... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)