Editor’s Note: Anecdotes and accounts of Earnie Shavers’ life were provided by biographer Marshall Terrill from his book, “Welcome to the Big Time.”

Legendary boxer, Earnie Shavers, died Sept. 1, just one day after his 78th birthday.

Born in Garland, a town in southern Butler County, Earnie and his family, who were sharecroppers, had a tough life.

“We were poor,” he told his biographer, Marshall Terrill. “No phone, electricity, or indoor plumbing. We had an outhouse and drank from a well. The best hope for a Black growing up in the South was just to survive.”

In Garland, young Earnie attended a segregated school.

“Our family couldn’t even afford paper lunch bags,” he told Terrill. “We wrapped our lunch in old newspapers the white people discarded.”

But the most traumatic event in his young life, which took place in 1950, turned out to be his saving grace.

The year was a hard one for farmers, and even harder on sharecroppers.

His father had purchased a mule and agreed to make payments in installments.

Every payment had been on time, until there remained only two.

The hot Alabama sun backed the earth that year, and what the dry weather did not destroy, the boll weevils finished the job. It was one of the worst years for crops in Alabama history.

The man the elder Shaver bought the mule from came to their home and wanted his money or his mule. When the sharecropper tried to explain, the man was having none of it.

He made his way to the barn to retrieve the mule.

When he stepped from the barn, Shaver jumped off the porch with a loaded shotgun.

The man left, with promises of returning.

Shaver left, with no promise of ever getting close to Alabama soil again.

Later that night the man returned with 20 Klansmen in full regalia, torches burning, and guns loaded.

They ransacked the house, but Shaver was gone.

For the next few months, the Klan returned to the Shaver home looking for the elder Shaver. Not finding him anywhere around, they finally gave up.

Meanwhile, Shaver had made it to his great-uncle’s house in Newton Falls, Ohio.

He got a job making car bumpers, and it wasn’t long before he sent for his family to join him.

Once the family was settled in, the children were enrolled in Newton Falls Elementary School.

Earnie remembered the people up North treated his family differently than the people in the South.

“They treated my family with respect,” he told Terrill. “That took some getting used to.”

Earnie excelled in school. According to Terrill, Earnie was smart and did well in both history and mathematics. He enjoyed his time in school, and later commented on how good the school was there.

“Earnie was a funny guy,” Terrill said.

His friend, Ken Boutwell, from Nashville, tried to get the road from the Garland exit named after Shavers, but Hank Williams, Sr., had already beaten him to it.

“He never acted like he was famous,” Boutwell said.

While in Garland, he tried to find some of the old places and faces of Shavers’ life.

He came across an elderly woman who said she remembered the family, but told Boutwell, all his family had moved up north.

Between 1969 and 1995, Earnie shined in the boxing world’s spotlight, living larger than any son of a sharecropper could begin to imagine.

Earnie earned a reputation amongst his peers as one of the hardest-hitting boxers in the sport’s history. He finished with a career record of 74-14-1, with 68 victories coming by knockout.

His career featured two attempts challenging for the world heavyweight title, but Earnie, nicknamed “The Black Destroyer,” lost to Muhammad Ali in 1977 and Larry Holmes in 1979.

He slowed down a bit in his later years, and Boutwell said he had it on good authority that Earnie had been in a nursing home for the last year.

Earnie leaves behind him a storied career, dreams achieved, and family and friends who will miss him.