Family and Friends Remember Jizelle - Pt 4
Pages: 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5
TriniView.com Reporters
Recorded: January 07, 2009
Posted: January 19, 2009
Buxo Potts, former manager of Jizelle Salandy:
BUXO POTTS: We must be able to work together. People need people and nobody; no human being could do anything without another human being involved. That should serve as a lesson that when we have young icons coming up we must get on board and support them and help develop them like I did with Jizelle Salandy. I took no shortcuts with her career. Every penny I got I spent it on her career to create this greatness. If I was about self we would not have had a Jizelle Salandy in this country. All of corporate Trinidad, the government and all the people that can afford to help develop the youths of this nation do so, so that they would not come back to be a plague to us. Help us work and develop them. That is the message I have for this nation and I am talking about all who cannot afford it. I know who I am talking about and you know who I am talking about too, so let us work together to develop. We have more Jizelle Salandys out there. I can go and go and find them and bring them for you all.
TRINIVIEW.COM: What impressed you most about Jizelle Salandy?
BUXO POTTS: You get one of them every fifty years and I said it in the eulogy. We had a Mohammed Ali and now we have Jizelle Salandy. She would go down as the greatest boxer on earth ever, male, female any thing you can think about. There is no other person in the history of boxing has any record like this child. She has broken every record and she is the most decorated athlete in the history of the boxing world and the history of the West Indies. There is no other.
TRINIVIEW.COM: What is your fondest memory of her?
BUXO POTTS: The love we shared. The last good memory I have of her, she sat on my bed the evening before playing with my head for about five minutes and I want to take that memory with me. I don't want to see her go down in a hole so. I am not going to the cemetery; I want to keep that fresh in my mind.
TRINIVIEW.COM: Do you have any last words?
BUXO POTTS: Goodbye Jizelle.
TRINIVIEW.COM: Thank you.
TRINIVIEW.COM: Michael Williams, how well did you know Jizelle Salandy?
MICHAEL WILLIAMS: I had known her at the age of eight and [until we left] primary school. I didn't really know much about her anymore, but she was a very nice person.
TRINIVIEW.COM: What lessons do you think the nation could learn from her life?
MICHAEL WILLIAMS: I think the nation could learn that although she was a nice person, you can make just one little mistake and that is the end of it. I think the youths should realize that fast driving is unnecessary and they should learn a lot from that incident.
TRINIVIEW.COM: How do you think we as a nation should remember her?
MICHAEL WILLIAMS: We should remember Jizelle as a hero and to me she was the best thing that came out of Trinidad.
TRINIVIEW.COM: Do you have any last words you would like to share?
MICHAEL WILLIAMS: I will just remember her in my thoughts.
TRINIVIEW.COM: Thank you.
Felix Voisin 'Wamba' Jones, former trainer of Jizelle Salandy:
FELIX JONES: When I started training Jizelle Salandy, I saw the potential in her and I knew she was extraordinary. She wanted to stay around boys and fight so I took her and I trained her. It had times when she would say, "I don't want to go to school anymore because I don't want to study and I don't want to fight again." She never got vexed with me but I said, "No, you have to do it!" and I would hold her down until she got cool and so on. After that, she got so good we knew we had something on our hands so we started training her as such and we used to take special care, look at her and so on.
There are a lot of things that the coaches cannot do that we could do because we studied for our jobs. Now Kim (Quashie) had taken her. Kim was boxing with me so I asked her, "Why not box?" and I started training her. But she wants to be a mother figure. If you know the girl, everything she see good, she wants to be a part of it. That was alright, but she wanted her own gym after a while because she saw how it is. But her head is on money. Mine is not on money, mine is helping my people to get up because I lived in the United States for years and I was helping White people and I saw how my Black people was going down. So I say, "All right," and I started with football and then I changed to boxing because I couldn't have the discipline I wanted. Now this girl one day just come and take twenty of my youths and gone and say she open a gym. I had some boxing equipment and so on that the government had given me and she took it. When I went for it, it wasn't there. When I went to register for the championship they told me there is a gym in Siparia named White Eagle. So I asked them, "What is that?" She managed to get Jizelle away for a while because she took the man I had as my technical advisor with her. But then Mr. Joseph adopted her (Jizelle) and he brought her back to me. I trained her and then I knew nobody could have beaten her. We would have had a champion anyway you look at it because she was that. She fought and she was winning all the time. When I trained her, I knew I could turn my back because I knew what she was doing behind there and nobody could have beaten her at all.
There are a lot of things whosoever wants to be a coach doesn't know because they didn't go to school for that. One afternoon this same girl, Kim Quashie, asked me to train her for a fight in the States. It wasn't really for a fight in the States. I called my boys in the States and I asked, "Should I train her again?" and they said yes so I said, alright. But she didn't want to do that. She and Buxo Potts wanted Jizelle because Buxo Potts used to come and meet me in the market every Sunday and beg me for her. But I wasn't in control of her; I was just her coach. I told him she had an adopted father to see about her and he (Buxo) had to ask him. He say no and I say no too because I know what Buxo Potts was. One afternoon when she was boxing for a fight, (because he had taken her to the States), we went to my old gym where I used to be. They had loved her and they had given her a contract. I missed her and I stayed there waiting. And when her adopted father came, he asked me if I saw her and I said no. So all she (Kim) wanted to do was to get close to her so she could take her. She took her from there and carried her straight to town to Buxo Potts. Buxo Potts never trained anybody; he was a jockey. He knows nothing about training people. Maybe if he had known she wouldn't have been here today because if you are a manager you have a managerial process and your managerial process says that everybody under your care must do what you say to do because you are contracted to that; you are getting paid for it.
I can't see how Jizelle could have gotten a car, take the key and you don't know, gone to drive and she was sleepy because she was partying and then you get up asking for her. She should have had a driver who you would have given instructions to say no, she is not driving any car and that is the part I couldn't understand and that is what I feel worried about.
You see what happen there, I told you already I don't like money and I told them I didn't come here for money. I came here to help my people because when I was playing football, and I went to play professional football foreign, people helped me so I had to put back something in the tin and that was what I was all about. I wasn't about the money thing because when she fought, I never took a cent from her. I told her flat, I said, "Bank your money, don't worry about me I am old already." This is what I am hurt about. I am hurt because they didn't take the right steps first and they want to say everything about Mr. Joseph. Mr. Joseph is a man who had Jizelle's welfare at heart and he did everything possible to enhance her career, her school and in the boxing fraternity. Let me tell you something, I had known Mr. Joseph before and since I know him he is always trying to help somebody and Buxo didn't like Mr. Joseph because Mr. Joseph would not have given up this child so. Mr. Joseph is a man who wants to see her go and keep her there. Maths, English, you have to do it! And I was on the other side; and both of us put together we would have had a nice thing going for her. She would have gotten all those world belts. I feel with time she would have ruled the world anyway because she had the three things that they didn't want to give her. One was education, the second thing was boxing because she would have boxed anyway because she was a natural boxer and the third thing was church, the spiritual part of it that they didn't want and maybe that is why she was a little on the rebel side, because you know that party and church mix like coconut oil and water. All we wanted her to have was the best and as she started going down and I had to go at the corner of the ring in every fight and start straightening her out because she was making mistakes.
Now let me tell you something. In boxing you have to be fit and in Jizelle's few fights, if you know boxing to any degree you will know that Jizelle was not fit at all. When Jizelle is fit she was beating any man and Jizelle had a lateral way of boxing on her toes that you couldn't hit her at all. And if you look at her boxing in her last fight, you will see that Jizelle was flat on her foot; only little times you will see her get on her toes. That means that the coaches she had wasn't giving her the things that she needed and they didn't take any recognized coach to really train Jizelle for these fights. And they were giving her hard fights. Those girls were real top class boxers and Jizelle wasn't getting the training that she was accustomed to. Something I learned in foreign and in Cuba and so on, is that a boxer is not a coach. You have to study to be a coach and once you don't study to be a coach, you wouldn't have the necessary tools to give her so she could stay on top. I know that I trained her well and I know that I had a boy that I trained before, Black Mamba Charles, and he helped me along very, very much. And Mr. Joseph, with his supervision, was doing everything for her and that lasted a long time so she was on the winning note with what I had given her long before. Not what she had put in; she didn't put in much and if you ask them, let them come to face me... face me and talk boxing with me and I will show them what training is. If she had gotten training like she was supposed to get, nobody in the world would have come close to Jizelle Salandy. This is how I feel about it.
I didn't take her death too good. I didn't handle it the way I thought I could have handled it, but I hope wherever she is that it is a better place than here and that she will always be boxing there. She will always be a champion in my heart, my family's heart and I think the public at large.
TRINIVIEW.COM: Thank you.
ANGELA FLEARY: As a little child growing up in the quarters, we all live together like family in here and Jizelle... well she fit in as any little child will. She used to play with the other kids and they went to school together.
TRINIVIEW.COM: What do you think about her contributions to Trinidad and Tobago?
ANGELA FLEARY: She did a lot. I think she did so much that you can sit back and other children could really learn and they can take pattern from what she did. Jizelle loved children. Besides the sports, she had another side of her and I think they could learn a lot from her.
TRINIVIEW.COM: What impressed you most about Jizelle?
ANGELA FLEARY: What impressed me most was her strength and her ability to go on because when we knew Jizelle we didn't know her as an athletic person and then she took a turn in life and she went on. She didn't stop. She just pressed on and she made herself a star. She was a beautiful woman and an ambassador for us here in Trinidad. She did well.
TRINIVIEW.COM: By her life she inspired a lot of ordinary people.
ANGELA FLEARY: Yes, she really did and it is so sad to know that she died so young. But who are we to judge? God gave and he taketh. Jizelle, I could say, she lived life and her life didn't have anything bad. You couldn't say anything bad about Jizelle from her youthful days growing up to the age of twenty-one. I cannot say anything bad about Jizelle. She was respectable. I have a nail shop. She used to call me Ms. Angie; that is how respectable she was. And she would say, "Miss Angie, ah coming down in the nail shop to do my nails." And I would say, "Jizelle, I am about to close," and she would say, "Miss Angie, please!" And you know with her voice... I would say, "Okay, come quick" and I would do Jizelle's nails. I took pictures of her nails, but I never took a picture of Jizelle in my shop, and I am sorry.
What I saw on the television, I knew Jizelle, I knew she was a boxer. But I didn't know Jizelle did so much and just by watching it, it breaks my heart to see something so good gone. What makes me proud of her is that she grew up with us in the quarters here. I am like an aunt to her and she respected us all. Everybody house in this Hickling Village could tell you something positive about that child. She was a beautiful child and she did what she had to do in life and she's gone today, God knows best.
TRINIVIEW.COM: Thank you.
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