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In the mind of Tommy Morrison it is all so clear. There is no fog mucking up his memories, no misfiring of neurons causing him to forget. The recollections of how he became the first known high profile professional boxer to test positive for the virus that causes AIDS are crystalline and thick with substance. There are some who will read this and think Morrison is anything but clearheaded about those dark days, however. They will believe he has been knocked in the cranium one too many times after seeing his words about conspiracies and plots and false positives. Morrison seems like a levelheaded man, an intelligent man and, possibly, a terrifically misguided man who has been sucked into the gaseous anomalies that are crackpot claims and Internet-generated nonsense that the AIDS crisis is mostly a government-induced hoax. Morrison was knocked out of boxing in '96 after being diagnosed with HIV. (Getty Images) Morrison was told before a tuneup fight in Nevada 10 years ago that he had tested positive for the HIV virus, changing his world and altering the boxing landscape forever. It had happened. One of theirs, one of the big-name fighters, had been caught in the AIDS snare like a handful of other athletes such as Magic Johnson and Arthur Ashe. Now, incredibly, Morrison blames that positive result on the nefarious forces of the sport's underworld. Or is it the United States government? Or was it the supplement he was taking? He has floated between these and other theories with the greatest of ease. The one he seems to cling to the most is that the test result was a lie, a devious set up, a monstrous piece of trickery. "I do not believe I am HIV positive," Morrison said in a telephone interview. "It was a false positive. I know it was. It has been 10 years that I have allegedly had HIV." "I never believed" that he had the virus, Morrison later added. "I've never had so much as a symptom." When asked to elaborate about why he believed it was a false positive, Morrison said it was possible he was set up by a rival promoter, who rigged the blood test to show he was HIV positive when he was not. "That question has crossed my mind," he said. "There was some pretty shady stuff going on then." There are always shadows and evil-doers in boxing, and there always will be. Corruption is in the sport's DNA and it is a place where despicable rogues, scams and con artists rule. But a faked HIV test result? Even for boxing that would be extreme, yet that is something Morrison, one of the most intriguing heavyweight fighters of the last 5-10 years, is claiming. Morrison has made other strange statements, including how at least a portion of the HIV crisis might be a government-induced conspiracy where a great many people are duped by false positives. He also spoke of how the supplements he was taking at the time could have triggered a false positive as well. He explains his expulsion from boxing by serving up plots and schemes almost a la carte. "Since I was forced into retirement," Morrison said, "two other boxers were forced into retirement for the same reason." Other fighters have tested positive for the HIV virus, but none nearly as famous as Morrison and none, at least publicly, have claimed their results might have been some frightening plot against them. There are only two possibilities when it comes to Morrison. He is either understandably denying the painful fact that he has contracted a terminal illness, or he is the victim of a monstrous scheme that would put every other boxing scandal to distinct shame and supermarket tabloids on red alert.
