![]() I didn’t know exactly what at first, but I knew I was destined for something bigger.” I believed early on that I could escape that and become something. “I didn’t want to be bound by those shackles. There is a lot of meth and heroin and people who abuse alcohol and do pills. I love where I’m from, but it’s a tough, poverty-stricken area. “I wasn’t happy with the economic situation we were in. “I wasn’t happy with what was going on around me, even when I was only 9 years old,” he said. Things were broken, he said, and doors were ripped from the jamb.Īt a young age, he knew he wanted to escape that life. Things were hectic at home and there were plenty of physical altercations in the home. He saw things no young child should ever see: Drugs were prevalent in Ashland City and he was taught how to deal. José Uzcátegui (L) and Caleb Plant (R) face off Sunday for Uzcátegui’s IBF super middleweight belt. ![]() He was born into poverty in rural Tennessee, Ashland City, where the median household income is just $55,855 as of 2017 and the per capita income is just $26,618. It was the toughest thing he’d ever done in a life he says has been colored by issues. So they cleaned her up and we saw her and at 10:55 on Jan. She’d had those tubes and wires on her all of her life and I didn’t want our last memory of her to be of that. But then after I talked to her, something happened and the doctors said, ‘She’s going to pass now.’ I asked them to take all the tubes out of her and clean her up. “So I thought it was best to keep that life support on until five so everyone who wanted to could get there. “They’d said she’d pass sometime in that coming night,” Plant said. After agonizing thought, he’d decided to keep her on life support until his family and friends had a chance to get to the hospital to see her and say their goodbyes.īut when he spoke to her as she lay motionless in that coma, something changed dramatically. He loved his daughter so much, and he looked forward to singing “Happy Birthday” and to introducing her to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, taking her trick-or-treating and meeting her boyfriends and walking her down the aisle when she was married.Īnd now, she was slipping away, and he was helpless. He literally had to make a life-or-death decision on the spot: Leave her on life support and pray for a long-shot miracle or remove her and end her suffering. I love you and your Dad’s not going to be mad at you.’” I just want you to know if you don’t want to go through this anymore, I support you. I’m not going to be mad at you or upset with you. I said, ‘Are you tired? Because if you are, I’m not going to be disappointed in you. “She was in an induced coma and I went up to her and I said, ‘Alia, are you tired of this? Do you not want to do this anymore?’” Plant said. On that fateful morning, he was alone with her in the ICU and had a talk with her. She couldn’t do the things with her father that Plant had dreamed of doing. “I couldn’t wait to be her father.”īut she spent most of her life in and out of the hospital and in the care of doctors. “I was so excited and so happy ,” Plant said. 29, 2015, not even two years since he celebrated her birth on May 7, 2013. This time, somehow, some way, Plant knew they were correct. Once again, doctors told him she was going to die. ![]() It felt different when he saw her this time, however. Plant walked into the intensive care unit of the hospital she was in and saw his daughter, who had wires protruding from her tiny body. Alia was born with a brain abnormality and she was plagued by seizures, sometimes several hundred a day, during her life.Īs he had so often done, Plant rushed to meet with his daughter’s doctors, who had once again put her on life support. I don’t accept that.’ I was probably naive, or blind to what was going on, but I couldn’t accept it. ![]() “Obviously, that’s something no parent ever wants to hear. Plant, we want you to know that we’ve done everything that we can do, but your daughter, she’s going to wind up passing away tonight,’” Plant said. “The doctors would pull me into this little white room and they had that look and they said to me, ‘OK, Mr. The ring is a sanctuary for him because of the hand life has dealt.įive times during the all-too-brief 20 months and 23 days that his daughter, Alia Plant, spent on this Earth, doctors told her father she was about to die.įour times, Caleb looked those doctors in the eye and said no. Pressure, Trevino quipped, was playing for 10 dollars with 10 cents in his pocket. The golfer Lee Trevino once laughed at the suggestion there was pressure trying to win the U.S. He’s lived through so much tragedy and dealt with so many horrors that trading punches with another person, even one of the best fighters in the world, is a fun thing. ![]()
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