By SEAN DALY Special to the Daily Press
It’s hard to picture Michael Clarke Duncan being the victim of a school yard bully. But that’s precisely what the 6’5”, 330-pound actor says happened while he was growing up on the south side of Chicago.
“I was bullied my whole life because I didn’t fight back,” says Duncan, 45, who appears this week in the new action movie “Daredevil.”
“My mother always told me ‘Don’t fight... only fight if you believe you are gonna fight for a purpose, but don’t just fight to be fighting,’” he said. That all changed one afternoon in 1966 when Duncan was followed home from school by a local thug named Roscoe.
“I was 9 and he was 10,” the former bodyguard to Will Smith and Queen Latifah remembers. “He always chased me. So on this day I looked up on the stairs of my house and there was my mother standing there and she said: ‘Today you stop running. Today you need to learn to fight back.’ I had two choices: Either fight this guy who is known for fighting or let my mother whoop me with the belt. So I took on Roscoe and it was-n’t that hard.” Sadly, Roscoe the bully passed away six months ago. “He was trying to become a singer and he had a heart attack,” Duncan explained. “That part of my life is over now.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 7, 2003. Read the original PDF.