Straight From the Boxer’s Mouth : Bray Changes His Perspective on Life After Shooting Himself in the Face

When the 9-millimeter, hollow-point bullet hummed between John Bray’s parted lips at the speed of about 1,500 feet per second, it did a bit of damage, as one might suspect. It tore open the flesh on the left side of Bray’s face and as it exited left a hole in his cheek larger than a silver dollar.

But Bray, the national amateur heavyweight boxing champion from Van Nuys, used up more good luck in that instant than most people get in a lifetime. The bullet did not strike any bones, which would have caused the soft-metal projectile to mushroom and would have, in all likelihood, killed him.

The bullet also did not strike Bray’s sense of humor.

“And they said I can’t take a good shot,” Bray joked, using a common boxing expression.

That Bray was able to even make a joke is remarkable. The doctor who repaired the damage to the cheek marveled at Bray’s fortune.

“What happened is just incredible,” said Dr. Fred Leess. “To sustain so little damage from such a thing is just incredible.”

But what made Bray’s recent display of humor even more remarkable is that Bray jested while pounding away at a heavy bag in the Ten Goose Boxing gym in Van Nuys. Last week, about a month and a half after the July 30 shooting that Bray said happened while he was cleaning his new gun, Bray returned to his life as a boxer.

Doctors gave Bray permission to fight Sept. 28 in a U.S.-Italy boxing tournament in Milan, but Bray, the left side of his face still slightly swollen and sore, said he will pass on that event.

He will, however, be in Australia in November to compete in the World Championships.

“Doctors said all the swelling would be gone in two or three weeks,” said Bray, 21, who won the U.S. championship earlier this year and is considered a solid favorite to earn a berth on the 1992 Olympic boxing team as the heavyweight.

“But even now, I’m eager to get back into it. I’m working hard, trying to get back in top shape. It was a helluva way to get a month off, but it was still a month off.”

Bray said his weight dropped from 205 to 194 pounds in the week after the shooting, but in the subsequent weeks, thanks to his mother’s cooking, his weight jumped to 215. The weight limit for a heavyweight in amateur boxing is 201 pounds.

The shooting occurred in a Van Nuys automotive shop owned by a friend. Bray, who works as an assistant to a Van Nuys private investigator, had purchased the 9mm semiautomatic handgun June 17, his 21st birthday.

At 8:30 on a Tuesday evening, Bray and his friend, Victor Moreno, sat and talked inside the automotive shop. Bray was cleaning the gun and as he held the slide action open looked down the barrel, according to a police report.

The slide action slipped from his hand and as it snapped shut, Bray flinched and pulled the trigger. The gun, which Bray said he was certain he had unloaded, went off.

As his friend sat and watched in shock, Bray stood, put the gun back in its leather holster, walked to a nearby sink and tried to wash away the river of blood that flowed from his mouth. Then he called paramedics.

At Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, Leess closed the wound with more than a dozen stitches and three days later Bray walked out of the hospital--not the same man.

“Everything seemed to change for me,” he said. “Just sitting and thinking how lucky I was, thinking that by all rights, I should have died that night.

“I go to church every Sunday now. I had let that slip a bit over the years. I am not one to sit and preach to people, but this has definitely renewed my faith in God. It has made me think about things I never thought about before. I think now that I am here for a purpose, maybe to be the heavyweight champion of the world.

“This, I think, was a wake-up call.”

Bray said in recent weeks he gave all of his gold jewelry--a few necklaces and rings and watches that he had started to accumulate with his boxing success--to his brothers and sisters.

“I was starting to pay too much attention to stuff like that,” he said. “Now I know that none of that is important. The shooting has made me appreciate everything, especially the little things in our lives, the things we just don’t notice anymore.”

Bray strolled through a cracked parking lot in downtown Van Nuys, heading for the gym, his hands heavily taped. It was a morning like a thousand others in his boxing life. But, also, a morning like no other.

“Since the shooting,” he said, “I hear things I never heard before. Like now, even here, stop and listen for a minute. Listen to the birds.”

From an alley between a bar and an old brick storefront, a few birds chirped.

“I grew up right here,” Bray said, “and I don’t think I ever heard a bird before. Now, I hear them all the time.”