SHOCK HITS HARD AT HOME\News of HIV stuns Morrison's Oklahoma hometown.

Byline: Jay Searcy Philadelphia Inquirer 

In another time, not so long ago, signs along Highway 20 approaching Jay in northeast Oklahoma welcomed their favorite son.

"Well Done, Tommy."

"Way to Go, Champ."

"Welcome Home, Duke."

All up and down the two-lane highway, friends and neighbors in the little town of 2,220 waved from pickup trucks and honked their horns in celebration.

One of their own, Tommy "The Duke" Morrison, the great-grand nephew of John Wayne, an all-state linebacker at little Jay High School, a hero in the movie "Rocky V," all of a sudden was a heavyweight champion of the world. He had gone out to Las Vegas and taken the World Boxing Organization title from George Foreman in a 12-round decision.

It was June 1993. Morrison was 24, Foreman 44, and time seemed suspended. Mamas and daddies took their kids down to Mom's Kitchen to see the onetime hell-raising kid who was making it big. They got his autograph and listened to him tell how he beat up ol' George.

Morrison went home again last weekend, to his 100-acre ranch on the outskirts of Jay, where he remained in seclusion, not answering the door, not answering the phone, not running down to the cafe where old friends and neighbors sat with long faces and talked about how things went wrong.

One of their own, the same Tommy Morrison, tested positive Saturday for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and the whole world seemed to be talking about it.

Morrison was retested Monday, and appeared at a news conference Thursday in Tulsa.

"I honestly believed I had a better chance of winning the lottery than contracting this disease," he said. "I've never been so wrong in my life."

On Thursday, a second test confirmed that he did have the virus that causes AIDS.

"I'm here to tell you I thought that I was bulletproof, and I'm not," Morrison said.

Friends say he may become a spokesman for AIDS awareness. "We all think he has a bright future outside the boxing ring," said his longtime trainer, Tommy Virgets.

Friends of the family have been dropping by to see his mother, Diana Morrison, who lives in a little trailer on West Cherokee, across the street from Trujillo's Hair Styling.

"I went to visit his mama last night," Randy Trujillo, who used to cut Morrison's hair, said Wednesday by telephone. "Everybody is just waiting around for the rest of the test results. And praying. I told his mama just to be uplifted by prayer. This is no time to be dragging them through the mud. Just be strong and talk to the Lord. His mama's OK, but she's taking this awful hard."

Morrison's mother is a full-blooded Indian, half Otoe and half Ponca, and it was she who taught Tommy to box. Her father, John Harrison, a Golden Gloves champion, had taught her to jab and hook, and she could whip most boys growing up. When Tommy was 10, she tattooed a pair of boxing gloves on his biceps, using a hot needle and India ink.

After high school, when Morrison was considering one of three small-college scholarship offers in football, she sat him down one day.

"Look," she said to the youngest of her three children. "Winning the Golden Gloves is a family tradition." Morrison's father, two grandfathers, older brother and two uncles were amateur fighters.

"On the one hand, you have college, which will always be there. On the other hand, you have the Golden Gloves in Kansas City, which is now. Think about it."

Morrison won the Golden Gloves championship in Kansas City and went all the way to the Olympic trials before losing in 1988. He turned pro later that year and was a world contender by 1990. In his last fight, a loss to Lennox Lewis in Atlantic City, N.J., in October, he earned more than $2 million.

When word of the positive HIV test came last week, six hours before he was to fight at the MGM Grand on Showtime, he had a record of 45 wins, 3 losses and one draw, and was headed, said his promoter, Don King, for a $4 million fight with Mike Tyson by the end of the year.

His record shows 39 knockouts as a pro, but his lifetime knockouts number in the hundreds, going back to his days on the "Toughman" circuit in bars and carnival grounds in Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas.

At age 13 he was beating men 15 years older and 60 pounds heavier, lying about his age and using assumed names to protect his amateur status. At many of the tournaments, for which he would earn from $100 to $2,500, his mother would be in his corner, holding the spit bucket.

"He was always getting into fights," said Andy Hudson, a friend in Jay. "You could say he had a carefree approach to life."

"I had done a lot of drinking and partying in high school," Morrison once said.

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Photo Tommy Morrison (right) is pictured here in "Rocky V." Daily News file photo