The Teacher: Heavy’s Transformation
“I don’t know how smart Heavy was,” says Michael Lewis, who taught him conflict resolution in a course given in a maximum-security prison. “He was just a moose of a guy who apparently had a very quick temper, and who in his earlier days had been very quick with his fists.
Sometime after Heavy got the training, a fellow prisoner told us, ‘I can’t believe it. Yesterday Heavy got into an argument and I thought he was going to drop the sucker right in his tracks. Heavy just kept talking to him!’ The fellow prisoner was attributing it to the fact that Heavy had learned that he didn’t have to drop people in their tracks. He could talk to them and get something out of that.”