Heavyweight champion James ``Buster'' Douglas recalled his family's struggle with poverty as he urged congressional support for a program to help the poor pay heating bills. The 232-pound boxer was the first witness Thursday before a Labor and Human Resources subcommittee. Wearing a starched white shirt and a black suit with a white hankerchief in the lapel, he read a two-page statement and answered questions from panelists. Douglas did not mention the Bush administration's proposed 25 percent cut for the 1991 fiscal year in the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which served 5.9 million households last year. Instead, he gave the Subcommittee on Children, Families, Drugs and Alcoholism a personal account of poverty in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and ended with a plea to ``do everything you can.'' ``I was 15 and we had a pretty terrible winter that year and we were behind on our gas bill,'' he said. A local aid program helped get the family through. ``I think that that had a great deal to do with me becoming heavyweight champion of the world,'' he said. ``In hard times, we had support.''
