IRREFUTABLE BOXING

IRREFUTABLE: IMPOSSIBLE TO DENY THE TRUTH

Boxing was my impossible. I walked in the boxing gym from the wild side, and my body reflected that lifestyle.  I spent my first year training with Charles King, who patiently encouraged my awkward punches, knowingly smiling while I tripped on my jumprope, over and over, and stood behind me nodding his head while I missed the speed bag, slamming it and missing it for rounds at a time, 5 days a week.  I'm not sure what I thought I was doing there, but I never missed a day.  When Gilbert Jackson walked up to me sometime during that year and asked me if I wanted to actually fight, I basically looked at him like he had lost his mind. "Aren't I too old to start? I'm 25," I said.  He told me a lot of women start at that age, and that he thought I could be good because I was aggressive.  We trained hard for another year, and by the time I won my first fight, against a girl who already had 7 fights; boxing became my only priority. I fell out of bed every day living for it. The impossible had truly become temporary, all things were suddenly possible.

I trained for five years in King's Gym during a magical period where every day, like clockwork, Andre Ward, Marlo Moore, Heather Hartman, Brandon Gonzales, and of course, Virgil Hunter, would come in, quietly, one by one, set up on the far table behind the ring, speak short hellos, and get straight to work. The magnitude of the seriousness and mental strength in this particular camp influenced all of us who came up under it. The environment in King's during that time was for real beastmode before Marshawn called it beastmode.  My idols and teachers Gilbert Jackson, Tony Hirsch, James Buggs, Bobby, Karim Mayfield, Mike Dallas, Gilbert Alvarez, Fernando Barajas, Heather Hartman, Simone Kearney, Chocolate and later on Falah Salem, Alfredo Angullo, Demetrius Andrade, Amir Khan; everyone grinding 'til they left literal puddles of sweat on the worn wooden floor, day in and day out trying to climb their way to the top of the coldest sport in the world. I used to sit there in a trance studying the way Andre shadowboxed, watch EVERYTHING Heather did, how she did it, and try to catch every whisper of information, knowledge, instruction I could overhear Virgil saying to fighters. Years later, when Virgil asked me to come train with his camp, and I had the opportunity to spend two years in the notorious den of elite fighters tucked away in industrial Hayward, I sincerely thought that meant I was going to the Olympics.

But real life is real life. Sometimes we are sprinting towards a different finish line than the one we have our eyes fixed on. I trained as hard as the pro fighters that I was in the gym with. I built my life around the dream of being great; I waited tables, cocktail waitressed in casinos, and bartended six shifts in four days just to be able to be in the gym twice a day on weekdays. I was that fighter with a truckload of heart, a work ethic that could knock over a tree and a technical understanding built by one of boxing's most brilliant teachers...but I was not a paragon of talent that was destined to get much further than my humble, yet impossible record of 9-3. Stumbling upon a career as a trainer transitioned me from being a fighter to being able to spend my time living the dream: paying back my debt to the sport that made me who I am. I wake up every day to give the most complicated simple truth there is in life to as many people as I can: IMPOSSIBLE IS POTENTIAL.

For two years now, Nicolette Stewart and I have been quietly working; in corners of boxing gyms that stay open late, on sidewalks and driveways by our house, at stairwells next to parking lots under street lights, meticulously developing her into a champion.  We had our first fight August 29th at King's, and came out not only victorious but left our first heavy-handed unforgettable mark on Bay Area boxing. I have a strong belief in Nicolette and the success that lies ahead of us.  Like everything else I have achieved, we plan on coming in the side door without a ticket, and leaving with a standing ovation, our names on the marquee. Stay tuned...