their blood.
The neighborhood was getting more and more ominous and I was getting more and more hated. I was just eleven years old, but sometimes I’d walk through the neighborhood, minding my own business and a landlord or owner of a store would see me walking by and would pick up a rock or something and throw it at me.
“Motherfucking little thieving bastard,” they’d yell.
They’d see me in my nice clothes and they just knew that I was the nigga stealing from them. I was walking past a building one time and I stopped to talk to a friend and this guy Nicky came out with a shotgun and his friend had a pistol. His friend pulled out his pistol and Nicky put the shotgun over my penis.
“Listen, little nigga, if I hear you’ve been going up on that motherfucking roof again, I’ll fuck you up. If I ever see you in this neighborhood again, I am going to blow your balls off,” he said.
I didn’t even know who the fuck this guy was, but he evidently knew who I was. Can you believe I was just so used to people coming up to me and stepping to me like that?
A few months before I turned thirteen, I got arrested again for possession of stolen property. They had exhausted all the places in the New York City vicinity to keep me. I don’t know what kind of scientific diagnostic tests they used, but they decided to send me to the Tryon School for Boys, an upstate New York facility for juvenile offenders about an hour northwest of Albany.
My mother was happy that I was going upstate. By then, a lot of grown men had started coming to the house looking for me.
“Your brother is a dirty motherfucker. I’m going to kill your brother,” they’d tell my sister.
“He’s just a kid,” she’d say. “It’s not like he took your wife or something.”
Imagine that, grown men coming to your house looking for you, and you’re twelve years old. Ain’t that some shit? Can you blame my mother for giving up all hope for me?
The fact that they were sending me up to the state reformatory was not cool. I was with the big boys now. They were more hard-core than the guys at Spofford. But Tryon wasn’t a bad place. There were a lot of cottages there, and you could walk outside, play basketball, walk to the gym. But I got in trouble right away. I was just angry all the time. I had a bad attitude. I’d be confrontational and let everyone know that I was from Brooklyn and I didn’t fuck around with any bullshit.
I was going to one of my classes one day when this guy walked by me in the hall. He was acting all tough, like he was a killer, and when he passed by, he saw that I was holding my hat in my hand. So he started pulling on it and kept walking. I didn’t know him, but he disrespected me. I sat in the class for the next whole forty-five minutes thinking about how I was going to kill this guy for tugging on my hat. When the class was over, I walked out and saw him and his friends at the door.
That’s your man, Mike, I thought. I walked up to him and he had his hands in his pockets, looking at me as if he had no worries in the world; like I forgot that he had pulled my hat forty-five minutes ago. So I attacked him rather ferociously.
They handcuffed me and sent me to Elmwood, which was a lockdown cottage for the incorrigible kids. Elmwood was creepy. They had big tough-ass redneck staff members over there. Every time you saw somebody from there, they were walking in handcuffs with two people escorting them.
On the weekends, all the kids from Elmwood who earned credits would go away for a few hours and then come back with broken noses, cracked teeth, busted mouths, bruised ribs – they were all jacked up. I just thought they were getting beat up by the staff, because back then nobody would call the Health Department or Social Services if the staff were hurting the kids. But the more I talked to these hurt guys, the more I realized they were happy.
“Yeah, man, we almost got him, we almost got him,” they laughed. I had no idea what they were talking about and then they told me. They were boxing Mr. Stewart, one of the counselors. Bobby Stewart was a tough Irish guy, around 170 pounds, who had been a professional boxer. He was a national amateur champ. When I was in the hole, staff members told me there was an ex-boxing champ teaching kids how to box. The staff members that told me about him were very nice to me and I wanted to meet him because I thought he’d be nice too.
I was in my room one night when there was a loud, intimidating knock on the door. I opened the door and it was Mr. Stewart.
“Hey, asshole, I heard you want to talk to me,” he growled.
“I want to be a fighter,” I said.
“So do the rest of the guys. But they don’t have the balls to work to be a fighter,” he said. “Maybe if you straighten up your act and stop being such an asshole and show some respect around here, I’ll work with you.”
So I really started to apply myself. I think I’m the stupidest guy in the world when it comes to scholastics, but I got my honor-roll star and I said “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” to everyone, just being a model citizen so I could go over to fight with Stewart. It took me a month, but I finally earned enough credits to go. All the other kids came to watch to see if I could kick his ass. I was supremely confident that I was going to demolish him and that everyone would suck up to me.
I immediately started flailing and throwing a bunch of punches and he covered up. I’m punching him and slugging him and then suddenly he slips by me and goes boom and hits me right in the stomach.
“Boosh. Uggghhh, uggghhh.” I threw up everything I had eaten for the last two years. What the fuck was that? I was thinking. I didn’t know anything about boxing then. Now I know that if you get hit in the stomach, you’re just going to lose your breath for a couple of seconds, but it comes back. I didn’t know that then. I really thought that I wouldn’t be able to ever breathe again and I’d die. I was trying desperately to breathe but all I could do was throw up. It was just horrible shit.
“Get up, walk it off,” he barked.
After everyone left, I approached him real humble. “Excuse me, sir, can you teach me how to do that?” I asked. I’m thinking that when I go back to Brownsville and hit a motherfucker in the stomach like that, he’s going to go down and I’m going to go in his pockets. That’s where my mind was at back then. He must have seen something in me that he liked, because after our second session he said to me, “Would you like to do this for real?” So we started training regularly. And after our workouts, I’d go back to my room and shadowbox all night long. I started to get a lot better. I didn’t know it at the time, but during one of our sparring sessions I hit Bobby with a jab and broke his nose and almost knocked him down. He had the next week off, so he just let it heal at home.
After a few months of workouts, I called my mother and put Bobby on the phone with her. “Tell her, tell her,” I said. I wanted him to tell her how good I was doing. I just wanted her to know I could do something. I figured she might believe me if a white person was telling her it. But she just told him that she had trouble believing that I had changed. She just thought I was incorrigible.
Shortly after that Bobby came to me with an idea. “I want to bring you to see this legendary boxing trainer Cus D’Amato. He can take you to the next level.”
