Friday, August 31, 2018
Hitting the books: The boxing gym saving Detroit's youth
By Michael Rothstein
DETROIT -- The buildings sit, one after another, on E Vernor Highway -- dilapidated houses, abandoned businesses, boarded-up structures, vacant lots populated by more weeds than cars driving down the multilane street.
It's a row of blight on the east side of Detroit, a city searching for recovery for decades. In the middle of this depression is a light, one easily missed along the road in this once-powerful city. On quick glance, it looks like every other building from the outside. Then you ultimately stop in the vacant field that doubles as a parking lot and see the sign: "Welcome to Downtown BOXING GYM."
Hope for the future of Detroit begins here in this dark-gray nondescript 27,500 square-foot edifice with a leaky ceiling. Walk in, go up a small ramp and find two boxing rings in the front. There's a row of heavy bags, some spare workout equipment and speed bags in the corner. As required in any boxing gym, there are, of course, plenty of mirrors for shadowboxing.
A boxing gym, on its own, is not going to save Detroit. It isn't going to be the reason this generation of Detroit kids has chances the last one didn't. Those reasons are in the back, behind the workout area that has trained champion amateur boxers, including 11-0 professional welterweight Janelson Figueroa Bocachica.
That the gym -- and the lofty goals it has -- is in a former book-binding facility is a small bit of irony because of what its founder has been working for the past decade-plus to accomplish. Boxing is how 49-year-old Carlo "Khali" Sweeney, the gym's founder, brings the children in to the free after-school program. It's education and the possibility of a better future that keeps them there.
Sweeney, a charismatic high-school dropout who said he didn't learn to read or write until his mid-to-late 20s and is just now contemplating returning to get his GED, is the de facto mayor of this building. He has had a hand in every hire and every decision. This was his vision; the reason why he took no salary for years, lived out of the gym's original location and drove an oft-broken-down Buick in the early days. When the Buick stalled out on a freeway in the snow, Sweeney got out and walked the rest of the way to the gym. All to be there for the kids.
Sweeney doesn't push the boxing portion of it -- knowing pro boxing can be fickle. The gym's best in-ring success is Bocachica, who has won his past four fights by knockout. According to BoxRec, he's one of only two welterweights in the top 200 under 20 years old along with Ricardo Salas. Bocachica is a fixture at the gym, working with younger fighters and serving as a general role model in and out of the ring.
"I'm on my way there. I made it super far right now and where I am, I'm in a great spot," Bocachica said. "I'm just getting better but in here, anybody can do what I've been doing. Everybody has a mind. Everybody has hands and feet. You got to get the right person to teach you the right way."
For Bocachica, those people are his father and Sweeney.
"He's taken care of me," Bocachica said. "It's like having a second father. Like a grandpa, like a little old man behind you saying, 'Are you doing good in school? Are you doing this? Are you doing that?' He brings you to the gym and works you harder over here. He's both sides. It's always been like that, since I first came to the gym."
Bocachica was one of the first kids to enter this program, back when it wasn't a program at all, but simply a man trying to save the kids of Detroit, one at a time in 2007 in an abandoned car wash on St. Aubin. It has grown from a handful to 172 children ages 8 to 18 (although alumni like Bocachica come back, too). While there's room for 250 kids, they don't yet have funding or staffing to grow the program and keep the vital one-on-one interaction intact. The ones accepted are chosen at random from an application pool. Sweeney wants to create an environment as close to the real world as possible, with multiple languages and cultures represented -- mirroring the world's diversity. And there's plenty of interest: a waiting list 850 students long for a program that has graduated 100 percent of its seniors since 2007.
Sweeney understands these kids as he was once one of them. Born on the east side of Detroit, poor enough to have to survive on sugar and syrup sandwiches, he said he lived from home to home with various family members through childhood and early adulthood. A former gang member, Sweeney said multiple friends from childhood are incarcerated or interred. So when a child has a problem, a parent has an issue, he understands.
"Growing up, everybody used to always say, you know, you so bad, man, you gonna be dead. You gonna get killed. You're gonna be in prison. That's what everybody would say to me," Sweeney said. "You fight all the time. They didn't understand that my fighting was just an excuse to get out of the classroom."
Sweeney's excuse eventually turned into a vision of how to help the next generation of Detroit kids remain focused on their education. Boxing is the enticement to get kids into the gym, but the real goal is in the white-painted rooms behind the rings. It's there where the motto he stresses -- "Books Before Boxing" -- is pulled off. That's the true mission of the Downtown Boxing Gym: a mantra consistently preached by the students. It's inscribed on a faux championship belt given to him by Rachael Ray that sits on a shelf in his corner office -- an office that doubles as a one-on-one literacy intervention lab in the afternoons.
Boxing brings the kids in. Education, life lessons and a group of adults preaching positivity and seeing potential in kids surrounded by negativity is why they stay.
"That's our future," said Valeena Bell, a parent with two kids in the program. "If they aren't taught the right way, what the heck is going to happen? What is going to happen? They are planning a future for them."
http://www.espn.com/boxing/story/_/...ing-gym-detroit-place-where-books-come-boxing
