'Boxing saved my life'

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Lamont Peterson wants to take the super lightweight world boxing title from poster boy champion Amir Khan. (MANUEL BALCE CENETA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

WASHINGTON -- Big Fight Coming To Washington, was the headline, but it wasn't about Obama versus Cain. This was about a real, looming contest of two young men with ten-ounce gloves, slender bodies and the hearts of heavyweights.

One of the men, I learned from the local paper, is a Pakistani Briton named Amir Iqbal Khan, champion of the world at 140 pounds. The other is a Washingtonian named Lamont Peterson, whose curriculum vitae stands out as especially uplifting and achingly sad, even among the backstories of rejection and redemption that professional boxing has built upon for more than two centuries.

They will fight for Amir's title on Dec. 10 at the Washington Convention Centre -- the building is named for Walter E. Washington, the town's ex-mayor -- condensing their pasts and their furious ambitions into 12 or fewer rounds. Both have fought for money more than 20 times. Each has been beaten only once.

"Young lion versus young lion!" the promoters crow. "Vegas fight at D.C. prices!"

Lamont Peterson, the challenger and underdog, is 27. Twenty years ago, he and his slightly younger brother Anthony either fled from, or were turned out of, their family's home in this city's intractable slums when their father was sent to prison. The boys took to the darkest streets of the alabaster capital, slept in parked cars and the bus station, ran errands for crack-market magnates and awaited an early death by malnutrition, exposure, or a loaded gun.

They didn't even go to school until the second grade.

Now, on an autumn morning, I find these same two Petersons, abundantly fit, literate and well-fed, sparring at a single-storey gym called the Head Bangers Boxing Club, a couple of blocks from the baseball stadium where our punch-drunk Nationals play. They aren't hitting each other. Coaches in padded cummerbunds are absorbing the young men's practice blows, while a hard-bodied debutante in pink spandex -- an aspirant for the U.S. Olympic squadron next summer at London, where women's boxing will enjoy its premiere as a medal sport -- grunts and sweats nearby, bunny-hopping in and out of a mammoth truck tire while caressing a 30-pound weight.

("I hated training," Muhammad Ali once complained. "But I said 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.' ")

Watching the session is a sage named Barry Hunter, who is credited with bringing the adolescent Petersons in from the sidewalk and inducting them into the non-judgmental royalty of the ring.

"Kids living on the street, six, seven years old, surviving on their own, never having a childhood. Unbelievable," he says. "Living in cars, living in a shelter -- you tell that story, it's a best-seller. It says that dreams do come true. It says that life can hit your ass with a blow so hard, no man can hit harder than that."

Barry Hunter tells me that when Anthony Peterson -- a lightweight with a record of 30 wins and one defeat -- earned his first purse as a professional, he threw a fete for himself at Chuck E. Cheese's, having never had a birthday party of his own. And now comes the older brother against Amir Iqbal Khan.

"You take a young man who's been what Lamont's been through and bring him to the cusp of a world championship, movies are made of this," Barry Hunter says. "Imagine the hope he gives some people."

"The guy in the White House ran on hope, too," I mention, ever the political sage.

"It's just about the same thing," says coach Hunter. "I won't say Barack came from nothing like Lamont. But remember, man, he was black."

Now the workout ends and Lamont Peterson, beaming, clean-cut, soft-spoken, a survivor of the hell of the unseen corners of America's failed cities, sits down next to me on a couch.

"It's been a long journey," the challenger says. "It's been a long career. There were times when I thought, 'I'm tired of boxing. I just want to be a normal kid, go out and have fun.'

"But then I think what being a champion would mean to the kids at the gym. I'm definitely not ashamed of where I came from. I wouldn't say I'm proud of it either. At this moment, I wouldn't trade it for the world. Boxing saved my life."

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 19, 2011 j6