Nate Jones

Boxing

Nate Jones was trading cigarettes while Montell Griffin was trading punches. Nate knew it could have been different.

Nate knew it wasn’t.

Nate knew the difference.

Who says you don’t learn anything in prison?

As Jones sat in front of a black-and-white television at the Western Illinois Correctional Center watching the 1992 Olympic Games from Barcelona, he thought he recognized the stubby American boxer entering the ring.

Nate was right. It was who he thought it was. It was Montell, the son of the guy who owned the Windy City Gym until he suffered a heart attack in a corner between rounds and died a few years back. Griffin’s father had given his life to boxing, and now there was his son doing the fighting, the same kid Jones used to box with at amateur tournaments like the Silver Mittens before Nate dropped the sport for a street gang called the Cobra Stones at 14.

Nate began doing odd jobs for drug dealers. The oddest of jobs, really. While he did, Griffin kept fighting.

Two roads. One led to Barcelona. The other led to the hole, a place Jones had visited a few times since being sent to prison for 20 months for armed robbery of a vehicle (known in the profession as carjacking) in 1991 when he was barely 18.

A teen-ager. Just like Montell. Two teen-agers with an attitude.

Now one was in the Olympics and the other was in jail, but Nate knew it could still be different, so he said so.

Nobody believed him.

“I ain’t no angel,” Jones said. “People said I can’t do this and I can’t do that, but hopefully, I can keep going.”

That Jones is here at all, one victory from a gold-medal confrontation with the legendary Cuban Felix Savon, is proof enough of that. But only a few people know how difficult it has been.

“I wasn’t supposed to be here. What I done, nobody can take from me. I can say I earned this.”

The hard way.