A Fighting Chance U.S. Olympic Boxers Urge Kids To Stay In School
Students at Salk Middle School bobbed and weaved, shadowboxing their way through some imaginary left-right combos.
Besides mimicking the agile feet and fast hands of U.S. Olympic team boxers, students also paid close attention to some personal stories of tough lives.
Several of the boxers - in town for an exhibition tonight against Ireland - told kids gathered for assemblies at Chase, Glover and Salk middle schools how they had dropped out of school or had had bad attitudes before taking up boxing.
They warned the kids not to make the same mistakes.
“I dropped out of high school trying to be the big man of the city,” said Anthony Stewart, a 178-pounder from Chicago’s infamous Cabrini Green housing project. “I didn’t listen to teachers, didn’t go to school, didn’t listen to my parents. I wanted to be liked by everybody, but really I just made enemies.”
LeChaunce Shepherd, a 147-pounder from Milwaukee, told the Salk group how boxing coaches had convinced him to go to college. It’s been tough, he said, but at age 23, he will graduate this spring from Northern Michigan University with a degree in mass communication.
“You should learn as much as you can inside the classroom and outside the classroom,” Shepherd said, pointing to sign-language interpreter Susan Burkart. “I mean, look. I don’t know anything about sign language, but I’d like to learn.”
Shepherd got some of the loudest cheers when he closed his speech by asking Burkart to show him how to sign “thank you all.” She showed him, and he made the sweeping gesture to the crowd.
Several students said they were impressed by Jason Ingwaldson, who said he once had lost eight matches in a row before becoming top-ranked nationally at 125 pounds.
“It made a lot of sense to me that in boxing, if you lost, you keep going and try to win,” said eighth-grader Willie Sprayberry.
Olympic team coach Al Mitchell tried to repair the sport’s violent image among the kids by saying that now, as opposed to the 1930s or ‘40s, “if you blink an eye, they’ll stop the fight.”
Still, when students were asked to raise their hands to indicate their favorite sports, basketball and football elicited the most response.
Principal Mary Haugen rejected the notion that bringing boxers to school condoned a violent sport, making a distinction between professional and amateur boxing.
She even put on the gloves and got a lesson from Mitchell in the finer points of the jab and left cross, amid students’ rambunctious laughter.
Haugen didn’t mind playing along for the kids’ sake.
“If I wasn’t willing to be a part of their culture, I wouldn’t be doing this job,” Haugen said.
Afterwards, eighth-grader Kristen Riley hung around with a pack of girls pleading for autographs.
“I thought they’d be a lot more arrogant,” Riley said. “I liked how they said if you believe in yourself, you can accomplish anything.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo