Originally Posted by JCC

A lot of guys grew up in neighborhoods grew up in tough neighhoods as he apparently did, and not all were black who did either. I'm not black and I grew up in a tough neighhood too.

There were a lot of tough kids in the neighborhood I lived, and also at that boy's club I went to when I was a kid too.

There was all kinds of sports there a kid could be engaged with there besides boxing.

You could do a lot of stuff there shoot pool, play ping pong, go swimming, there was a lot of stuff to do there play basket ball as well as other things.

But boxing was all I was ever interested.

As for street fights? Kids getting into fights there it was near a daily thing to happen there.

But few messed with the few kids there that were boxers. But some did! But those were easy fights for the kids who were boxers.

I never lost one of those kind of fights. Neither did any of of the other kids on the boxing team at the club either as for those kind of street fights.

In those days if a fight broke off in the pool hall at the club for example, which was often over something.

They could take those kids down stairs to the gym and put them in the ring and put the gloves on them and that's the way grudges would be settled.

They would announce "FIGHT IN THE GYM, FIGHT IN THE GYM." And it would always draw a big crowd into the gym of at the club.

It was a fun thing actually, and if it was a situation in which one of the kids was one of the boxers of the club which wasn't often. But when it was he often would TKO the other kid he got into a fight with in the first round no matter how much bigger the other kid may have been. It would always be a miss match.

That came to happen often enough at the club that few of the tough kids, and they all were tough wouldn't want to mess with those other kids at the club if they knew they were boxers.

I hear a lot of talk today about this so-called modern training for boxers today, about it being better. DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT! The old school was better! We had tougher, more talented, well-conditioned fighters back in those days.

As I remember it those kids were so tough and well-conditioned, as for many of them they would have gotten into the ring and to have fought any body that wanted to fight no matter how big or tough they may have been.

If you could have have put the gloves on the DEVIL and put him in the ring, and they would have fought him too, myself included.

In the 1960s and especially in the 1970s martial arts came to be promoted more with a lot of hype with the growing popularity of all the kung fu movies which was a lot of silly and hyped up hollywood stuff.

A lot of kids started taking up marital arts, but I never saw those kids to ever be about to take a punch.

I always saw the karate and all that martial arts stuff as having been over rated.

I'd always found the toughest kids to be boxers ... tough .. two fisted street fighters.

There is nothing out there that will toughen you in body and toughen you in mind, and build self confidence and really teach you how to fight than boxing.

In my veiw, boxing is and always has been number # 1.

JCC