Why ADVERTISE using GYM 44???: Reason #58

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
- Maya Angelou

For individuals like me, who have invested a HUGE chunk of their life into the survival of the Sports industry, can understand the POWER of a story. If you hope have lasting success in sports, or in life, you had better not only KNOW, but stay true to your STORY...... Keep Reading

"I never played the Game." By, Howard Cosell

Page 225. He tells a Story about HOW the great "Sugar Ray Leonard" got involved in boxing.

Page 225. He states

" When Ray, the fifth of his seven children, was three, Cicero packed his family into a '57 Mercury and headed for Washington, D.C., where he worked as a night manager in a supermarket. He later bought a house in Palmer Park, a predominantly black, lower-middle class community in suburban Maryland.

Leonard's childhood was uneventful. He kept to himself, staying home, reading comic books, and playing with his German shephard.

Never much interested in team sports-he was too small to excel in basketball or football-he preferred wrestling and gymnastics and took up boxing ONLY because his brother Roger goaded him into it. Roger, a year older than Ray, had begun winning boxing trophies and waved them in Ray's face, chiding him for hiding at home with his mama.

And so, in 1969, when he was thirteen, Ray walked into the recreation center in Palmer Park and laced on a pair of gloves. There he came under the tutelage of two men who would start him out on his journey to fame and fortune. They were Janks Morton, an insurance salesman who would become Leonards's closet friend and adviser, and Dave Jacobs, who worked for a pharmacy and in his spare time guided the center's boxing team

For reasons Leonard always found hard to explain, he knew almost instantly that he was meant to be a boxer, that this was the road he must take to achieve self-fulfillment. He was an outstanding pupil, absorbing every lesson that Jacobs and Morton taught him. Victories came in the bunches, and in 1972, he lied about his age so he could ........TRY-OUT for the Olympic team at the trials in Cincinnati. He was sixteen. The minimum age was seventeen. During one fight, Johnson, a coach then, too, turned to Jacobs and said,

THAT KID YOU GOT IS SWEETER THAN SUGAR."

So he Walked into a GYM, willing to put in the work. And a TRY-OUT was created. Now, that his boxing career is finished, the video below displays the trail he left.