Champs

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1

Every human

being that comes to this planet

has a fight.

The ultimate opponent

is actually truth.

The truth will wean

out everything else.

Fighting for your identity

or for who you are for real

is one of the hardest

things you have to do.

Boxing, I think,

is conquering not

only your opponent,

but yourself.

You've got to

transcend your fear

and reach deep down

to a part of you

that you may not

even know is there.

The heroic nature of boxing

is something that's undeniable.

There is skill,

there's expertise,

but there's always this

possibility of tremendous loss.

Boxing is just the anticipation.

It's one punch and

it's all over with.

A lucky punch can

turn a guy into a star.

And being caught

when he's not looking

could turn a star to

a shadow of himself.

Rich kids don't go into boxing.

Boxing is a way

out of the ghetto.

One minute, a boxer is

not getting anything.

The next minute, he's

signing a contract

for millions of dollars.

How do you handle that?

The sport itself,

there's a purity to it.

But the business

might be the most

unsanitized of all businesses.

Boxing is one of those

sports where the toughest

motherfuckers in the world are

letting some guys that couldn't

make it take advantage of them.

It's a reflection of our society

and your ability

to achieve dreams,

but it's also a reflection

of our society and the fact

that we are unquestionably

divided between the haves

and the have nots.

It's not an easy

way to make a living,

and it's the most

dangerous sport there is.

But that's the risk you take.

I'm the youngest of

nine in my family.

As you can see, a

black little boy.

Black and came from

people call it the ghetto.

My mother didn't read,

my father didn't read,

and so they were hard workers.

And that was my beginning.

When you live in

a project, people

throw their trash on the ground.

We were the family

that picked the trash

up and put it in the dumpster.

And people looked and

would laugh at us.

My mother said, you know,

you live in this environment.

You don't have to be like that.

Of course, people

had money and they

used their money

in the wrong way.

My mother didn't

buy clothes or toys.

She bought food.

She knew that this is what

we need to be able to live.

My upbringing, it was four

sisters, three brothers.

Coming out of Philadelphia

is a task itself,

especially in the inner

city called North Philly.

In the morning, we'd get

up to my mother saying, OK.

Get up, get ready for

school, this and that.

You had to ration out two cans

of pork and beans with six kids

and try to mix

other stuff in there

to call it something different.

Mom, it's the same

pork and beans.

It's just got other meats in

it that make it something else.

My father was one of the

guys that got up every day,

did what he had to do.

I never seen him sell

drugs, anything like that,

but I know that he used drugs.

I know that he drank.

So I had the two parent

structure in the house,

but it was a family

where we was tight,

but there were some

things that wasn't

as I would say a

normal family would be.

The worst characteristics

you could think of black life

is where I stem from.

A lot of drugs.

Tons of violence.

My parents sold women.

They were in the sex

industry and stuff.

That's what they did.

We weren't safe in the house.

We were always vulnerable.

A lot of men sleep with

my sister, beat me.

There was a pattern of

abuse that Mike experienced.

Bullies in the neighborhood

which routinely would pick

on him, but also Mike

was beaten by his mother.

His father was

pretty much absent.

My mother's very promiscuous.

It was just the way life was.

Everybody I knew had

just their mother at home

or their mother's boyfriend.

Nobody was ever with his father.

I don't know that world.

My whole world is just lost

kids with broken homes.

You know, forget poverty.

I don't care how much

money you get, or game.

Forget that.

Poverty hurts and leaves

an everlasting effect,

impression on you.

Poverty has its own

self perpetuating logic.

When you are strapped

for cash and you

need to survive

in the short term,

you start to adopt certain

practices that in the long term

end up preventing you from

taking advantage of all

the opportunities that

may be out there for you.

We came in on the

era where it really

got a little worse, where

nobody had anything.

You couldn't tease me about

my mother being on welfare

because your mother

was on welfare.

Childhood poverty oftentimes

leads to adult poverty, and

you get locked in these ruts.

So not only are these

worse environments,

but they find it much

harder to escape.

All these ills work together

to create very strong barriers

to upward mobility, and

very hard to still believe

the American dream is out there.

The American dream is something

that we're all proud of, we all

embrace, yet it's a

little bit dangerous.

America may be one of the

richest countries in the world,

but we also have

the largest pockets

of poverty in the

developed countries.

One in five children

in the United States

grows up in poverty.

America has, by far, the

most unequal distribution

of income and wealth

in the developed world.

Yet, the idea of the American

Dream is, in a sense,

what keeps the whole

system running.

I know what it is when people

move away from you because they

think that they're gonna

catch what you got.

They think they're gonna get

poor if they get to know you.

I was just always

searching for something.

I didn't like my

life at home, so I

wanted to have a

family somewhere else.

I tried to find a new family.

People that I hung around

was in the same

situation that I was in.

You went on like you

was going to school,

but in reality, we was in the

area, but not in the classroom.

We stayed around the school,

but not actually in the school.

And eventually, people do

find out, but after a while,

you get lost in the system.

When I went to school, they said

we wasn't gonna be anything.

They said, we're

gonna be statistics.

You're not articulate.

You don't know your ABCs

and the simple stuff.

And my mom always said, so

they read better than you.

Who's the fastest

in your school?

I said fastest at what?

She said, running.

Who run the fastest?

I outran everybody.

My mom says, there's things that

you do better than that person.

I said, but momma, they

don't talk about that.

Your day will come.

My goal wasn't to be the

president of the United States.

My goal was to be the

baddest guy that I can be.

We just basically

looked at school

as being no fun, no action,

and if you do catch us there,

it's gym where we get

to play basketball.

We could just do

things that we thought

was more important than

reading, and writing,

and science, and history.

I stopped going to school

because people were

kicking my ass.

I just walk around the

school 'til school is over

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