THE BUSINESS OF BOXING

TRAINING FIGHTERS VIRTUALLY GYMLESS: THE GARY RUSSELL SENIOR STORY

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TRAINING FIGHTERS VIRTUALLY GYMLESS: THE GARY RUSSELL SENIOR STORY
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WHILE MANY FIGHTERS JOIN GYMS OF VARIOUS KINDS TO BECOME GREAT FIGHTERS.  HERE IS A BOXING TRAINER, WHO TRAINS HIS SONS AND A FEW FRIENDS IN HIS BASEMENT AND PRODUCES SILVER AND GOLDEN GLOVE CHAMPIONS.  HE HAS A SON WHO HAS BEEN INVITED TO THE SUMMER OLYMPIC TRIALS.
 
A FATHER AND A TRAINER WHO REJECTS THE POLITICS AND BACKSLAPPING OF AMATEUR BOXING AND PRODUCES NATIONAL CHAMPIONS HIS WAY.
 
YOU WILL BE ENLIGHTENED AND TOUCHED BY HIS STORY.

Fighter Behind the Boxers

Even While Training A Potential Olympian, Gary Russell Sr. Does Things His Way

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 7, 2006; Page E01

The house looks like any other house on the 4600 block of Omaha Street in Capitol Heights, with its sturdy red brick, white trim and a green weatherproof carpet running up the front steps.

But walk inside, through the living room with the television turned to cartoons, across the kitchen, turn right, go down the back stairs and into the most extraordinary boxing gym. The gym has no ring, no speed bags, no exercise bikes, no boxing posters on the wall. Nothing but a basement floor of rollout vinyl, battered faux-wood paneling and a mirror tacked to the wall. In fact it isn't even a gym at all. Yet this is all Gary Russell Sr. has.

Gary Russell Sr. trains his five sons in the fine art of boxing from the basement of his home in Capitol Heights.
Photos
Home Schooled
Gary Russell Sr. trains his five sons in the fine art of boxing from the basement of his home in Capitol Heights.

And every afternoon he grinds out his cigarettes, forgets about the blood pressure pills he only takes half the time anyway and limps down the stairs on a right knee shot to pieces in a hunting accident to do the thing he loves most of all:

To teach boxing.

Here he has trained his five sons, ages 9 to 17, turning four into Golden and Silver Gloves champions. So many champions that their belts and trophies fill a wall of shelves in the garage gathering dust and mildew. Another stash is tucked away in the attic.

The door to the basement is always open and on any given night neighborhood kids and the occasional local professional will be working out with Russell and his assistant, Robert "Herb" Martin. But it is the kid in the corner, the one shadowboxing in front of the mirror, arms flying, breath hissing, a tornado of fists and feet, that everyone watches.

He is 17-year-old Gary Russell Jr., the United States' best hope for an Olympic boxing gold medal in the 2008 Olympics. Known in the house as "Little Gary," he is the No. 1 amateur bantamweight in the country and No. 3 in the world in the 118-pound-and-under class. He has just 10 losses in almost 200 fights.

You have probably never heard of Gary Russell Jr., because in the local boxing world, the Russells are an island. Perhaps it is Gary Sr.'s fault. He doesn't race home to tell the media when his kids win. His vanquished opponents will not do it for him. In the great turbine of information, the best boxing family in this area might as well not even exist.

Friends say this is because Gary Sr. possesses a resolute sense of what is right and is unafraid to speak his mind. They tell him he should keep quiet, but he says he can't if something is wrong and affects children. Others call him stubborn and say he doesn't know when to pick his battles.

"I know the peripheral of all this," Gary Sr. said of the local boxing clique. "It's not real, man, I'm not going to do it. In fact, we're going to do our own thing and continue to win. And they hate me even now with Little G winning. They hate that."

It is an old battle. Gary Sr. vs. a boxing world he thinks is phony. In the end, he's always gone off by himself. Before the basement of the house on Omaha Street, there was the lobby in the building of the two-bedroom apartment the family lived in on New Jersey Avenue in the District. And before that was an alley in the city's Trinidad neighborhood.

"It's motivation for us," Gary Sr. said.


 

He has given his boxing team, made up of his children and the neighborhood kids to train with them, a name. The name is Enigma. "The other gyms around, they can't figure us out, man," he said. "We're an enigma. We're unsolvable."

Gary Sr. is 45 now and talks through what seems like a perpetual cold. Years ago he wanted to be a fighter like his Uncle Bobby. After his mother died when he was 4, he was raised by his grandparents in Northeast Washington, but on Sundays when ABC's "Wide World of Sports" broadcast its boxing specials, he was by Bobby's side. He learned some things from his uncle -- how to punch, how to hit the speed bag, how to train. Then every day he'd run home from school, go straight to the garage and practice until the street lights came on.

Gary Russell Sr. trains his five sons in the fine art of boxing from the basement of his home in Capitol Heights.
Photos
Home Schooled
Gary Russell Sr. trains his five sons in the fine art of boxing from the basement of his home in Capitol Heights.

He won't say it, but his wife, Lawan, will: He trained himself.

Then he started training others. He started with kids in the neighborhoods where he lived and even worked with a few pros. But then came his own kids. Eventually he wound up with 11, nine of them boys. And so he trained them, too. But he did not live with his first three sons; things did not always work out. He is estranged from his first boy, who fought professionally as Gary Jones. His second son, Devaun Drayton, died in 2004. A third is in college.

The other six boys, the ones he had with Lawan, all live with him on Omaha Street. He named each of them Gary Russell. Though after Little Gary, in a concession to Lawan, he agreed to call them by their middle names.

He embraces the children in his home, keeping them close, praying nothing will go wrong. And everybody loves his kids. They smile, they are polite and they shake the hands of strangers. Those who know them say it is a testament to Gary Sr. and Lawan, to the way they keep them at home and have given them structure in their lives with the regular boxing practices. Maybe boxing out of a lobby and a basement is not ideal, but it has held the family together.

It's hard to argue with the results. Each Russell child who boxes has won the local Golden Gloves competitions since the age of 7. Little Gary, and 16-year-old Allan have also won national Silver Gloves competitions.

Gary Sr. brags about them, raving about Little Gary's spot on the U.S. national team or the recurring extra role that Allan has on the HBO series "The Wire," which is filmed in Baltimore; 13-year-old Antonio's place on the school honor roll; and the fact that 9-year-old Antuanne has yet to lose a fight in two years.

"He's private, he's to himself," said Ernesto Rodriguez, who once trained with the family and now is a deputy with the Prince George's County Sheriff's Department. "He has a big heart. He wants to help kids, but he doesn't want to be at all the boxing shows promoting himself. He's just a regular guy who's proud of his kids and his accomplishments."

Olympian Desire That Burns


Sprawled on the floor of his living room, stuffing tapes of his fights into a VCR, Little Gary hardly seems the type to knock someone senseless. He is just 5 feet 3, but is a compactly built young man, with the wisp of a moustache.

Then the screen flickers, a grainy, shaking film comes to life, and there's Little Gary dancing in circles, his feet barely touching the mat. He bobs his head, slides and ducks. His body is in constant motion, no move wasted, dodging punches until it almost looks as if this is a dance.

Suddenly from the middle of this hypnotic waltz, he unleashes a flurry of punches so fast his gloves look like tiny blue flashes. The other fighters' heads snap back, or they fold up. One crumples into the ropes. In one scene Little Gary especially loves, he unloads a right hand that rises like a missile straight out of the floor. He plays it over and over, like a boxing Zapruder film.


 

Dance, dance, dance. Thumpata, thumpta.

BOOM!

Gary Russell Sr. trains his five sons in the fine art of boxing from the basement of his home in Capitol Heights.
Photos
Home Schooled
Gary Russell Sr. trains his five sons in the fine art of boxing from the basement of his home in Capitol Heights.

He laughs and claps. It is clear there is a part of Gary Russell Jr. that loves the thrill of landing a punch that will close another man's eyes.

"It's got to be bred," he said of his fire. "It's got to be in your blood. When you fight I turn into a completely different person. If I fight it's like, 'Okay, when we step into that square you are my enemy, you are out to hurt me. I'm out to hurt you.' It's like you leave this persona and go to another. But what was in this one goes to that one. I feed off the people who love me. I feed off the people who hate me."

He is thoughtful, polite, at ease. He locks eyes with the person he is speaking to. He comforts his youngest brother, 5-year-old Isiah, who walks into the room crying, by pretending to pull off the boy's nose and then replace it as Isiah stops weeping and giggles.

But he also has an edge. One of his most vivid memories was a loss at age 9 in the Silver Gloves championships in Kansas City to a boy named Rau'shee Warren, a 2004 Olympian and now a teammate of Little Gary's on the U.S. national team. It was the first time he had been challenged in a fight. The memory lingered so long that he exacted revenge in a sparring session this summer when he cracked Warren on the chin, nearly knocking out the other fighter.

He burns for the Olympics. Everything he has done the last few years -- the weightlifting, the running, the absences from school for boxing tournaments -- has been for two weeks in Beijing in the summer of 2008. Last year, Little Gary won the local, regional and national championships to land a spot on the U.S. team. Now that he has a taste, he knows he wants to stay.

"I've thought about it. It's like I can't lose man, I can't," Little Gary said. His eyes go dark. He is serious. The room is suddenly very, very quiet.

"I feel like this is my destiny, to get to the Olympics."

Keeping It in the Family


Here's what they do in the basement. They don't do it like everyone else.

Practices are not predictable things. Rap music blasts from speakers set up on the floor as the kids shadowbox in a giant circle that twirls around the tiny room, bouncing off the paneling as they do. It looks less like a boxing workout and more like a Friday night dance party. But Gary Sr. likes this. He thinks it gives the group personality. And he is big on personality.

Rather than confine his kids to a boxing regimen, he wants to create a plan that fits them. Little Gary is centered, smooth and fast. Allan, the artist and actor, can drift more in fights but packs a devastating wallop. Antonio, the 13-year-old, is the one with the mean scowl. Gary Sr. recognizes each twist then works to bring it out in the fights.


Fighter Behind the Boxers

"Most coaches are satisfied if their fighters are just swinging their arms and throwing punches," said Martin, the assistant coach. "To Gary, there's a right way and a wrong way to throw a punch. It's not just throwing punches, it's throwing punches correctly. A punch has a starting point and a stopping point. And you have to throw it without being out of position to shoot the next one. They're very advanced."

The combinations have names. Gary and the kids invent them as they go along. For instance, a fake to the right, a fake to the left and then a punch designed to lure opponents into seeing something that isn't there is called "Three-Card Molly" -- a misinterpretation of the slight-of-hand card trick three-card monte. "Shoot fin" is a jab, an uppercut and a hook. "Cat" means the fighter must drop into a crouch and fight with reflexes, just like a cat will do.

Gary Russell Sr. trains his five sons in the fine art of boxing from the basement of his home in Capitol Heights.
Photos
Home Schooled
Gary Russell Sr. trains his five sons in the fine art of boxing from the basement of his home in Capitol Heights.

"Say we're in a gym and [Gary Sr.] says, 'Okay G, shoot fin.' Nobody knows what a fin is," Little Gary said. "If he says now 'Okay, I want you to throw a jab and an upper cut and a hook,' everyone knows. They say, 'Okay man, you all heard what he said?' "

No training idea seems too outlandish to Gary Sr. To toughen his kids, he used to drop them off at the bottom of a hill, then have them run home regardless of the weather.

To sharpen their focus, he's had them spar in a giant green contraption he called "the Pickle Suit," designed to help fighters sweat off pounds and also to create an unnatural impediment. In other words, if you can fight two rounds in the Pickle Suit, you can probably survive anything in the ring.

To make them develop other punches, he's sent some into the ring to spar and only allowed them to use a left hand jab while the other boxer can use both hands.

Many times they don't even fight in the basement. Instead, Gary Sr. will sit down, gather everyone around and talk.

"My father has told me so much," Little Gary said. "He instilled it in my head. He tells me I'm not an illiterate fighter. A lot of fighters are illiterate when it comes to what they are doing. We are more trained athletes where we can see if the guy keeps pulling his jab, pulling his jab, I'll be like, Okay, there's a big right hook coming. Then I step away from his right turn. Then I'm going to crack him."

In part, this too is why they are in the basement. Team Enigma is welcome in any gym around town. And Gary Sr.'s been to most from time to time. But joining up with another coach means sharing secrets. Gary Sr. has tried to take his kids to other gyms, but left after some of the coaches tried to wear his children down, making them stay in the ring for three and four rounds while leaving their own fighters in for a round or two.

He has a few gyms where he still goes, the Hillcrest Boxing Gym near Capitol Heights and Old School Boxing in Clinton. Otherwise, he'd rather just stay in the basement.

One Who Got Away


When the boxing people remember Devaun Drayton they talk about the feet. Feet so fast, so smooth, he could walk into a ring without having trained for months and still pummel people with his fists.

This is the son Gary Sr. couldn't save.


He is convinced this is because Devaun came from a relationship before his marriage to Lawan and thus didn't live in the house on Omaha Street with the rest of the children, but rather on Maryland Avenue in the District with his mother.

Gary Sr. tried to bring Devaun into his protective cocoon, into the basement, because when he was there everything was safe. And Devaun could fight. Once, Gary Sr. convinced his son to leave Maryland Avenue and entered him in a National Golden Gloves tournament outside Kansas City a week before the event. Devaun hadn't trained in months.

Gary Russell Sr. trains his five sons in the fine art of boxing from the basement of his home in Capitol Heights.
Photos
Home Schooled
Gary Russell Sr. trains his five sons in the fine art of boxing from the basement of his home in Capitol Heights.

"He won hands down, made it look easy, man," Gary Sr. said. "He didn't train five days. He was that good."

It was the last time Devaun fought.

"So I don't know, he got caught up there on Maryland Avenue," Gary Sr. said. "I did my best to get him away from there. Man, I had him too."

Gary Sr. called a friend in Miami, a trainer named Milton LaCroix, begging LaCroix to take his son away from D.C., away from the streets. LaCroix, who trained ranked heavyweight contender Shannon Briggs, agreed to take on Devaun. He sent a ticket for a company jet. All Devaun had to do was put on a suit and tie; the plane would be waiting.

On March 10, 2004, the police found Devaun dead, shot in the yard of the Phelps Career School in Northeast. He was only 17. Only later would Gary Sr. surmise the killing was over a gun. Not that it mattered. As far as he was concerned it was the streets that had killed his boy.

He had the funeral home dress Devaun in the suit he was supposed to wear to Miami. Then at a private showing, just before the casket was closed, he took the unused plane ticket and slipped it the breast pocket of his son's jacket.

"I mean, it was a waste, man," he said. "It was a waste."

If Only He Could Let It Be


Now comes the hardest part, letting go of Little Gary.

"I hate it, man, I hate it, I really do," Gary Sr. said with a wince. Already he's lost two of his oldest sons because they weren't with him under his roof. He can't bear the idea of something happening to any of his others.

The Olympics loom in just two years and already the national team is making more demands, asking for Little Gary to spend weeks at a time at its headquarters in Colorado Springs. He recently dropped out of Suitland High because his boxing commitments caused him to miss too much school. He now attends an accreditation program in Temple Hills.

There could come a point before the 2008 Olympics that the national team is going to want his commitment to be closer to full time. This means Little Gary wouldn't be practicing in the basement, plotting strategies, inventing new names for combinations.

Worse, because so many of the national team's coaches come from the Washington area, Gary Sr. is running straight into the clique he can't stand. USA Boxing has also adopted a style of fighting aimed more toward scoring points than knockouts. It is a very straightforward style that doesn't take into account a fighter's personality. Gary Sr. is terrified his son's boxing will be damaged.

"You can tell when Little Gary goes away for a month and comes back it's a little different," Martin said. "You have to keep constantly teaching it."

Two weeks ago, he pulled Little Gary from a U.S. team training camp in Annapolis because an assistant coach is Barry Hunter, who runs Headbangers, a D.C. team that is the Russells' chief rival. It meant Little Gary did not participate in a boxing exhibition in Miami. His replacement lost.

"If you don't stand for something, you fall for anything," Gary Sr. said.

His friends understand his gripes and agree that it is a shame that Little Gary won't be in the hands of someone who understands Three-Card Molly or Cat, but they also say he has to pull himself away.

The coaches and fighters who are friendly with Gary Sr. say he loves his children dearly, that he is only trying to do what he thinks is best for Little Gary. Even the Olympics people concede this.

In the end, they all say the same thing.

"I try to tell Gary, 'Let him go, let him go,' " Rodriguez said.

No matter what happens now with the national team, Little Gary will have to fight his way into the Olympic trials this year and then through the trials competition in the summer of 2008. This does not concern Gary Sr., because so far there has been no other bantamweight in this country who can beat his boy. By then, he figures, Allan could be right there, too.

They are family. They stay together.

"All [the politics] does is make me want to go out and kick their asses even more," Little Gary said.

So it stays as it has been: father and son in the basement of the red brick house on Omaha Street.


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