The Riverside building is forty minutes farther.
I did the forty hours at a food bank on West Second. It was supposed to be punishment and it was the best thing that happened to me that year, which I've decided is a fairly common feature of punishment.
I finished the semester online, at the kitchen table, on a Chromebook the district loaned me that had a broken hinge.
And in April, Ruben Sifuentes called again.
He said, "You can't spar. You can't get hit. That's forever and we both know it."
I said I knew.
He said, "You can hold pads. You can teach footwork. I've got eleven kids in the Tuesday-Thursday beginners and I'm sixty-eight and my knees are gone."
I said I'd think about it.
I went the next Tuesday.
I've been at that gym for five years. I run the beginners now — nine to thirteen, twice a week, and the youth program is up to thirty-one kids from eleven.
I have one rule that I say at the start of every single session, out loud, and the kids can recite it back at me in a bored voice, which is exactly how I want it.
The rule is: everything you learn here makes it worse if you use it out there.
Not "don't fight." That's useless and they know it's useless. What I tell them is the true thing, which is that the day you learn to throw a hook correctly is the day the law starts treating your hands differently than everybody else's.
I tell them my case. Not the video — the finding. I tell them a hearing officer wrote down that my training was a relevant factor in what a reasonable response was.
That lands harder than any lecture about turning the other cheek. Because it's not moral advice, it's arithmetic, and thirteen-year-olds respect arithmetic.
Now Brody.
He did not go to Missouri. He finished at Halstead by online program the same as me and graduated with a certificate rather than walking, which I only know because somebody told me.
He works for a plumbing outfit in Derby now. His boss's daughter is in my Thursday class, which is how I found out, and which is how everything in a city of four hundred thousand people works.
He came to the gym once. Three years ago, in the winter, on a Thursday, and he stood in the doorway in a work jacket for about ninety seconds while I finished a round.
Ruben went over. I didn't.
I don't know what was said. Ruben told me afterward, "He asked if he could put his kid in the summer program in a few years."
I said, "What'd you tell him?"
Ruben said, "I told him the summer program's a hundred and ten dollars and it's first come, first served."
That's it. That's the whole reunion. I've never spoken to him.
I want to end on the thing I actually believe, and it's going to disappoint anybody who came here for the eleven-second version.
The punch did not fix anything.
Wes Doerr transferred schools in November and nothing happened. Three complaints went into a file and nothing happened. A kid checked over his shoulder to see if a teacher was watching before he told a girl to kneel, and that had been working for twenty-six months.
What changed it was not my left hand.
What changed it was a sophomore named Priya Anand who started recording before anything happened because she had decided that somebody should have it. It was nine families who did not delete a video when a stranger's mother wrote them a letter by hand. It was a lawyer who asked for a discipline file that had been sitting in a cabinet the whole time.
I got the ending everybody wants and I'm telling you it cost my mother three shifts, a job site, and a year of being asked about it at the dry cleaner. It cost me an eye I'm still not allowed to risk and two years of being the only thing anybody at that school could see.
If I could do it again I'd throw the first punch and not the second, and I'd walk out, and I'd still be in exactly the same amount of trouble, and I'd sleep better.
Halstead has a written incident policy now. Complaints involving athletes go to the assistant principal, not to the athletic director. Everything gets a documented outcome. That took two years and it took Wes Doerr's mother, not me.
There's a picture on the wall on North Broadway, third row, second from the left. Fourteen years old, a belt that doesn't fit, and a face like somebody who has just found out she is going to have to be tough for a while.
I look at it about once a week on my way to the pads.
She thought the hardest part was going to be the fighting.
🥊 If somebody ever underestimated you and you had to live with what came after, tell me about it in the comments — I read every single one. 👍