Lauvia Sherman, principal at Ralph Bunche Public School 125 in Harlem, greeted fighters Michael Bennett and Jermain Taylor with the kind of terse lecture that school disciplinarians and boxing trainers share.
“You know how I feel about boxing,” she said with no explanation further than a frown. “But I want you to talk to our students about discipline, hard work and dedication to achieve goals.”
With that she sent them off to a classroom of 3rd through 6th graders in an afterschool program. Despite the boxers’ best intentions, as they dutifully spoke of the rigors of training, diet and sacrifice, the question-and-answer session veered into the nitty-gritty. Fifth-grader Quinceya Donaldson was particularly blunt. She wanted to know how much the boxers were paid and what it felt like to get knocked out.
On Saturday night Bennett will get paid to box for the first time. The Chicago heavyweight–along with five teammates from the 2000 U.S. Olympic team–will make his professional debut at Madison Square Garden. The fighters’ first professional contracts, however, have been kept confidential.
Bennett has a four-year deal that calls for him to fight perhaps eight times in the first year.
“It allows you to pay your bills,” was Bennett’s diplomatic response.
As for getting knocked out, the two fighters joined the students’ laughter prompted by the question, then rapped their fists on a table–knock on wood–and said they hadn’t had that experience.
Asked to recall his favorite moment, Bennett said it was “walking with all the other athletes, along with my U.S. teammates, in the parade of nations at the Olympic Opening Ceremonies.
“Now my ambition is to be a world champion.”
He begins that quest south of Harlem in midtown Manhattan on Saturday. Besides Bennett and middleweight bronze medalist Taylor, the other U.S. Olympians with similar hopes are lightweight silver medalist Ricardo Williams Jr., bantamweight bronze medalist Clarence Vinson, flyweight Jose Navarro and welterweight Dante Craig. Their four-round bouts are scheduled for the 6,000-seat theater rather than the 20,000-seat main arena at the Garden.
Bennett weighed in at 201 pounds Friday. His opponent, New Yorker Andrew Hutchinson, weighed 193. Hutchinson has won, lost and fought a draw in his three pro bouts. For those who fear Bennett will be awed stepping into the ring for such a high-profile debut in a venerable venue and on an HBO telecast (tape at 10:45 p.m. Saturday), he faced more pressure in his last amateur bout in September.
“I’m assuming it won’t be as large as the Olympics,” he said. “It doesn’t get more global than that.”
At the Olympics, Bennett lost to the more experienced Cuban heavyweight Felix Savon, who went on to win his third Olympic gold medal. Because they fought before the semifinals, the loss eliminated Bennett from medal consideration.
But the American’s sportsmanship in the bout and its aftermath attracted the attention of Lou DiBella, a former HBO Sports executive who will launch a boxing-entertainment venture with Saturday night’s fights.
“I did not go to Sydney with the intention of signing Michael Bennett,” DiBella said. “But I admired the way he fought against a veteran with a lot more amateur boxing experience. He knew what he had to do and he tried to bring the attack.”
That style should be more effective in the pros, where DiBella believes Bennett “could make some noise as a heavyweight, and certainly could be a cruiserweight champion.”
DiBella, whose stated aim is to reform contracts that allow promoters to exploit fighters, called Bennett “mature and cerebral about that, appropriately wary of the dark side of boxing.”
Bennett will turn 30 in March. Seven years older than any of his fellow Olympians-turned-pros, he was the least likely to begin a professional boxing career. But he says the decision was not difficult:
“I just decided that millions of people go to work at jobs they hate. I’ll be doing something I love. I’ve been a warrior all my life.”
Since his arrest for armed robbery a decade ago while on summer break from North Park College, he has made leaps from student, to prisoner, to boxer, to amateur world champion, to Olympic team captain, to prizefighter.
A skilled high school athlete in football and wrestling, he overcame his lack of boxing experience by building on the lessons from his prison tutors. He then parlayed a more conventional regimen in the Chicago Park District’s Garfield Park boxing program into an opportunity with USA Boxing, the national amateur program geared toward Olympic competition. Next the Olympics became his springboard to a professional opportunity.
Even as he prepared to fight in Sydney, however, Bennett talked about a different dream:
“My preference would be a job where I could do mentoring with children.”
As he prepares for his first pro fight, that other dream is also being realized–not just with the trip to P.S. 125, but in Chicago too. He has been a career-day speaker and frequent visitor at Holmes Elementary School, where his girlfriend’s daughter is enrolled and where students sent him encouraging notes before and after the Olympics.
“It’s so exciting for the kids and me that he comes here,” said Philip Weiss, a social worker at the school. “One of the nicest things he did was to be straightforward in describing decisions he made, good and bad, and the consequences of his actions. . . . He told them to look out for your future even though it isn’t here yet.”
He bought bicycles as rewards for the boy and girl with the best grades in the 4th-grade class that first invited him, said Weiss, who tapes Bennett’s bouts and shows them in school.
Describing the 800 students as predominantly African-American from single-mother homes, Weiss said when Bennett talks to classrooms, “the kids get really quiet. That’s very unusual. He’s reached a lot of kids here, a lot of kids from deprived families.”
A broad banner hanging in the Garfield Park gym reads “Welcome Home, Michael Bennett, Captain of the 2000 Olympic Boxing Team.”
George Hernandez, Bennett’s trainer at Garfield Park, was not part of the USA Boxing team, but will be back in Bennett’s corner in New York. Hernandez said he doesn’t know how long he will leave the banner.
“It was not a perfect struggle,” he said. “Michael did not win a gold medal. But he demonstrated the work ethic that shows you can succeed even if you don’t win it all.”
