ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES
Eric Kelly was once one of the most promising amateurs around. He presumed he was invincible until the bottom fell out of his world,
How Eric Kelly has thrived, despite having his dream taken away from him
BOXER walks into a bar and has a fight. And then the punchline of nightmares. He gets a pool cue across his face that scoops his left eyeball almost completely out. The 2003 brawl would have dire consequences for Eric Kelly, a leading US amateur who had been tipped for professional glory. What he initially presumed was just another black eye and nothing much for a boxer to worry about turned out to be everything for a boxer to worry about. The swipe of wood had ripped through tendons and muscles. His eye wasn’t just black, it was ruined. Upon hearing that his beloved career was all but dead, sickness scurried from the walls of the doctor’s surgery and climbed into the pit of his gut.
“Nothing satisfied me more than going to that gym and putting on those gloves, lacing up those gloves to work out and hit the bag, shadow boxing and being amongst my peers and getting in that ring,” Kelly says today. “Nothing satisfied me more. Honestly, since then, I’m still wandering baseless because my heart, my passion, my goal was to be the champ.”
Baseless. Without boxing to guide him. Boxing wasn’t only his base and his shining light, it was his everything. His comfort blanket, his reason for being, his shield from reality. And in the squelch of an eye it was gone. He was exposed, he was lost, and he had no one to blame but himself.
It shouldn’t have been like this for Eric Kelly, the kid with the world in his hands. Not so long before, he was fighting the likes of Jermain Taylor, Jeff Lacy and Andre Ward. He won multiple national titles and was selected to join the United States Olympic Education Center where he would fight for a place in the 2000 Olympic Games. But a common symptom of being young and talented is thinking you’re young and invincible. At parties, with girls, rebelling against insecurities; a complete inability to prioritise the right things.
What began as the mischievousness of youth became something rather more sinister the day he found out his father had been diagnosed with HIV. His father who had instilled a deep sense of discipline into Kelly by introducing him to boxing, his father who used to turn up to all his fights leading a small army of fans, each of them wearing bright ‘Team Kelly’ bomber jackets. But young Eric’s discipline disappeared; he was overwhelmed with bitterness and anger upon hearing about his father’s condition.
Born in Florida and raised on the crack cocaine-lined streets of 1980’s Brooklyn, Kelly now admits he was no longer behaving like a boxer should. By 2003 he’d been thrown off the Olympic programme but Emanuel Steward recognised the then-22-year-old’s talents and invited him to Detroit, where he would train in the Kronk Gym. He was going to turn professional with one of the greatest trainers of them all.
Instead, the boxer walked into a bar and a pool cue and the punchline of nightmares. Today the eye no longer hangs by a thread. Neither does his future. He has opened a gym – Southbox – in the Bronx, and he hopes to one day open another in the UK. But the hangover from the bar fight that ³
I’M STILL WANDERING BASELESS BECAUSE MY PASSION AND MY GOAL WAS TO BE THE CHAMP”
curtailed his career is apparent when you talk to him. More so when you look at him. His left eyelid droops low over his left eye. It gamely tries to follow whatever his right eye is focusing on. His very own souvenir of bad-tempered idiocy. Not so much a lesson but a doctorate in how not to behave. And his education wasn’t over yet.
Within four years of the bar fight he was not only baseless he was homeless. The same mistakes were being made and in the summer of 2007 his story goes from the cruel to the downright unthinkable.
“I had two kids born on the same day in the same year,” he says. “By different moms. I had one kid born in New York. I had one kid born in Florida. July 26, 2007: Two kids, different mums. Same day. Same year. I was going crazy! How do I go back into that hospital room and tell the mother of my children, ‘Sorry sweetheart, I got to get on the plane, I just had another kid born in New York’?”
Juggling fireworks and a flamethrower would have been preferable. He breaks into a laugh as the ludicrousness of it all becomes apparent. Time does that. But back when he was darting from state to state, from mother and child to mother and child, Kelly’s outlook darkened further. He found himself yearning for a time machine so he could put all his wrongs right. Even today, he still drifts back to that moment his troubles began, when he strutted into the bar in Detroit, all invincible and stupid.
“I get flashbacks all the time,” Kelly says. “I wish I could turn the clock back every day. I had a flashback to it on the way here. It’s all I do. You don’t understand.”
Kelly, now 38, cuts an impressive physical figure. Just over six-feet tall with broad shoulders, the years of boxing training are obvious despite the baggy clothes and lavish black fur coat that covers him. He’s articulate and funny and looking forward, or at least trying to. It’s a future that would not have been possible without his past, on his shoulder and in his mind, reminding him of what he lost.
He picks up a copy of the latest Boxing News and flicks through it.
“I can’t get away from it,” he continues, looking down at the pages, picking out familiar faces at every turn. “Adrien Broner. I used to live with this kid. I’m older, he was 15 or 16. Who else we got? Anthony Joshua, 2012 Olympic champion. I was the 2000 Olympic alternate. Joshua should have come up looking up to me. Now I sit here and look at him. Do you understand what I’m saying?
“Here’s another. Terence Crawford. I knew him well. Every time I look at boxing, it’s something [that reminds me of the past]. Some fighters I watch win championships, fighters I beat when I was an amateur. It’s like me watching them live my life.”
The sport of boxing seems to be haunting Kelly, like it does to so many.
“It’s not boxing haunting me, it’s me haunting me,” he objects. And he’s right of course. To learn and to move on, to really move on, dwelling on the consequences of the mistake is hopeless. He’s going deeper than that, to the origins of the mistake itself.
“It’s not the sport that did this to me, I did this to me, by not being good to boxing. If I had been good to boxing, this s**t wouldn’t have happened. You can’t go against the grain too much.” He pauses, then points to the scene of the crime. “That’s why this eye is shorter than this eye, right?”
In time, Kelly settled into fatherhood. He now has four children from three different mothers. Those children are his driver and were the catalyst required to grow up. In 2009, he started work at Church Street Boxing Gym, a sore thumb in the polished affluence of the Financial District in New York, where bankers and flash business folk go to learn to box. Or at least try to.
A video went viral in 2012 of Kelly decrying the abilities of his students. And not behind their backs either. As one clumsy oaf winds up an uppercut Kelly is seen doubling up with laughter behind him. “Do the uppercut again,” he pleads. “Is it good or bad?” “Terrible. Like the worst thing in the world.” Not exactly motivational talk of Angelo Dundee standards but it certainly found its way into the hearts of the Youtube generation. Within months Kelly was an internet sensation. The bitterness that had been building for years is apparent in that video if you watch it today. You can sense the frustration in the New Yorker as he tries to teach men to fight who have no business fighting. Because it wasn’t supposed to be like that for Eric Kelly, the kid with the world in his hands.
He knows different now. That sense of entitlement has gone. He knows the cards were dealt at the beginning and he, and only he, has been playing them ever since. It’s only now he’s starting to understand the rules, and his purpose. He is here to educate, not
only on boxing but on life. Perhaps the most glowing testament of how far Kelly has come is a 20-year-old Londoner named Sonny Waghorn.
Amateur boxer Sonny has walked away from his family in the UK to put all his trust into his boxing trainer. Waghorn now lives in the Bronx, living off his savings, so he can train every day. He lives alone – “the way I like it, less people to worry about” – and his inspiration is Eric Kelly.
“He’s not just coaching me on boxing, he’s telling me how I should be, how I should carry myself on a day-to-day basis,” Waghorn tells
Boxing News. “I’ve had to do a lot of growing up because it’s tough out there, you have to adapt. You have to grow as a person and then grow as a boxer.
“He’s taught me to get nastier. In the US, everyone has their own coach and starts calling people out. People wanted to spar me as soon as I got there. No one knew me but it was like fresh meat for them, everyone wants a turn.
“I didn’t do well the first time,” Waghorn continues. “But Eric gave me the motivation to do better the second time. He said he’d whup my arse if I didn’t sort myself out. He made me realise I wasn’t there to mess around, he made me realise I had to get nastier, I had to adapt. He told me not to worry, not to care what others thought of me.”
Kelly breaks into the conversation. “The kid is pretty talented,” he says about Sonny. “He has a lot of heart and that gives you a lot to work with.
“His boxing IQ isn’t empty, there’s a good bit here but we need to refine it. He needs to start recognising chances and taking them, make ‘em
miss, make ‘em pay. We need to take the training wheels off a little bit – mentally – and go for it. “A lot of that will come with time,” Kelly continues.
Time. The great healer. The leveller. The truth. “I like to refine skills and technique, create openings. When you see an opening, touch it. Hit and don’t get hit, be defensive. Funny thing is, when I was a fighter I wasn’t that defensive.” Kelly bursts out laughing.
“No, I wasn’t defensive at all.”
I GET FLASHBACKS ALL THE TIME. I WISH I COULD TURN THE CLOCK BACK EVERY SINGLE DAY. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND”