Meet Cam F. Awesome, the self-proclaimed Taylor Swift of boxing.
Aman who was once known as Lenroy Cameron Thompson Jr. had only taken a few dozen steps from the athletes’ village when the smiling stranger stopped him with a question.
“Is it OK if I get my picture taken with you?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, “only if you’re OK with getting your picture taken with someone who’s not famous.”
“Oh,” the woman said, moving into the frame, “I saw your video last night.”
The picture taken, the man continued through the bustling promenade in a Toronto tourist district made more festive for the Pan American Games. He was wearing a black tank top with a U.S. team jacket tied around his waist, leaving “boxing” as the only visible word.
“That was weird,” he said. “No one knows who I am at my own local Walmart.”
They might not know him as Thompson, but after his loss in the semifinals at the Pan Am Games, and specifically for his post-fight interview with ESPN, they might know him for his new name. It is his legal name, the one on his driver’s licence. He is Cam Awesome. Awesome, a 26-year-old super heavyweight, lost 2-1 to Cuban Lenier Pero, and in his interview with the U.S. sports television network, he made an unusual comparison: “I’m not saying I’m the Taylor Swift of boxing, but I’m not not saying that I’m the Taylor Swift of boxing.”
That was Thursday. By Saturday, Swift, the singer with 61.2 million Twitter followers, helped amplify his message on the social media website. Nick Jonas, another pop music star, used the platform to say Awesome was “my hero.”
“It wasn’t pre-planned,” Awesome said with a smile. “I don’t take losing well, and I used to kind of freak out a little bit when I lost, out of anger. I decided the best way to deal with it is just to put a smile on and be positive.”
Awesome, who has expressive eyes and an easy smile, is also vegan, rare among athletes, and almost unheard of among boxers. He is also a stand-up comedian who has performed on tour, and he aspires to work in television once his boxing career has ended.
He never grew up aspiring to be a boxer. He found it almost by accident, as a way to get in shape as a teenager, because “girls don’t want to date the fat guy.”
Growing up in Uniondale, N.Y., he said other children made fun of him. In high school, he said he would often volunteer to work in the nurse’s office at lunch because he could not bear the thought of walking into a cafeteria filled with potential tormentors.
“I believe everyone’s a weirdo,” he said. “People need to embrace it.”
When he was still a teenager, and still going by his birth name, Awesome and his family moved to Florida. He adopted a new persona, as a confident, swaggering teenager with a burgeoning boxing career. After a while, he found he did not have to feign confidence; it was suddenly coming to him naturally.
He kept winning in the boxing ring, too. And by 2012, Awesome — then still fighting as Lenroy Thompson — seemed to be on his way to the London Olympics. He was 23 years old, based in Kansas, and heading into the spotlight. And then, everything stopped. Five months before the Olympics, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency announced it was going to suspend Thompson for a year for not reporting his whereabouts for out-ofcompetition drug testing. It was not that he failed a drug test, but rather that he failed to let the testers know where he would be — when he was leaving the country for boxing, for example. He sank. “Drunk,” he said. “Drunk for a lot. I drank a lot.”
Any time he would go outside, he said, people would ask him if he was ready to fight in the Olympics. He would have to explain what happened, rehashing every detail. Most of the time, he feared people walked away assuming he was really just a drug cheat.
Eventually, he stopped going out during the day.
“I’d hop the fence to my apartment complex pool,” he said. “I had a floatie. And I would drink. I’d put my iPod in a Ziploc bag and float around and drink all night.” It continued into his apartment. “Right before I would go to bed, I’d open another bottle of wine, have a sip,” he said. “I’d wake up like, ‘I don’t want to waste this bottle of wine, I just opened it.’ And then I’d continue drinking.”
He lived like that for months, until an unusual challenge pulled him back. Thompson — as he was still known — had ballooned to more than 280
I believe everyone’s a weirdo. People need to embrace it
pounds. The challenge was to live as a vegan for 28 days, which would also require him to swear off alcohol.
Slowly, he began working out. He started getting back in shape, getting back into the ring and getting back to his old life. But he felt like a new man.
“Lenroy’s dead now,” he said. “But he was a good man.”
He changed his name to Cam F. Awesome. Picking Cam was easy, because it was already part of his name. His surname?
“Literally, to this day,” he said, “I can’t think of something better than the name I chose.”
It is on his driver’s licence, and it is on his passport. And despite how events unfolded at the Pan Am Games, there is a chance his name will also appear on the U.S. Olympic team roster next summer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
On the second-last day of the Pan Am Games, sitting on the second floor of a coffee shop in downtown Toronto, Awesome had two different paths to qualifying for Rio. And as he nursed a lemonade and a veganfriendly cookie, he contemplated the paths he has already taken, as well as his recent brush with fame.
“One of my least-favourite things about Taylor is that she hasn’t gotten back to me,” he said. “She hasn’t invited me out to coffee, or on a date, or anything. Things are a little rocky between us now.”
Cam Awesome agreed that fame could be fickle.
“The fame changed Taylor Swift,” he said. “It’s like she doesn’t even know I exist. Anymore.”