Ringside: inside a powerful boxing documentary made over nine years
As kids, Destyne Butler Jr and Kenneth Sims Jr dreamed of boxing glory. Both found early success as youth boxers on the South Side of Chicago – Butler demonstrated enough promise at age 12 to merit a profile in the Chicago Tribune, in which he proclaimed his intent to box in the London Olympics, to front a Wheaties box, to haul in winnings. Sims’s determination to box in the 2012 Olympics caught the attention of German film-maker André Hörmann, who made a documentary short on him and his coach – his father, Kenneth Sims Sr – in 2009, with the intent to make a feature film on the two boxing prodigies.
But plans change. Sims failed to qualify for the London Games, a crushing defeat Hörmann captured on camera, while Butler fell into a burglary ring conducted by a then mentor; he was arrested for residential burglary of Chicago-area homes in 2012, at age 18, and spent four years in prison. And Hörmann’s film, Ringside, for which he and cinematographer Tom Bergmann moved to Chicago for 18 months in 2013, morphed into a nine-year odyssey of two divergent fighters in and out of the ring. The 93-minute film, which will air on Showtime, is a time-lapse portrait of two steely father-son bonds, two paths of redemption and revision, two families for whom boxing has served as both community and anchor.
“Boxing is the chain that holds everything together, but it’s not the center of the story,” Hörmann told the Guardian, and Ringside primarily focuses on the push and pull of father and son, of community and sport, outside of the ring. The film interweaves Sims and Butler’s two separate tracks, a sort of Hoop Dreams – the 1994 documentary, filmed over five years, about two black high schoolers from the South Side who dream of professional basketball – for millennial boxers.
Ringside opens with a cinematic shot from the original documentary short: Sims, introverted and focused, strolling along a patchwork storefront in Chicago’s South Side, a majority-black area in one of America’s most segregated cities plagued by violence, racial discrimination and disinvestment. Then 18, Sims was deep in preparation for Olympic qualification, pouring hours into the gym with his father, a bounty of encouragement who cut his teeth as a street fighter. Reserved and circumspect, Sims Jr keeps distractions at a minimum; Hörmann’s camera toggles between drills in the ring and the Sims family home, a one-bedroom apartment bedecked in boxing ribbons and trophies.
Butler, who grew up in the projects, began boxing at age seven as an alternative to fighting in school. “I loved it so much and I was so good at it, so I just stuck to it,” Butler, now 25 and living on the South Side, told the Guardian.
At the outset of Ringside, Hörmann catches up with him a world away from the exuberant local news appearance of his childhood – in 2013, he talks to his father and mentor, Destyne Butler Sr, on the phone, and shows off his muscles to his mother on video conference from prison.
Over the course of the film – which is to say, the better part of a decade – both boxers face crushing disappointment: Sims misses the Olympics, struggles with the devastating toll of gun violence in his neighborhood, and wades into the world of professional boxing under the name “Bossman”. Butler, with the help of a lawyer and his father, attends a grueling prison boot camp with the expectation of a four-to-six-month release, yet is inexplicably expelled from the program just 10 days from completion. He’s sent back to jail for the rest of a four-year sentence, which only hardened his resolve to return to boxing. “Imagine you were planning on doing four to six months, and now you have to do four years of your life,” he said. “You know how many people would just come up and say, ‘man, my life is over with, now it is what it is.’ I said no, I’m still going to do what I’ve gotta do.” Hörmann’s camera finds Butler again at 22, as he emerges from prison on an empty road in southern Illinois to new clothes, his father and brothers, and an immediate, unsteady return to the ring.
The footage of Butler’s journey – a promising talent trapped in legal limbo, berated by mostly white officers in boot camp and arbitrarily dismissed from the program – feel especially resonant now, as protests against anti-black racism, police brutality and America’s double-standard incarceration system flourish across the United States. “Police brutality and police being unfair – this is the type of stuff I’ve been going through even before I was locked up, but especially when I got locked up,” said Butler. “This is what’s been going on. This is going on with my story. So I understand everything that people are talking about with the police.”
As a German film-maker who had only read about the South Side of Chicago before traveling to the area for the documentary short in 2008, Hörmann said he, too, found the American way of incarceration and de facto segregation confounding. “I’ve never seen any place as segregated as Chicago,” he said. “When I learned about Destyne and Kenny and their dads teaching their sons how to explain to the police every move they make,” – how to be extra careful around police, how to defuse an encounter with law enforcement made potentially lethal by their skin color – “that kind of mindset struck me.”
A long nine years in the making but a brisk hour and a half to watch, Ringside offers plenty of classic boxing underdog moments, but no tidy answers. The film is ultimately a twocharacter peek into a decade of dedication, the community around the ring in a neighborhood full of risk, the possibility of redemption through sport. “I didn’t want to do a portrait of the South Side or a political statement in the first place,” said Hörmann. “I wanted to do it like through the eyes of my protagonists, that point of view. I’m not the right guy to tell anybody about the South Side, though it has to be done.”
But Ringside does, according to Butler, point to the untapped and underfunded talent of the South Side. “We have a lot of talent. We just don’t have as many opportunities as everybody else,” he said. “Music, boxing, football, basketball, clothing designers, I mean the list goes on.”
Nine years in, the two boxers are no longer eager amateurs, but still pursuing their dreams – Sims, now 26, has a professional record of 14-2-1 and fought at Madison Square Garden. Butler regained his boxing shape, won the Chicago Golden Glove in 2018 and currently has an undefeated 9-0 pro record. And in 2020, he channels the same ambition evinced in his early boxing days 13 years ago. “I’m trying to do a lot of things – I’m trying to be on billboards, I’m trying to be the biggest athlete out there, I’m trying to model, I’m trying to do a lot of stuff,” he said. “I’m just trying to be a star.”
Ringside premieres on Showtime on 12 June with a UK date to be confirmed