Four years had passed since my life changed.
I still can’t fully wrap my head around that sometimes. Four years ago I was fighting in basements for forty thousand dollars trying to stay alive and keep my family above water. Now I’m sitting in a locker room at the American Airlines Center in Dallas with my name on the marquee outside. I hold a record of twenty eight and zero with twenty four knockouts and I still have moments where I look around and have to remind myself that this is real and not something I’m going to wake up from.
Monday morning four years ago I walked into Hendrix Boxing on the north side of Dallas not knowing what to expect and Coach Ray was standing in the middle of that gym with his arms crossed looking at me like I was a project he wasn’t sure he wanted to take on. He was forty-two years old, built like he had fought his whole life which he had.
He didn’t say much that first day. He just watched me work the bag for twenty minutes and then told me that everything I thought I knew about fighting I needed to forget. He said I had the most natural power he had seen in all his years of training fighters but that power without discipline was just violence and violence without direction got men hurt, killed or both. I wanted to tell him that I already knew that firsthand but I kept my mouth shut and listened because Legal had trusted this man and Legal didn’t trust anybody without reason.
That first year was humbling in a way I hadn’t even expected. Coach Ray broke everything down to zero and rebuilt it from the ground up. Footwork, head movement, combination punching, ring generalship…all the things I had never needed in a basement because raw aggression had always been enough. It wasn’t enough anymore. I was going pro and pro fighters were trained, smart and patient. I had to become all of those things without losing what made me dangerous in the first place.
That balance took the whole first year for me to find. I went eight and zero that year. Regional cards, small venues, opponents that Coach Ray handpicked specifically to test different aspects of what we were working on. I knocked out six of them and won the other two by decision. My name started moving through Texas boxing circles while I was on probation and checking in with my officer every two weeks. I was going home to an apartment that was finally starting to feel like somewhere I actually lived instead of somewhere I crashed between situations.
Melo and Mazi were settled at UT Austin. My moms had cut her hours at work because I wouldn’t let her keep killing herself and for the first time in my life I could hand my mother money without her asking where it came from. At that point, she now knew that it came from somewhere she could be proud of.
That feeling right there was worth everything.
Year two I started getting recognized. Coach Ray put me on bigger undercards, got me in front of cameras for the first time, and my knockout percentage was doing the talking that I didn’t have to do myself. I went seven and zero that year and by the end of it I had a fight streamed on ESPN Plus. Over thirty thousand people watched live and another two hundred thousand caught the replay. I remember sitting in my apartment watching the broadcast with Gutta and hearing the commentators say my name while they broke down my fighting style and talk about me like I was somebody to watch.
Gutta looked at me and said that he’d told me so.
That was all he said. I told you.
Because he really had been saying it since we were teenagers throwing hands in the neighborhood and he had never once stopped believing it even when I wasn’t thinking about believing in anything.
I won that ESPN fight by second round knockout and my phone didn’t stop ringing for three days.
Year three is when everything shifted to a different level. Coach Ray started matching me against real opponents. Men with real records, real experience, real intentions to take my head off. I went seven and zero again but these were hard fights. Not underground hard where anything goes and there are no rules. Professional hard where the man across from you has been trained specifically to take apart what you do. You have to be sharp and disciplined and ready to adjust in real time because he’s adjusting to you. I won the NABF Heavyweight Title in year three, North American Boxing Federation — which isn’t a world title but it is legitimate. It got me ranked in the top fifteen by theWBC and IBF. My face was on boxing websites. My highlights were going viral.
Street Hendrix was becoming a name that people outside of Dallas, outside of Texas knew and talked about.
Coach Ray never let me get too comfortable no matter how much success I was seeing. Every win he was already talking about the next fight. Every knockout he was breaking down what I did wrong in the rounds leading up to it.
He was harder on me the better I got and I understood why. The better you are the more people study you. The more they study you the more you need to evolve. Standing still in this sport was the same as going backward.
Now I’m here. Twenty eight and zero. Twenty four knockouts. Twenty six years old and ranked number six in the world by the WBC and number eight by the IBF. I’m the mandatory challenger for a title eliminator fight that’s being finalized right now between my team and the promoters. One more win, the right win against the right opponent on the right stage — and I’m in a world title fight.
The heavyweight championship of the world is not a dream anymore. It’s a timeline. It’s a plan with steps and I’m standing on the second to last step right now. I was only here because I beat the right nigga ass, at the right gas station, on the right day. Although that court shit seemed like a curse at the time, it all made sense now. It set me up to have a successful future. So no, I didn’t regret protecting that raggedy bitch and making that nigga stop beating on her. I’d do it again if I knew this would be the outcome.
Legal sits ringside at every fight. He doesn’t say much before I go out. He just daps me up while he looks at me in a way that I knowhas my pops behind it somewhere. I feel like he’s watching both of us at the same time. He had the pleasure of seeing my father in his prime, so I know that this is like history repeating itself for him. I never ask him about it and he never explains it, but we both understand what it is.
My mom hasn’t worked a single day in two years. I bought her a house in a quiet neighborhood on the north side with a yard, new furniture and told her the only job she had from now on was taking care of herself. She cried for hours and then told me I was just like my father. I didn’t know whether to be grateful or scared by that so I just hugged her and let her have the moment.
Melo is averaging twenty two points a game in his junior heading into senior season at UT Austin and NBA scouts have been at three of his last four games. Mazi is projected to go in the first two rounds of the NFL draft next year if he keeps his momentum. My brothers are about to be millionaires before they’re twenty three years old and I can’t even put into words what that does to me when I sit with it.
Hood’s sons. Even with the cards life dealt us. All three of us becoming something in this life. All three of us making it out of what tried to swallow us whole.
The money is different now too. Not underground money that I had to hide and couldn’t explain. Real money, sponsorships, appearances. I don’t move product anymore. Haven’t touched that life since the day I walked out of that courthouse and gave Legal my word.
Gutta handles his own business and I don’t ask about it because that’s how we keep things smooth between us. The less I know, the better. He’s still my corner man. Still the first person I callwhen anything happens. Still the only person outside of Legal who knows every version of me that has ever existed.
The women have been there. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. When your name is on ESPN and you’re undefeated, when you move through the world the way I move through it, women find you. I have never had to look for company and I have never once been lonely.
But my heart has been somewhere else this whole time and I haven’t been able to do anything about that no matter how hard I’ve tried or how many times I’ve told myself to let it go.
Four years and Brielle Devereaux still lives in my heart like she never left.
I haven’t seen her in years. I hear things sometimes through Simone, but I’ve made it clear that I don’t want to know any of Bri’s business. Gutta and Simone are complicated still, the back and forth shit is what they’ve been doing since the night of the Champ fight. Now, they’re officially together but fall out more than any damn body I know.
I know Bri finished her degree. I know she’s been working in her father’s company in some kind of marketing role. I know she’s been living her life the way she was always going to live it. Clean, properly, carefully, in the lane her family built for her.
