Hitting The Books

Inside Detroit’s Downtown Boxing Gym, where lessons learned in the ring aren’t as important as those taught just feet away in the library.

- Michael Rothstein

A small lineup of kids, not yet teenagers, eye themselves in a wall-sized mirror as a trainer barks out combinations of jabs and hooks. In one of the rings behind them, two teens—one in an “I have the cheat codes to boxing” T-shirt—spar while a crowd of children stand along the apron, banging ferociously on the canvas whenever a flurry lands.

And across this warehouse-like gym, in a corner past the mirrors and rings and heavy bags, is a library demarcated by a dozen bookshelves crammed with titles ranging from a 1,200-page red volume on tort law to multiple copies of Twilight. Students and tutors sit, working on reading comprehension and math homework.

This is the Downtown Boxing Gym, 27,500 square feet of effort and effect on the east side of Detroit. That the gym is in a former bookbindery is more than apt considering what founder Khali Sweeney has been working toward since 2007. Boxing is how Sweeney, 49, brings kids to the free after-school program (he has trained national champion amateur boxers and 11–0 professional welterweight Janelson Figueroa Bocachica), but education and creating a better future is the goal.