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sorry if done already, its 3 pages heres an extract
Behind a metal detector at the entrance to the Marquette Recreation Center, a middle-aged secretary sits at the front desk, crying. A boy she knew, a 19-year-old amateur boxer named Darnell Mason, had been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and was killed in a drive-by. Three other people were shot: one in the arm, one in the leg and one in the face. The bullet that killed Mason went through his left eye.
In north St. Louis, this is nothing unusual. Upstairs in the Marquette gym, Devon Alexander, 23, shadowboxes as he has since he was seven, so many years and so many killings ago. Jabbing, up on his toes, he looks at ease, but to him there are better places to be.
For Alexander, life in the ring began in the fall of 1995, when a former narcotics detective began teaching him and 29 other kids how to slip punches and throw hooks in the basement of an abandoned police station. Officer Kevin Cunningham had brought these boys from their elementary school, for which he was a community patrolman. In most cities police don't monitor elementary schools, but this was the Hyde Park section of St. Louis, which had a crack-fueled economy and one of the highest homicide rates in the city. Here, Bloods and Crips start recruiting children around age nine. Cunningham got to these kids before the gangs did, but it wouldn't change things much in the end.
As a boy in St. Louis, Cunningham, now 45, kept clear of trouble with the help of two equally powerful forces. "I was always playing sports," he says, "and my mom would beat the s--- out of me if I joined a gang." Having boxed as an amateur, Cunningham began his career in public service through his love of the sweet science. In high school, a recruiter promised that if he joined the Army he could "just box." He enlisted. More than a decade later, he was a cop, but he would sell a liquor store that he owned on the side in order to return to his passion -- this time as a trainer.
Taping Alexander's gloves, Cunningham notes that the gym in the old police station (now the St. Louis Parking Meter Division) was once a shooting range. The trainer believes this helped motivate his kids. "That's why they was fighting so hard when they was little -- smelling that gun powder," he says. After one year and thousands of dollars from his own pocket, Cunningham was winning tournaments around the country with his team. Today he's one of the world's premier trainers, but back then he had only the simple hope of, he says, "using boxing to save some souls."
A look at the numbers seems to indicate that Cunningham was a spectacular failure: Of those first 30 children, nine are now dead. About an equal number are in jail. Others were lost to the streets, many joining the Bloods or Crips. Through it all, one boy survived: Alexander, who last summer fought for the world 140-pound championship with Cunningham in his corner. "I'd ask myself why I didn't get shot walking to the gym," Alexander, says. "Any of us could have fallen to a stray." He shakes his head.
Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/201...#ixzz0iO8xLcqF
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