Fighter Behind the Boxers

Even While Training A Potential Olympian, Gary Russell Sr. Does Things His Way

The house looks like any other house on the 4600 block of Omaha Street in Capitol Heights, with its sturdy red brick, white trim and a green weatherproof carpet running up the front steps.

But walk inside, through the living room with the television turned to cartoons, across the kitchen, turn right, go down the back stairs and into the most extraordinary boxing gym. The gym has no ring, no speed bags, no exercise bikes, no boxing posters on the wall. Nothing but a basement floor of rollout vinyl, battered faux-wood paneling and a mirror tacked to the wall. In fact it isn't even a gym at all. Yet this is all Gary Russell Sr. has.

And every afternoon he grinds out his cigarettes, forgets about the blood pressure pills he only takes half the time anyway and limps down the stairs on a right knee shot to pieces in a hunting accident to do the thing he loves most of all:

To teach boxing.

Here he has trained his five sons, ages 9 to 17, turning four into Golden and Silver Gloves champions. So many champions that their belts and trophies fill a wall of shelves in the garage gathering dust and mildew. Another stash is tucked away in the attic.

The door to the basement is always open and on any given night neighborhood kids and the occasional local professional will be working out with Russell and his assistant, Robert "Herb" Martin. But it is the kid in the corner, the one shadowboxing in front of the mirror, arms flying, breath hissing, a tornado of fists and feet, that everyone watches.

He is 17-year-old Gary Russell Jr., the United States' best hope for an Olympic boxing gold medal in the 2008 Olympics. Known in the house as "Little Gary," he is the No. 1 amateur bantamweight in the country and No. 3 in the world in the 118-pound-and-under class. He has just 10 losses in almost 200 fights.

You have probably never heard of Gary Russell Jr., because in the local boxing world, the Russells are an island. Perhaps it is Gary Sr.'s fault. He doesn't race home to tell the media when his kids win. His vanquished opponents will not do it for him. In the great turbine of information, the best boxing family in this area might as well not even exist.

Friends say this is because Gary Sr. possesses a resolute sense of what is right and is unafraid to speak his mind. They tell him he should keep quiet, but he says he can't if something is wrong and affects children. Others call him stubborn and say he doesn't know when to pick his battles.

"I know the peripheral of all this," Gary Sr. said of the local boxing clique. "It's not real, man, I'm not going to do it. In fact, we're going to do our own thing and continue to win. And they hate me even now with Little G winning. They hate that."

It is an old battle. Gary Sr. vs. a boxing world he thinks is phony. In the end, he's always gone off by himself. Before the basement of the house on Omaha Street, there was the lobby in the building of the two-bedroom apartment the family lived in on New Jersey Avenue in the District. And before that was an alley in the city's Trinidad neighborhood.

"It's motivation for us," Gary Sr. said.