He's Fighting, for His Life

"I had to choose my kid over my brother," Tony said. "If I didn't have a kid, I would have joined the military."

Keith sent whatever money he earned home to Tony to put in Keith's bank account. Keith's logic was the military provided all he needed -- clothes, food, a bed -- and the residual earnings would be there upon his release. When that day arrived, Keith returned to Washington and invited Tony to join him in picking up the few thousand dollars. Instead, Tony offered a confession: He had spent all the money.

"Every last dime," Tony said. "He just said: 'Don't worry about it. Let's go.' He never even mentioned it. He knew I had a kid and I needed it."

"The things I do for Tony," Keith said by phone from Tokyo, "it is for what he did for me as a younger child."

During the 10-year interval between the time he dropped out of high school and started boxing, Tony worked at a number of jobs, including a greeter for the city, a security guard at a grocery store and delivering The Washington Post. He tried becoming a police officer, but a 1995 assault conviction stymied that hope.

Keith said Tony's problem was a lack of dedication. His flirted with interests, but never followed through. At one point, Tony told Keith he wanted to become an air traffic controller. Keith lent Tony money to take courses, but Tony eventually dropped that, too. He meandered from job to job, ambition to ambition.

"I was grown accustomed to Tony signing a new hobby and eventually dropping it," Keith said. "I was telling him, 'Do something more steady.' In a way, eventually I realized I wasn't being supportive. I learned to go with whatever he came at me with."

The one constant in Tony's life was fathering children. After his first child at 17, Tony had two more in a three-year span with his girlfriend. Then he fathered two additional children with two different women.

"When he started having kids, after the first three, I thought he would have to stretch himself thin to have kids and live the life he wanted to," Keith said. "He was a product of his environment. It was only natural for him to gravitate to one person he felt love from."

When he was 27, Tony's life started to change. He had a job as a security guard, but he took up boxing for the extra $400 to $500 per month. Keith thought it was another temporary hobby until he saw something from his brother he hadn't seen before. "I knew he could do anything he wanted to do. I just thought he lacked the dedication," Keith said. "I saw him put in the gym time, the early-morning workouts, giving up his regular job, and I knew he could do this."

That year he also married Sydnee, his "first, last and only wife." They had met five years earlier when she worked at the National Children's Center. He spotted her at a softball game and said he was going to marry her. It started a four-year courting process in which they dated off-and-on.

Sydnee went through a divorce and wasn't looking for another marriage. Tony didn't accept no. He accepted her daughter from a previous marriage as his own. He and Sydnee have since had a son as well.