My mom allowed me to take an old burlap bag and fill it with moss, corn stalks and rocks, then hang it from a tree and spend an hour a day punching my heavy bag.

I'm not going to be anybody's punching bag.

Instead of punching the hole you are going to fill in the oval.

My left eye went when I was young. I was working the speed bag, and some steel went in the eye and scratched it to pieces. I was kinda blind in that eye.

I actually have a punching bag right outside in my garden.

My family's support and the negative environment of the day toward blacks in South Carolina became the forces that led me out of the South - first to New York, then to Philadelphia, where I found opportunity in the form of a PAL gym and my trainer, Yank Durham.