The fight of his life

VERO BEACH, Fla. – The man who could become the next heavyweight boxing champion of the world reclined on a couch attempting to calculate the distance between his family in Maryland and his training site here, between the people he loves and where he needs to be to support them.

“How far is Florida from D.C.?” Tony Thompson asked one of his trainers. They first tried calculating the distance to Orlando. Then, they tacked on the distance from Orlando to Vero Beach. Finally, Thompson reached his conclusion.

“We a long way,” he said.

A long way from his home in Fort Washington, Md., and his native Washington, D.C. A long way from his wife and seven kids. A long way from a childhood in Southeast D.C. when he left school early and his dreams unfulfilled.

On Saturday, Thompson will fight for the heavyweight title against Wladimir Klitschko in Hamburg, Germany, a bout in which he’s a heavy underdog. The path to the fight started nine years ago, when Thompson was 27 and realized he could make a living by pounding another man’s face. It was a way to support his family, nothing more.

Thompson doesn’t love boxing. He derives no joy from training. He fights for the reward, not the act.

“I really don’t like getting hit,” he said. “I really don’t like to train for boxing. I’m just good at it. It’s what I do to make a living. If I had my choices of making a living, I’m not one of those people who would say boxing. … Boxing was so far down the list for me.”

A few minutes earlier, Thompson answered a call from one his children wishing him a happy Father’s Day. Muted in the background was a television displaying the U.S. Open golf tournament, which occupied Thompson’s attention for a few moments. He was just biding time – a three-hour intermission between going to the movies and the bowling alley on his lone day off of the week.

Thompson splits most of his free time between his children, the bowling alley, the golf course and the movies. He goes to clubs only when his promoters need him at events. He doesn’t smoke, rarely drinks. The only parties he’ll attend are cookouts he hosts.

“I’m so boring, it’s ridiculous,” said Thompson, 36. “I’m so redundant. I do the same thing pretty much every day.”

Thompson won his first four professional fights, lost his fifth eight years ago and hasn’t lost since. He has a 27-fight win streak, primarily against unknown opponents. Now, he’s fighting for boxing’s most prestigious distinction. His late start to the sport combined with his understated lifestyle would make him one of heavyweight boxing’s most unlikely champions.

If Thompson had his way, this story would be about his career with the Washington Redskins. He would be a retired Pro Bowl defensive end who returned to his hometown NFL team after a college career at Notre Dame.

“At least 12 (sacks) a year,” Thompson said. “I’d be all-around defensive end, not just sacks. Five INTs. Great run defender, all that.”

That was the plan discussed at his grandmother Catherine Thompson’s kitchen table when he was a child. Although aunts joked about how “clumsy” Thompson was growing up, he learned to be tough. Ellis Houston, his cousin, remarked that Thompson’s first boxing experience came in back-alley fights on Ames Street, off of Minnesota Avenue NE.

“He was always the headliner,” said Houston, 32. “He whupped everybody. If there was a problem in the family, he took care of it.”

“He was always a fighter,” said Thompson’s brother, Keith, 36. “He just became a boxer.”

Thompson never aspired to become a boxer. He and Catherine had other plans. His grandmother provided stability, insisting he set goals and follow them. She died when Thompson was 11.

“I didn’t realize how much I needed her at the time,” he said.

Without his grandmother’s influence, Thompson lost his focus. He knew his parents, but they were never fixtures in his life. Tony’s mother, Regina Yates, died of HIV infection when he was 27. His father is in jail in Virginia and still writes asking for money.

“I send my man money,” Thompson said. “He had no role. I love him, I know him and I’m sure if he didn’t get caught up in the life he did with drugs, he probably would have been a great man. He’s a great guy to know, he’s just not worth anything as a father.”

Thompson’s closest friend remained Keith, a staff sergeant in the Army stationed in Tokyo. Ten months younger than Tony, Keith and his brother were inseparable as kids. They had the same parents – the only two with those parents among Tony’s five brothers and five sisters – and shuffled from home to home together before moving in with Catherine when they were in elementary school.

Despite having little money, Keith never felt poor because Tony cooked and scrapped to provide for him. To this day, Keith’s three children eat pancakes because that’s what Tony fed him.

“If it wasn’t for my brother, I’d probably be in jail myself,” Tony said. “I wanted him to look up to me.”

At 17, Tony’s life changed when he fathered his first son. He dropped out of Spingarn High, joined the Job Corps and earned his GED so he could support the child. When Keith enlisted in the reserves, family members thought Tony would enlist, too. But Tony the father won out over Tony the brother. The brothers split for the first time.

“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 as a greeter for the city, a security guard at a grocery store and a deliveryman for 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. He 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.

Ask Thompson how many children he has, and he’ll tell you seven – though only six are biologically related.

When he retires from boxing, he hopes to become a “soccer dad,” supporting his children in a way he never experienced.

“I want to run around with my kids and help them realize the way and support them in their way,” Thompson said. “I want to be there to let them know, they got a support system.”

Saturday night, Thompson said, he’ll be thinking about how he wouldn’t change a thing.

“You spend too much time thinking about the things you didn’t do instead of the things you should do,” he said. “I can do this. And for my family, I should do this. And for everybody, I will do this.”