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Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life - Hardcover

Latimore, Ed

 
9780593716366: Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593716361 ISBN 13: 9780593716366
Verlag: Portfolio, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

We’ve all got a choice. We can get better at fighting or worse at life.

Every day, we absorb body blows: some glancing, others that knock us to the mat. It doesn't matter how well-prepared or tough you think you are. Everyone, at some point, is hit with a haymaker from life. It's the cost of living. And just like in the ring, opting out of pain is not an option.

In Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business, former heavyweight boxer Ed Latimore takes readers on a journey from his hardscrabble childhood in Pittsburgh's public housing projects to his signing with Jay-Z's Roc Nation Sport. With honesty and humor, Ed shares how the discipline of boxing served as his rite of passage into manhood and gave him the tools he needed to overcome his childhood trauma and the demons of alcoholism.

Ed’s story is one of learning the hard lessons of maturity in perhaps the harshest way possible—from the hurt business. It’s a story about finding self-mastery in the face of uncertainty, discovering the power of forgiveness, and embracing pain and adversity to design a life of purpose.

Like Ed says, “How we absorb life's blows and rally through bruised and bloodied rounds shows who we are at our core. We sacrifice, weep, heal, and carry on. In hardship, we transcend.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ed Latimore is an author, former professional American heavyweight boxer, competitive chess player, and the founder of Stoic Street Smarts. He lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Hard Childhood Makes It Easy to Accept Harsh Truths

I was born in 1985 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and spent the first ten years of my life in the Terrace Village housing projects in the Hill District. This was the height of the crack epidemic, and while the entire nation was dealing with the devastating effects of this new drug, poor Black Americans were getting hit the hardest.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that the projects were a nice place to live before crack. You didn't move to the projects because you couldn't decide between a ranch-style home in the suburbs and a downtown condominium. Chris Rock said it best in his comedy special Bring the Pain: "Crack is destroying the ghetto? Yeah, like the ghetto was so nice before crack!"

Even before crack came to the ghetto, the ghetto was where you went when you had nowhere else to go. Crack fed the fire of violence and crime and then fanned those flames to incinerate anything in the ghetto that resembled peaceful life in a developed nation. Gunshots, gang violence, and hard drugs were the backdrop of my everyday life from as early as I can remember.

When I was four, my babysitter left out what I thought was a toy water gun. I decided to have some fun and spray it around a bit. Well, it turns out that the "water gun" was a syringe, and the "water" it was filled with was heroin.

One thing I've always admired about hard-drug users is their unapologetic attitude toward their addiction. Years later, my mom told me that the woman who left out the needle showed no shame-she just wanted her money back.

"I need some money for this, Miss Faye. That baggie of horse was twenty!"

For my mom's part, it wasn't the woman's addiction that bothered her; it was the careless placement of drugs around a child. My mom wasn't indifferent to having a drug user babysit, she just chose the lesser evil: leave me home alone or let the neighborhood junkie watch me.

I've always made a lot of jokes about drugs and the ghetto. Seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine once wrote, "Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel." My sense of humor is how I cope with the residual trauma from my childhood. I figure I can either laugh a little or cry a lot. I choose to laugh.

After the argument about the wasted heroin, my mom had to find a new babysitter. Choosing not to work, and instead relying on welfare, food stamps, and child support was always an option, but it was easily the worst one. Food stamps can only be used for food, and hardly enough of it to support a family. The only reason I got three meals a day was because I relied on free lunches during the school year and community meal programs during the summer. This was in addition to our biweekly trips to the food bank.

We lived in subsidized public housing projects. We didn't have to pay for utilities, but the rent was based on my mom's income. So, no matter how much my mom made, she would be left with roughly the same meager amount of money after living expenses were taken care of, and that wasn't ever enough.

My mother had no degrees or certifications, so she couldn't get a higher-paying job. However, she had learned how to type, so she used a temporary job agency to help her find work. This helped a little when she got an assignment, but getting a job meant her monthly food stamps and welfare benefits decreased, while the monthly rent increased.

People think that going on food stamps and welfare is a free ride to an easy life, but once you get stuck in that system, it's difficult to escape. Furthermore, government assistance is not a lifeboat that will float forever. Recipients eventually exhaust their benefits, and after that, eviction comes. If you get evicted from the projects, your options are either staying with family or becoming homeless.

As a result of this dynamic, most people in the projects take up side hustles that the government doesn't tax, like babysitting, drug dealing, or selling "40s"-forty-ounce glass bottles of malt liquor. My mom dabbled in all three at different times, but she also used another tactic to lessen the financial burden: She got a boyfriend living with her but kept him off the lease.

Just Because It's Normal Doesn't Mean It's Right

I don't remember how my mom met Fred. I just remember he appeared one day and started living with us. He worked at Wendy's and liked to build model airplanes. He would occasionally play me in Tecmo Super Bowl on my Nintendo, but other than that, I don't have any positive memories of him.

Instead, I remember the beatings. Aside from striking us with a belt or extension cord, Fred would make us put our hands against the wall, extend our arms, and kick out our feet so that our arms were the only thing keeping us from falling to the ground. Then we'd have to hold the pose indefinitely. He beat us if we bent our arms or dropped to a knee. I grew up thinking these types of beatings from Fred were normal for two tragic reasons: Everyone around me received similar beatings, and my mom often beat me worse.

The popular saying was "A hard head makes a soft ass," meaning, kids who don't listen got beat. It's the ghetto version of "Spare the rod, spoil the child." The problem with beating young children is that they can't make the connection between the pain and what they did wrong. It only makes them fearful of the adults around them. This type of punishment doesn't teach a kid anything but how to be afraid, and it sets them up for failure later in life.

Even if children could make the connection, beating them doesn't teach them anything about how to behave correctly. It only teaches them that violence is the way to get what they want. Proponents of physical discipline often call them "spankings," but at least in the hood, we didn't grow up with any illusions. Everyone I grew up with called these acts exactly what they were.

We weren't spanked. We were beaten. "Spanking" sounds harmless and innocent. When you hear "spanking," you think of someone putting a young child over their lap for a few open-palmed slaps to teach them the error of their ways. Worst case, the image that comes to mind is of the child being hit across the ass a few times with a belt. That is not what I experienced, nor was it the experience of many children I grew up around.

My sister and I were beaten with everything from belts and extension cords to plastic bats and, as we got older, open-handed slaps and plastic hangers. Once, my mom was pissed that I hadn't cleaned up my room, so she started throwing all the stuff at me that I hadn't picked up. One of those things was a snow boot, and she launched it with all the fury of an out-of-control woman under the heavy influence of alcohol. It landed squarely on my brow and opened a cut that I should have gotten stitched up, but my mom wasn't going to take me to the hospital for a wound she had inflicted.

Whenever people asked what happened, I told them that I hurt myself during a "rock fight" with the neighborhood kids. This wasn't unbelievable, as I often had rock fights with other boys as a game. It was a dangerously stupid way to pass the time, but it was fun. We were all used to getting beat up at home, so getting tagged with a few boulders while talking shit never seemed like a big deal to us. Of course, when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

One day, my mom sent me to a corner store, and I crossed paths with some kids I had tossed rocks with before. This time, they decided to take things to the next level and tried to jump me. There were four of them, but it's hard for prepubescent kids to do real damage to each other-at least with their bare hands. In the middle of me dancing around, throwing blows at one kid and evading another, one of the kids I...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593716361
ISBN 13 
9780593716366
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
289
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Portfolio
https://www.wetones.co.uk/

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