In the 1970s my dad was a semi-famous boxer.
He never made it to a heavyweight title fight, and barely ever made it on TV, but he was a journeyman fighter with a lifetime record of 83-17-3, which is damn respectable if you ask me! Most of those losses, and all three draws, happened in the final years of his career, when he was getting old, and was distracted by the responsibilities of fatherhood.
When I was old enough to ask him about it, he was already retired. From that point on, the man called the Ann Arbor Assassin was content to teach his skills to me. He converted our garage into a gym, because even though he wasn’t fighting he never stopped training, and I was right there with him. As a teenager I was more into cannabis than boxing, but in my Ann Arbor neighborhood there wasn’t a lot of other stuff to do. I actually found myself getting more popular at my Ann Arbor high school, because my dad was training several other local kids. The Ann Arbor Assassin was a low tier local celebrity, and there was a waiting list for people to come and train in his tiny gym. That was a lot of years ago, and the gym has become an Ann Arbor legend. At one point I almost converted the old gym into a grow room for my cannabis plants, but then I realized the local youth of Ann Arbor still need a local gym to come and train. It is my dad’s legacy for Ann Arbor, so I kept it open to the public.