The Man Who Loved Him First: Coach Leonard Overstreet

In 1968, Alvino Peña opened the Davenport Boxing Club. He worked to keep the doors open and filled the room with kids who needed somewhere to put their feet.

Some of them became champions. Michael Nunn. Antwun Echols. Names anyone who follows this sport knows.

One of them was a nine-year-old named Leonard Overstreet.

The room he grew up in

Leonard came up under Alvino and became one of the top amateurs in the country. He shared a gym floor with Nunn and Echols — not as a spectator, but as a training partner. If you know what those two became, you know what the work in that room looked like. Nobody got to coast.

Alvino wasn't only a coach to him. He was family. He taught Leonard the sport, and a good deal that had nothing to do with the sport.

What he doesn't hide

Leonard's career stopped. He went to prison and served twelve years.

He has never been quiet about it. He'll tell you himself, and he has — on camera, on local television, without softening it.

When he came home, Alvino was waiting. He made Leonard promise to walk the straight line.

Leonard made that promise. He has spent the years since keeping it the only way he knows how: in a gym, with young fighters, doing for them what Alvino did for him.

About the man who did it, Leonard has said it as plainly as it can be said — Alvino loved him when he didn't love himself.

That sentence is why everything we do here is built around Self Worth.

What he coaches now

Today he coaches in Davenport at Overstreet's Top Notch Boxing, the gym he co-founded with Azariah King.

Most of our fighters are young people competing as amateurs. We also train adult amateurs, and we work with professionals when they're serious about winning.

He was in Antwun Echols' corner, and he stood with him to the end.

He is not interested in telling a kid what they want to hear. He is interested in telling them the truth about the work, which is the only thing that has ever changed anybody.

Why it matters to us

Boxing is honest. The work you put in shows up, and the work you skip shows up too. There's no faking a round.

That's why it teaches so well. A fighter who learns to be straight with himself about his conditioning learns to be straight with himself about everything else.

Leonard learned it from a man who kept the lights on for kids nobody else was keeping the lights on for. We're passing it forward.