Why We're Called Self Worth Boxing

In 1968, a man named Alvino Peña opened the Davenport Boxing Club. He kept the doors open for kids nobody else was keeping doors open for.

Some of them became champions. Michael Nunn. Antwun Echols.

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

The sentence this is all built on

Leonard came up under Alvino and became one of the top amateurs in the country. Then his career stopped, and he served twelve years in prison.

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

Years later, asked what Alvino meant to him, Leonard put it in one sentence: Alvino loved him when he didn't love himself.

That's the whole idea. Somebody thought he was worth something before he could believe it, and stayed until he could.

Why boxing carries it

Boxing is honest in a way most things aren't. The work you did shows up. The work you skipped shows up too. There's no faking a round.

That honesty is why it teaches. A young fighter who learns to be straight with himself about his conditioning learns to be straight with himself about everything else. He also learns that he can be bad at something on Monday and better at it by Friday, which is a thing a lot of people go their whole lives without ever proving to themselves.

You don't get Self Worth handed to you and nobody can take it from you. You build it, in rounds nobody watches.

Where it happens now

Overstreet's Top Notch Boxing in Davenport, Iowa, is where this lives right now. Leonard runs the floor at the gym he co-founded with Azariah King. Young fighters compete as amateurs. Adults train. Professionals come through when they're serious about winning.

The mentoring is free. It always will be. The boxing training is paid, because running a gym costs money. But no kid has ever been turned away from the part that matters most, and no kid ever will be.

Bigger than one gym

Self Worth Boxing is a name for something that isn't finished.

One gym in Davenport is where it starts, not where it ends. Every town has kids in the same position Leonard was in at nine years old — capable, unconvinced of their own worth, and one adult away from a different outcome. Alvino was that adult for Leonard. Leonard has been that adult for a lot of fighters since.

We're building this so it can go further than one room on West 12th Street.

If that's something you want to be part of — as a fighter, a parent, a coach, or someone who wants to help it grow — get in touch. Call 563-340-0097 or email coach@selfworthboxing.com.