The One That Got Away

"I didn't steal it," Dominic said when Hatley stopped him. Hatley didn't believe the boy. He ran into the garage and brought out a pair of boxing gloves.

"This is what you need right here," he told Dominic. Hatley had fought since he was 11. The sport disciplined him, humbled him; he loved it and wanted others to love it, too. It started with his own boys. At Greg Jr.'s birth, Hatley held the baby before the buzzing artificial light of the hospital room and declared, "This is my 2004 Olympian"--and he meant it. Greg Jr. and Charlie--two years younger--started training when they were 3, boxing when they were 8. By the time Dominic drove by on that stolen mini-bike, Greg Jr. and Charlie were accomplished junior fighters.

Hatley told Dominic the boys trained back there, in the garage. Would Dominic join them?

Yes, he would. And after his second day with the Hatleys in that muggy, 20-by-20 makeshift gym, Dominic stole Charlie's bike.

---

At 14, Shannon Buard gave birth to Antoine; at 16, to Dominic. At 18, the Dallas Police Department charged her with theft; at 19, with prostitution; at 20, with possession of a controlled substance; at 21, with prostitution again; and at 22, with evading arrest.

Antoine and Dominic were placed in the Buckner Foster Home in Dallas. Antoine was 7, Dominic 5. Antoine had a thinner, longer face than his brother and a lighter complexion. Indeed, a decade later, the guys at the Oak Cliff Boxing Club called Dominic "Cold Black"--which, as one fighter, Larry Givens, explained it, meant "black as soot."

Dominic had never met his father. Antoine didn't know his all that well.

Two years after they were placed in foster care, Angie Littleton of Oak Cliff, an elderly woman and foster parent for some 20 years, adopted the boys, had them take her name and brought them to her yellow, one-story house a mile from Greg Hatley's on 56th Street.

The boys liked music, and they loved beats, so Littleton put her adopted sons behind the drum set at church. They liked sports, gravitated toward the violent ones, so Littleton enrolled them in peewee football and sent them to the Hatleys, where Greg Sr. coached both Antoine's and Dominic's teams. The Littleton boys ended up in the same age bracket as Greg Jr. and Charlie, respectively. According to Antoine, he and his brother played in their school shoes. Angie Littleton didn't part with money easily.

That pissed off Antoine. But he found a way to fix the problem. In South Oak Cliff, good neighborhoods run hard against bad ones and, on the right night, bleed together. In 1992, when he was 9, Antoine says, he started dealing drugs.

"Quit hanging around the street folk," Clarence Littleton told him. Clarence, now 54, is Angie's biological son. He raised the boys with his mother. But neither boy listened. Why should they? Soon, Antoine brought home clothes for Dominic, Air Jordans for Dominic, everything he and Dominic wanted.

The truancy started in junior high. The boys left for school every day at 7 a.m. but never went there. Letters from the Dallas Independent School District poured in. Each time Clarence got one he'd ask Dominic if he had skipped. The boy would say no; Clarence would produce the letter; Dominic would 'fess up. The denials and confessions became routine.

Antoine had drifted. In and out of police precincts and juvenile detention centers, he says the Littletons kicked him out at 14. Clarence says Antoine left by his own choice. In either case, throughout Antoine's teenage years, "my job was hustling," he says.

Dominic fared better. Sure, he was in the streets; he knew its language. Greg Hatley years later would say he could walk with Dominic down any boulevard in Dallas and feel safe. But for whatever reason, Dominic stayed out of trouble. Clarence Littleton remembers him serving only community service for his truancy. Making curfew was Dominic's problem.

This is where the Littletons were cruel, Greg Hatley says. Lots of times, Hatley would take Dominic home after boxing practice. If it was after 8:30 p.m., the Littletons wouldn't unlock the front door. Clarence denies it ever happened, but both Hatley and Antoine concur: Many nights Dominic had to sneak in through a window.

If all the windows were locked, Dominic slept in a car.

---

Through his pickup truck window, on the way to work, Greg Hatley would see one kid after another wander the streets, maybe without food or parents or a home, but always without prospects for a better life.

Greg Hatley had a better life. Fourteen years with the Dallas Fire Department, a wife, a house, three sons, a daughter and six years removed from a pension that could have allowed him to retire in his early 40s.

But those kids. Right here in Oak Cliff. He couldn't stand it, driving to the fire department, looking at all the lives he wasn't saving. So in 1998, he quit his job, quit six years before the health benefits, the retirement package, everything kicked in. Greg's wife left him. Charlie cried a lot--he missed his mom. But Greg had found his calling: Through boxing, he would try to change lives.