The One That Got Away

Dominic's was the first. But it wouldn't be the last. Soon, word spread through Oak Cliff: Some former firefighter had turned his garage into a boxing gym, taken the wildest and least disciplined kids around and turned out young men who ended each sentence with yes-sir or no-ma'am. Word spread to Jon Edmonds, the president of the Foundation for Community Empowerment, a nonprofit grant maker in Dallas. Edmonds stopped by the garage, saw Hatley, his sons and about five other kids training. Edmonds gave the club a $5,000 grant. Word spread even to Todd Wagner, after he and his business partner, Mark Cuban, sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo.com for an estimated $5 billion in 2000. The Dallas entrepreneur wanted to give back; he called Don Williams, the founder of FCE, asking for a list of the programs and organizations that changed lives. Williams took Wagner straight to Hatley's garage.

"It was one of the most inspiring things I'd seen," Wagner says. "You could sense that he was a father to all of those kids...It still gives me chills."

In 2001, the Todd Wagner Foundation decided on a remote swath of land in Lancaster for Hatley and his fighters--a grove of trees to the north, prairie to the south and open sky above--and built the new Oak Cliff Boxing Club and gave it an annual budget of $250,000, according to The Dallas Morning News. (Neither Hatley nor Wagner will discuss the former budget.)

Now Hatley had all the resources he'd need. Now Hatley would really reach kids. First, he talked to Dominic.

"Take me to where the other Dominics are," Hatley said.

That would be 1900 Highland Hills, now the Estell Village apartment complex, better known as the Pinks for its pink-sided government-subsidized housing. Yet there was nothing effete about the place, just hardened men and women, mostly black, and the children who sometimes went neglected. Hatley pulled up every day and took 15 kids to practice, the majority of them sitting in the back of Hatley's pickup. Then more kids wanted to come, Lil' Chris and Scarface and Binkie and Lil' John and kids from not only the Pinks, but the surrounding complexes. Soon, Hatley needed a van and three or four trips to get all the kids to the club. Soon, 200 children called the Oak Cliff Boxing Club their own, 50 of them working out on a daily basis.

Some of them just wanted to eat. The after-school meal at the Oak Cliff Boxing Club might be their only meal of the day. It tore Hatley apart. He'd visit a kid at home and find a jar of pickles in the fridge and nothing else, or rats crossing the floor, or a kid's mother on the couch smoking weed.

Best, then, to redouble the effort. Drive around area schools to make sure his fighters were there. Demand that they bring report cards to the gym. Stay until dusk, stay until midnight, stay beyond that, helping kids with homework. Then get up at sunrise, shake out of bed Greg Jr. and Charlie. and set them out on their morning jog, because Greg Hatley not only had beginners at the Oak Cliff Boxing Club; he had in his sons Olympic hopefuls.

Maybe Dominic would be one, too. A freshman in 2001 at A. Maceo Smith High in Oak Cliff, he'd have to first quit challenging the entire football team to a fight, quit smoking weed in the locker room at school, quit missing class, quit throwing temper tantrums at the boxing club, quit pouting, start acting more like a man or face yet another spanking--yes, a spanking--by Hatley before the rest of the boxing club.

But Hatley never gave up on him. There was no reason to; Dominic was too talented. "The slickest, probably the smoothest fighter I've ever seen," Hatley says. It may be important here to say that Greg Jr. and Charlie Hatley are four- and seven-time national champions, respectively. "Dominic was the most talented boxer I've ever seen," Hatley says.

But that doesn't explain it all. You want the real reason Hatley never gave up on Dominic Littleton? Everyone else already had. The Littletons had. They sent Dominic to various apartments in Oak Cliff and Hatley's house in Kaufman rather than their own. Dominic's brother had. Antoine didn't graduate from high school; he instead got his GED, and got it from the Texas Youth Commission, the state's juvenile detention agency, his new home. Dominic's mother had. Shannon Buard in 1998 killed a man over $3 and a dice game; she was sentenced to 85 years in prison.

"Dominic was the first one where, boom, I just felt--I knew he needed me," Hatley says. "And I just grabbed him."

It was a Saturday night in 2001, and Dominic was once again staying at the Hatleys' place for the weekend. That night, Dominic, 16, and Charlie, 15, were going out--admittedly, to a roller skating rink; this is what passed for fun in Kaufman. But it really wasn't that bad. There would be girls there.