THINKS THE EAGLES STOLE ONE
"And we were clamoring," Mitchell Allen said. "It was a nice amateur career. But there weren't a lot of opportunities if you weren't with the gangsters. They might give you a draw, but that was about it."
At 21, Mitchell Allen became a trainer.
Above the ring at his gym, posters of Ray Robinson, "the only 'Sugar,' " he cautions, and Joe Louis, the man "who saved America," hang from the rafters.
Hanging near them is a large banner celebrating Damon Allen Jr. as the Ringside world champion, a National Golden Gloves state champion, and a Junior Olympics bronze medal winner for 2008.
"Damon has surpassed us all," Mitchell Allen said. "The way he listens, I have no problem with him about training and no problems about the girls."
Damon Allen discovered his love for boxing by accident. Hanging out in the gym every day after school, he played basketball like his grandfather, Mitchell Allen Jr., a longtime middle school coach.
"But I wasn't really good at it," he said.
One day, he told his father and great-grandfather he wanted to box.
They dismissed him as too pretty.
"He would spar and get beat, bloody-nosed," remembers Damon Allen Sr., "but he'd come back in the gym every day, no matter what, and he got better and better."
"It was no stopping him," Mitchell Allen said. "He just amazes me with some of the things he does."
Allen's boxing record is 60-7.
Allen, no relation to former amateur light welterweight champ Rock Allen, likens his quickness to undefeated welterweight Floyd Mayweather Jr.
A senior-to-be and honor roll student at Communication Technical High School, Allen trains at the gym five days a week, four hours at a time, with his family - his two sisters giggling nearby.
"It's like I come here, and that's the gym - and I go home, and that's the gym," he said rolling his eyes playfully.
At the family's Southwest Philadelphia home, there's more training; lectures from his father and, sometimes, homework such as shadowboxing.
Allen welcomes the added instruction.
"When everybody else is not training, we're still training," he said.
After Allen graduates high school, he said he plans to attend the Art Institute of Philadelphia to study visual effects and motion graphics.
Eventually, he sees a career in movies.
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