Is This The Future Of Boxing?

Jay Caspian Kang features rising star Adrien Broner:

Adrien Broner grew up in the Westwood neighborhood of Cincinnati, one of 12 kids born to Thomas Knight. All of Broner's siblings learned how to fight with gloves on, but none quite took to it like Adrien and his twin brother, Andre. At the age of 6, Broner had impressed his father enough that Knight brought him to Mike Stafford's gym and claimed that he had twin boys who could whip anyone Stafford put in front of them. The boast held true until Stafford had Broner fight Rau'shee Warren, a future three-time Olympian who also made the trip to Broner's camp in Colorado Springs. Warren beat up Broner and made him cry. After that, Stafford wondered if the twins and their father would return. "We showed up the next day," Thomas said.
Mike Stafford has trained fighters in Cincinnati for about 30 years. He has coached amateur champions, Olympians, and now Broner. But his connection with Broner runs deeper, and not only because of Broner's seemingly unlimited potential within the sport. As a boxing coach who works with kids of all ages, Stafford has had a firsthand look into the urban decay that has crippled the city. "When Adrien was 8 years old," Stafford explained, "I'd drive the van out to his neighborhood and there'd be 20, 30 kids trying to get to the gym. I'd make some of them run down to the gym cause they couldn't all fit. Out of all those kids, there's only about four or five left. The rest are dead or in jail or running the streets. Adrien's one of the only ones left."
As a kid, Broner's boxing career oftentimes took a backseat to his activities on the streets of Cincinnati. "I did everything you can name," Broner says, "but when I got in trouble the last time, my mom told me, 'You can't be king of the streets and king of the ring, you gotta pick one.' I had to make a choice. I chose the ring." Before Broner came to prominence, Stafford helped produce another promising young prospect named Ricardo Williams. Like Broner, Williams started fighting before the age of 10. But unlike Broner, whose success has come as a professional, Williams turned in one of the most storied amateur careers in recent Amerian history, capped off by a silver medal at the 2000 Olympics. But after he turned pro, Williams's career was derailed by trouble with the law. In 2005, he was convicted for conspiracy to distribute cocaine and sentenced to three years in prison.

I've been out of the boxing loop for a while, and hadn't come across Broner, or realized that he's from Cincinnati.  I remember Williams as an amateur and early in his pro career, but didn't realize he went to prison.  Cincinnati has managed to turn out a number of top amateur and professional boxers over the years, and we'll see if Broner can hit the boxing highlights of Aaron Pryor without all the low points Pryor found outside of the ring.