I was around ten years old when I landed in Canada from Jamaica, with my family, not knowing a word of what was ahead of us. Our first apartment was small — 1315 Van Horne, apartment four. New country, new faces, new language. I didn't know it yet, but that was the beginning of a story that would take me years to fully understand.

It didn't take long before I learned what it felt like to be judged before anyone even knew my name. Growing up, I faced intense racism — the kind that shapes how a kid sees himself and the world around him. I carried that weight for a long time. I sat in classrooms where I was small, but I had to be ready anyway. New country, new language — everything was new, and none of it was easy.

Then I found sports.

It wasn't a plan. It just happened — through the local community center, through the parks, just being a kid who found something he was good at. But once I found it, I couldn't get enough. There was a drive in me to be the best at whatever we were playing, and for the first time in my life, I had somewhere to put all that energy.

Sports gave me something I didn't have words for yet: confidence. A sense of belonging. It felt like a calling — like I'd found the thing I was supposed to be doing. I started to understand what my body could do, and I started to carry myself differently because of it. And I noticed something else, too — how people reacted to that. The effort, the performance, the will to compete. People respected it. They accepted it.

Being accepted for what I could do meant everything. It gave me a place in the world that had nothing to do with where I came from or what I looked like — just what I brought to the field. That's what sports gave me. Not just a game. A way to find myself.

A few years later, at fifteen, Murielle Flynn gave me a job as a sports monitor at that same community center — going from the kid who needed somewhere to belong, to being the one other kids looked up to. That shift changed how I saw myself completely. Murielle and Joe Odman are the two people who had the biggest impact on who I am today. I wouldn't be standing here without them.

Through all of it — the racism, the streets, the years my parents had no idea what to do with me — my parents never stopped supporting me. God bless them for putting up with everything and still standing behind me the whole way.

But by my teenage years, all that energy didn't always have somewhere good to go. I spent time in the streets, got pulled toward a gang, and came close to a version of my life I'm grateful I never had to live out.

Then, at eighteen, a kickboxing coach saw something in me and invited me to train at his gym in the Mile End. I said yes — and it changed everything. Kickboxing became the thing that pulled me out of the streets for good, and gave the fighter in me somewhere real to grow.

After I retired from competing, I stayed close to the sport — training fighters, and eventually traveling the world as a boxing photojournalist. That work put me ringside for some of the biggest fights on the planet, and gave me the chance to photograph legends of this sport.

For the past 24 years, I've owned and run my own gym, training both fighters and recreational members. Watching people walk through those doors — some chasing a title, some just chasing a better version of themselves — has shaped everything I believe about this sport.

But somewhere in those years, I noticed something: boxing never had a brand that truly represented it. Plenty of companies made equipment. Almost none of them understood what it meant to actually be a boxer — to wear that identity with pride, everywhere you go, not just in the gym.

So I had an idea. A logo, a brand, that would say exactly what boxers are, what this sport is, and what it means to represent it.

I brought that idea to my friend Ilan Artzy, who photographed me in his basement — and that photo became the "X" you see in the BOXER logo today. Years later, I brought the bigger vision to another friend, Andrew Small. We talked it through for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in the parking lot of an Orange Julep. A couple of weeks after that conversation, Andrew didn't just bring me some ideas — he designed the logo and the brand identity, and it was better than anything I could have imagined.

That's how Boxer Athletics was born — not in a boardroom, but out of a basement photo shoot and a parking lot conversation between friends who believed in the same thing I did.