The Contender - Softcover

There were three flights of dark, rickety stairs up to Donatelli's Gym, a Harlem boxing club where champions had trained. Most of the boys, black and white, came up those stairs in the daytime and with friends. But Alfred Brooks, a seventeen-year-old high school drop-out, climbed them at night, alone and running scared.

Down on the hot streets the punks were after him, and maybe the police, too. His best friend was sinking into the twilight life of narcotics addiction. The widowed aunt who bad taken him in when his mother died was asking too many questions. And the job in the grocery store felt more and more like a one-way ride to nowhere. The world that Alfred bad been drifting through sud-denly began to close in on him.

The only way out was up -- up the treacherous stairs, into the large, murky room where he began to learn that it's the climbing that makes the man -- the gut-wrenching second effort, the dawn run, the will to get back on your feet after you've been knocked down.

Alfred Brooks learns that getting to the top isn't as important as how you get there, and that before you can be a champion, you have to be a contender.