Kid Gloves

In the fading summer light, a lone figure jogs around Sheffield Park, near the rusting freight houses in the Blue River Valley. His shirt clings to his chest in a low ring of sweat. Every few steps, he throws a few feeble punches into the sticky air. His fists feel like feathers. This is not a good day.

There's only a week to go before the biggest amateur boxing tournament in the United States, and David Arrieta is worried that he started training too late.

He spent most of his summer vacation in Chicago, visiting relatives and going to clubs with friends. He managed to squeeze in a few training runs, but that's not the same as banging bags in the basement of the Whatsoever Community Center, which has made champions out of kids from this old, working-class Northeast neighborhood for more than seventy years.

Earlier this evening, when he was sparring, Arrieta kept waiting to make his move, ducking away from his opponents instead of stepping in and rolling combos of jabs and hooks. It was plain to all the other kids who sat in the cramped space around the ring that he was out of shape and, worse, not all there mentally.

Sitting around with the kids was Arrieta's father, who'd made a rare visit to the gym. When Marcos Arrieta hunkered down and leaned back against the wall, a piece of the old plaster stuck against his Joe's Crab Shack T-shirt. As he watched his son get pushed around the ring, the elder Arrieta casually picked the debris from his shirt.

Marcos Arrieta had introduced his son to boxing seven years earlier, when David was nine years old. Marcos had been a pro fighter himself in the corrupt circuit of northern Mexico, where fight promoters thought nothing of matching a skinny man with a 300-pounder just to pull in a few more pesos. But he'd given up boxing and left the violent border town of Juarez, Mexico, in the late '80s, just before David was born, in hopes of giving his family a better life in America. Today he's a two-job cook.

After the practice rounds, Marcos chewed out his son. You look slow, the old man said in Spanish. You look like you're being lazy. You're not using your feet. You're not using your head.

I'm tired, Arrieta replied, staring at the floor.

Now, in Sheffield Park, he's pushing, making one last pass around a softball diamond, its infield overgrown with weedy grass. He climbs the hill to the Whatsoever Community Center, a stoic red-brick building raised in 1889. With a high bell tower, the structure seems to lord over the blue-collar homes surrounding it. In the gym, he gulps chilled water from a drinking fountain and mopes through the rest of his routine -- push-ups, jumping jacks, medicine ball.

"What's going on, man?" his coach, Ray Rivera, asks. "You all right?"

"Yeah," Arrieta whispers, grabbing hold of the speed bag's sturdy support and lazily stretching his back.

The room reeks of mold. Rivera leans against a hand-me-down metal desk, takes off his white Kangol hat and rubs his forehead.

"You gotta hang in there, man," Rivera says. "Everybody has a bad day in the gym. Things get bad, that's when you gotta stick with it."

"He had it last year," Rivera says of Arrieta. "He went all the way to the semifinals."

Back then it was pretty much the same story. Arrieta hung around Chicago until a week before the Ringside Labor Day National Championships. Now just three years old, the annual event has grown to be the largest on the amateur circuit. It's the brainchild of John Brown, who owns Lenexa's Ringside Inc., maker of all things boxing -- speed bags, silky shorts, gloves, turnbuckles, ring ropes, even rubber dummies. Part of the tournament's draw is the Ringside name; another part is the vast number of weight divisions in which kids and adults can fight. But the grand prizes are the real lure: At the end of the weekend, the champ in each division gets to raise a jewel-encrusted belt above his head, just like a pro.

More than a thousand fighters compete, coming to Kansas City from as far away as northern Canada and Kazakhstan. Last year, in spite of his late return to the gym, Arrieta almost made it to the finals, relying almost entirely on his raw talent. This year, he came back from summer vacation in Chicago a week early; though he still worries he hasn't had enough time to get in shape, Arrieta figures the extra week will make a difference.

But in Rivera's mind, it's not good enough. His own sons -- Ray, Jesse and Neiko -- work out year-round. And with each tournament, they've inched closer to national championships. This summer, Ray, the oldest, was runner-up in the Junior Olympics, which won him an invitation to represent the United States at one of three international tournaments in Sweden, Puerto Rico or Mexico City. Arrieta has hung around in the gym with Rivera's kids on and off for most of his life, but their dedication hasn't soaked all the way into his veins. Now, as a junior at Northeast High, there are other distractions, too.