Shavaris Buie, age 18, Brooklyn, NY, January 31, 2002
Robin Bowman

Shavaris Buie, age 18 The biggest thing that ever happened to me was when I was 14 years old and I was getting into a lot of trouble. My neighborhood was bad and I used to hang with a bad crowd and I went upstate to boot camp and I did eighteen months.... I got arrested for robbery, assault. I see a whole different thing about life now, you know. I’m an older person, a better person. I went to Europe and I fought boxing, you know. And that just gave me an outcome, another whole look about life. I feel a lot of sad sometimes. Because my mother and father, they’re on drugs, you know, hard drugs, like crack and stuff, and my grandmother takes care of my mother’s kids which is me, my brothers and sisters, which she don’t have to do. One of my brothers is handicapped. He’s deaf. He can’t talk. He can’t walk. That’s a lot of responsibility for my grandmother. So I feel sad about that sometimes but I don’t let it hold me down. I take my anger out on the punching bag. I pray for my mother, hope she can turn her life around. I see my mother whenever she feel like coming. I don’t know where she lives at. I don’t know where she sleeps. She turned down rehab I don’t know how many times. So she’s not, like, wanting help. My grandmother don’t trust her. She steals her money when she comes to the house. My grandmother has to lock her door when she leaves. That’s not right. My biggest fear is getting older and becoming a bum on the street or something, and having nowhere to live. Sleeping in cold parks. That’s my biggest fear. Because nobody grows up and says, “I want to be a bum.” It just happens. I think I can have an impact on the world if I stay in the gym and I turn professional one day and if God blesses me I could be the World Champion and everybody could look back and say, “Oh, that’s Shavaris, he used to live on Gates Avenue and he moved his grandmother and his family out of the projects, you know.” An impact on the world like that.