Every Little Step: My Story Read Online Free PDF

met at the local Boys and Girls Club, where we played against each other in the basketball league. Mike was a really good basketball player. Ralph Tresvant played in the league too, but we were all on different teams.
    Mike and I joined Transitions, and with them we performed in a lot of talent shows, but after a while Mike and I felt like we needed to get out. The rest of the troupe was just too old. They kept wanting us to do crazy things that nine- and ten-year-olds weren’t supposed to be doing. We were some badass little kids, but even we knew we weren’t supposed to be hanging around with fifteen- and sixteen-year-old guys. One of the guys in the group, Preacher, looked like a very short grown man.
    One day Mike and I came up with a clever plan to get out of the group: we would start brawling. We went over to the house where most of the guys lived—they were brothers—and we started fighting each other. It was raining out and we kept beating on each other for what felt like at least an hour, kicking, punching, cursing. When the older guys finally came outside, they got mad at us for fighting. Right then they said we were kicked out of the group. Exactly what we wanted. We were happy as hell—so happy, in fact, that we then snuck into Preacher’s house and stole two of the trophies the group had won.
    During the next couple of years, while I was beginning to imagine myself as an entertainer, I also discovered another passion: boxing. I kept showing up in the local gym, which was run by Bill Marshall. Along with other kids from the neighborhood, I would train and spar. Mr. Marshall told us if we stuck with it, we could go to the Golden Gloves in New York, one of the preeminent amateur boxing tournaments in the country. I stuck with it over the course of a year or so and got to be pretty good. I always could throw the hands really well. We had a big match at the gym to determine who would make the trip to the Golden Gloves in New York. I beat up my opponent, a kid named Michael Green, and knocked him out.
    When we made the trip down to New York, my mother saw the kid I was supposed to fight in my first match. He was this big white boy, already cut up with bulging muscles at like age twelve. My body was starting to get cut up too, but I was still skinny. He looked like he was way bigger than me. Mrs. Carole Brown was not having it.
    “Uh-uh. No, son, you’re not meant to do this,” she said to me.
    I was devastated. I had trained hard for this, had lain awake at night envisioning the moves I would make in the ring, how I would be the twelve-year-old reincarnation of my hero Muhammad Ali. Now she was telling me no?
    “Ma, please!” I begged her. I could feel boxing superstardom slipping through my fingers. “Please?!”
    But her mind was made up, helped along considerably by the sight of that big white boy.
    “You’re not going to be a fighter when you grow up,” my mother declared. “You’re going to be a singer.”
    Now, I couldn’t really argue with that, but it didn’t make me any happier. When I wouldn’t fight, the kid I had knocked out back in Boston, Michael Green, who had madethe trip specifically for reasons such as this, stepped in to fight in my place. At the opening bell, he bounced out there to face the big, cut-up white kid with all the muscles. They sized each other up for a few seconds, then Michael threw his first punch. It connected with the kid’s big head, and he fell straight to the canvas. Knockout! I was stunned—and now even more upset.
    “Oh my God! Mom!” I said.
    “I don’t care,” she answered, refusing to budge. “Nobody’s gonna beat up on your face.”
    And with that, she effectively ended my boxing career. It was a wrap.
    I must say that the time in the ring was beneficial to me. It gave me more confidence in my physicality, which translated into my becoming a better dancer. When you’ve gone into the ring and come out alive, it gives you a sense of invincibility