Tom Keegan: Ex-cop now boxing bigwig

Musty smell. A poster of young and beautiful Muhammad Ali standing over flattened Sonny Liston hanging on the wall. Fight cards from decades past and fresher ones promoting future fights decorate the dark, dank warehouse walls. Heavy bags. Speed bags. A revered old man with a towel wrapped around his neck, bags under eyes always on the lookout for the next underprivileged youth with a quick look about him.

Every boxing gym across America pretty much adheres to that script.

Recently retired Lawrence police detective Mike McAtee remembers his initial voyage into just such a place.

“The first time I walked into the gym, it was in the basement of Tomahawk Hills Golf Course in Shawnee,” McAtee recalled. “I fell in love with the sport immediately. It was life-changing. It was everything what you would envision it smelled like, looked like and felt like, exactly like that.”

Too small for football, he kept getting injured. Too short for basketball, he decided to take up his mother’s favorite sport. As a freshman at the University of Kansas, McAtee, 53, weighed all of 106 pounds.

He doesn’t carry a badge anymore, but he does carry a lot of weight now when he walks into a boxing gym, even though he only weighs 142 pounds. After 25 years on the Lawrence police force, McAtee accepted a job offer as director of boxing operations for USA Boxing. He retired from the force June 24 and started his new job June 26. One day as a retiree was plenty. He moved to Colorado Springs on the Fourth of July.

Even during his time putting together pieces of puzzles that led to solving crimes, McAtee never completely took his feet out of the ring. For one thing, he trained police officers, firefighters, even an FBI agent, to prepare them to fight in “Guns and Hoses” charity boxing events for the benefit of spouses and children of public-safety officers killed in the line of duty.

Boxing and cops forever have been linked in real life and on the silver screen. The story line: Good kid in a bad situation is on the brink of heading south in life, a cop takes him to the local gym and finds direction while learning how to defend himself.

McAtee said USAB has 35,000 members. At the moment, the most famous is Claressa Shields. A native of Flint, Mich., Shields at the age of 17 won a gold medal in the London 2012 Olympic Games in London, the first Olympics in which women boxers competed. USA has won 111 medals in Olympic boxing, and Shields will attempt to do what no American ever has. She will try to win gold medals in two different Olympics.

“You could put her story on 85 percent of our kids,” McAtee said. “Low self-esteem, not doing well in school, didn’t have much, tough home life. Boxing gave her a voice, an opportunity way beyond what her imagination ever could have dreamed of.”

For all but the elite few, the adrenaline and glory that come with chasing Olympic medals does not enter the equation.

“Most of our gyms are in some of the toughest neighborhoods in the country,” McAtee said. “A high percentage of our volunteer coaches are from law enforcement, EMT’s, firefighters, military, people who have been around young people who are in difficult situations. They seem to gravitate to the sport.”

The Olympic Games bring amateur boxing to the forefront every four years, but the chief mission of USA Boxing plays out in dimly lit, smelly basements and warehouses adorned with spit buckets, badges of honor of a sort.

The mission, in the words of USAB’s new director of boxing operations: “It’s about helping at-risk kids.”