On Saturday night, Maurice Hooker, for the first time as a world champion, returns home to fight. He’ll face the undefeated Jose Ramirez to unify the WBO and WBC super lightweight titles. For the first time as a world champion, he’ll fight in front of friends and family at the University of Texas in Arlington, not far from Dallas’ South Oak Cliff neighborhood where Hooker grew up.

This is, in many ways, his homecoming. But for Hooker, that road back home has been anything but easy.

Even at its best, boxing is a hard and lonely sport. It taxes all who fight for a living. But relatively speaking, some have it easier than others. A few begin their careers fighting for powerful promoters. They earn enough money to focus solely on boxing. Because they’re carefully matched, their development is slow and meticulously crafted. They have seemingly every advantage a boxer could have.

Then there are others.

These are the boxers who are often considered simply opponents. They are sparring partners. They fight in untelevised matches far away from home with only a few weeks’ notice. They risk their lives for short money. Hooker was one of these boxers.

“[Boxing] is a tough, dangerous sport,” Arnie Verbeek explained. “You make a little bit of money. You’re better off selling cars or doing something else.” Verbeek is Hooker’s manager, but talk to him for even a little while and you soon realize their relationship is more than that. “He became like my son,” Verbeek said of Hooker.

And so, when Hooker walked into Verbeek’s Dallas gym — Maple Avenue Boxing Gym — and said he wanted to box professionally, his eventual manager matched him tough.

“I said, we’re going to find it out early and if it doesn’t work, we’re going to do something else,” Verbeek recalled. “And that’s because I love the kid and I don’t want to fool him. So, we went through hell … I didn’t care. We’d take any fight.”

And as Hooker fought in nightclubs and hotel ballrooms, he kept winning. He seemingly always liked to fight. From his days in South Oak Cliff, which remains a tough neighborhood — “a lot of drug dealing, fighting, stealing” is how he describes it — Hooker fought. He did it so often, in fact, that’s how he began boxing.

“I was getting in a lot of trouble in the streets, a lot of fighting,” Hooker remembered. “So, my [step]dad took me to the gym to actually get beat up.”

Perhaps, Hooker’s anger stemmed from the time he and his family got robbed inside their home a couple of years before he went into that boxing gym. He had a gun put to his head. He saw his siblings also get guns put to theirs. His stepfather was made to kneel before getting kicked in the head.

“I had to go to counseling for that stuff,” Hooker says. “Kind of messed me up a little bit as a kid.”

But on the day Hooker went to the gym the first time, with his stepfather hoping he’d get beat, the opposite happened. “I beat a couple of guys up,” Hooker said in a matter-of-fact tone, “and I fell in love with it.”

And so Hooker fought. He fought as an amateur even though his style wasn’t entirely suited for the non-professional ranks. He fought and sparred countless rounds inside Verbeek’s gym against boxers like Errol Spence Jr., Alex Saucedo, and Rob Brant. He fought anywhere and anybody and for each of his first few fights he received $500. A few days after those fights, Verbeek would give Hooker another $500 just to keep him afloat.

“It never was about the money,” Hooker said, “it was about my dream. To believe in myself.”

View photos WBO world super lightweight champion Maurice Hooker (R) lands a left against challenger Alex Saucedo at Chesapeake Energy Arena on Nov. 16, 2018, in Oklahoma City. (Getty Images) More

Watch Hooker fight and one of the first things you notice are his natural attributes. He is 5-foot-11 with a heavyweight’s reach. But during his early years Hooker’s style negated his natural advantages. “He was an inside fighter when I got him,” Hooker’s trainer, Vince Parra explained. “He’s got an 80-inch reach, so I taught him how to fight long. Taught him that he was born with the power.”

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