“You don’t know how many cars I ran through,” Ford said, laughing.

Such sacrifice has helped generate good will in the community. Upton stands apart.

“You notice when you walked up on the corners, you ain’t see nobody standin’ on my corners,” Ford said. “They ain’t gonna have that nonsense around us. That show you that the people — city, street people — cares about what we are doing.”

Even with Davis’s success, and the national attention it has brought to Upton, the loss of previous fighters — those who the coaches said decided to “go left” and give in to the streets — weighs heavy.

Ray Davis, a fighter Ellis trained as a teenager, is in jail after ending up on his own when his father was shot at a corner store. Ronald Gibbs, a 17-year-old nationally ranked amateur, was stabbed in the heart in 2012 in a dispute defending his sister. That same year, Ward, the fighter under whose banner Gervonta Davis had his picture taken, was shot nine times. He was two fights into his professional career.

“Every day, his friends would come here and wait for him to finish training so they could run the streets,” Ellis said of Ward. “I said, ‘Man, you can’t have one foot in the streets and one foot in the gym. It’s not gonna work.’”

The day that Ward was killed, Ellis said, he was in his car when he received the text. “And where he got killed was like three minutes from where I was driving, so I drove around there. And they had the yellow tape around him.”

History of Fighting

After locking his belt in its case, Gervonta (pronounced Jer-VON-tay) Davis drove a few blocks northwest and stood in front of the home he once shared with his mother and grandmother, a bitter wind tunnel of a block dotted with abandoned rowhouses. Garbage spilled into an alley framed by a rowhouse with no roof. An open Bible lay on a stoop, its pages fluttering.