Nicknamed "Rock," Gibbs was once a top-10-ranked amateur boxer and reached the semifinals in the 2010 National PAL Championship. He was the original promised one.

"We need that somebody in Baltimore," Ford says, fighting back tears. "Rock, he was that person."

The lessons Davis learned on the street from the elder Upton boxers trumped anything they ever taught him in the ring.

"They were hanging out outside the gym on the streets and stuff, just like how I was. I saw what they were doing and I just stopped," Davis says. "I was like, 'I got to do something better and do something different,' because that's what happens to people when they got one foot in the gym and one foot out the gym."

Davis, however, didn't always have both feet in the gym.

Tough upbringing

The bullets whizzed past a 15-year-old Davis, fleeing with friends from a car full of individuals shooting at the group after a dispute.

A few rounded corners later, Davis had escaped unscathed. That was his closest encounter with death, but it wasn't the only one.

There was the time a year later when Davis watched from inside his mother's house as an argument between two males escalated, resulting in a deadly shooting. Or the time Davis, then 11, stood down the street, just yards away from a shootout between one of his brother's friends and another individual.

Davis first smoked marijuana when he was 8 years old, with his older brother, Demetris Fenwick.

"Anything he was doing, I was just trying to be like him," Davis recalls. "I acted like I was high and then it really hit me, and when it hit me I was like, 'Whoa.' It wasn't for me, so I never smoked again."

The gym provided a safe haven for Davis, who used to run from his locker to the rec center once school let out for the day, prompting Ford to open the gym an hour earlier.

But the street is never more than a few steps away. Davis wasn't the only one the gym kept out of trouble.

"It's hard coming in here, beating your body up, but it saves your life. It keeps you out of prison," Ford says. "It's saving me – I'm alive. Dealing with the street life, it's like a habit."

Davis broke Ford's habit.

"He did," Ford says as he looks to the ceiling, again teary eyed. "That kid's amazing."

Ford was going to quit boxing — the heartbreak had become overwhelming. But Davis shared Ford's vision, that one day he could be more than just a neighborhood superstar.

That he could put Baltimore on the boxing map as a nationally ranked boxer, attracting the likes of HBO and Showtime to showcase the talent in the area.

It's the only area Davis' family knows.

Family struggles