Fire Escape Nights Before a Heavyweight Title

Shannon Briggs lived in the Atlantic Plaza Towers housing projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn, for all of his childhood. In January 1984, when he was 13, he came home from Bishop Loughlin High School to find that he and his mother had been evicted. The front-door lock had been knocked out and the apartment was empty. They went to his aunt's home, but she told the family the next morning that they had to leave.

What followed lasted years. Briggs has described moving between places like musical chairs, including shelters and the subway. For a while he slept on the fire escape of his old building. At one point he was attacked and hit with a pistol. According to the Andscape profile, he was still without a home at 17, in 1988, around the time he took up boxing.

He turned out to have talent. He built a promising amateur career and, in 1991, reached the heavyweight final at the Pan American Games in Havana, where he lost to Cuba's Felix Savon. In 1992 he turned professional with the trainer Teddy Atlas and began with a run of wins, most of them by knockout.

In November 1997 he beat George Foreman in a disputed decision to win a heavyweight title. He lost to Lennox Lewis the following year and kept fighting for more than a decade. After a heavy defeat to Vitali Klitschko in October 2010, he has said, his career and finances were in ruins and he fell into depression. He later changed his habits, returned to training and built a following on social media with his catchphrase, Let's go, champ, still chasing a title shot in 2016.