When Mike McCallum was 15 years old, he saw both the room he wanted to be in and the key that would unlock the door to enter it.

McCallum was training at the legendary Dragon Gym in Kingston, Jamaica, under the tutelage of Austin “Tealy” Taffe who had imported a new set of techniques from his native Cuba. Tealy preached the strict technical adherence of the stellar Cuban amateur program mixed with a dedication to inside fighting. One of his understudies at that point was an aging welterweight Bunny Grant. Grant had challenged for the WBC super lightweight championship in 1964, coming up short in his quest to become Jamaica’s first world champion. Over the next decade or so, he would be a fixture in the Commonwealth title picture, striking down hopeful young contenders with his trademark bodywork.

McCallum watched Grant in the gym day after day as he prepared for a bout against Mario Saurennann on the undercard of the biggest boxing event ever in their homeland, George Foreman vs. Joe Frazier in January 1973. Lucien Chen, a local bookmaker, horse racing afficianado and resort mogul, had helped broker a deal with the national government to pay Foreman and Frazier a collective $1.2 million or so to fight at the National Stadium, with the hopes that ticket sales and the closed circuit proceeds would make it financially profitable, but also that the event would help build boxing in the country. Though Mike Fennell, who was the president of the Jamaican Boxing Board of Control, would later reveal that blizzard conditions in the United States’ east coast made the night less profitable than expected, what it produced in terms of glory for the country in the sport would be incalculable.

With a $5 ticket, McCallum watched as Grant defeated Saurennann, and an hour later, watched the paradigm-shifting moment as Foreman demolished Frazier. The sight of a man hoisting a world championship in a sold-out stadium would burn itself into McCallum’s mind as he placed himself in that scene and dedicated himself to manifesting that reality. That same year, McCallum, who was 15 at the time with barely a year’s worth of formal competitive training, beat a man 10 years older than him to win the national amateur title.

“You’re gonna be alright,” Grant would tell McCallum. “You’re a bad boy.”

Somewhere along the way in everyone’s journey, you become the people who helped you in the beginning, and if you’re lucky, you even surpass them.

McCallum made his way to the United States after the 1976 Olympics where he represented Jamaica. At the Olympics, he bonded with Clint Jackson, the captain of the ’76 US team, and spent time in Nashville, Tennessee, where “The Sheriff” was genuinely what his nickname suggested. With his sparring partner fees, his first pro contract and what he earned sweeping some of Jackson’s cells where he sometimes slept, he bought himself a 1980 Sky Blue Mazda RX-7.

Within four years he was a part of the famed Kronk team in Detroit, Michigan, under Emanuel Steward’s guidance and management, already one of the best junior middleweights in the world, and now with a new nickname “The Body Snatcher.” He earns the moniker and Thomas Hearns’ brother Billy shouted it as he hammered away at the livers of his Kronk brothers.

McCallum was just a call away from some of the biggest names in the sport, including then-champion Roberto Duran. However, McCallum wouldn’t get the fight against Duran. It would instead go to stablemate Hearns, despite McCallum being the No. 1 contender for Duran’s title.

McCallum couldn’t believe it. Months prior, one of the last things he told his partner Yvonne was that he would beat Duran for the title. Yvonne would pass away due to complications of open heart surgery as McCallum was at the Kronk preparing for a fight that, unbeknownst to him, was not going to happen.

It’s this injustice, the perceived betrayal by his manager Steward, the tragedy, the spotlight always drifting away from him regardless of how great he was, that would color his legacy, and tint his own perception of the sport moving forward. But with the WBA title now vacant, McCallum got to fight Sean Mannion at the iconic venue where Foreman and Frazier had each fought, and after training alongside the similarly perpetually aggrieved Livingstone Bramble to improve his conditioning, won the world title Bunny Grant was never quite able to.

McCallum wouldn’t ever get to face Duran, nor any of his Four Kings contemporaries, Hearns, Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. The shorthand explanation historically has always been that they were ducking McCallum, a mythology that he was more than willing to add to over the years.

Though McCallum had plenty reason to be bitter, when asked about the harder luck aspects of his career, the avid fan of the deadpan comedy of Abbott and Costello and James Cagney would always fuel the fire in humorous ways. He would claim that when he asked Leonard to fight him that he simply said, "You already beat my brother in the amateurs” — he did — and that Duran told him he was “the devil” when asked why he didn’t fight him.

Though tales of McCallum’s career invariably focus on his scheduling misfortunes, they often leave out the conveyor belt of excellent fighters McCallum did beat: Julian Jackson, Donald Curry, Milton McCrory, Sumbu Kalambay, Steve Collins, Herol Graham and more.

By the time 1994 began, McCallum was, amazingly, still active, relevant and dangerous. That McCallum missed out on fights against his 1980s contemporaries but still managed to test the best of the 1990s, Roy Jones Jr. and James Toney, is an astonishing feat of longevity and brilliance.

McCallum was now campaigning at 175 pounds and was under the tutelage of another legendary Detroit-based trainer, Eddie Futch. Before Bernard Hopkins and Naazim Richardson and after Foreman and Archie Moore, McCallum and Futch were boxing’s resident old man pairing. The two seemed to instinctively take to one another. Even before McCallum was old by the sport’s standards, he utilized the kind of subtle techniques that Futch grew up with, ones Futch felt were “lost” in the sport. McCallum would lay on the floor watching VHS tapes of Sugar Ray Robinson while Futch would sit on the couch pointing things out, the two bonding over a fondness of a bygone era.

McCallum and Futch even had similar origin stories, fateful, inspirational nights at their local stadium as 15-year-olds. Futch was a talented track and field athlete and basketball player who was a die-hard fan of the Detroit Tigers and their Negro League neighbours the Detroit Stars.

In 1927, Futch saw that the Stars’ home stadium Mack Park was hosting a boxing match between Tiger Flowers and Bob Sage. Futch mustn’t have had the $1 for a ticket being sold at the Recreation Cigar Store, because he snuck in that night. When he left the stadium, he had a new Tiger that supplanted second baseman Charlie Gehringer as his hero.

Flowers, himself an aging former middleweight champion — the first Black man to earn those honors — was using old man techniques to pester the light heavyweights of the day, staying busy and earning a decision as he eyed a showdown with recent champ Maxie Rosenbloom.

Sixty-seven years later, Futch now had his own Tiger Flowers on his hands. Futch was preparing McCallum for a 10-round undercard bout beneath the scheduled Gerald McClellan-Lamar Parks bout, which became McClellan-Gilbert Baptist.

McCallum was to have his eyes on the Jeff Harding-Randall Yonker WBC light heavyweight title bout as the sanctioning body’s No. 2 contender while staying busy. Stay busy fights were a Futch hallmark, something McCallum later said he didn’t initially understand but came to appreciate as it kept him perpetually sharp.

He would enjoy the fruits of that approach on March 4, 1994, perhaps his final masterpiece, as the 37-year old stepped in to face Yonker. Harding, who had been out of action for 14 months prior, sustained a cut in sparring in preparation for the bout against Yonker, prompting the WBC to rule that McCallum could step in and face him for an interim title.

The brash antagonist Yonker, who used the nickname Kid Galahad for his resemblance to Elvis Presley, pulled out all the stops during pre-fight festivities trying to pester McCallum. As he weighed in wearing a purple bandana and dangly earrings, he posed as he screamed “look at that gut, look at that spare tire," poking fun at McCallum’s physique.

Steward happened to be there for the proceedings as he guided McClellan into the main event. Although the relationship between the two men would forever be somewhat chilly, the respect between the two never waned, and Steward seemingly saw the trap Yonker was walking himself into.

“Yonker can outtalk him, I know that much. But in the ring it will be very different,” Steward told The Mobile Register prior to the fight. “He’s fighting one of the best fighters in boxing. McCallum may be the most balanced boxer in boxing today. He’s a guy I’m just in total awe of, myself.”

Publicly, neither McCallum nor Futch offered much of a retort to Yonker’s bombast, chuckling on the dias while the Mobile madman stirred up the press corps. In speaking to reporters, Futch instead stuck to comparing McCallum’s ability to age gracefully in the ring to his fighter’s hero, Robinson. Privately though, McCallum was fixing to prove a point.

As the fight began, Showtime commentators Steve Albert, Ferdie Pacheco and Bobby Czyz each made cracks about McCallum’s age and his physique, which was outstanding in relation to the general public, but perhaps an inch larger in diameter than it was a weight class south. Albert playfully referred to Futch, who would be inducted into the Hall of Fame months later, as “McCallum’s octogenarian trainer.”

The time for playful ribbing ran out as McCallum began to wail away on the ribs of Yonker near-instantly. Yonker spent nearly the entirely of the first round with his back on the ropes as McCallum calmly battered him to the head, but mainly the body. Futch was equally as calm in the corner, reminding McCallum to continue backing up Yonker.

The end was near, even from the opening bell. In the fifth round, McCallum caught Yonker with a left uppercut that sent his head flying back with his mouth agape, causing McCallum to pause for a brief moment thinking his opponent might topple forward. He did, but not all the way, allowing for a lane for McCallum’s left hook to the body.

As visually apparent as Yonker’s reaction to the uppercut was, his audible reaction to the body shot surpassed it in terms of drama. Yonker audibly yelped as McCallum’s left hand sank into his midsection, before heaving within earshot of ringside microphones to the beat of referee Joe Cortez’s count. Eddie Curran, reporting ringside for the Mobile Register, described the reaction as “the same open-mouthed, fright-eyed 'ohhhh' you’ve seen zillions of times before in that photo, the one taken the instant Jack Ruby put a bullet in Lee Harvey Oswald’s gut.”

“I wanted to punish him. He did too much talking at the press conference. He ran his mouth off too much,” said McCallum at the post-fight conference

Cortez put a halt to the punishment not long after, declaring McCallum the new interim WBC light heavyweight champion.

“When I hit him with the first body shot, he started crying,” said McCallum in his post-fight interview with Pacheco, mimicking Yonker’s agonized howl. “I said well, I know the end soon come. In Jamaica, we say ‘end soon come.’”

The end of McCallum’s career would soon come as well, but not before his interim title reign ended. In another cruelly ironic twist of McCallum’s career, rival promoter Dan Duva filed a court order prior to the bout on behalf of his fighter Egerton Marcus, the WBC’s No. 1 contender, which retroactively nullified the title change.

Thankfully for McCallum, he was so untouched and unscathed by the bout that he was able to take publicity shots in his fight trunks with the title belt around his waist before it was voided.

McCallum would go on to win the real belt anyway, defeating Harding the next time out. He would wrap up his career with a bout against Roy Jones and a third against Toney, passing the torch on to them on his way out.

Jones, the savant who felt he couldn’t get the best in the ring with him, later said he agreed to fight McCallum because the veteran said he needed the money.

Throughout his career, McCallum always took the stance that while fighters were rivals and opponents, they ought to work together to help one another financially. He told reporter Scoop Malinowski that at a function post-retirement, he rejected pleasantries from Hagler, asking him, 'Why didn’t you fight me so we could make some money to feed my family? This is a hurt business that we’re in. This how we feed our family. You didn’t fight me, Thomas Hearns didn’t fight me. Roberto Duran didn’t fight me. But all of you fought each other. And you want to tell me that you respect me? No, you don’t respect me man.”

In Toney, he found a practitioner and appreciator of the old school techniques he coveted, engaging in three battles that are — or should be — mandatory viewing for any fighter looking to learn the craft of boxing. Toney would always say that McCallum had the best skillset he ever faced, and McCallum always returned the praise in kind.

It took a new generation of all-time greats, and some painful lessons administered on the young folks, for the general public to truly realize that McCallum was indeed the bad man Bunny always told him he was.

When McCallum passed away at 68, he was on his way to the gym, about to pass down the knowledge he’d inherited from Bunny, from Manny, and from Eddie.