Once Jahmal Harvey stopped fighting, he became an Olympic boxer (2024)

So when Jahmal Harvey, a 13-year-old star running back on the youth football team Davis also coached, showed up one day in 2014, Davis taught the kid a few basic moves, then gave him gloves and headgear and threw him straight into The Doghouse. He did this with all his new fighters.

“Got to see if they have heart,” Davis said. “Got to find out what you’re getting before you waste your time.”

Harvey faced three boxers that day, all with months of training. He walloped them all in a flurry of punches. When he was finished, Davis had his answer. “I got me a fighter,” he said to himself.

Seven years later, Harvey is not only a fighter but a featherweight amateur world champion, a boxer with the rare mix of speed and power who is now an Olympian. In his opening bout Wednesday afternoon, Harvey defeated his longtime rival, Brazil’s Luiz Oliveira, to advance to the quarterfinals at 57 kg (126 pounds). He is probably the United States’ best male hope to win a boxing medal at these Games and perhaps become the first since Andre Ward in 2004 to win gold.

Harvey imagined none of this that day he first went to Davis’s gym. He already knew his destiny: He was going to be an NFL running back. Already he was tearing up the fields for Davis on the Oxon Hill Roadrunners football team, the kind of back who got about three or four carries a game, racing for touchdowns every time and then not touching the ball the rest of the day out of respect for the opponent.

Boxing was just something Davis suggested to stay in shape for football. Football was going to be his life.

But something about putting on the gloves and hitting people appealed to Harvey. He was short and light. Despite turning every Oxon Hill Roadrunner game into a gallery of juking, cutting, sprinting highlights, he was a small child, and in the neighborhoods where he grew up around Southeast D.C. and Oxon Hill, kids his size got picked on — which meant learning young how punches are thrown.

“I had already been in a lot of fights,” Harvey said on a video call not long before leaving for Paris. “Like too many to name. Too many to count.”

The next week, Davis took Harvey to one of the top boxing gyms in the Washington area to spar with a fighter known in the local community. Harvey did well against that boxer, too. High school started, and Harvey had been working out so much, fluid gathered in his knees. He missed his first season of football. He started to wonder if maybe his 5-foot-6 frame wasn’t going to hold up in football.

In 2016, Harvey met Gary Russell, the WBC featherweight champion from nearby Capitol Heights, and realized he could have a life as a professional boxer. He met the father of another fighter whose son was trying to go to the Olympics, and the father told him how his son got to travel around the world, often missing school.

“To me, that was just the best thing ever,” Harvey said.

That summer, he watched Russell’s younger brother Gary Antuanne Russell fight at the Rio de Janeiro Games. He was sold. From then, he wanted the Olympics.

Harvey and Davis started hitting the boxing circuit, driving to fights all over the East Coast. That year, he won his first big tournament, the junior Olympics in Dallas. Two years later, he won them again in Charleston, S.C., and then the youth national championships in 2019.

Davis kept testing him, throwing him into sparring sessions with all the top boxers around Washington and beyond — fighters older and stronger, with more experience.

“I was going with guys that were national champions, that were at my weight,” Harvey said. “Then I started going up against bigger guys that were national champions. Started sparring pros. And then pros that were the world champions. Was sparring an Olympian. He always put me in there with the best.”

Harvey could fight with them all, Davis said. The problem was, Harvey didn’t know how to stop fighting. He couldn’t stop being the kid in the street fights, the one with a grudge. The boxers he sparred with started holding him back with their hands or wrapping him in their arms. He hated being wrapped up in the ring.

His fists would fly, punches coming in a frenzy. The bell rang, and he wouldn’t stop. He knocked the other fighters down and tried to hit them on the floor. More and more, his sparring sessions ended in brawls.

Davis remembers the last time it happened, around 2016 or 2017 during a session at a gym called NoXcuse. Davis and a couple others had to pull Harvey out of the ring. On the drive home, Davis said, he told Harvey that the fighters he was sparring with were supposed to be his friends. They were helping him get better.

Something changed after that. Harvey grew more determined, more focused. Davis was amazed at how Harvey seemed to mature overnight. As a fighter, Harvey got better. He became a part of USA Boxing. The pandemic came, and Harvey and Davis kept training in parks and on sidewalks, anywhere they could. In 2021, Harvey went to the world championships in Belgrade and won gold. The man he beat was 23 years old and had fought in that summer’s Tokyo Olympics.

Harvey had hoped for Tokyo, but he wasn’t ready. He began imagining Paris and made getting to these Games his obsession. He was an important part of USA Boxing’s future. He was traveling the world, filling his Instagram page with pictures of places he never imagined visiting.

He found he liked studying the cultures and the history. It felt new, exciting and fresh. He was going to Paris; he was sure of it. Then he started losing.

The defeats came from nowhere in 2022. Before then, he had just two losses, both coming in 2017. But then he dropped three straight bouts, losing twice to Oliveira, Wednesday’s opponent. He was feeling weaker. He didn’t understand why. Finally, a doctor realized that Harvey, who had become a vegetarian a few years before, wasn’t getting enough protein and was deficient in a number of vitamins.

A nutritionist urged him to start eating salmon. His strength came back. So did the victories. Last summer, he won the Pan Am Games title, beating Oliveira in the semifinals to take a 3-2 lead over his rival. After that, Paris was all but a certainty.

“I know the Olympics is going to be my time to shine,” he said.

Davis will be at the North Paris Arena on Wednesday afternoon. The Doghouse is long gone, replaced by a regular boxing gym with a regular boxing ring. But he keeps photos of The Doghouse on his phone, sharing them with anyone who asks.

“We made something out of nothing,” he said.

Just like the kid who walked into The Doghouse that first day, a fighter who needed to learn how to fight.