Denzel Bentley: 'If it wasn't for boxing, I don't know where I'd be'

LondonWorld

A former British champion boxer is working with an anti-knife crime charity which creates steel gyms made from melted-down knives.  Denzel Bentley, the British middleweight champion from November 2020 to April 2021, teamed up with knife crime charity Steel Warriors for the initiative.  Full story at LondonWorld.com

Transcript

00:00 Steel Warriors is an anti-knife crime charity. We've been going since 2017.

00:04 This is our first gym behind us. We now have gyms in three locations,

00:08 Finsbury Park and Ruskin Park in South London. Four if you include our gym in Brixton Prison.

00:14 And what Steel Warriors is about is very much transforming a negative into a positive.

00:19 If you think that our process involves the transformation of a knife into a pull-up bar,

00:27 then you begin to understand actually what our work involves and why it's so important for us

00:32 to be creating safe spaces for young people to ultimately train with it.

00:36 I think it's important to just keep pushing these things out there. I mean,

00:38 if I didn't find boxing, I don't know where I'd be if I'm being honest. I mean,

00:42 boxing took my energy away from being outside, being in the streets or whatever you want to

00:46 call it. So instead of me, I come home from college or wherever it is, instead of me like

00:50 putting my bags down and going to meet our friends and just hanging out on the block or something,

00:53 I'm like, no, I'm going to go boxing. I mean, my experience of knife crime, it wasn't the best.

00:57 I've lost a few friends to knife crime. A lot of my friends growing up were stabbed.

01:01 Some survived, some didn't. And it made me feel like maybe I could be the next victim.

01:06 No, not in a sad way, but just in general, that's life. Do you know what I mean? So

01:10 if everyone around you is, you know, falling victim to something, it's only normal for you

01:14 to think that I'm going to fall victim to that next. And it's like, make decisions.

01:20 Leave my house with a knife. I don't feel safe or do I try and find an establishment like this

01:26 that I can join where I do feel safe and I do feel like, you know, I can spend a lot of time

01:30 here and I ain't got to be hiding indoors or hiding away from anything. So like I said,

01:34 when I found boxing, that was my, you know, that was my safe place. I'm going boxing because I

01:39 feel like outside isn't too safe. So I'm going from my house to an establishment and back home.

01:43 But it's something for me to do. I'm still enjoying my time. I'm still using my energy. I'm still

01:47 exerting myself as a youth because, you know, young people have lots of energy and they want

01:51 to use that energy. That's where you direct that energy. So I think it's amazing what they're doing.

01:56 How much people have got back here, you know, they were here before I got here,

02:00 they're still here and I'm about to leave.

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