While reading “Dark Blue Suit” and the boxing documentary, watching the fights, and reading the imagery, I started to recall some parts of my relationship with my own father I had tried to “remember to forget”. They weren’t bad memories, but memories that reminded me too much that he was still my father.

After what little we had as far as a father/child relationship at the time fell apart during the summer between my 9th and 10th grade years, and again after I had graduated high school. He had told the court I would never graduate during the child support case that would decide if he be required to help pay for college expenses, and after I found out and had the official court record with his hypocritical words on it (told me my whole life to go to college and he would help pay for it), I gave up on ever having a relationship with him and wanted nothing to do with him.

To have nothing to do with him also meant rejecting the support that the court decided he was required to pay, I did so by taking a break year between high school and college since it was contingent on attending college right after high school.

I knew that if he paid for my college, I would have little say in my education and to become dependent on him to attend college would be to hand my future over to someone who I barely knew and didn’t care. Continue reading →