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Boxer fights life's demons as biggest opponent

Faith and perseverance win out for South Cariboo boxer
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Boxing coach Kelly Ricketts’ struggles have taught him many life lessons.

When life let Kelly Ricketts down at a very young age, the future seemed hopeless, but he found a way to crawl out of his despair and mend the broken elements of his past.

Be it divine intervention or just dumb luck that began his rebirth, he turned years of abuse and neglect around to be his foundation for a successful and joy-filled life.

Ricketts, a local boxing coach, was one of eight children in a family led by an abusive father and an alcoholic mother.

His dad was a coastal logger and they lived near Campbell River, often in secluded floating camps with few amenities and little money. Parenting skills were thin at best and his dad's idea of swimming lessons was to push four-year-old Kelly and his older brother off a dock, into the ocean, then walk away and expect them to figure it out. Both youngsters were wearing life jackets, but the experience entrenched a deep fear of water in the boy and it would last many years.

Aside from abusing Kelly's mom and terrorizing his children, his dad didn't have much to do with the family, and by the time Kelly was eight, his parents had split up.

After moving to Kelowna, Kelly says his mom surrounded herself with the same kind of undesirables she'd become accustomed to and continued in a downhill spiral fuelled by booze and drugs.

"As a kid, I didn't think it was out of the ordinary because we'd never had much contact in a social way except with others similar in lifestyle to us. We were poor and I never even had a bike. All we had were our clothes."

As his chain of friends grew longer, Kelly began to realize how wrong his family situation was. A turning point for him came at the age of 12 when he went to visit his older brother.

"His brother's friend was crying and he looked bad."

The boy begged Kelly to help him shoot up some heroin because he was too wasted to manage on his own. It was an awful sight that sickened Kelly and helped steer him away from drug use.

His mom married a new man who was just as abusive as his dad. Police and ambulance were regularly at the door, cleaning up the aftermath of beatings the man laid on her.

At 13, Kelly got a 22-calibre rifle for Christmas, which was huge as far as gifts went in his house. He never imagined he'd use it to save his mom one day when his step-dad had her against the wall with a butcher knife to her throat.

"I pointed that loaded gun at him and I was so scared, but I threatened to kill him. When he dropped the knife, I jacked the shell out of the rifle, fearing he'd shoot me.

"Then he started choking me, and when I was just blacking out, my sister hit him on the head with a cast iron frying pan and knocked him out."

Calling police wasn't an option, because in the young boy's mind, they were the enemy.

"They were always coming to our house to take someone away. I just figured it was something the family had to take care of. You become a victim and nothing else matters."

Kelly ended another attack a while later with a rock to the back of his step-dad's head. The next day, his mother told the boy that she wanted him out of the house and gone.

"I thought she was joking. I was just a kid, 14 years old. The next day when she came home from work, she asked why I was still there and told me again to leave."

He grabbed what he could carry and walked penniless to town to the Tastee Freez where a fellow told him about a possible job he might find at a sawmill.

He knocked on the head-sawyer's door and was turned away momentarily until the man focused in on the BC All-Stars baseball jacket Kelly wore. While the boy had nothing material, he possessed great athletic ability and was an outstanding baseball player.

The man offered him a job as long as Kelly would play on his sawmill ball team.

His life at the mill camp was tough, as his accommodations was a small shack with little more than a bed. He was sure the bedding hadn't been washed in a year and it was full of bedbugs which gnawed at him nightly.

He was assigned to have his meals with a couple who stocked only whiskey and stale French bread in their own dark little cabin.

Kelly sat on the edge of his bed crying and wondering if this was what his life would be.

"I was still a kid. I had no family and it was a very scary start."

Luck came his way when he befriended university students living at a nearby forestry farm campus. He then ate with them almost every evening in the school cookhouse and took more food in doggy bags back to camp.

His job as a tail-sawyer was tough, but he was making money, so he persevered.

As the weather warmed, a stench in the cabin grew stronger day by day. When Kelly discovered its source to be human excrement beneath the floorboards from the shack's previous inhabitant, it was time to call it quits.

He found another job where the money was good and stayed a while, and then at 16 years, Kelly went back to Campbell River to work as an apprentice mechanic. Life wasn't bad at all, with an income, a car and lots of women, he says.

"I was pretty together. Most of my demons were hidden by then."

He met a woman nine years his senior who had two children, and when she later announced to him that she was pregnant, Kelly dutifully married her. Only one of her children, Brent, lived with them and Kelly, still a child himself, treated him as his own.

They had two children together but the marriage lasted only seven difficult years, with his unfaithful wife quietly leaving one day with the three children after being caught with one of Kelly's friends.

Some time later, Kelly got a phone call from his wife who said 14-year-old Brent had been shot and killed in an incident at the reserve.

His life was over, just at Kelly had thought his was at that same age when he'd sat on the edge of his camp bed in tears.

Several years of emotional detachment followed, with Kelly using women with no commitment and no conscience.

It eventually caught up to him and he found himself once again, empty inside and wondering if this is what the rest of his life would be.

A couple of weeks later, a pair of missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came to his door and they talked for a while. He was impressed with the young men and Kelly joined the church and was baptized.

His way of thinking changed and his morals got a thorough house cleaning. Through the church, he met wonderful women – the type who would never have given him a second glance in the past.

"I had never known real ladies before. It changed the way I treated women and allowed me to be the person I was meant to be."

Friends set him up for a blind date with Ingrid, a lovely Mormon woman in Vancouver, and a long-distance relationship ensued. It kicked up a notch one night at a church dance when Ingrid entered the room.

"We both looked at each other and I felt like the room went muted with a conduit of light between her and me. All I could hear was this voice inside me saying this was my eternal companion, and I asked her to marry me."

He shared his stories with Ingrid, and often, they were too harsh for her to bear. In the beginning, she was an unwilling participant in the confessions, but then she realized that Kelly needed to talk in order to heal.

Ingrid had one child, Kelly Lynn, previous to the marriage and together, Kelly and she had five, Samantha, Errin, Isaac, Jacob and Kathrin. With Kelly Jr. and Wade, they had a full house with eight children in total.

With dreams of helping others, Kelly hit the books and earned a degree as a clinical psychologist and a sports administrator.

He also took up boxing with his sons, Kelly Jr., and Wade and they each went on to succeed at the sport. Over the years, Kelly won several awards, including the Diamond Belt, Silver Gloves, Golden Gloves and the British Columbia Heavyweight Championship. It brought him to the 1988 Olympic trials in Edmonton where he went as far as the semifinals, losing to the fighter who had narrowly beat him earlier at westerns.

Boxing was more than just winning titles, though. It had a far-reaching effect on Kelly's life in general.

"It taught me about staying focused and gave me goals. It kept me on a regime and gave me a handle on my energy, and steered it in a legitimate way."

In 1989, the family felt they needed a move and came to 100 Mile House where Ingrid had once lived and Kelly had often visited to hunt.

Kelly worked as a millwright and operated the successful Bighorn Boxing Club for three years before leaving the area in 1992. They returned last September, when he opened the Zeus boxing club and settled down to enjoying the outdoors and the many activities it offers.

He now also devotes time to his country music, which has produced top-30 and top-10 hits and brought him to play at the 1996 Canadian Country Music Awards.

He would like this next chapter of his life to read that he's had a positive influence on the community and helped other people achieve their goals. He's willing to listen as much as he's willing to share his experiences.

"I've been in nightmares all my life and I want people to know that you can survive adversity and you can flourish."