LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Crime, and how it affects people, is palpable at the Park Hill Housing Project.

Across the street from spray painted and boarded up buildings, inside Unit 31, is where Braxton Carter learned about life.

"That's where I really found out who I was," Carter said.

The space was too small for a family of six. His dad wasn't around. Fending for himself was the only option.

Sometimes that meant entering the world of drugs.

"You're a product of your environment, and that's what I saw. I saw the drug dealers out there. They had nice cars, jewelry, money. I wanted that. I never had nothing," Carter said.

What started as dealing spiraled out of control.

"I wasn't going to get caught by the police. I wasn't going to go to prison. I was going to sell drugs all my life, get rich and get me a big house. Like they have in the movies, like they have in the music videos. That's what I saw," Carter said.

The lyrics of Tupac, Biggie and Lil Wayne fueled Carter's vision.

"Thug life, gangs, violence," he explained.

Carter soon became a major player in Louisville cocaine sales. Veteran traffickers were family.

"I looked at the drug dealers as father figures," he said.

Police also became quite familiar with Carter, which ultimately ended with him behind bars. Years of his life were spent at Kentucky State Reformatory in La Grange and other prisons.

"I still have buddies in there that I think about," said Carter.

His time on the inside was sobering in more ways than one.

"It was mainly my kids that got me to look for something. I needed some type of outlet," Carter told WDRB. When he got out, he found it at the gym with gloves, and a coach that was on the verge of changing his life.

"Mr. Dixon walked up to me and said, 'hey would you like to get some sparring in,'" recalled Carter.

He had never been in a ring before, but he was scrappy and knew how to handle himself in a fight. It just so happens, he wasn't alone. James Dixon had taken in several troubled teens.

"A lot of them, more or less, wanted a father figure more than boxing," Dixon said.

They were getting both. What started as sparring in Dixon's garage recently turned into "Louisville TKO," a boxing gym on Breckinridge Street in downtown Louisville. The best of those who train at the gym travel to take on other fighters in the region; however, learning the proper way to throw a left hook or right jab is only part of it.

"To become a good boxer, you have to show up every day. It's a commitment. It's a lifestyle," said Dixon.

Patience, confidence and adversity are what it's really about.

"You get knocked down in life. You're going to get knocked down in boxing. If you do it long enough, it's how you get up and you learn a bigger lesson from getting up," Dixon explained.

They are some of the exact lessons a young Cassius Clay learned to reach the top of the boxing industry. Carter, a big Muhammad Ali fan, picked up a nickname of his own, "Red." His new skills in the gym made him a beast. Rivals think twice before getting in the ring with him.

While a return to the "old Braxton Carter" is always in the back of his mind, the future for "Red" is too colorful to move anywhere but forward. His eyes are now set on going pro.

"Now he's a role model to other kids," Coach Dixon said with a smile.

Carter is living a life he never knew could exist and realizing a dream he didn't know he had.

"I look at the man I am now, and I don't even recognize the man I was back then," Carter said. 

Louisville TKO works with Right Turn and Jefferson County Youth Detention to keep bringing new, potential boxers into the gym.

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