Thursday, October 1, 2026
After Cleavon Wills’s family moved out of Far Rockaway, he grew up in Hempstead and attended Uniondale schools, and his experiences inspired him to open a gym, Precision Boxing, in his now longtime hometown. His goal was to give young people a place where they could learn more than how to fight.
Among the families who train at the Hempstead facility are Gianni Rivera, 14, and her siblings, Eric, 24, Nile-Asia, 19, and Paris, 12.
Their father, Ed Rivera, said the family’s involvement in boxing began when he brought Eric to the gym for extra training when he was playing baseball. Gianni and Nile-Asia watched their brother train, and eventually wanted to try boxing themselves. Gianni was 5 when she started.
Nearly a decade later, boxing remains part of her routine. After school at Academy Charter School in Hempstead, Gianni balances training with cheerleading, dance and band, often heading to Precision Boxing after her other activities.
“People ask me if I came straight from school, and if I win the games,” she said — because she sometimes comes in wearing her cheer uniform.
Her mother, Monique Lassic-Rivera, said that Gianni went through a challenging period from about second grade until shortly before middle school, when she became more withdrawn while dealing with problems at school that her parents initially didn’t know about.
With support from a school counselor and Wills, her mother said, Gianni gradually regained her confidence.
For Wills, 52, who is also known as Blacq Ninja, life lessons are central to boxing. He wants young people to develop discipline, focus, and patience that extends beyond the gym. After they start training with him, he explained, he asks their parents about their behavior at home and how they’re doing in school. Like school athletes, children must maintain good grades to continue training at Precision Boxing.
“They need to be carrying that discipline everywhere they go, not just in front of me,” Wills said. “The job is not to teach a child to respect you, the job is to teach the child to respect everyone and themselves — so if they’re just respecting you, you’ve failed.”
Wills’s own interest in martial arts dates to his childhood and the death of his father, Clarence Wills, in 1980. His father worked at the New York City Fire Department’s Engine 1, across from Madison Square Garden.
“They brought all the contents [of his locker] back to our apartment in Far Rockaway, Queens, and there was a black karate uniform,” Wills recalled. “And I was like, ‘Daddy did karate?’ I said, ‘I want to do that, too’ — but a child losing their father, you want to do everything they did.”
Older boys in Far Rockaway eventually began calling Wills Black Ninja because of the martial arts moves he used while sparring, he said. He later changed the spelling to distinguish the name in online searches.
He chose Hempstead for Precision Boxing because he knew the community and saw a need for more outlets for young people.
Wills said he wants young athletes to understand that losing is part of improving. “I tell the kids and amateurs when you compete it’s about winning and losing, because if you keep winning, you’ll never go back to the drawing board — you’ll never improve,” he said. “You have to take losses to learn what you did wrong, that you can do better.”
Gianni Rivera said that boxing has given her a place to work through mistakes and frustration. “It gives me a pathway on where I can take it all and who I can trust with all my stuff,” she said.
Precision Boxing’s impact, Wills said, extends beyond discipline.
Tyquian Brown, began training there not long before the pandemic. He initially went to the gym in part because he had high blood pressure and wanted to improve his fitness. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2020, after a hospital visit following a car accident. Doctors told him he had likely had the condition since he was a teenager.
After his diagnosis, doctors encouraged Brown to remain active, and workouts at Precision Boxing became part of his routine.
“When I started going to Ninja’s gym, my whole body went through a kind of transformation,” he said. “The doctor said, ‘What have you been doing?’ I said, ‘Going to the gym.’”
Brown said he is now in remission, receives monthly infusions, and continues to exercise. “This is what keeps me going,” he said.
Throughout Wills’s boxing career, he said, several celebrities who once lived in New York have sent their children to train with him. One is Uniondale High School alumnus Busta Rhymes’s son, T’Khai Wood-Smith. Other notables include Alicia Keys’s sons Egypt and Genesis Dean.
Wills also oversees the newly renamed Hempstead Community Boxing Gym at Kennedy Memorial Park, formally known as the Hempstead Boxing Club is a free program for children and adults. The rejuvenated program, he said enrolled 70 children within two weeks of its opening on June 1.
For Wills, winning inside the ring is only one measure of progress. He wants the lessons learned there to follow his athletes into school, home and whatever they pursue next.
“Everything is about self-control and improvement,” he said.
