A “gym rat” at the tender age of three, Griffin considered Windy City Boxing Club the best place in the world to be. His father purchased it from former bantamweight champion Johnny Coulon in 1973 when it was located in Woodlawn. While its main purpose was a boxing gym, it also served as a backdrop for several Hollywood films and TV shows. During that time well-known fighters such as Ernie Terrell, Alonzo Johnson, Renaldo Snipes, Leroy Murphy and Eddie
Perkins frequented the gym. But it was a thirty-one-year-old Muhammed Ali, who was living in Hyde Park at the time, that befriended young Griffin and his father.
Between the ages of five and thirteen, Griffin remembers
spending a lot of time with Ali until his father passed away in 1983. Then life as he knew it changed. The gym went through various ownership changes before closing for good and Griffin became a regular teenager living in a tumultuous neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. He experienced life’s ups and downs while also losing friends to gang violence. But at age twenty, it was a family member’s invite to move to Los Angeles to find work that ignited an excitement for change, and Griffin’s return to boxing.
No one would have predicted that after thirty amateur fights, in a sport he had been absent from for almost eight years, Griffin would defeat John Ruiz to make the 92’ Olympic trials. Another win over future heavyweight contender Jeremy Williams at the Olympic Box-Offs officially secured his spot on the 1992 United States Olympic Boxing Team at light heavyweight. Although defeated by gold medal winner Torsten May of Germany, Griffin’s overall amateur record was an impressive 30-3 and the Olympic experience was something he could never have imagined in a million years.