Kenny Adams was an Army Ranger, a Vietnam veteran, an Olympic boxing coach, and a Hall of Fame trainer.

Just one of those would have been enough to define a normal man, but Adams - who passed away Monday at the age of 84 - was anything but. He was unique, and in recent years had made himself a fixture at the DLX Boxing Gym in Las Vegas, offering advice and help to all those who came through the door.

He did so while sharing stories and joking, and while his mind could occasionally wander, he was never far away from jumping up to dance, shadow box, and would still leap into the ring, bounce off the ropes and throw combinations if the mood took him.

 “My heart is broken but I am so grateful to have had this person in my life,” said Trudy Nevins of DLX. Former world heavyweight champion Hasim Rahman, a regular in that gym, wrote on social media: “One of the greatest teachers ever.” 

Kenny was a lot of fun, but he was also a disciplinarian. 

He often wore his Army Ranger cap and dark glasses, and got out of the service in 1988.

He started Ranger school in 1962.

“It was tough,” he told me a couple of years ago. “Ranger school was very, very tough. But physically, mentally it was okay because it was my secondary thing that I did, first thing I did then, I was a boxer. So it was not a big thing for me because I was lean, mean, tough, that’s what you gotta be to be.”

Originally from Springfield, Missouri, Adams was raised by his aunt and uncle, and would go on to train some 25 world champions. He coached them the hard way, which is how he had been brought up.

“I had an auntie who raised me and she was a strong disciplinarian and would whip my butt often,” he remembered. “As a matter of fact, her role was, ‘Take them pants off, boy, and get naked.’ And she would whip me with iron straps. And, ooh, I just think about them, it was something. But that was life. She was a disciplinarian. She was a tough, tough woman. She’d say, ‘Go get that stick out there off of that tree and bring it in here.’”

Kenny returned with the stick.

“’Let me whoop that butt.’ She didn’t play. Put me in a closet... Man, you know, they couldn’t do that in this time and day. They wouldn’t allow that, but that woman... Hit me in and everywhere. Boy, I grew up in a tough lane.”

Life was difficult early on, and Adams lived through segregation.

“We didn’t like it and it wasn’t good, but you put yourself through life and you take it and you leave it, but it’s just people that you’re involved with and you’re around sometimes,” he said. “And they weren’t all black people. They were white people and Mexican, et cetera, that I have friends with. And I think a lot of that has a lot to be with you. “You accept people for what they are and that’s what you have to do. So, yeah, there were certain people and some people that would move it to the next level, which was wrong. Definitely. But you just gotta live with it. And only the strong survive, the weak fall by the wayside.” 

Adams had started boxing at the age of 10, and he was able to follow that passion in the military, where he found a home in the 101st Airborne Division. 

He did his first eight weeks in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and his second eight week stint in Fort Carson, Colorado.

“They had a boxing show at the base there at one of the companies,” he said. “And I got involved in that. And then when I got to Fort Carson, I did it again. And I said, ‘Oh, so they can do this in the Army?’ So, that’s where I learned and really started doing it. And I got with the team and stuff then.”

As an amateur, his skills had people calling Adams “Little Sugar” because of a likeness with Ray Robinson.  

But serving in Vietnam was something he would never forget. 

“Yeah, it was kind of tough in a sense, but I was with a good outfit, 101st Airborne Division,” he said. “The main thing is to stay alert, stay alive. And that was a good motto to have because you had to deal with the enemy like that. And you go up in the mountain areas and in the jungle areas… A lot of people got hurt there, injured. Really, you had to be on the ball there. You work in a five-man team, you go behind the enemy lines, and we would jump behind enemy lines and things of that nature and basically, you’d be going to villages and places where there could be entire squads of enemies. You had to be very diligent, so that made you stay alert and stay alive. I lost a lot of friends. You must pay attention to your left and your right because one mistake and it’s all over. Our job was to get the particulars of what they [the enemy] were doing, to see what they were up to and call-in artillery on them and things of that nature. Rather than being with a company where you got 30 or 40 people and they could hear you, behind enemy lines like that, you was on your own.” 

Adams said he danced with death several times, and during that period, he was disappointed that Muhammad Ali would not be called up in the draft, when Ali said he had no problem with the Vietcong. But Kenny’s stance softened over the years.

“Since I’m just a big Muhammad Ali fan, I don’t have any big things I like to say, or say anything bad about it because we hooked up and we got along very well. At first, I didn't like it. I was like, ‘What does he think he’s doing? Not going to the Army. He’s in our country, and he’s not going in the service?’

“And until we sat down and talked about it and I started thinking a lot of things. That was his theory. He didn’t believe in doing that. And I can’t take away something that he wants. And since he’s one of my idols, I say, ‘Well, hey, I took his spot. No problem.’”

Kenny said he had suffered with PTSD “somewhat” and he had some residual anger issues. Boxing was a form of therapy.

And when he travelled to Germany as an amateur boxing coach, he saw the trainers at a camp in Zandhoven doing something he had not seen before. He watched intently as coaches trained their fighters to lift weights, and when he returned to America, Adams immediately had fighters start strength and conditioning. This was years before Evander Holyfield popularized it.

“It’s for power and explosiveness on your punching, and it gives you a lot of endurance and stamina also,” Adams said. “So that’s where I learned it at, because they showed me a lot about conditioning that I didn’t know before. When I learned that, and the different movements and things that they did, I could see why they called it strength and conditioning.”

The key, Kenny said, was light weights and high repetitions. The goal was explosiveness, and Adams achieved that with many of his fighters.

He marked Diego Corrales as one that he was able to teach to punch harder and increase his power.

Adding Missouri bantamweight southpaw Eddie Cook, Vince Phillips and Edwin Valero to the list, he continued: “You have to rotate the ball of the foot and get that explosiveness going and turn the body. That’s where it’s at.”

Of course, Adams had already seen almost everything there was, as a key component of the 1984 and 1988 US Olympic teams, working with the likes of Pernell Whitaker, Evander Holyfield, Meldrick Taylor, Virgil Hill, Riddick Bowe, Ray Mercer, and Roy Jones Jnr.

It was Pat Nappi, who was his coach in the army, who brought him in as his assistant to work with the 1984 team.

Kenny’s fighters were doing well at tournaments, so he naturally caught the eye.

“They came around and saw some things that I was doing, and those are things they wanted to implement and put into the drills and everything, such as runs and things of that nature,” Adams recalled.

Nappi was a disciplinarian, too, and that was already installed in Adams, whose squads had won national tournaments and forces championships.

Without hesitation, he knew the likes of Holyfield and Whitaker would make it in the pros.

“I knew they were gonna be great,” Adams said. “You could see their ability all day, even the things that they did as far as their drills were concerned. They were above the rest and you could see that. You can see the difference in people sometimes. Plus, they went to the next level and they were not goofballs. They were guys that got in there and worked hard and drove themselves to be the best. And I think that’s what it’s all about.”

The 1988 team was known primarily for Roy Jones being robbed, something that 40 years on Adams rued as “as bad as any decision I’ve seen.”

Kenny said he nearly got kicked out of the venue because he “wanted to crack somebody.”

“That was just terrible,” he recalled. “Here’s a great fighter that just… they just took his medal is what they did. They just took it. Said, ‘Hey, we ain’t gonna give it to you.’”

Adams had stories about how the deck was stacked against the US fighters in Seoul and said he and the team “were treated like animals.”

But a year later, Top Rank boss Bob Arum and Vice President Akbar Muhammad spoke to Kenny about training pros and he soon switched. They were shrewdly aware of the sway that Adams would have with elite US amateurs.

“They knew that if I came along with them, then the fighters, some of them will come along with me,” said Kenny. 

Fed up with amateur politics, too, Kenny brought his brand of tough love to the pros.

In 1989, he guided Frenchman Rene Jacquot to the Upset of the Year, something he also orchestrated again in 1997 when Vince Phillips knocked out Kostya Tszyu.

The idea for Phillips was to keep moving to Tszyu’s left and away from the right hand, not allowing the Russian-Australian to get set, and then pounce.

Adams was also clearly fond of Eddie Cook and proud of the work he did with him and said: “Eddie was a very strong, strong puncher. He had a big left hand and he was a hard worker. Most of these guys were hard workers. That’s the one thing. And plus, the point is I’m a disciplinarian. And being a disciplinarian, we get up and we run. We all go to the gym.”

He was always disappointed that Kennedy McKinney didn’t get his props for being as good as he was, but admitted he felt McKinney rebelled against his disciplined methods.

“Different strokes for different folks,” Adams sighed. “And I guess he wasn’t the only one. There was quite a few other people that dealt with drugs and so on. That’s why I always tested. I started testing people. What I would do once a week, and they never knew when I would test them, is have them urinate and have it checked.”

He would also check that his fighters were actually in bed asleep at night, too, but his iron fist was clenched to look after them.

“You have to protect your people too, you know,” he said. “That’s what you have to try to do.”

Asked whether he had a soft side, he paused and replied: “There is a soft side to me. Yeah, there is in a sense. And I know what my job is. Another thing is, I have so much pride in what I do, I never want any of my fighters to lose.”

Not many of them did. The long list of fighters he worked with includes Michael Nunn, Frankie Liles, Johnny Tapia, Sam Peter, Michael Bent, Mike McCallum, and Ruslan Chagaev.

And Adams would always say it was his way or the highway and that cost him a lucrative relationship with Floyd Mayweather 

“You run the show, but you don’t own the show,” he recalled Floyd telling him. “And I said, ‘Well, it ain’t going to work,’ and I walked away. I don’t beat myself up over that. I just take it in my stride.”

But Adams added: “And Floyd probably didn’t need anybody anyway. He was a disciplinarian within himself. So it really didn’t matter because he had his father [Floyd Snr] there, who was a very technical guy himself, and he had [uncle] Roger, who I had worked with, who was another guy who could box very well. And he had another brother [Jeff] that could box and do well. It wasn’t nothing that would affect him.”

Of Valero, Adams described the tortured Venezuelan as “one monstrous boxer.” Asked whether he had a fighter who either disappointed him or failed to live up to his potential, Adams kept his response classy.

“I was definitely disappointed in some of them, but I would never… I wouldn’t call a name, I’m sorry to say,” he said.

Adams more than left his mark on the sport. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, finally, just last year, and he struggled in his final months. He couldn’t attend his induction in Canastota, but he made an impact on many champions and Olympians.

Adams, for so long a familiar and friendly face, was full of sayings. 

“There are two types of fighters, the quick and the dead, and you’ve got to be the quick,” was one of his mottos, but he will be known his incredible work with two of the great US boxing teams, his roster of champions and, yes, for being a staunch disciplinarian.

“And that plays a big role in a lot of boxers,” he said. “You gotta be hungry.”

Kenny Adams was a pioneer and blazed a trail. He wanted the best for his fighters, and did everything he could to make sure they got the best out of themselves. 

That didn’t just get him into the Hall of Fame; it got many of them in, too.

“It really makes you feel good,” he said a couple of days after he was enshrined as we sat in DLX. “It’s a nice feeling when somebody recognizes things you’ve done over the years, and that’s good.”

Tris Dixon covered his first amateur boxing fight in 1996. The former editor of Boxing News, he has written for a number of international publications and newspapers, including GQ and Men’s Health, and is a board member for the Ringside Charitable Trust and the Ring of Brotherhood. He has been a broadcaster for TNT Sports and hosts the popular “Boxing Life Stories” podcast. Dixon is a British Boxing Hall of Famer, an International Boxing Hall of Fame elector, is on The Ring ratings panel and is the author of five boxing books, including “Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing” (shortlisted for the William Hill Sportsbook of the Year), “Warrior: A Champion’s Search for His Identity” (shortlisted for the Sunday Times International Sportsbook of the Year) and “The Road to Nowhere: A Journey Through Boxing’s Wastelands.” You can reach him @trisdixon on X and Instagram.