Print edition: 
Immanuel Thompson will graduate with honors today with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Wichita State University.
To the many people who know about all 23 years of his life story, that fact is almost as much shock as happy ending. “And I’m about as shocked as anybody else about it,” he said this week. Meanwhile, authorities from several walks of life, including boxing, Wichita State University and the Drug Enforcement Administration, say there are lessons to be learned here.
When Wichita Eagle readers first encountered him, in 2002, Manny, as his friends call him, was a troubled 14-year-old who had barely escaped recruitment by street gangs in the neighborhood around 13th and Oliver.
The story, later reprinted in Reader’s Digest magazine, told how Manny was flunking out of Coleman Middle School. He could barely look anybody in the eye. He stuttered. Every stereotype regarding race or poverty seemed to conspire against his future: He was a black male, lacking a father in the home, the son of a single, black, impoverished mother.
“I suddenly found myself alone 10 years ago, raising three boys alone in a broken family,” Brenda Thompson said. “I didn’t get down about it, but I saw what happened in other families, how children would take a bad turn. I saw what happened with the Carr brothers (who are on death row for multiple murders in Wichita in 2000). And I said, ‘That’s not going to happen to my children.’ ”
When Manny soon began mouthing off to her and failing in school, she found an ally: a barely literate part-time janitor who lived up the street. Johnny Papin was an ex-thug who was teaching Manny how to box, hitting a bag Papin had hung from a tree in his back yard.
Papin, who had boxed as a flyweight at the highest professional levels decades before, conspired with Brenda to use Manny’s love for boxing as an incentive. Papin thought Manny’s boxing skills as a 14-year-old were as good as any kid on the national level, but Papin’s real goal, as he said at the time, was “to give that boy a real life.”
He loved Manny like a son, and admired Manny’s mother, who he said has more grit than most. He told Brenda to never take any sass from that kid, and that he’d help mentor him. So when the boy slacked off in school, Brenda made him quit boxing, and Johnny backed her, turning the angry child away from his boxing club until he showed them report cards that showed a turnaround. He also told Manny to apologize to his mother.
A few months later, as Manny dazzled Johnny with a growing talent for boxing, Manny came home one day with a sheet of paper reporting that he’d made the honor roll at Coleman.
What happened since, and what will be marked with today’s graduation, is a story even more improbable.
“I hate going to graduations,” said Papin, who is still a part-time janitor, and who now coaches Manny as a professional boxer. “But I’m going to this one. That boy didn’t have a prayer of graduating from junior high school when we started, let alone graduating from college.”
But Manny didn’t just learn how to study, or learn how to get good grades, one of his mentors at WSU said this week. Manny put together a 3.4 grade point average; he became a professional part-time model, good enough that he was featured a few months ago in Cosmopolitan. He joined the Army Reserve. He has served an internship for more than a year in the Wichita office of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
In the nine years since Manny almost flunked, he kept sparring and training in thousands of painful hours with Coach Johnny, learning discipline. And he paid attention to his mother, who kept telling him that anything he did today, bad or good, will have consequences in the future, bad or good. He tried to emulate the older man’s passion for excellence, and learned focus from his mother, who told him how important it was to seize upon goals.
“One thing many college students sometimes don’t realize is that succeeding is about being focused,” said Jennifer Brantley, a coordinator at the cooperative education and work-based learning office at WSU. “It’s not enough to study and get good grades. It’s about the ability to stay with something and figure out how to get better. Manny doesn’t sit on things. He seizes on what people tell him and what will get him to the next level.”
That next level will likely involve getting a master’s degree in criminal justice at WSU, and then working toward a career in law enforcement, hopefully as an agent with the DEA, Manny said this week. That’s not a far-fetched goal, though budget concerns have imposed a hiring freeze at the DEA. But they like him there.
“Let me just say that he does a great job here,” said Tyler Graham, the resident agent in charge of the DEA’s Wichita office. “He’s an outstanding kid and a good person. What he’s done for us is not glamorous work, it’s mostly clerical, answering the phone and filing, but he’s the first person people coming in this office encounter, and in an office of 23 or 24 people working cases, he gets to see all the cases we’re working on.”
Graham told Manny not long ago that his best move, given how tough it is to get hired at the DEA, might be to explore working first for the Wichita Police Department, getting field and street experience before applying. What impressed Brantley, the WSU coordinator who overheard Graham’s advice that day, was that Manny seized on Graham’s advice immediately, making calls to police commanders Manny knew who teach criminal justice courses at WSU.
“Success in college is not necessarily about knowing what you want to do, but in focusing on opportunities, focusing on what you can take advantage of,” Brantley said. “Manny seems to know this better than most.”
Meanwhile, he’s still training as a boxer with Papin though Papin suffered a mild stroke earlier this year. Manny’s first professional fight ended in victory only seconds after it began; but that fight was more than a year ago, and Papin has told him that the only way he’ll ever succeed as a professional is to move to Los Angeles and concentrate on boxing — a move that Papin himself thinks maybe Manny perhaps should not do.
“That young man has so many possibilities now,” Papin said. “And only one of them is boxing.”
