Perseverance and grandma’s cooking drive Nico Hernandez to an Olympic medal

Everybody on the “north end,” as many who live in Wichita’s Hispanic community call it, knew about Nico Hernandez long before anyone else.

They knew his family, who for many years have been hard-working and community-active people. They knew he loved to box. And even if Nico never said much, they knew his resolve.

“I’ve been around him for a while,” said Jeremiah Kelley, Nico’s 23-year-old cousin and best friend. “He has that drive. You can’t teach heart and Nico’s had it ever since I’ve known him.”

Hernandez, 20, is an Olympic bronze medalist in the light flyweight division. He battled to get to Rio de Janeiro, then clawed to get to the medal stand. He won three bouts, assuring himself of a bronze medal, before losing to Uzbekistan’s Hasanboy Dusmatov as hundreds of people packed inside the Cortez Mexican Restauarant on the north end to watch and cheer and laugh and cry.

“We had intentions of opening at 8:30 that day but there were so many people in the parking lot early that we opened at 7,” said Mary Cortez, the restaurant’s long-time owner. “People were parking everywhere.”

Did she break the fire code?

“We had firemen and policemen here for the fight,” Cortez said. “I told them we were at our limit.”

Cortez will honor the Olympic medal winner at her restaurant with a celebration from 8 p.m. Saturday until the wee hours of Sunday morning.

“It’s Nico Nation on the north end,” she said.

Hernandez is basking in the limelight after so many years of getting up early every morning to train, run, train, run, train, run. Only a few people were paying attention then, but they were the right people.

One, of course, was his father and his coach, Lewis. He pushed Nico into a boxing ring at the Northside 316 Boxing Club near 18th and Market when he was 9 and saw right away that his kid might have what it takes.

“There are only a few boxers who won national Silver Gloves six years in a row,” said Israel Villa, owner of the Villa Boxing Club and a guy who used to box against Nico’s dad. “That’s what really set it off for me to start saying that this kid is going to do a lot of damage as he gets older. He dominated the Junior Olympics and won in the national Golden Gloves.”

So forgive Villa if he’s not surprised that Hernandez will be sporting bronze when he returns to Wichita on Tuesday.

“I had a feeling he was going to medal,” Villa said. “He’s got the talent. He’s very determined and dedicated.”

Hernandez is 5-foot-4 and has trouble walking into a brisk wind, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t eat.

Villa said one of Hernandez’s guilty pleasures are chicken nuggets at McDonald’s. But his favorite meals are the ones his grandmother, Roseanna Hernandez, makes.

“He eats everything,” Roseanna Hernandez said, “but he really likes tacos. And he loves it when I make a strawberry Jello cake, that’s something he really loves.”

Hernandez is one of her nine grandchildren. She was a sheet-metal worker at Boeing, and then Spirit, before retiring. Her husband was an iron worker and school custodian.

They handed down a strong work ethic.

“When Nico was little, he was always trying different things,” Roseanna said. “He was walking at seven months and riding a bike with no training wheels before he was 3. He liked rodeo and doing different things. He’s been a natural.”

Hernandez played soccer when he was younger and tried basketball and wrestling at North. He went out for cross country to help him stay in shape for boxing and ended up being a cog on a state-qualifying team.

“We knew Nico would do great things in boxing if he stuck with it,” said his uncle, Emiliano Hernandez, who has helped Nico with agility and footwork training. “He’s never quit in anything he’s done and that’s what I admire the most about it.”

Hernandez’s enormous growth in popularity is most noticeable in the number of tweets he’s been getting since becoming an Olympian. The phrase “Don’t find yourself, create yourself” is pinned at the top of his Twitter page.

“What you see with Nico is really what you get,” Emiliano Hernandez said. “He’s always been really well grounded and I think he’ll remain humble and appreciative for everything that has happened to him and for where he’s gotten and where he wants to go.”

Here’s something interesting and telling about Hernandez. It comes from one of his English teachers at North, Brooke Johnson.

It didn’t take her long to become a big Nico fan — she watched his Olympic matches with clenched teeth — but more for how he was as a student. She wasn’t even aware he was a boxer, she said, for a long time.

“His dad called me and called all of his other teachers to ask if it was OK if Nico misses class for a while because he had this great opportunity to go train and that he could potentially go to the Olympics one day,” said Johnson, who still teaches at North. “I look back on it now and laugh because I prepared all of this work for Nico to take with him. I believe we were reading ‘Of Mice and Men’ at the time.’ ”

Hernandez did the work, she said, and his determination to be a good student impressed her.

“I’m pretty bubbly in the mornings and I was always at my door to greet students,” Johnson said. “Nico would just look at me and smile that smile he has that kind of tilts to the side. I would ask if he was tired and he told me he had been up really early that day training or running miles. I remember thinking how dedicated he was but he never really talked about boxing and never really bragged on himself.”

Villa tells the story about how Hernandez had a chance to go to a national boxing event or walk in North’s graduation ceremony in 2014. It was an easy choice — Hernandez walked with his fellow seniors.

“It just says how much education was a big deal to him,” Villa said. “You only get that one chance to walk and you can always box. He viewed that graduation ceremony as a chance of a lifetime.”

And what a life it’s turning out to be.

This story was originally published August 22, 2016 at 3:22 PM with the headline "Perseverance and grandma’s cooking drive Nico Hernandez to an Olympic medal."