'Heart of gold': Boxing coach still helping kids long after his own personal tragedies

When the bell rings and the boxers approach each other with dukes up, muscles flexed and fire in their eyes, Howard Watts says it's hard not to worry about their safety.

He just tries not to let on.

"I think you're more nervous than your boxer. But the thing is, you've got to show that you're cool and calm and you can't get excited."

Watts sits on the edge of the boxing ring, the muscles in his weathered, 76-year-old hands bulging as he grips the bottom rope and further gathers his thoughts.

"You try to go in there as a team. We're together, we're in here together."

Watts, P.E.I.'s boxing coach for the 2023 Canada Winter Games, has been providing that comfort and support to kids for the past 41 years as the operator of KOed Boxing Academy in Charlottetown. 

And not just between rounds of a boxing match.

When Trevor MacKinnon lost his mother in a house fire when MacKinnon was just 10 years old, Watts would pick him up at his grandmother's house, or at the mall after school, and drive him to the gym and home again afterward. 

"The boxing club saved me," said MacKinnon, now 49 and living in Alberta with his wife and kids.

"Not that I was a real bad kid or anything like that, but I got into some mischief and it definitely saved me, big time."

MacKinnon, whose last name was MacAdam before his grandmother formally adopted him at 18, won a bronze medal with Watts in his corner at the 1991 Canada Games on P.E.I.

"Howard was a great coach," said MacKinnon. "He was a stern coach. When you needed to be put in your place, he put you in your place, but [he had a] heart of gold."

That golden heart would experience some aches throughout the years.

His own two sons, who were accomplished boxers, died of drug overdoses. Darren died in 2007 at the age of 29 and Steven five years later at the age of 37.