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To the reader, why a Memoir?
Because I do not know how to tell a story I did not live. Before I wrote a single word of KINGPIN, I sat with a question that most people skip past. What am I writing? Not the story. I knew the story. I had been carrying it for decades, turning it over in my hands like a stone I could not put down and could not throw away. The question was what to call it. What shape to give it. What contract to make with the reader before they even opened the first page. So I did what I have done my whole life when I did not know something. I studied.
A biography is someone else telling your story. A journalist. A historian. A writer who interviews you, reads about you, and reconstructs your life from the outside looking in. The facts might be right, but the feeling belongs to someone else's interpretation. That was not what I wanted. Nobody can stand inside my memories and tell you what the grease smelled like in Jessie Mae's kitchen. Nobody can describe the sound of a body hitting a wrestling mat from the perspective of the man who put it there. A biography would have given you my life filtered through someone else's understanding. I did not survive what I survived so another person could explain it to you politely.
An autobiography is the full record. Birth to present. Every year. Every milestone. Every chapter of a life laid out in order like a timeline on a wall. That was not what I wanted either. KINGPIN is not the story of everything that ever happened to me. It is the story of the things that made me. There is a difference. An autobiography tries to be complete. A memoir tries to be honest. I was not interested in being complete. I was interested in being true.
A memoir is a writer reaching into his own life and pulling out the moments that burned the hottest, the people who shaped him the deepest, and the lessons that cost the most to learn. It is not a record. It is a reckoning. The writer is the subject matter expert because he is the subject. No one can fact-check what it felt like to sit on a stoop crying after losing your football eligibility. No one can verify the weight of watching your mother talk to her own reflection in a mirror. No one can confirm or deny the exact feeling of hearing a referee slap the mat and knowing you just pinned a man in front of a city that came to see you do exactly that. Those moments belong to me. A memoir is the only form that lets me give them to you the way I experienced them.
That is why KINGPIN is a memoir. Not because it was the easiest label. Because it was the only honest one. I wanted to write a book where I am the source, the subject, and the voice. Where every sentence carries the authority of a man who was there, who felt it, who bled through it, and who spent twenty years learning how to put it into words that do it justice.
I chose memoir because I love the truth. Not the kind of truth that lives in timelines and public records. The kind that lives in the body. In the muscles that remember a wrestling match twenty years later. In the ears that still hear a grandmother's voice across a crowded kitchen. In the chest that still tightens when you drive through a neighborhood you used to run through as a boy. That is the truth KINGPIN is built on. My truth. Told in my voice. From the only perspective that has the right to tell it. Mine.
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Before the First Whistle
A Boy the City Expected to Become a Statistic
Before the first whistle. Before the first pin. Before the roar of a gym full of people chanting a name that had not existed five years earlier. There was a kitchen in the Richard Allen Homes where onions hissed in hot grease and a grandmother held two knives and drew a line the whole neighborhood understood.
There was a boy too big for his age, too old for his years — feeding his brothers and sisters before the sun came up because nobody else in that house was able. A city that expected him to become a statistic. He became Kingpin instead.
Curtis Ingram Is
  • The oldest of ten children
  • Number one ranked heavyweight wrestler in Philadelphia
  • All-City football player at Overbrook High School
  • First in his family to walk onto a college campus
  • US Army combat veteran
  • Married for thirty-five years
This Is Not a Sports Book
This is a book about what it costs to refuse the life the world assigns you. It is about discipline when discipline is the only thing you can control. It is about falling in front of everyone and getting back up like you meant to be down there.
Discipline
Push-ups on a cold carpet before dawn when nobody is watching and nobody is coming to save you.
Refusal
Black excellence that does not start with a spotlight. It starts with refusing the story the world wrote for you before you were born.
Redemption
Getting back up — every time, without apology — until the comeback becomes the whole story.
About the Book
What Kingpin Is About
Everybody has a story about where they came from. Most people tell it safe. Curtis Ingram does not.
KINGPIN: A Memoir opens inside a kitchen in the Richard Allen Homes housing projects where a grandmother kills a man for dropping her grandchild. It moves through a childhood defined by a mother's schizophrenia, a father's invisible sacrifices, and the weight of being the oldest child in a house where childhood was a luxury nobody could afford.
It follows a boy who discovered that football and wrestling were not games. They were the only honest places in his life. On the mat, effort had a scoreboard. On the field, discipline had a result. Everywhere else, the rules kept changing.
By sixteen, Curtis was the most dominant heavyweight wrestler in Philadelphia. He pinned nearly every opponent he faced. He earned All-City honors in football on a team so undermanned he played both ways every game.
He built a brotherhood called Brook Phi Brook because he wanted his school to feel what pride and standards looked like before the world handed them out. And when the one wrestler who could beat him took the championship in Curtis's own gym — shoulder dislocated, family watching from the stands for the first time — he did not quit. He came back. He always came back.
Not the Wins. The Coming Back.
That is what this book is about. Not the trophies. Not the rankings. Not the headlines that could have been written and never were. The coming back. The discipline that looks like stubbornness from the outside and feels like survival from the inside.
57,000 Words
Two decades of courage on the page, compressed into a book that does not waste a single sentence.
21 Chapters
From Richard Allen Homes to combat deployments in Bosnia — a life lived on the edge of everything.
Foreword by James Brown
Former NFL offensive tackle, Virginia State University — a man who knows what it means to carry weight and keep moving.
Literary Context
Where Kingpin Sits on the Shelf
KINGPIN occupies a space no memoir has claimed before — sitting where the best books of the last decade intersect without being any one of them.
Heavy — Kiese Laymon
The raw, unflinching honesty of a Black body navigating a world that never quite fits.
Between the World and Me — Ta-Nehisi Coates
The moral authority and precision of a writer who refuses to let the world off the hook.
Educated — Tara Westover
The impossible escape from a world that was designed to keep you inside it.
Open — Andre Agassi
The athletic reckoning — what sport costs, what it gives, and what it cannot save you from.
No book on the market combines all of these elements. No book on the market tells this story. Until now.
About the Author
Curtis Ingram
Some people write memoirs because they had an interesting life. Curtis Ingram wrote one because he survived a life that was never designed to let him.
Survived
A life in Richard Allen Homes that was never designed to let him make it out.
Soldier
Two combat tours in Bosnia, where the same discipline from the mat carried to the front line.
Still Standing
Thirty-five years of marriage, two children, and grandchildren prove the man is still here.
The Life Behind the Book
The oldest of ten children. Raised in Philadelphia's Richard Allen Homes by a mother battling schizophrenia. The boy who fed his siblings before school because nobody else could.
The teenager who watched a crew he ran with end up on death row for murder — and chose a different door.
The first person in his family on either side to attend college. Two combat tours in Bosnia. Thirty-five years of marriage. Two children. Grandchildren.
KINGPIN is his first book. It will not be his last.
Overbrook High School — A Hallway of Destinies
His Overbrook High School classmates included Will Smith, Olympic gold medalist Jon Drummond, and hip-hop artist Steady B. All three appear in the book.
One became the biggest movie star in the world. One won Olympic gold. One is serving life in prison. And Curtis walked out of that same building carrying two duffel bags and a hunger that has not stopped burning in four decades.
Same hallways. Same bell. Same city. Different doors. That is the question this book cannot stop asking — how do some men walk through fire and come out the other side, while others disappear into it forever?
10
Siblings
The oldest of ten — the one the family leaned on before he was old enough to know it was happening.
#1
In Philadelphia
Number one ranked heavyweight wrestler in the city. Pinned nearly every opponent he faced.
2
Combat Tours
US Army. Bosnia. Two deployments. A soldier who carried the same discipline from the mat to the field to the front line.
35
Years Married
A marriage that has outlasted everything the streets, the Army, and the years tried to take from it.
Audiobook
Hear Kingpin
Some stories need to be heard, not just read. The weight of a grandmother's voice. The crack of pads on a Friday night. The silence in a gym after a pin. The sound of a man telling you the truth about his life without flinching.
The audiobook for KINGPIN: A Memoir is currently in production. When it drops, you will hear this story the way it was meant to be experienced — raw, unfiltered, in the voice of the man who lived every word of it. Audiobook samples and YouTube previews are coming soon.
Next Project
The Story Does Not End With Kingpin
In Chapter 8 of KINGPIN, three boys stood at the edge of the same darkness. One ended up on death row. One is serving life. One walked away and became the man writing this book.
The Lost Boyz is the next project. It returns to that crew through exclusive interviews from behind the walls where two of those men have spent the last four decades. For the first time, they will tell their story in their own words. And the man who was close enough to be pulled under will sit across from them and ask the questions that have followed him for a lifetime.
What happened to you after I left? What did that world look like from the inside? And what do you want the people who never lived it to understand?
Curtis Ingram is the only person alive who was inside that circle and walked away. That is why this project can only be written by him.
The Lost Boyz
Three boys. One darkness. Three doors.
  • Exclusive interviews from inside the walls
  • The men at the center of the case — in their own words
  • The questions that have followed Curtis for forty years
  • A reckoning only one man alive can write
Currently in development. Follow for updates.
Media & Contact
Connect With Curtis Ingram
For all press, speaking, and media inquiries:
Speaking Engagements
Curtis speaks on discipline and identity through sport, first-generation college success, Black excellence and refusing systemic limitations, military service and veteran transition, and the power of personal narrative.
Press & Media
Review copies, author interviews, and media assets are available upon request. Reach out directly to arrange coverage, features, or editorial conversations.
YouTube & Social
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