Hey there, gang, just dropped a ton of winner photos over on the new Johnny Goodtimes Facebook page. If you’ve not already joined the page, do so, and if you’ve won since December and I took a pic, it should be in there! Feel free to tag yourself and your friends in the pics.

The new Philly Blunt is up, and it’s nothing short of awesome. (You can listen here on the site, or listen here on itunes.) We spoke with Maleek Jackson, who runs a fitness gym in Northern Liberties. His story is incredible: the fifth of 13 kids who grew up on the “Smallside” at 18th and Catherine, he came up with any parental guidance. I asked him about falling in with the wrong crowd. 

MALEEK: I grew up and I kind of veered off, you know. I was never the type of kid who really paid attention or cared about school. Then when I went to high school it took off. I started doing my own thing. The streets got more of my time than anything else.

REEF: What year is this? Late 90s, early 2000s?

MALEEK: This is early 2000s. And I ain’t gonna say I fell in with the wrong crowd, because all my friends were exposed to exactly the same things that I was exposed to.

REEF: So there wasn’t a lot of opportunity.

MALEEK: Right. It was normal. We sold drugs. I fell into a life of crime. I robbed people. I robbed businesses. And it was just the norm. We knew what we were doing was wrong, but we never was in a position where someone sat us down and was like, “Yo, stop doing what you doing.”

Once in prison, he became friends with a man named Taj, who started bugging him about getting his GED.

MALEEK: He said to me, “If you go home today, what you gonna do?” And I’m like, “Aw man, I don’t know.” But the fact of being free is enough, but it isn’t. Because if they grant you your freedom and you not prepared for that, you ain’t planned for that, then you know for sure that you’re gonna return…

He got his GED, he started to box, and soon started to think about his future. So when he get out, he had decided he either wanted to be a boxer, and if that didn’t work out a personal trainer. And when he got a chance to meet former middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins, he jumped at the opportunity. Hopkins (who I interviewed in 2005) had also spent time in prison as a young man. 

MALEEK: I see Bernard. I’m like nah. You know me, I just walked up to him. I’m like, “Hi my name is Maleek I just came home, I did ten years, I want to be a fighter. I know you hear this all the time, you know, this that and the third.” And that conversation led to an hour long conversation…so he paid Danny Davis, who was training Bernard Hopkins at the time, he paid Danny Davis to train me. Danny was training fighters in Canada and Russian, he was being booked in Vegas…

REEF: So you like, “While you gone…”

MALEEK: So yeah, while he was gone, he would leave the torch in my hand like “Yo, you always in the gym, you might as well be my assistant. I’m going away for two weeks. I got a list of clients that need personal training. You’ve been paying attention, like you know what to do. Just do it.” And you know I just followed suit. And it just came to me naturally, it just fell right into my plan B.

Find out which celebrity that he trains punches the hardest, what one word separates him from most other people, and what advice he has for people who want to get in better shape. This is a really cool interview.

The Oscars are coming up this weekend, so we’re celebrating by doing an all movie week at quizzo. There will probably be a few Oscars in the mix, but certainly not all. Horror films, blaxploitation, John Hughes films and softcore porn classics will all be in the mix as well. And I’ll be playing music off of famous soundtracks between rounds. Gonna be a fun week to quiz!

Birra is cancelled for tonight, but we’re on for Bards at 9:15. See you lovers tonight!

Yes, I will have scores, videos, and a recap of Quizzo Bowl coming this week. But in the meantime, we’re back in action. We kick off at Dilworth this evening at 6 pm. This is a really fun spot for a quiz and a great opportunity for a win. On to Sidecar at 8 pm and O’Neals at 8 with Boots. Great crowd at O’Neals last week. Hope we can keep it moving. After lots of stops and starts the past few weeks at Sidecar with ownership changing hands I think that this week we’re finally all systems go.

NOTE: There is no quiz at Comcast this month. We’ll start back up next month. If you were planning on playing, come on over to Dilworth, just a couple of blocks away. See ya tonight!

This year we’re doing a picture round drawn by Philly artist Keni Thomas (do yourself a favor and follow him on Instagram) , and believe when I tell you, it’s going to be AWESOME.