<table> </table> The Royals&#8217; new center fielder is a fighter. Maybe you saw the clip of him rushing the mound and throwing a big punch (that missed) at a Tampa Bay pitcher last summer.</p><p>But that&#8217;s not the point here.</p><p>No, Coco Crisp is a fighter because he&#8217;s the son of a former boxer, because he&#8217;s never felt appreciated, because he played only two full seasons through high school and college.</p><p>&#8220;That&#8217;s my attitude,&#8221; Crisp says. &#8220;I go up each at-bat; it&#8217;s personal.&#8221;</p><p>Boston general manager Theo Epstein likes to say that Crisp plays &#8220;with a chip on his shoulder and a smile on his face.&#8221;</p><p>Crisp just turned 29. He has a wife and two young daughters. He doesn&#8217;t go out after games as much now. He&#8217;s a homebody. The rough edges have smoothed a bit &#8212; but the attitude will always be there.</p><p>Just ask James Shields, the Rays pitcher who Crisp rushed, or even Eddie Murray, the Hall of Famer who was the hitting coach in Cleveland when Crisp played there. Murray went around to all the bigger players, muscular guys like Travis Hafner, telling them to use heavier bats to hit more home runs.</p><p>Murray never said this to Crisp, who then asked for the biggest bat the team had. He started swinging a 34-ouncer, up from 31 1/2 , and went from three home runs in 2004 to 15 the next year.</p><p>At different times, he has had the attitude to openly reject the idea of not being an everyday player in Boston; the talent to prompt Red Sox manager Terry Francona to describe him as the game&#8217;s best defensive center fielder; and the guts to win a poker tournament in Las Vegas that included at least one guy who plays on TV.</p><p>He&#8217;s also honest enough to say he has &#8220;one of the poorest&#8221; outfield arms in the American League and self-aware enough to openly laugh when &#8212; in one of the more bizarre scenes in baseball &#8212; he was run over by an all-terrain vehicle driven by the Mariners&#8217; mascot.</p><p>&#8220;You won&#8217;t find a harder worker, more disciplined, or just a more generous guy,&#8221; says Roger Cador, the baseball coach when Crisp was at Southern University. &#8220;He was the guy who would always share his computer, his time, his ideas, everything. You just don&#8217;t see that all the time.&#8221;</p><p>Whatever competitive fire Crisp has, he attributes to his family. Loyce, his father, is a former prizefighter &#8212; he went by &#8220;Sugar,&#8221; as in &#8220;Sugar Crisp.&#8221; Pamela Newton, his mother, is a former champion sprinter. His grandfather, Milton Newton, is in the U.S. Track and Field Masters Hall of Fame for inventing the starting blocks used in the Olympics.</p><p>And Sheileah Crisp, his sister, is a professional ice skater.</p><p>It was Sheileah who gave him the &#8220;Coco&#8221; nickname. His real name is Covelli. Grandma shortened it to &#8220;Co,&#8221; and Sheileah doubled it up to Coco after thinking her brother&#8217;s big ears looked like the monkey&#8217;s on the cereal box in front of her.</p><p>&#8220;We&#8217;re competitive, whether we&#8217;re playing Monopoly or pingpong,&#8221; Crisp says. &#8220;When you have that, you have family members that like to gloat. So you want to win. You want to be a winner so you don&#8217;t see them gloating in your face.&#8221;</p><p>Production is king, and Crisp comes to Kansas City with $5.75 million owed him for 2009, a number that Royals general manager Dayton Moore thinks worth it for an everyday center fielder who can bat at the top of the order.</p><p>Moore knows Crisp has been slowed by injuries the last few years. He thinks Crisp can be closer to the guy who hit .300 with 16 home runs in 2005 and was one of the best center fielders in baseball in 2007.