A SHRINE TO THE SWEET SCIENCE

This article first appeared in The Australian Worker magazine.

Boxing is dead, the glory days long gone. Fight fans today want to see the kicking and grappling of the UFC. They dismiss boxing as one-dimensional. But I count myself amongst followers of the one true faith. I boxed from the age of 13 until I was 22 and have never been able to shake my love for the sport. That’s why I’m climbing the steps to Gleason’s Gym in New York at 6am one Saturday.

In a sport that relishes tales of the past, Gleason’s Gym is a link to the days when boxing was king. It was opened in 1937 by Robert Gagliadi, who changed his name to Gleason to appeal to Irish fight fans, and dozens of boxing greats have walked through its doors to work their trade.

Legends of the sport like Jake LaMotta came out of Gleason’s. Muhammad Ali prepared for his fight against Sonny Liston there, and Panama’s Roberto Duran used it as his American base.

As I head up two flights of stairs to the gym’s entrance a grey-haired man, a little stooped, trudges ahead of me carrying a leather satchel. I recognise him as the gym’s owner, Bruce Silverglade, and introduce myself. The gym doesn’t open until seven on the weekend, he says, but I’m welcome to come in early.

He unlocks the heavy grey door, revealing a dark cavern. He asks me to wait by the doorway. “I wouldn’t want you tripping over anything.”

I stand in a small rectangle of light as he disappears into the darkness. Gleason’s was originally in the Bronx, moved to Manhattan in 1974, and came to its current home in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1984. I wonder if I’ll still feel the history after all the moves.

Rows of fluorescent lights flicker then reveal the gym. The floor is a mottled grey, paint worn away unevenly. The walls are painted blood red. The gym is huge, with four boxing rings, ten punching bags, and plenty of open space.

The most striking thing is the stench: that strong odour of stale sweat and almost-rotted leather. “I don’t even smell it anymore,” Silverglade says. “My nose is burned out.”

Silverglade bought into Gleason’s back 1983, then took an early retirement from his office job to devote himself to the gym. “I never looked back,” he says. “There was a huge financial disruption, but it didn’t matter to me because I was happy. I turned my hobby and my love into my profession.”

In his corner office I pay $85 for a month’s membership. He lends me a leather skipping rope and I walk out into the gym alone. Normally such a noisy place, where bags are thumped and rattle on chains, trainers bark instructions, and speedballs rat-a-tat, it is eerily quiet, like an empty cathedral waiting for a choir to bring it to life.

There’s a tick of leather on concrete as I skip, punctuated by the beeping of the electronic timer. As I warm up I move around the gym, taking it all in. Black lockers are decorated with news clippings and fight posters. Above a row of exercise bikes there’s a large yellow poster. A quote attributed to Virgil reads, “Now, whoever has courage and a strong and collected spirit in his breast let him come forward, lace on the gloves and put up his hands.”

The full-length mirrors are flecked with dried sweat. You can sense the blood and sweat shed by hundreds of boxers in the pursuit of all too elusive glory. The magic, the sense of history, is still there.

I’m not the only one who feels it. On another visit Alicia Ashley, the WBC women’s super bantamweight champ, explains the attraction. “Any other gym you go to has a totally a different feel. They are so modern. This has kept the old- fashioned gym with the exercise machines and everything. It’s a whole different intensity. When you are here, you want to train and you want to feel immersed. Even if you don’t box you have that feeling.”

The no-frills gym attracts an unpretentious crowd. “The people here aren’t stuck up. You’ll train among champions and they’ll act like they are your best friends.” Ashley, whose unmarked face belies her ring experience and her 45 years, was one of the first women at the gym 17 years ago. Now there are hundreds of female members.

Silverglade says the diversity of the gym reflects the city. “A boxing gym, and particularly Gleason’s, is just another cross-section of New York City. I have 67 nationalities here. My youngest is six-years-old, my oldest is 87-years-old. I have heads of corporations, doctors, lawyers, and schoolteachers. I also have kids from the projects with very limited amounts of money, so there’s a tremendous diversity. And there’s a total respect for everyone.

“There is a mutual respect and mutual admiration, because it takes a lot of courage to step through those ropes. Your level of ability doesn’t matter; your fear, your adrenaline, is the same whether you’re a world champion, or you’re a businessman or woman. There’s a respect for that.”

Silverglade has no time for the heckling armchair critic. “Fans say, ‘He’s a bum, he’s a tomato can.’ The person who says that doesn’t understand what it takes to be a boxer. They are sitting on their couch eating potato chips and saying, ‘I can do that, that guy’s a bum,’ but they won’t go through the kind of strenuous training that it takes to be a boxer.”

There are dozens of trainers working out of Gleason’s. Ashley, who trains fighters herself, tells me, “There are a lot of characters, you couldn’t even write a book about it.

“You have some that are rivals. Today they are talking to each other, tomorrow they are not, and the next day they are back together. It’s a big dysfunctional family.”

One of the more colourful characters is John Douglas, who wears a gaudy purple Yankee’s cap. I talk to him while he’s sitting on one of the bicycles watching sparring. He fought for Guyana in the 1996 Olympic games then moved to America. Douglas, his accent still heavy, says, “My dream was to be world champion, five times, but they deny me that.” Like any boxer will tell you, the judges just didn’t get the decisions right.

“I still have hopes, I still think that I might get a shot. That’s why I’m still training at 40. George Foreman won at 43.” He laughs at the idea but goes on to explain how training fighters has honed his skills. “It makes me be the best boxer in the world. Nobody can beat me. Because I see all their mistakes, it opens my eyes to a lot of things I never see. “I’ll beat anybody, because I ain’t scared of nobody,” he says, and lets out a low chuckle. “God is my best friend. Once the Creator is your best friend you have nothing to worry about.”

As the day draws on the gym grows busier. There are kids, just learning, awkwardly lunging over their skipping ropes. Inside one boxing ring a couple of novices spar, faces red as they trade punches frantically and ineffectually.

In another ring two seasoned boxers throw punches with purpose. Delen Parsley Snr, known to all as Blimp, is preparing his son Delen Jr for a fight. Delen Jr moves around the ring as smoothly as a cobra, throwing punches at his opponent from unexpected angles.

In his time Blimp sparred the likes of Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis. “I just love the art of boxing,” he says. “You got to look out for yourself. You can’t tag out. You can’t take a break. I love the chess game of the sweet science.” Of Gleason’s he says, “I love the atmosphere, it’s real raw. I love the purity of it. It’s not coming to work here, it’s like coming somewhere to have a nice time.”

Hector Roca, a weathered, heavy-set trainer originally from Panama, is up at four on weekdays to be in the gym when it opens. “If I don’t come I feel like I missed out on something,” he says in a thick accent.

Roca invites me into his small office. Dominoes are scattered on the table. Roca plays for cash when the gym is quiet. Not that he is too worried about money. “With [light-welterweight champ] Arturo Gatti I make millions of dollars, and I lose everything, but I’m happy,” he says, as he tells me about the fallout from a divorce. “I need the money to live, but I’m not hungry for the money. Money don’t mean everything. When you dying, money don’t want to care for you.”

Photos of Roca with famed boxers paper the walls. There’s a signed picture from his countryman Roberto Duran and a photo with Hilary Swank, who he trained for Million Dollar Baby. He pulls out a photo album and shows me a picture of himself with Australia’s Jeff Fenech, when the two of them were about 20 kilos lighter.

Roca misses the golden era of boxing, when fighters were hungry and titles meant something. “Before, everybody was a gentleman. Only big mouth is Ali, but he do it for promotion,” he says. “Now you find a fighter talks a lot of garbage and can’t fight.”

Like Alicia Ashley says, there is something about the being at Gleason’s that makes you want to dig deep and train harder. It might be that trainers like Roca are looking on, silently judging, finding you wanting if you slack off, or that you’re following in the steps of the greats.

After a month in the gym I’m feeling a touch of the “John Douglases.” I’m thinking that maybe I could make a comeback and find the success that eluded me as an amateur boxer; that, despite retiring ten years ago, my best days are ahead of me. I wonder if I should ask Silverglade about doing some sparring.

Then I consider the advice another Gleason’s trainer, Don Saxby, gave me. “Boxing doesn’t like everybody, as much as they would like to do it,” he said. “There are certain things in life you are just not going to grab. You can want it, you can like it, but boxing is not for everybody.”

There’s no doubt that I liked boxing more than it liked me. I fought some of the best in Australia, but would never be one. I spent countless hours in the gym and never won so much as a state title. The best move I ever made in the sport was getting out.

• About the author: Chris Ryan, a former amateur boxer, is a freelance writer and personal trainer with Rushcutters Boxing.

I leave the gym glad I got to train at the still-beating heart of New York’s boxing world, and relieved I wasn’t silly enough to climb through the ropes one more time.