Lessons Learned: A day in the life of a boxing gym.

By John “Iceman” Scully

Tonight (May 26, 2004) there were two happenings that illustrate just how kids can be taught lessons that will carry over into other aspects of their lives. For the last two weeks I have been having open sparring at my gym. The community center where the gym is located also houses a frequently used basketball gym and on some days there are 100 kids and young men in there using the court. Every once in a while one of them will come by the gym and check it out but none of them have actually signed up to take boxing. So recently I implemented a little unofficial thing where anybody that wanted to spar when I was in the gym could do so. You didn’t have to be a boxer or even have aspirations to be one. You just could just box your friend or even your enemy. Just to see what it is like. I figured it would attract a lot of attention and it has.

Now, there is a kid I have been working with for a couple of weeks now. (I’ll call him “Ty” for the sake of this story). He is not a boxer yet but he has interest in possibly becoming one down the line. He weighs about 168 pounds. The thing about him is he has had a very sketchy past and has some demons he has had to try and conquer in his personal life. He is in the church now and is trying to put that past behind him and head into a productive future. Like a lot of kids, though, he has certain things holding him back that go beyond the physical. One thing about the kid is his bad habit of “breaking.” As a trainer, to explain my boxing philosophies to potential boxers, I explain my theory on what “breaking” is. I believe that in almost every conflict, in particular a boxing match, your opponent will give you a window of opportunity at some point where snatching victory from him is a real possibility. It may be very subtle and last for a couple of seconds or it may be very obvious and last much longer and the trick is being able to recognize it and act on it. A trained eye can see it and a trained eye along with ability can use those moments to turn the fight in your favor or put the chance of victory further away from your adversary. It is an acquired skill to be able to recognize the chances when they present themselves. When we train in the gym for fights we train ourselves physically and mentally not to break. The kid, though, he breaks pretty easily. He is a tough kid, a street kid, but under physical and mental duress I have seen him break and break badly. For example, a few days ago we were at the running track doing laps and other exercises on the clock, meaning each person that attempted a certain run was doing it for time on the stop watch. Best time wins.

We had this one drill where you had to run up this staircase ten times on the clock. Halfway through the drill he suddenly stopped and began yelling at myself and another boxer for talking while he was running. He was saying that it broke his concentration and he couldn’t finish. This was one of many times he has done something similar to this and I was sick of it. I exploded at him, making him only about the fifth person in my thirty-six years that I have ever cussed out. Everybody was shocked. It got to be a very heated confrontation that, under different circumstances, might have led to blows being exchanged. Heavyweight contender Lawrence Clay-Bey immediately stepped in to mediate and defuse the situation. It took a little time, though. Eventually, though, order was restored and we managed to finish the workout. Afterwards I had a talk with Ty and explained to him that I didn’t feel he was going to make it as a boxer if he couldn’t deal with such distractions. I explained to him that he was about as solid as a marshmallow while he needed to be a rock. Breaking like that in the middle of a real match would prove to be disastrous. I later told Clay-Bey “Watch. This will be a turning point for him.”

On the flip side, we have another kid that often comes into the basketball gym portion of the community center to shoot hoops every once in a while. He is also known as an accomplished football player who will more than likely be heading to college as a player in a year or so (he ended up with a full football scholarship to one of the biggest and most recognizable football programs in the nation). When I first saw him about two weeks ago, at first glance, I assumed from the size of him and his facial features that he was between twenty-four and thirty years old. He checked in at 6 foot 3 inches tall, weighed 260 pounds and had the appearance and attitude of a grown man. I was shocked to find out he is only a high school student. Sixteen years old! I don’t even know his name. All I know him by is what Clay-Bey calls him: “Man-Child.”

Today, during the open sparring that I was doing, he rudely bounded into the gym and loudly announced “Who wants to box me?” No surprise to me when there were no takers. I went out into the basketball gym and pulled “Ty” aside. “I want you to come in the gym in two minutes and tell the room you want to get some sparring today and let’s see what happens.”

A couple minutes later Ty comes into the gym that had maybe forty five kids in there just waiting for somebody to spar somebody else and get crushed. He makes the offer to spar and Man-Child says “Oh no, Dogg, you don’t want to see ME in there.” The whole room gets to buzzing with anticipation and before you know it they are both having someone glove them up. I tell Ty “Now, look. Forget the street mentality. You have to be smart in this ring right here. He is going to come out and try to blow you out of there. Keep your hands up, let him hit your arms and shoulders. Don’t trade punches with him. Get through the first round and your time will come.” I put some grease on his face and then went over to smear some grease on man-child’s face, too, to protect him from possible cuts. He looked at me in irritation and said, disdainfully, “I don’t need none of that.” I knew it already but him telling me he didn’t need any grease on his face let me know that he had no idea what he was about to get into. He probably looked at having grease on his face as a weakness, like it was a way of admitting he needed protection against this inferior (in his mind) opponent. He had some bad info.

The last thing I tell Ty before the opening bell is “Don’t worry about how this thing begins. Worry about how it ends. That’s all that matters. Keep your hands up and let him wear himself out.”

The sparring starts and man-child comes out strong and, actually, he had a pretty strong and straight left jab. Heavy. But I see he has no concern for his own conditioning and I feel that his miscalculation will come back to bite him in the butt soon enough. Everybody that never boxed before thinks they have more gas in their talk than they really do. The first round basically saw man-child throwing big bombs and coming forward while the sheer weight of his body and punches were literally pushing Ty all over the ring. But in his very short time in the gym ,watching Clay-Bey and I train, Ty picked up the one thing that would ultimately see him through this test. He kept his hands up high. He was getting hit with enough shots that his left eye began to redden and puff up a bit but he wouldn’t break. Actually, the round ended with Ty talking to the big man, telling him “That’s it. Come on!! Keep throwing punches. Come on, big man.”

Think of “Rocky 3” and Clubber Lang’s approach. That was man-child. (I will just keep pounding on you until you fall.) Rocky (Ty), on the other hand, is encouraging him to “Hit me harder.”

So the first round ends and even though man-child got the better of the round overall it appeared to me that the WAR would be eventually be won by the guy that just lost the initial battle. Between rounds I told Ty “Listen to me. Come out with your hands up. He will come at you strong to make his last stand but that’s it. Fifteen seconds into this thing he is going to be finished. Then you come on and do your thing. Dig down deep when the time comes. Don’t break!”

Literally, the gym is packed with people and everybody is hyped up on the edge of their seats expecting something big to happen any minute. It does, too, but it isn’t what most of them expected.

The second rounds starts and, according to the script, man-child comes out with bad intentions again. But his tank is closer to empty than to full and it isn’t long before he shows me a sign of the one thing I have been expecting all along: Breaking. He throws some punches, takes a step back and let out a big gasp of air, Exhaling hard. I say loud enough for Ty to hear me: “Get him Ty. Get him NOW. Jump on him!!” Ty hears me and excitedly gets to work, letting his hand go in combination with bad intentions of his own. He comes on furiously and just a few punches later, including a finishing right hand-left hook, man-child falls to the canvas with a thud. Half from the punches and half from exhaustion. It is like a ROCKY movie! The place goes crazy. The other kids are yelling in amazement and disbelief. Seeing this big 260 pound kid worn out and dropped by this other 168 pound kid is so much of a surprise to these people that half of them are yelling and screaming and cheering while the other half is staring down at the man-child in disbelief. The same exact look thousands of people across this world had on their faces in the moments after Tyson was counted out against Douglas. People are yelling and I am, too. I am yelling and pointing hard at the kid’s friends. “I told you! I told you. My man has big heart. I told you,” I screamed at them. I was hyped up for Ty and I was trying to drive home to them the point of what has just transpired. Size doesn’t matter as much as heart and will and toughness. Character. Like Holyfield often says: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

“Ty” stalks around the ring afterwards full of confidence, pumping his hands in the air like it was a real fight he just won. He rushes to me and hugs me like he just captured the world title. Not a world title. THE world title. Some people in the room may not have realized what the big deal was about but I did. In regard to Ty, it is something that maybe I am the only one in the room other than him can realize and appreciate. He has overcome more than just his opponent and that ninety pound weight disadvantage. He overcame himself and his own imaginary walls that stopped him from crossing over to the next level. If he learned his lesson well enough he can use it to overcame non-boxing issues in his life, too.

Now, coincidentally, less than twenty minutes after those two sparred each other I had some females in the gym and they wanted to spar each other, too. Two of them had actually arranged a sparring match yesterday and they were here today to get it on. The gym was packed with teenage kids and even members of the rec center staff who wanted to see these two go at it. One of them, a meek looking girl, very thin, had been in the gym a few times and had expressed interest in boxing but had never actually trained with me. The other girl was a much tougher looking girl that had a reputation with the other kids as “a tough girl” and a girl that would fight in the street with no trouble. The thin girl is nervous but wants to spar the tougher looking girl for whatever reason. The buzz in the crowd is that the tough looking girl is going to kill Ms. slim. I see her nervousness and I try to reassure her by telling her “Don’t be afraid of this girl. This isn’t the street. This is totally different. Listen to me. Walk right out when the bell rings and punch this girl right in the mouth and see how she likes it.”

I can tell by the look on her face that she is nervous still but she seems to trust me a bit and I am confident she will follow instructions. The other girl, on the other hand, seems to think that this is a cakewalk she is about to embark on. They glove up and the bell rings to begin round one. The whole entire ensuing episode lasts for about thirty-four seconds. The tougher looking girl tries to go right to the taller, slimmer girl but runs into some long and awkward jabs that she, of course, has no idea how to skillfully defend against. At one point the tougher looking girl loses her balance and turns her back to the slimmer girl. Showing a surprising killer instinct, the slimmer female rushes in and when the girl turns around to face her she is met by a smashing right hand to the middle of her face that twists her nose into a bloody mess. The tougher looking girl lets out a yell and involuntarily turns her back and heads towards a corner where I meet her. The crowd is going crazy. For the second time in less than twenty minutes they are witnessing sparring with surprising results. I lift the girls head up and her bloody nose is twisted up and her eyes are watering. Before I can tell her that the sparring is over she beats me to it, telling me “bump this. take these gloves off.” She quit with very little hesitation. The other girl celebrates briefly before having her friends take her gloves off, too. Once again, people cannot believe what they have just witnessed. The girl that landed the nose-twisting punch is relieved, surprised and happy but still has enough respect for the tougher looking female that she doesn’t want to gloat about it openly too much. But I see clearly that both of these girls, and some of the people in the crowd, have learned some lessons about boxing today. The two girls that got stopped today were both outwardly tough acting and looking both physically and otherwise. They gave off the impression that they were tough girls that would fight to the end. They seemed strong willed and actually they went into the sparring nonchalantly, like it was not a big deal. The other girl, though, was quiet and reserved and actually seemed intimidated and scared by both opponents. However, she still went ahead with the sparring despite her fears. It was easy for the other two because they were led to believe that they had nothing to fear while this other girl, despite her obvious fears, went ahead and faced whatever was coming for her. She showed character, strong character, and in the face of pain, surprise and embarrassment the other two did not. Those are the kinds of things that I personally pay attention to and love to see.

So, as it stands, five people found out today what I learned a long, long time ago in regard to competing in a 20X20. Not everybody is cut out to actually do this thing called boxing, believe that. And looks, size, weight and reputation are worthless in the squared circle if you can’t actually box. You also have to have the heart to do it when the going gets rough and the belief that you have something inside of you stronger than what your opponent has inside of him. More than likely it will be a thing where the five people that sparred today will not pursue boxing careers but they will likely have gained knowledge about themselves and life that they will carry with them in some way for the rest of their lives. That’s a common occurrence across the world, too. Just another day at a boxing gym.