Boxing gets facelift

Boxing gyms are supposed to be 3D: dark, dank and dingy.

The air is supposed to smell of vintage sweat, paint should look like it’s suing the wall for divorce and the heavy bags should look like they were old when Jack Dempsey was a pup. If you’re lucky, at least the protective mouthpiece is new.

It’s a cliché that is true much more often than it’s false. The sport is a way out of tough, dead-end neighborhoods. Boxers are built from the ground up; gritty surroundings create gritty fighters.

The only way to attach the three Ds to the Howard Street Boxing Gym, located in the heart of downtown Spokane, would be to triangulate its position: between Division Street, the Davenport Hotel and the bus Depot, and even that would miss the mark.

Go through the unfinished lobby and down the stairs at 165 S. Howard Street. Inside, the walls are painted a pristine white. What isn’t fitted with mirrors is covered by vintage posters of professional and amateur boxing cards from around the world. The heavy bags have that distinct, misshapen look they get when they’ve been well-used, but are far from worn out.

The lights, bright and white as the walls, give the place an all-business attitude – even when the room is empty and quiet.

What the room lacks in boxing history is more than made up for by the 100-odd years of experience shared by the men who oversee training therein.

Despite the fact that the doors are only now officially opened, this gym already has accomplished something noble and significant.

It’s helped save the sport of amateur boxing in Spokane.

When the 2004-2005 amateur boxing season ended last spring, the venerable Spokane Eagles boxing club disbanded. The Eagles Aerie on East Francis was about to move into a new building on the other side of its parking lot and there was no more room to continue sponsoring the highly successful program.

For years the club operated out of the lodge’s cramped basement. The place had all the charm bare cement walls can offer, but it spawned a series of national champions over the years. Winning gave the place a Spartan charm; losing it put the team on the street with few options.

“We were looking at a couple of places where we could go, but there wasn’t anything definite,” said Dan Vassar, the soft-spoken, gentle man who runs the program.

Ironically, when he’s not coaching local youngsters, Vassar is a nationally recognized boxing coach who frequently works with US. national teams. He’s regularly tapped to head teams for international competitions around the world and helped prepare the Olympic team to compete in Athens prior to the 2004 Games.

There was talk about moving into a building close to Arbor Crest vineyard in the Spokane Valley, but it didn’t pan out. And since amateur boxing operates on a budget that would have to triple to be considered a shoestring, the outlook was bleak.

But boxing gets into a person’s blood. The life-lessons it teaches – self-reliance, confidence, self-esteem – instill a passion for the sport that lasts a lifetime. It’s what keeps men like Vassar and Ray Kerwick, twin forces working to keep the sport alive long after their sons have moved through its ranks. In fact, devotion to their sport is one of the legacies both men have passed to their offspring. Vassar’s sons, Frankie and Dan, both earned amateur championships – Dan won a pair of national Junior Olympic titles to his brother’s one – and now coach in their own right; Kerwick’s son, Mahlon, an Armed Forces champion boxing for the Army, was set to join his father as a coach this fall before being recalled and sent to Iraq.

Vassar and Kerwick had faith. A new home would present itself.

Kevin Keefe discovered boxing as a high school student at Gonzaga Prep five years ago. He read about Vassar taking a United States boxing team to Kazakhstan for an international competition and decided to give the Spokane Eagles program a try.

It was a good fit.

After two years working under Vassar and Kerwick, Keefe, then 17, won the 125-pound championship at the 2003 Native American Boxing Championships, in Peshawbestown, Michigan.

Keefe is a smart, technically solid boxer who doesn’t overpower opponents in the ring. His punches are fast and accurate and his defense is solid. In his brief time in the sport he’s been a sponge, absorbing all that Vassar and Kerwick have to teach.

“I was a good student before I got started boxing,” he said. “But what I learned from boxing is just how far you can go with discipline and hard work.”

Keefe was preparing for his freshman year at the University of San Francisco, making a big splash on the college boxing team, when he heard of the club’s homeless state.

“I just didn’t want to see the club cease to exist,” Keefe, 20, said. “This club is too great a resource to just go away. The coaches have so much experience and have so much to offer that we needed to find them a home.”

It just so happened that Keefe had a place to turn.

“We were in the process of buying the old detox center on Howard Street,” said Keefe’s father, Spokane attorney Tom Keefe. “My wife, Jo Ann (Kauffman), owns a consulting firm, Kauffman and Associates, and the building’s going to be its new headquarters and I was going to keep my office there as well.

“Kevin came to me and said ‘Dad, isn’t there something we can do to help out the club?’”

It just so happened there was.

“We gave Kevin the basement to turn into a boxing gym,” Tom Keefe said. “The club could use it and he could turn it into a business to help him through college.”

And so, the Howard Street Boxing Gym was born and team became the Howard Street Boxing Club

Where the old Spokane Eagles basement was cramped, the Howard Street Boxing Gym has space. Mirrors make it look even bigger.

Five heavy bags hang from the rafters at one end of the basement. Double-end bags, a round punching bag suspended between two bungee cords, line a side wall. Three separate speed bag stations, each set for boxers of different heights, dot the opposite wall.

A cut-down-to-fit ring sits in the middle of the gym, stretched between concrete columns. It’s small by bout standards but big enough to accommodate sparring. A table next to the ring holds a collection of sparring gloves, head gear and bag gloves in varying sizes – a must for a program that works with fighters ranging in age from 8 to 34 years.

“More than that, I now have an office where we can keep track of our paperwork,” Vassar said. “I have a television and a VCR so we can tape our bouts and I can sit down with the kids and we can go over their bout and they can see what they need to do to improve.

“It’s a little thing, but it’s something we never had before.”

Where in the Eagles’ basement boxers had to wait their turn on equipment, they now can slide from station to station without missing a beat when the new season begins the first Monday after Labor Day

After a lifetime of accumulating equipment, Vassar finally has a storage room not originally intended to hold his car.

Another side room eventually will house treadmills and stationary bikes for cardiovascular work. A third will become a shower.

The posters that adorn the walls are Vassar’s, collected from the fight cards where he has coached boxers or judged fight cards – from international matches like USA vs. Cuba, USA vs. France, USA vs. Ireland, to mementos of his trips to Kazakhstan and Thailand as the head of a national team. Tom Keefe, himself a boxing devotee and the club’s unofficial photographer, has begun adding his own memorabilia from Spokane’s boxing past.

Along with the posters are framed pictures of a few of the hundreds of boxers who have come through Vassar’s program, some posed with such boxing legends as Sugar Ray Leonard, Jimmy Ellis and the infamous Mike Tyson. The autographs are real. There isn’t enough wall space in the entire building to hold the Vassar collection, however.

Kevin Keefe returned home at the end of August, looking to pack his belongings for a year studying in Barcelona, Spain. He made sure to get in some training time with the club and to check out the progress on his gym.

“I’m just glad that we were able to do this,” the 20-year-old gym owner said. “I’m glad the club has a new home and they can keep going.”

Yes, there still are plans to take the gym public in some way, he said. But there’s no hurry on that front.

“I’m happy with the way things are right now,” he said.

Note

For those interested in joining the Howard Street Boxing Club, contact Dan Vassar, 928-6584, or Ray Kerwick, 928-3027. The season begins September 11.