Local brewers step in ring to box for charity
Usually, when there’s a lot of beer involved and punches get thrown, few people come away smiling. But Beer Wars isn’t your typical Saturday night out.
Beer Wars pits employees from about 30 craft breweries in Vancouver and Victoria against each other in a boxing ring with proceeds from tickets going to their program that helps kids in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Participants get three free months of training at the Eastside Boxing Club in Chinatown, the chance to punch (and be punched), and all the adulation from a beer-soaked crowd they can absorb in three, two-minute rounds.
“Some are natural, some aren’t,” Dave Schuck, head coach at Eastside Boxing, says of his nascent boxers. “We get some that look like they’re under water and some that just take to it naturally. And it’s not for everyone. Not everyone wants to get punched in the head or punch someone in the head.”
Paul Gibson-Tigh, a sales rep at Parallel 49 Brewing, is back after making his debut last year. Gibson-Tigh said his experience in the ring was such a blur that he doesn’t recall much of it at all.
“Literally, the bell rings, and everyone’s going nuts and you can’t hear anything. You’re focused on this one goal amid chaos and … it’s pretty interesting in the ring. You don’t really remember a lot. It’s sort of like, the bell rings, then there’s a ref holding up someone’s arms.”
Caryn Westmacott, production manager for Red Truck Brewing Company, is also back for the event’s second year. She’s been physically active her entire life, but had never even thought about boxing before signing up last year. She says she couldn’t pass up the chance to do it again.
“Physically the workout is really challenging. They don’t take it easy on you, which is great,” she says. “The hardest part was definitely the mental/emotional thing. You’re actually signing up to get hit and to hit somebody (and) I think for a lot of people it’s the emotional part of that that’s actually more challenging.”
But the biggest draw for both Gibson-Tigh and Westmacott was the opportunity to help the afterschool program at Eastside Boxing.
Every day, just after local schools let out, a gaggle of up to 30 children between ages 13 and 19 stream into the gym as part of a program that includes free organic snacks and education around eating healthy, donated clothing and any other bit of help the kids need.
“A lot of youth when they started coming to us, they’d come and say they hadn’t eaten breakfast, some haven’t eaten for over 24 hours,” said Leigh Carter, community coordinator at Eastside Boxing, about the impetus of the program.
“If youth are coming in without that food in their stomachs, it’s really hard for them to participate in any physical activity or thinking for that matter. It’s just really hard for them to concentrate on what it is they’re supposed to be doing,” she says. “We also try to get those youth to take some granola bars or some cereal or oatmeal with them … so they can eat it in the morning or they’ll have something to snack on while they’re at school.
“So, it’s not only providing them with snacks while they’re here in the space, it’s giving them nutritious food to take home with them (that) they can snack on.”