Niagara club has stood strong in boxers’ corner since 1919
Fourth generation of Welland ring family never gets tired of training fighters
Nappers Boxing Club will receive a belated anniversary present when the Welland Sports Promotion Committee holds its annual awards banquet later this year.
Ray Napper, head coach of the nonprofit club for the past 14 years, had been scheduled to formally accept the H.L. Cudney Memorial Award in early April. The presentation, though, was postponed until the fall due to COVID-19 restrictions limiting public gatherings.
Selection committee chair Ron Lemon said the club — which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year — is welldeserving of the city’s top sports award.
He said the honour recognizes the important role Nappers has had in teaching people of all ages to live together “without using boxing as a violent sport.”
“But one that shows it is a sport that brings self-defence into a positive value to learning to live with each other without hurting each other,” the retired educator and one-time Cudney Award winner added.
“The club has helped numerous kids over the years find themselves and bring them back to a productive way of life that has positive goals,” he said.
“Going into the clubhouse, you can feel it is a place where people want to be, not just the boxers but the parents and friends watching them work out.”
Napper, a one-time Canadian champion who succeeded his father, Jeff, as head coach, accepts the description of “more than a boxing club” as the ultimate compliment.
He said an overriding interest in what people can do with their lives, rather than what they can accomplish inside the ring, dates back to the club’s founding in 1919.
“We spent so much time with these guys at practice. You get to know them really well because you end up going out of town sparring or to competitions,” he said.
“You just want the best for these guys, especially back when my grandfather had it. It was more about helping people who didn’t have it all that well.”
Ray Napper Sr. ran the club for 18 years before he died of a heart attack in 1995 at age 63.
He was in Lennox Lewis’s corner when the boxer won gold in superheavyweight at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul and had a hand in coaching several Canadian and Ontario champions, including Olympians Tom Glesby and James Pagendam, who both fought out of the Welland club.
Despite this success, he didn’t ignore club members who were just fighting to improve their lives rather than dreaming of stardom.
“My grandfather really helped keep these guys on a good path. He always pointed out their positives and their strengths over beating them down on what they could improve on,” Napper said.
Napper Sr. passed the commitment to help others succeed on to son Jeff, who ran the club for 10 years.
“That translated into how my dad ran things, and I just paid attention to what my dad did and doing the best I can do in that,” he said.
Napper recalled a former club member stopping by and praising the role the club played in his life.
“He told my dad in high school he was going to drop out, wasn’t going to do his exams. He said my dad had quite a talk with him, that life was pretty hard if you didn’t have a good education,” he said.
Napper added: “The kid took the conversation my dad had with him to heart, finished high school, went to college.
“He’s pretty successful now. He’s a licensed mechanic, travelling and has a couple of toys.”
Nappers Boxing Club makes a point of telling potential members it is not a self-defence studio.
“If they say they’re coming for a selfdefence reason, we tell them that they only place they’re allowed to demonstrate the skills they’re learning is inside the club, inside the ring, with our supervision,” Napper said. “I know it’s odd to say, but we don’t really promote fighting, outside the ring at least.
“It’s more just the discipline and people getting more self-confidence. That’s their self-defence.”
Robert Napper Sr., the current head coach’s great-grandfather, founded the family-run institution as Nappers Boxing and Wrestling Club in 1919 on Niagara Street, just north of West Main Street.
That incarnation of the club operated until the Second World War. In the late 1950s or early ’60s, the Boystown Boxing Club was opened by Robert Napper Jr., and Ray Napper Sr. also coached.
“It wasn’t Nappers Boxing Club, but my family opened it. It was my family who ran it,” Napper said. “It was on Church Street. There used to be an Optimist Club behind the old graveyard and it was in there.”
Even now, the club’s current head coach, now 35, has difficulty putting a finger — let alone, a glove — on the way boxing has become part of his family’s DNA.
“You could say it’s in the blood, but I don’t know,” he said after some thought.
Napper didn’t immediately take to the sport.
“It just started out running the boxing club with my dad, which I didn’t really enjoy at first. He has let me take breaks along the way,” he said. “Then I would get down to the club and I usually would just throw the tennis ball against the wall.
“It wasn’t even until after my grandfather passed away that I really took an interest. He just said, ‘If you want to learn, you better learn now.’ ”
The transition from fighting to coaching was smoother.
“Even when I was a fighter, even at 12, 13 years old, I had people commenting on how I was like a coach,” he said. “I think it was just always in my blood. It became pretty obvious once I started boxing. I was always trying to help and correct people, get everybody better.”
Ray Napper works 12-hour shifts as a youth worker at a detention centre in addition to running the club, now located on Park Street. That can lead to long days, though not for the fourth generation of this boxing family.
“I don’t get tired of running it. Sometimes it’s been a long day but by the time I walk through the doors, it’s all those good people. They just make my day,” he said. “Right now, not being at the club for a few weeks has been hell basically.
“A lot of the people from the club have been texting me because they figure I’ve never been away from the club this long.”
Napper feeds off the energy from members of a club that has been coed since the mid-1990s.
“A lot of boxing clubs — especially, ours — are nonprofit. No one in my family makes money or have we ever made money,” he said. “We do it for the love of the sport, and it shows in our work.”
Except for candles on a birthday cake that now number 101, the club hasn’t changed all that much over the years as far as Ray Napper is concerned.
“My earliest memories of the boxing club are around 1990, and it’s always seemed like amazing people are down there,” he said. “Fast forward to 2020 and the atmosphere is the same. The people are all different, but it’s all the same.
“It’s awesome walking through those doors every night and saying ‘Hi’ to everybody, and how much everyone appreciates everything at the boxing club.”