Throwing leather
Boxing club develops physical, mental toughness
Tires crunched on gravel as cars pulled up in front of a large metal building. It gets dark early this time of year, and a brightly lit “Open” sign sliced through the gloam.
From outside, the building looks like any other out-of-the-way machine shop or engine repair outfit you’d find in a hundred places, large and small. Walking through the front door, that’s exactly what you’d find, in a sense.
But instead of gleaming chrome and roaring engines, this shop builds bodies and minds to tackle the sweet science of boxing.
A half dozen boys, from elementary schoolers to teens, turned out on this particular night for scheduled training at Morrison Boxing Club in Maumelle. They wrapped their hands and laced their gloves with little fanfare before a grandfatherly-looking man snapped them to attention. The boys immediately snagged jump ropes to warm up, their feet barely leaving the ground while the ropes whistled over their heads.
“Most people, Americans in particular, are soft,” said Allan Nader, head coach. “They don’t really know what they can do physically, and they don’t really know how much stress they can handle mentally. My job is to teach [people] how to withstand adversity and develop the character strengths to do what’s right in the face of adversity.”
Nader didn’t talk loudly — he didn’t have to — but he was constant. He moved from boxer to boxer, adjusting footwork, demonstrating
form, reinforcing technique. He often asked the boxers questions to help them self-analyze what they were doing, making them think.
“I tell everybody the same thing when they first start,” Nader said. “I say, ‘My best advice to you is you’re either going to quit in a minute or not. And if you’re not going to quit, you have to learn to measure in very small increments because you get a little bit better today than you were yesterday at one small thing.’
“If you add all those small things up, it’s like building a brick wall. You have to put a lot of bricks down, so it changes from a pile of bricks to a wall. So it changes from individual things that you do into a system, a synergistic system of attack and defense. If you don’t give up, you will learn.”
Nader is old-school, and he’s got the credentials to back up his way of doing things, having trained 10,000 fighters in various levels of amateur and professional ranks since 1971 and, at one time, operating what he said was one of the largest boxing gyms in the Washington, D.C., area.
After moving to Arkansas in retirement, he started shopping around for coaching gigs. He didn’t like what he saw out of some gyms, the kind that skim over the endless fundamental groundwork that is monotony itself, yet critical to learning the sport, until he walked into Bill Morrison’s club, Nader said.
“I stopped and looked and said, ‘I’m looking for someplace to coach,’” Nader said. “Bill said, ‘We’re always looking for coaches.’ A month after I’m there, he said, ‘You’re the head coach because you know more about boxing and have been doing it longer than anybody.’”
The love Nader has for the sport is obvious, not only in how he interacts with his athletes, but for what he’s gone through to keep the club together over the past 12 years.
“We lost our lease, so we were down for a year, and we lost all our boxers because if you don’t have a place to train, you have to go someplace else,” he said. “Then it was a matter of rebuilding. Then a tornado hit us and tore the building down. It ripped all the doors out, bent the steel, and it was a year before the insurance company would settle up. It was 18 months before we got the gym back.”
Boxing in general suffers as a result of participation in other athletic activities, and that is particularly true in Arkansas, Nader said. That and a general misunderstanding about the sport and what it teaches are things he’s constantly up against, he said.
“The things I teach are character traits, not physical traits,” he said. “First one is determination; you have to not give up. The only sure way to lose in boxing is to quit.
“Second thing is, you’re not going to get it right, but you have to approach getting it right. You have to have the determination to continue, even though it didn’t work the first time. I tell them, ‘Failure is just a step on the way to success.’ Actually, you learn more from losing than you do from winning.”
On this night, Nathan Grummer, a lanky teen from Maumelle, came by for a trial training session with the club. As much as he wants the club to grow, Nader didn’t oversell to the kid. Instead, the first thing he showed him was a large banner on the wall bearing several points from Sun-tzu’s The Art of War. The message: Be a mental warrior first.
“You have to believe in yourself,” Nader explained later. “If you get in a ring with somebody, you have to believe you can win. You have to develop some self-confidence and some knowledge about who you are and what you can do.
“If you get in the boxing ring and you don’t have some fear in you, you don’t know what’s going on. What do you do with fear? You let it drive what you want to do instead of running away. You have a choice: fight or flight. Part of this is learning to face obstacles; then modify what you’re doing and change what you’re doing so it works. This has to be your own goal. You don’t box for a coach; you box for yourself.”
Along one wall, a row of parents took in the evening’s workout. Humberto Puentes’ three sons — Humberto, Erick and Gil — are in the program, and for the past year, the family has made the drive from Conway to Maumelle for the boys to train.
“They all wanted to try it at the same time, but they enjoy it differently,” their father said. “The tall one, the young one — they love it. The middle one, not so much.
“It’s good because it keeps them more focused. They want to be right here, training.”
That was music to the ears of Scott Grummer of Maumelle, the new kid’s father, who said he hoped boxing would provide some elements beyond sport-specific skills — “something to get him focused and get his mind on things to keep him active,” Grummer said. “For me, it’s almost like a youth military operation. He can have somebody who can feed life skills into him: routine and discipline. That’s the main thing — a positive focus versus a negative focus.”
Youth aren’t the only athletes who have found a home here. Nader trains boxers in their 50s and 60s and has seen his share of women give the sport a try, too, he said, a roster that includes his wife, who is also his assistant coach.
“When I first met him, he would go to box, and I was like, ‘Why would anybody do that? Why would you get in a ring and let somebody hit you?’” Phyllis Nader said. “I had never been in a boxing gym. My only picture was what I had seen in movies, and I would never have come in just by myself because I would have been intimidated. But getting to know him and getting to know something about the sport, it was like, ‘I want to learn how to do this.’”
“I came in and trained for maybe a year and a half, off and on, to learn how to box. My goal was to be able to get in there and spar and be in control of myself. But I heard his spiel a million times, so I just naturally started helping the kids, and he was like, ‘You need to get your coach’s certification.’
“Women are dramatically more coachable than men,” Allan Nader said. “Every guy thinks he knows how to fight. They’re in third grade, they roll around in the dirt, and what that does is program your brain. Whatever you did then, that’s what you do when you get in the ring. Women, on the other hand, say, ‘Teach me how to do it.’ They pay attention, and they do it.”
In what would be the twilight of many coaches’ careers, Nader is still chasing goals, particularly the one prize that has thus far eluded him.
“My goal is to produce an Olympian,” he said. “I have produced national-level competitors, people who’ve boxed on the U.S. team, boxed all over the world, pros that made money, but I have never produced an Olympian.”
“There are 56,000 registered boxers, and 10 make the Olympics. So you have to be good, you have to be lucky, and you have to be the right age at the right time. I had a couple guys who got close. Got put out in the trials, lost their second fight.
“I’ve got two here who have a possibility, and I figure I have, max, 15 years to make it. It’s too late for [the 2020 Olympics]. I don’t have anybody ready, but in the next four years, I might.” He grinned. “Experience counts,” he said. “You have to be able to adapt and adjust.”