Golden Gloves champ aims high
At 201 pounds and 6-feet31/2, boxer Ryan Skelton qualified as a heavyweight at the state Golden Gloves championship in West Palm Beach last month. But for some reason, officials told the 26-year-old they were moving him up a notch, to fight as a super-heavyweight.
“I said, ‘You know what, it doesn’t matter to me. I’ll end up fighting the big boys, anyway.’ I did and ended up winning it.”
The Palm Beach Gardens resident, who trains in West Palm Beach with five-time world kickboxing champion Steve Shepherd, said he and Shepherd were a bit discomfited watching the guy he was about to fight drop an opponent in the first round with a shot to the head.
“Even though I’ve never been knocked down or hurt, we said, ‘let’s come up with a game plan,’” Skelton recalled Friday. “It was basically just going to be, moving to my right, away from his power hand. He was a righty.”
It worked. “He never adapted, never landed any big shots, especially not with the right hand.”
Skelton went to high school in Venice, Fla., on the Gulf Coast, where he played wide receiver on the football team, with his father as the coach. He moved to Palm Beach Gardens in 2010 and took up boxing soon after.
He trained with a successful pro fighter named Dave Lewter, a Florida Boxing Hall of Fame inductee. When Lewter stopped training, Skelton looked up Shepherd, also a Florida Boxing Hall of Fame member, whose KickBox-SuperFIT gym is at 915 N. Dixie Hwy. (Shepherd quit the Hall of Fame last month, to protest Mixed Martial Arts rules he felt allowed unnecessary violence.)
“I wanted to train with the best, and Steve had trained Dave.”
When he’s not punching people, Skelton works as a server at Blue Point Bar and Grill, on the water in Tequesta.
But his heart is in the ring. He plans to keep fighting locally, statewide and beyond, with Shepherd as his trainer and promoter.
“Once you start continuing to win as a pro, you can get bigger and bigger opportunities,” he said. “And then there’s Showtime, HBO, those are the big ones. That’s where you start making a lot of money boxing . ... That’s been my dream for the longest time.”