Boxing clever through the years
Ashley Fourie is giving back with his Boxercise gym
KEVIN RITCHIE
ASHLEY Fourie is living proof that you should never judge a book by its cover. With a face that’s seen more than its fair share of kilometres, a hairstyle that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 1980s, a chain around his neck that could tow a small car and a collection of silver rings above his knuckles bookending the flames tattooed up his forearms – the last thing you’d think was that he’s a 70-year-old grandfather.
You’d be right, though, if you pegged him as a biker – not a middle-aged crisis looking for a Harley, but the real thing now in his 10th year at the legendary Crusaders Motorcycle Club. You’d be right if you took him for a boxer; the loping gait of the fighter or maybe it’s just the boxing T-shirts that are part and parcel of his everyday get-up along with the skinny jeans and the sneakers tell the tale.
Fourie used to be a boxer, a very good boxer in his youth, rising through the age divisions collecting titles along the way: best in Johannesburg as a 13-year-old, South African champion at 15 and then at 16 beating the legendary Mike Schutte on points because he’d overindulged in sweets and cooldrinks at the school café at KES and inadvertently gone up a weight division before the bout.
His love for motorcycles proved his undoing. He bought his first, a 49cc, as soon as he was legally allowed to, progressing up to a 250cc doing odd jobs where he could, cleaning out his dad’s pigeon lofts at their Yeoville home and then a 500cc bike when he turned pro. He’d won the open SA title as an amateur, then rated number three in his weight division a year after turning pro he was about to fight the number two ranked fighter in the division and after that get a crack at the championship belt.
But it was not to be. Cleaned off his bike by a car as he was on his way to the gym, he spent the next 19 months undergoing 26 operations.
“The doc said I’d never walk again,” he remembers with a grin, but he confounded the medics and climbed back in the ring – albeit without a left knee cap – two years later.
I went to Cape Town and beat the Western Province champion, but after another four fights I called it a day,” he says. “I became bitter, so I started bouncing in Hillbrow, both for the money because I’d become a dad and also because I hated bullies.”
It was tough, working in the day as a technician with what is today Telkom and bouncing at night. He was shot three times before he packed it in. Once again, he sought solace in boxing, this time with the legendary trainer Willie Toweel, learning the ropes as a trainer not a fighter, helping to prepare boxers like Charlie Weir, Sugar Boy Malinga and Bruce Mcintyre.
He left after four years to further his career with Telkom down in Kwazulu-natal, but still found time to become vice chair of the KZN boxing association.
When he transferred back to Joburg, he joined Toweel again. He tried to turn his back on boxing once and for all, but when he left to bring up his four kids as a single dad, four of Toweel’s pro boxers followed him, demanding to be trained even though he had no gym, so he hung up a couple
of bags in the trees in the backyard and trained them there, taking one of them to a draw in a championship title bout.
Retrenched from Telkom after 33 years’ service, Fourie had no doubt what he would do – return to boxing, but this time with Boxercise, only the second gym at the time in the country to do so. He set up shop in Blairgowrie, a suburb in Johannesburg’s north where he had originally helped put up telephone poles and run telephone lines in when it was still farmland.
That was 21 years ago, with five women in the class. One of them still trains today with him. He also started getting younger boys coming in, at the behest of parents worried that their sons were losing their way.
“It started off just giving them purpose, but soon they wanted to box competitively as amateurs. I had a helluva of a job I must tell you because the kids in the north aren’t as tough as those youngsters in the south, one strike to the mouth and they’d run howling. But we persevered and every time we beat the boys in the south their trainers would applaud us, because they knew what it had taken.”
Fourie trained his sons and saw them become SA champions, with his eldest becoming an under-19 world cup winning Springbok rugby player too.
“The success stories that stick closest to my heart aren’t the champions that I’ve seen gone on to win belts, but the kids that learnt to believe in themselves and find themselves and then go on to fulfil their potential.
“My passion, though, believe it or not, is Boxercise... giving people the opportunity who have never done sport in their lives or did it as kids to come back, get fit and have fun doing it.”
In his own way, he’s paying back the gift the sport gave him as a youngster being bullied at Yeoville Boys.
“You can imagine what it was like, a surname like Fourie in an English school and ears like mine. I was getting beaten up every day, so my dad enrolled me in the Yeoville boxing gym, which was only a block from where we lived. I loved it from day one. I learnt to defend myself against bigger guys, I loved the training and the discipline. No one ever bullied me again.”
This year he’s in his fifth gym in Blairgowrie in 21 years. It’s brand new and he’s raring to go.
● For details about Boxercise, call Fourie on 072 297 1811.