 Salena Minter, age 35, from Kingston |
Minutes later, the boy emerges from the dark hallway, chocolate milk in hand. Wide awake and smiling, he traipses through the gym, eyes looking upward to the numerous adults he passes as he sips from a straw. Wiedenkeller follows behind, his khakis, turtleneck, and loafers exchanged for a black cut-off T-shirt and sweatpants. As the boy, Abraham, sets to work building a tower of blocks, his father stretches and wraps his hands, the two sharing the small space between a trio of punching bags suspended from the ceiling by chains.
Wiedenkeller begins to work the bag. He keeps his gloves up, his knees bent. As the bag swings and circles back at him, Wiedenkeller dips and swerves as though he knows where the bag is going before it goes. Each punch is delivered with purpose, and even the erratic rapid-fire bursts of aggressive jabs, like a drumroll, seem too precise to be emotive. Hearing an explosive release of punches, Abraham looks up from his tower, growing piece by piece as tall as he, with a proud smile upon his face. Recognizing immediately and without disappointment his father's concentration, he picks up another block and cautiously adds it to the stack.
Parrish Leitos, Demorest's tall and jovial sometime-assistant, approaches Abraham and playfully threatens to knock over his tower. In rash defense, Abraham grabs the blocks, toppling the tower to the ground. The collapse is inaudible amidst the popping of gloves on bags, jump ropes smacking the floor, and Bonnie Raitt on the stereo. Abraham takes off after Leitos, little arms swinging wildly by his sides; the chase ensues in one door of a back room and out the other, the two facing off in a bright patch of sunlight cast by the wall-to-wall picture windows on the far side of the ring. Leitos giggles at Abraham, his pursuer standing barely to his knees. Turning quickly on his little heels indignantly, Abraham heads back to his corner to rebuild his tower.
"Abraham has been coming with me to Demorest since he was born," Wiedenkeller says. For almost seven years now, at least once a week, Wiedenkeller has made the drive from his New Paltz insurance office to Brian Demorest's gym, on the corner of Broadway and Ulster Avenue in Kingston, which will be four years old this coming June. The proud parent of three children, a business owner, and boxer for more than 25 years, Wiedenkeller sees his life as a natural relationship between family, business, and boxing. Like the majority of those who train at Demorest, despite his level of commitment, Wiedenkeller has no aspirations of becoming a professional fighter. Eighty-five percent of Demorest's clients will never set foot in the ring.
While some people see sparring as the natural culmination of their training, it is rarely the motivation when they first take up boxing. Like Wiedenkeller, most come for the emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing that training facilitates. Though a large part of Demorest's business comes from private lessons, they are mostly geared towards fitness, rather than fighting. Vincent Cozzolino, a vice president at IBM, comes in every Saturday morning for a 70-minute workout, including jumping rope, abdominal work, shadow boxing, and punching—a workout that burns more than 900 calories. As one member put it, "There's being in shape, and there's being in boxing shape."
"Boxing has a black eye," Demorest will frequently remind you, his tone flat and without humor. And though Demorest will not argue the obvious fact that boxing is fighting, he thinks of his sport more like chess than scrapping. A bout is like a chess game, where each player must act and react with exceptional prowess. They must be able to exploit their opponent's weaknesses and predict their strengths. Much like the practice of martial arts, boxing promotes focus, whether the opponent is a heavy bag or another human being. It is this mental conditioning paired with the cathartic nature of direct and explosive physicality that makes the sport addictive to its adherents.