Boxing in Philadelphia by Gabe Oppenheim

Author:Gabe Oppenheim [Oppenheim, Gabe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
ISBN: 9781442236455
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

16. Murray Dubin, Philadelphia Inquirer, November 29 and December 5, 1977.

17. Vince Kasper, Philadelphia Daily News, March 21, 1986.

18. Thomas J. Gibbons, Philadelphia Inquirer, August 14, 1988.

19. Dan Gelston, Associated Press, February 19, 2005.

20. Pierce Egan, Boxiana (London: G. Virtue, 1829), 5–6.

Part Two

New Day Rising

Chapter 5

The Worksites

Mr. Pat didn’t hide all his demons from me—some he readily shared. He told me about his alcoholism (while omitting what brought it on). One night he drunkenly thought he was in a boxing match with a tree and spent hours hitting it like a heavy bag. His nadir came in the early ’90s when he was working for the city morgue (a place I tried hard to picture—another worksite). He was sneaking into work each day with a small bottle of moonshine (imported from the South) in his sock. One day during his commute, he drunkenly fell down a flight of underground stairs and onto trolley tracks, from which he was removed in time. It was then that he was forced into rehab.

He also told me about the recovery process—the way he began writing poetry. One poem contained this: “This was the life I chose to live.”

That sort of regret was his trademark.

But there was another aspect to his memory that I was drawn to: the recollection of place. Nearly everyone in the Philly boxing world, even the younger fighters, recollected some older bygone gym or arena or neighborhood he or she used to occupy. It wasn’t because developers had a habit of tearing down small local gems in favor of large commercial buildings—Philadelphia had no such willing developers. It was more a case of places almost disappearing—crumbling very slowly day by day, until one night, in the darkness, they were just expended, gone. Poof.

Others vanished more nefariously.

The names of the places leaked out of Mr. Pat’s scrapbook: the Alhambra, the Passyunk Gym (both South Philly staples Mr. Pat spent a lot of time in), the Cambria, Champs. You hear grandiose names such as these—Alhambra, named for the Moorish palace in Spain; Passyunk, named for the street, which was named for the Native American trail (in the Lenape language, “passyunk” means “in the valley”)—and you have to find out what happened to them, whether they still exist. I asked Mr. Pat to accompany me on such trips, but he waved me off.

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