The moment I twisted the knob and
pulled open the door, I entered a time warp.
The décor of the Chet Cashman boxing
gym screamed more quasi-vintage ’70s/’80s than those far-out flare bell-bottoms
and bitchin’ denim jackets. The gym was encased in cinderblock walls caked with
the color of manila. Six small glass block windows were aligned across the top
of the walls, permitting just enough natural light while also providing a sense
of seclusion. A packaged figurine of Elvis Presley was propped up against one
of the windowsills. Multiple pipes ran across the ceiling, further contributing
to the gym’s cellar-like character.
The gym is a historical gem, nestled
underneath the Greater Ithaca Activities Center in downtown Ithaca, New York. As I stood
in the entrance to this tucked-away gym, which was no larger than your average
strip mall convenience store, I took in the surrounding sights and sounds.
The gym presented all of the boxing
essentials. An assortment of boxing gloves rested across a set of three pipes.
In the far left corner of the room was a speed bag in use, which echoed the
rhythmic beating of a Native American bass drum during a pow wow, crescendoing
gradually. Three body bags hung from the ceiling, two in the right corner and one
in the left. With each strike from a trainee the thick slab of wholesale beef
was tenderized.
And on the right was the main stage, the
ring, dressed in red, white and blue. This was where my interview subject for
the evening, Danny Akers, the head trainer of the gym, assisted in mitt
workouts with his young pups. It was the 5’4” 135-pound stocky Shannon Davis’,
the main subject of the article I was writing back in November of 2016, turn to
toss some jabs at his sensei. Every single punch that met mitt boomed like the
firing of a sixteenth century musket. I watched the session unfold and Davis
tire, his arms reduced to linguine, but ultimately persevere through the
grueling exercise.
As captivating as the spectacles that
took place around me were, what truly captivated my attention were the collages
of old newspaper clippings, fight promotions and worn photographs plastered
across certain segments of the gym’s walls. Each of these “Walls of Fame”
commemorated a range of boxers from Ithaca’s homegrown Ralph “Shocktime” Smiley
to “The Greatest” in Muhammad Ali, as well as boxer/trainer Chet Cashman
himself. More importantly, these shrines told the tales such as “Revenge At the
Armory” and “Everyone’s a Contender: Chet Cashman is Ithaca’s Mr. Boxing.” Past
class portraits recount the lineage of boxers who trained at the Chet Cashman
gym decades ago. It is headlines and photographs such as these that for a group
of individuals evoke stories that establish tradition and community. It is also
artifacts like these that for sports writers like myself lay the foundation for
who we are and why we put pen to paper.
When former Managing Editor of Sports Illustrated Terry McDonell wroteback in 2011 of the collective stories from sport’s history that the members of
his “tribe” share, he observed that sport allows for the conception of a
universal identity and how we as individuals “define ourselves in our sports.”
Well, the same goes for us sports penmen and penwomen. Instead, with the exception
of beat writers, we define ourselves in all
sports rather than just a single one.
In his inaugural column for ESPN in 2007,
NBA columnist J.A. Adande thought the most proper introduction he could give
his new readership was simply listing more than a handful of the reasons of why
he is enamored with task of writing about sports. He first stated that he
“writes about sports because they somehow manage to incorporate every aspect of
our world,” and then proceeds to catalog a litany of themes from “life, death,
hope, disappointment” to “health, drugs, love, hate.” A couple of more
paragraphs into his column, Adande proclaimed, “I am much more fascinated by
the how and why a team wins rather than who
wins.”
Youth sports fiction author Fred Bowen
was asked, “Are you just going to
write about sports?” It is a query that is posed to him from time to time, but
Bowen welcomed the question, and answered it with care. He discussed the
teaching value sports have for children, citing four significances. The third
impact he mentions was how “sports are the place where many kids tackle some
important issues.” Bowen referenced two novels of his, Winners Take All and Touchdown
Trouble, and locates the plots of these books in the struggle of seeking
answers to life’s toughest conflicts.
And then we have the sports scrivener
Rick Reilly, who in his ever so whimsical and witty disposition, chose the
Adande-route and issued a proclamation for why he too has the hots for composing
sports literature. In his 2009 column for ESPNThe Magazine, Reilly described sports as being “real,” noting they “can’t
be fake.” He comically compares them to Oprah,
and recalled a once severed bond between a father and son that was re-stitched
after the Boston Red Sox expunged the Curse of the Bambino in 2004. He said,
“Sports has mercy,” and harked back to an Illinois prep football game the year
the column was written, and how a kick returner passed up on scoring a
touchdown and ran out of bounds at the one-yard line. The player and his
teammates’ goal were for an autistic teammate to score the touchdown, which the
player did. Reilly also declared “sports has honor.” The example he used to
support this claim was during a Texas girl’s high school volleyball playoff
match when one player suffered a head injury and was carried of the court on a
stretcher. Her teammates were too emotional to continue playing and chose to
forfeit the match. But the opposing team refused to accept the forfeit because
it did not want to win in that fashion, and urged its adversary to reschedule
the match.
If you were reading closely, you should
have been able to hear the common melody sung within these three examples. Each
one touched upon the main motive as to why sports writers as well as fans are
so drawn to sports: the story. McDonell professed the importance of “the story”
in his piece when he pronounced that “it’s not about the scores and stats,” in
sports, “it’s about the stories.”
As much of a sponge as I am when it comes
to sports statistics, I along with every other sports writer understand the
power the anecdote has in enriching our work. We aspire to produce writing that
is vivacious and animated. Writing that is dry and plain to us is the
equivalent of eating a box of Wheat Thins that was left out for a week or two.
We want our readers to immerse themselves in the moment and experience the raw
emotions that are tied to it. And stories, not stats, do just that. We want our
audiences to feel as if they are reading a John Grisham novel, not the
encyclopedia.
Those newspaper articles, fight
promotions and snapshots from the Chet Cashman boxing gym were what consumed my
interest the most. I was that fiancé whose eyes were glued to the glass casings
of the 24-karrot wedding bands; I was absolutely mesmerized. I became so
invested in learning about the background and upbringing of the gym. Even if
this was only a sliver of the pie of the article that I was writing then, my focus
and curiosity still gravitated towards these remnants.
I was profiling Davis at the time to
discover the story behind how he began boxing at the amateur level. Davis
previously wrestled at Ithaca College before sustaining multiple concussions in
one season, and was advised by head coach Marty Nichols and athletic trainer Jess
Anderson to walk away from the mat, which he agreed to do. Eventually, Davis
began to self-train, pumping iron and hitting the heavy bag more, until he
found his way to the Chet Cashman gym. It was there that Akers admired Davis’
raw talent and asked Davis the three fateful words, “You tryna fight?” Without
hesitation, Davis retorted, “Yeah, I’m tryna fight,” and the rest was history.
My preliminary interview with Davis was
one of, if not the greatest interviews I have had in my career as a sports
writer. We chatted close to an hour. There were just so many rich details of
this young man’s journey that I wanted to explore deeper and deeper. I learned
he attended Blair Academy, which is one of the top-ranked wrestling high
schools in the country. I learned that he came from a long line of successful collegiate
wrestlers. Yet, he told me he realized over time he never truly had a strong
enough passion for wrestling, unlike with his newfound love in boxing. He also
described to me the times after school when he was sixteen-years-old and he
would return to his house in Newton, New Jersey and take a couple of rounds on
the heavy bag in his basement. A perfect foreshadowing, although Davis assured
me he had no idea he would find himself in the boxing ring in the subsequent
years.
Even when I was interviewing Akers on
Davis, I found myself more intrigued by the retellings of the history of the
Chet Cashman gym than by his insight on Davis as a boxer. I was even more
enthralled by Akers’ memory of the legendary Joe Frazier saying to him, “You
riding with me, trainer,” and the two of them hopping in Frazier’s set of
wheels and grabbing drinks at five-o-clock in the morning in Philly back in
1970. I knew all of this was more than likely not going to be incorporated into
my article, but I did not consider once pushing the stop button on my recorder
and cutting off the interview from there. The anecdotes he was sharing with me
then were too precious to turn a deaf ear to.
It is narratives such as hitting up the
bar with Joe Frazier and the articles pasted on the gym walls that emit a
strong sense of nostalgia to whoever hears them or reads them. They let the
listener or reader to fantasize, transporting him or her back in time to that
moment and allowing him or her to experience a slice of history that is so
personal that very few individuals can truly say they have lived. To what
Adande and Reilly alluded to in their work, the stories in sports give us the
rare opportunity to experience facets of life that we either have yet
experience or do not have the chance to experience. Accounts reminiscent to
Davis’ illustrate to the audience the similar lessons Bowen tries to teach in
his novels, that even though there will be a time in our development when we
face a road block, at some point we will find our true calling.
And like what McDonell iterated in his
piece, these types of stories that arise through sports are what mold sport
writers into their true identity: the yarn spinner. We are students of sport’s
chronicles. We are the grandkids who cluster around grandpa’s rocker to listen
to him reminisce about the golden years of the Say Hey Kid, Wilt the Stilt and Roger
the Dodger. We are also memoirists of athletics’ antiquity. We desire to take
the thread of the yarn from a person or group’s hand and spin it, so that even the
grandest of epics such as Davis’ self-pilgrimage and to the smallest of tales of
rides at dawn with Joe Frazier will continue to be told and heard by more and
more generations, perpetually.
