Pulling Aces from a crowded deck

BY STEVE JANOSKI

For Joe Zabry, the "Fight Night" he’s hosting on Friday at the Boonton Elks’ Club is more than just an amateur boxing show — it’s a light at the end of a long, winding tunnel that will signal a triumph in the wake of several years of broken business deals and countless setbacks.

His story is not unique in the boxing world, which is second only to politics in viciousness and rarely has room for good men.

But as he sits in his office, its walls crowded with pictures of famous fighters, past and present, surrounding an expansive aerial shot of New York City’s Flat Iron Building, he has the look of man who finally has a clear purpose.

Zabry, a youthful-looking 36-year-old, has a spiral of tattoos winding down his left arm and is rarely seen without a baseball cap and a whistle around his neck. He’s a vigorous talker, a mover, bursting at the seams with energy and ideas and optimism reminiscent of Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty.

Boxing has been in his blood since the start: both his father and uncle worked as mechanics during the day and part-time trainers at night. He started at an early age and, between boxing, MMA, has had well over 100 fights.

He left at 18 for the Air Force; 11 years later, he returned to New Jersey, and continued to fight while at the same time becoming involved in several gyms that left him with something of a bad taste in his mouth.

Now though, on the third floor of an old brick building on Main Street in Boonton, he seems to have found a permanent home for Aces Boxing Club.

The gym, like Zabry, is a mixture of old-school and new-school. Freshly painted gray sheetrock contrasts sharply with where the red brick peeks through, and brand-new heavy bags are wrapped with peeling duct tape around their midsections.

A black boxing ring sits in the corner of the gym. Someone is always using it.

Zabry has moved within walking distance of the gym; now, he says, there are times that he doesn’t drive for two weeks at a time. He buys lunch from the deli downstairs, and eats it in his office, which looks out over the training area. He always answers the phone.

And slowly, in a trickle that has turned into a stream, they’ve come, walking down bustling Main Street, through the gray metal doors, up the two flights of wooden steps to the chorus of slaps and thuds that accompany all boxing gyms.

Friday night will be the amateur debut for five out of the six boxers from Aces, and they, along with Zabry, will see exactly how much their work has paid off. The fights are as important to the coach as they are to the fighters.

"I always tell these guys – your wins are my wins, your losses are my losses, your lessons in the ring are my lessons in the ring," he said.

If they lose, he says, he wants them to use it as motivation to have a better showing in eight weeks, when he’s planning his next card – to show a fighter’s heart, even in the face of defeat.

This is difficult, and he knows it; Zabry is well aware of the psychological aspects of fighting, and that’s one of the reasons he’s built Aces as he has – more "club," less "gym."

He speaks on things like the "circle of life in a boxing gym," where younger fighters look up to the older ones, more experienced ones, and the more experienced ones look up to the Golden Gloves — and maybe, one day, Olympic – champs.

But it all starts with Friday, with the fight itself. May 25 is D-Day, and nothing, he says, sharpens the mind and the body like preparing for a fight.

Even if they never fight again, they will remember that night for the rest of their lives.

"(The fights) give all of our boys the option of being a local, hometown hero," he says. "Even if they go nowhere with this….we’re going to make them feel like a rock star for that night in front of all their friends and family."

And regardless of wins and losses, boxing has given many of them the experience that adulthood often lacks: the feeling of being a part of something greater than one’s self, of knowing what it’s like to truly spill blood and sweat next to someone else in the pursuit of a common goal.

It’s these bonds, forged by the hours of physical misery in preparation for a fight — be it in a ring in Boonton or the mountains of Afghanistan — that are often the strongest.

It is also a way of reaching back to a more gritty time and pulling the idea of hard lessons, of earning your pride, out from the past.

Boxing has always been an inner-city, immigrant sport, Zabry says, but as the families prospered and left the tenements of Paterson and Newark, Jersey City and Elizabeth, there became little reason to try and earn money with one’s fists.

For many a suburbanite kid that walks through his doors, Dad wasn’t the boxer — Grandpa was, and putting on the gloves reignites the connection that so many families have with fighting.

And the fighter’s story, he says, is eternal.

"If you like history, you like boxing. If you like love stories, you like boxing. If you like rags to riches, you like boxing. Boxing is about stories, fighting is about stories," he says.

These are the stories he see every day, walking up his stairs, dropping their backpacks, putting on the gloves and the headgear, and proving to themselves that they are, in fact, men. That they’re not scared.

"There’s a lot of lessons in that ring that you learn that apply to life… a whole level of self-awareness, responsibility, and accountability," he says. "The boys that don’t understand it, don’t get it, they normally drop out."

The ones that do end up having the stories worth telling.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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