Pequannock resident prepares for Friday amateur boxing bout

Thursday, Aug. 9, 2012
By Steve Janoski

When 22-year-old Sean Cogavin straps on the headgear, puts in his mouthpiece, and steps between the ring ropes, he's all in — full bore, no letting up.

Round after round the young Pequannock resident goes, bobbing, weaving, ducking and hooking, always preferring to spar only the toughest, most experienced opponents at Aces Boxing Club inBoonton. When he steps out, his eye is blackened and his nose faces a little further west, but he has no complaints.

Just a few weeks later, and he's already had two bouts across the Hudson after only four months in the gym, and he's given club owner and coach Joe Zabry the green light to put him on as many cards as possible. Put plainly, he loves to fight.

His personality outside of the ring is a sharp departure from his rough ring manners, however. Standing a lean 6 feet tall, he is exceedingly polite and affable, the kind of guy every trainer wants in his gym.

Once the bell rings, though, that mood changes, and there's no doubt that as he looks out the window of the sweltering third-floor gym on a Sunday afternoon, the tattooed, gray-eyed fighter is ready for his New Jersey debut and hopes to notch his first victory in front of a crowd of family and friends this Friday night.

He gets asked questions about why he picked this sport all the time, but he doesn't expect those who've never fought to understand.

"You don't realize it until you step in the ring and you actually move with somebody and yeah, you take a few hits you give a few hits…but it's therapy, you know what I mean?" he said.

And reflecting on his short but intense amateur career, the Lincoln Tech graduate said that boxing has become an escape from the daily grind of working in the labor-intensive HVAC field, one that he approaches with a blue-collar attitude that involves few words, lots of sweat, and a little blood.

He's found it's a different game than basketball, which he played during his four years at PequannockTownship High School, and the pressure of being alone in the ring, with no one to depend on when his lungs falter, is startling.

Family ties

One might say that the sport runs thick in his family's blood; besides an Irish cousin who fights overseas, his grandfather on his mother's side was a boxer in the Navy, while his father's father fought in the Marines. So maybe it was fate that the Ryan Lane resident, who always had heavy bags and speed bags in his home, found his way into Aces on the advice of a friend and to the chagrin of his mother, who never told him about the family hobby so as to not encourage him to take up the brutal pursuit.

Cogavin, however, called his mother "a trooper" who just greeted the notion of her son fighting with a shake of her head.

And that's what it's all about, after all — the fighting. Every workout, all the dieting, every minute of jumping rope and pad work, and endless miserable heavy bag drills, all aimed at performing flawlessly for just one night. Cogavin said the sport's rhythms are deceptively difficult, even for someone who prides himself on being in shape.

"Even that first day jumping rope, it just blows your mind….it's like, 'Damn, I can't even jump rope that good,'" he said.

When he does get in the ring, Cogavin fights in what historically could be called the Irish manner: in his zeal to exchange, his fists (and sometimes his face) lead the way.

"With a guy like Sean, you gotta hold him back enough to where he's not dangerous or a detriment to himself in that ring…you've got to save him from himself initially," said Coach Zabry, who is working on improving Cogavin's skills and patience.

However, the coach said that it can be difficult to rein in a born brawler's inherent recklessness, even when it's absolutely necessary, and teaching him, to use his height, footwork, and long arms to position an opponent before unleashing the lion is sometimes a struggle that can only be learned through experience.

"What Sean didn't realize is that it's easy to get into a fight, but it's not easy to win a boxing bout," he said. "Unfortunately, Sean is one of those hard-headed Irish kids that … you have to beat 'boxing' into."

In general though, a fighter's most important attributes are invisible to the naked eye, and Cogavin has two of the most crucial: the ability to take a punch (a "chin"), and a steadfast work ethic, both of which were on display last Saturday after a particularly bad loss in a Long Island bout.

"He took a beating, he felt like [expletive]," Zabry said. "But the next day, he was right back in the gym. And that says a lot about a boxer's character."

And the fighter looks at it the same way. Every bout is a lesson, no matter if he wins or loses. That's why he told Zabry that he wants rack up as many amateur fights as possible over the next year with an eye toward turning pro.

"Right now, man, I'll fight a guy that's 30-0. I'll fight anybody, 'cause it's only gonna make me better," he said.

Olympic dreams?

Cogavin admits he caught the Olympic buzz a bit and considered training for four more years in order to shoot for 2016, but his clock is ticking in a sport where a pugilist's "prime" is considered to be between the ages of 26 to 30. Right now, he's playing catch-up.

And of course, he can't look past this Friday. There's a lot on the line, and it will be his first time fighting in front of his family, friends, and – perhaps most importantly – his mother.

"I don't want to get beat up (in front of her). I don't want to get to where…every night I come home, she's like, 'Really? This is really what you're doing still?' So hopefully it's a blowout," he said with a laugh.

However, Zabry believes that the crowd will see a more cautious boxer instead of a face-first, Rocky-style southpaw brawler. Even if they don't, though, both coach and boxer know it will be just another lesson.

"Sean's one of these guy's that's just like, '[Expletive] it, let's fight. I'll fight everyone in front of me,'" Zabry said.

Full bore. As always.

For tickets, call Aces Boxing Club at 973-794-6509.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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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

http://www.northjersey.com/sports/153427975_Pulling_Aces_from_a_crowded_deck.html?page=all