Sweat, the sweet science and solidarity The 1-2 combo of Pan Am Boxing Club and sister organization Pan Am Place halfway house strives to help Winnipeggers absorb the body blows both in the ring and in life at large By: Conrad Sweatman Posted: 11:15 AM CDT Friday, Apr. 12, 2024

“My name’s John L. Sullivan and I can lick any son-of-a-b—— in the house,” so the 19th-century Boston-Irish boxer was known to boast. With these words, he introduced not just himself but, as legend has it, trash-talking to the boxing world. Most popularized by Muhammad Ali, the art form now seems as tied to the “sweet science” of boxing as stinging bees with floating butterflies.

There’s a hint of that art in the way Chris Sarifa addresses his boxing classes at the Pan Am Boxing Club.

“I don’t wanna see you drop your f—-ing hands! Your opponent’s just gonna exploit that,” the neck-tattooed trainer bellows over West Coast hip-hop inside a basement gym almost foggy with sweat.

I’m pretty sure he’s talking about me, all wild swings and telegraphing tonight. Over the six months Pan Am Boxing Club has become my unexpected sanctuary, it’s hardly the first time an instructor there has barked correctives, like a fiery preacher or floor manager, in my direction.

But invigorating, not humiliating, captures the spirit of most of the trash-talk firing around this gym, whose culture is a strange, wondrous thing.

For an organization that teaches a violent sport, in the downtown of Canada’s reputedly most-dangerous city, Pan Am Boxing Club impresses one for how friendly its environment is. Wholesome even.

Today it’s fashionable for organizations to glossily advertise their “diversity, equity and inclusion commitments,” then to go on catering to the same cliques they always have. Glossy Pan Am is not, which also may reflect why it’s one of Winnipeg’s most genuine microcosms.

“For sure, you get all types of people here,” says Sarifa who’s also manager of Pan Am Place, a halfway house for men, and Pan Am Boxing Club’s sister organization and neighbour. “Hard exercise can unite people.”

All this exertion and it’s no wonder that what Pan Am advertises as “Winnipeg’s hardest workout” is also its stinkiest.

In the drop-in classes I attend, 30 people or so cram into a windowless cellar to smash things with sledgehammers and gloved fists while the trainers pace and shout directions.

You’re not going to smell like you just left happy hour at 529 Wellington Steakhouse, the tony restaurant in the city’s Crescentwood neighbourhood. In moments of self-pity, I compare these scenes to the “satanic mills” and factories that once surrounded Pan Am’s McDermot Avenue location during Winnipeg’s industrial era.

Drop-in classes usually include a few rounds of body sparring. (You’ll need to prove yourself for several months, and provide a doctor’s note, before trying classes with headshots.) The drop-in crowd is young, old, heavyset, petite, tall and short. I’ve been knocked around or outmanoeuvred by all the above and left sparring rounds dizzy and sore.

But only rarely have I felt others were pushing past my comfort zone, a big no-no at Pan Am. A nonbinary-inclusive sign hangs above the changeroom entrances, where snatches of Ukrainian and Arabic can be overheard.

Still, the drop-in crowd skews male. This probably has something to do with the presence of Pan Am Place’s residents, for whom gym membership is free. There’s no shortage of women trainers though, and everyone who enters the gym is greeted, after the smell, with a wall of fame reflecting the fact Winnipeg’s competitive boxing scene is hardly just a boys’ club.

If the drop-in class’s motley crew has a common denominator, it’s an almost old-fashioned interest in self-improvement. If there’s a common lingo, it’s gentle ribbing and quiet grumbling in the middle of a gruelling set.

There are times I leave class as slippery with others’ sweat as my own, an odd intimacy with strangers. But there’s a friendly impersonality to it all. People rarely ask you what you do for a living or really even seem to care. In any case, if you talk or moan too much, there’s a good chance Chris, Raylee or another trainer will descend to give you a little sermon peppered with threats: “You can do it! Don’t give up, or you’ll get planks!”

When it’s over, your trainers and opponents warmly reach out to fist-bump you. I recognize the ritual and motivational clichés, but like the Limp Bizkit blaring over the speakers — “like a chainsaw, skin your ass raw!” — it pumps me up despite myself.

A colour-blind playing field where work ethic is the main thing — isn’t there a tired, drag-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps ring to all this? Worse, doesn’t boxing promote violence that could seep out of the ring and onto the streets?

We’re touching on the larger debates that surround boxing as a vehicle for community outreach. Notwithstanding, it’s hard to deny Pan Am has become one of Winnipeg’s most intriguing “safe spaces” for those our city too often passes over.

Though Pan Am now relies on government funding, the origin stories surrounding Pan Am are about hometown heroes and bold private initiative. Sugar Ray Leonard once called boxing “a poor man’s sport,” though in Winnipeg it certainly has its patrons.

One of these is Harry Black — a man who attracts honorifics, like president and head trainer at Pan Am, founder of an accounting firm, president of ProTELEC alarms, Canadian national boxing champion and Olympian. As a fighter, Black cut his teeth under Pan Am’s former head coach Ed Yaremchuk, who according to local lore established Pan Am in 1968 after a chance meeting on a city bus.

Yaremchuk is legendary for having volunteered nearly all his spare time — and much of his spare cash — to bringing up a generation of Winnipeg fighters.

In 2013, Pan Am made community outreach a bigger part of its mission by opening Pan Am Place, and in 2016, the North End Boxing Club, a partnership with the City of Winnipeg. The two programs dovetail, with NEBC aimed at kids — it offers a free after-school program for 12- to 17-year-olds — and Pan Am Place aimed at young men, age 18 and up. As well as a team of passionate staff, a small army of volunteers helps keep everything ticking.

Testimonials from former residents on Pan Am Place’s website read like the uplifting stuff of Hollywood movies. They relate experiences of jail time, homelessness and addiction — and then deliverance, after an embrace of boxing and the residency’s almost monastic lifestyle.

If boxing can be a secular religion, a vehicle for redemption and liberation through disciplined struggle, Pan Am is a vital church and commands the respect of one

One of these testimonials is from BJ Heinrichs, who spent three years at Pan Am Place. “I’ve struggled with addiction since I was 15 years old,” he says. Before joining Pan Am, Heinrichs tells us he “had lost trust with all my family and friends. I hit rock bottom, and then I hit rock bottom again.” Through his residency he sustained sobriety, finished schooling, and now lives independently and works full-time as a personal trainer.

I’m moved by Heinrichs’ story but, over a conversation with him, I find myself blurting out things I know signal my boxing-noob status. Boxing’s role in helping troubled youth find the straight and narrow is part of the sport’s mythology. But that doesn’t change the fact the sport is a violent one. What gives?

“I channel my inner demons every time I box,” he says. “The discipline’s there with lifting weights too, but the boxing gym is a little less self-absorbed. Everyone’s in it together, and at Pan Am people truly endure these workouts together… So, it builds community.”

Not every one of Pan Am’s residents stays the course. A musician friend of mine spent a couple months of a house arrest sentence at Pan Am but, in keeping with its code of conduct, was ultimately asked to leave for breaking curfew. I can tell this bruised his ego, but he doesn’t seem to regret his time at Pan Am.

“I’ve always been a fighter and now I’m a better one,” he tells me. I’ve seen him in bar fights, but is he speaking partially in metaphor? The do-gooder in me wants to think so. We move on to talking about his recent successes in music. The boxing gym may not be for him, but his focus on creativity seems stronger since confronting his addictions at Pan Am.

Sarifa, who manages Pan Am Place, tells me he’s unaware of any studies of Pan Am’s long-term outcomes for participants. If the matter were researched, there would be a lot to consider.

Pan Am, as a greater organization, isn’t just taking on reform and access to opportunities for at-risk youth and men. It’s also a hub where Winnipeg’s four corners interact, trade jokes and jabs, and maybe come to know one another a little better. There are no elixirs, and barely enough Band-Aids, to treat problems such as social fragmentation, the epidemic of addiction and urban decay.

These are abstract terms for up-close, ever-present realities in parts of Winnipeg.

It’s hard to expect non-profits to singlehandedly make more than a dent in them. Yet, on the few occasions I’ve heard locker-room conversations after class turn to the organization’s role in all this, any trash-talking is completely absent.

If boxing can be a secular religion, a vehicle for redemption and liberation through disciplined struggle, Pan Am is a vital church and commands the respect of one.

Conrad Sweatman is a Winnipeg writer.