The New York Times-20080127-Grit Beneath the Glitter

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Grit Beneath the Glitter

Full Text (2077  words)[Author Affiliation] Barbara Lazear Ascher is the author of Dancing in the Dark: Romance, Yearning and the Search for the Sublime.

ADELINO DA COSTA peered above his red leather boxing gloves and locked eyes with his opponent. Their knees bent, their bodies at an angle, the two men dodged, ducked, jabbed and wove within a 20-foot-by-20-foot red carpeted ring raised above a polished concrete floor marked with yellow and orange stripes.

Releasing his right elbow like a spring, Mr. Da Costa shot a fist forward, straight and swift. Gloves collided, producing a sound like a drum punctuating the music of Tabanka Djaz, a band from Mr. Da Costa's native Guinea-Bissau, in West Africa. The music blasted through the subterranean boxing gym on Madison Avenue near 78th Street, just steps from where afternoon tea was being served in delicate bone china cups at the Carlyle Hotel.

As an uppercut shot past his head and into thin air, Mr. Da Costa raised his arm to signal a halt to the sparring and embraced his opponent, a boxing student who had paid $145 an hour to hone his skills in this netherworld. As the student removed his face guard and shook his head with discouragement, Mr. Da Costa smiled.

Make mistakes, he whispered, but make them with confidence.

It was 6 p.m. on a recent Wednesday at Punch Fitness Center, the gym established a year ago by Mr. Da Costa, a former Portuguese national kickboxing champion who is 30 and now lives on the Upper West Side. Seven clients -- lawyers, hedge fund managers and a model -- were practicing fancy footwork; at other times during the day, the brightly striped gray floor would be filled with 4-year-olds, octogenarians, young mothers and tattooed professional fighters.

The neophytes winced as the trainers instructed them to squat and stay put while their hands were wrapped in long cotton bands and then eased into thickly padded, mitten-shaped boxing gloves, preparing them to take aim at more than 20 punching bags of various kinds, four mean-faced mannequins and the trainers themselves.

Aquilino Delgado, one of the gym's 11 trainers, urged a woman in her 20s with glutes as firm and round as unripe cantaloupes to loosen up and move with the beat of the music. Pow! Pow! Mr. Delgado grinned and jabbed. Salsa boxing!

Oh, she said, laughing. That's my favorite kind!

It has taken a year, but the people above ground are slowly discovering what is going on one story beneath the street. Little did they realize as they shopped for $975 chinchilla ascots at Parker or $2,300 cocktail suits at Luca Luca, two high-end boutiques next to the gym's entrance, that sweat was flying beneath their elegantly shod feet.

Mr. Da Costa, who discovered his gift and passion for boxing as a child in Portugal and went on to twice become that country's middleweight kickboxing champion, has a reputation and a following. In the world of professional boxers, word traveled fast that Punch was a place to come to train for a big match. But for the uninitiated, the only clues were two boxing gloves, one red, one yellow, above a recessed doorway at street level in a five-story office building.

In the gym's early days, Mr. Da Costa occasionally emerged to invite homeward-bound moguls to stop by for a visit. For the most part, they politely rejected his offer: Thanks, Rasta Man, another time. But eventually, with dreams of Sugar Ray dancing in their heads, a few dared to descend those stairs.

Now barely a year old, the gym is a thriving business that recently doubled its space to 3,000 square feet and added 15 pieces of punching equipment, a massage room, space for group training and the new regulation ring for training professional mixed martial arts fighters.

Yet despite its owner's panache, Punch is not to everyone's taste.

That chichi place? said Lou DiBella, president of DiBella Entertainment, a leading boxing promoter. You won't find me there. I promote world champs. Punch isn't my kind of gym. Rich kids don't box. They play tennis. Poor kids fight.

The city is home to many boxing gyms, some of them legendary, like the 17,000-square-foot Gleason's, near the Brooklyn waterfront. In 1937, when Gleason's opened in the South Bronx, boxing was a gritty sport and its practice was restricted to gyms in parts of the city where, as Bruce Silverglade, Gleason's longtime owner, put it, Nobody wanted to go.

Starting about a decade ago, both the sport and the neighborhoods where it is practiced became increasingly upscale. At Punch, which attracts about 50 clients a day, evenly split between men and women, there's no scent of sweat, a gym staple that is noticeable here for its absence. (Great ventilation, one patron explained.) There is another difference, the lighting: Recessed illumination flatters, rather than casting the grim light of low fluorescence.

It would be easy to make the mistake of thinking that what goes on in this clean, well-lighted place is less than deadly serious. The constant, watchful presence of Mr. Da Costa's 5-foot-9, 160-pound sculptured and tattooed body, his head topped with dreadlocks, corrects that impression.

This is a sport that can be turned aggressively outward or used as a method for self-awareness, he explained as a weary client took a break at the water fountain. To that end, he sometimes sounds more like a dharma teacher than a boxing coach. Know yourself. Stay focused. Be present.

You have to give the client confidence, he said. Once you've done that, then you can begin to change them. You change the inside first, then you work on technique.

Alan Pollack, a 60-year-old trial lawyer who lives seven blocks from the gym, claims to have been changed. Mr. Pollack arrives promptly at 7, as he does three times a week, for his nightly sparring, and dons headgear, baggy knee-length boxing shorts and flat black leather regulation shoes that lace above the ankle.

Boxing, Mr. Pollack says, has served him well.

I'm paid to fight for my clients, he explained as he waited for Mr. Da Costa to show up for a sparring match. And I'm mentally, physically stronger from boxing.

Mr. Pollack has been awarded a high honor: a nickname. It is a badge of courage in the world of boxing. Think of Hurricane Carter, Smokin' Joe Frazier, Bonecrusher Smith. These names evoke the poetry of the streets, which is echoed in the names written boldly across the gloves of a few similarly honored clients, puffy trophies stored and hanging on the walls. A-Train. All Day. Mouthpiece. Bench.

Mr. Pollack is Silver Fox, and the name suits him. He has white hair and a stealthy manner. Swift on his feet, he's learned the art of the feint. He has absorbed one of Mr. Da Costa's main rules: For every movement, you fake three, so your opponent doesn't see what's coming.

This rule, Mr. Pollack says, is helpful in the courtroom, which, following the advice of his trainers, he won't be abandoning for the ring any time soon.

Turns out I have to keep my day job, he said with a laugh. No matter how good I thought I was, they made sure to let me know I wasn't that good. Still, he added in his own defense, I do have a good left-right combination.

At 2 o'clock the next afternoon, the gym closed, as it does daily, so that the pros and occasional visiting prizefighter can train. Some of the world's best boxers can be seen here; this day, Mr. Da Costa was preparing Marcelo Garcia for the South Korean national championship in mixed martial arts. Those sitting ringside studied the intensity of focus and precision of blows and shouted Porrada! -- Portuguese slang for kick his behind.

Another fighter slipped between the ropes to take his turn challenging Mr. Garcia's endurance as Mr. Da Costa returned to a stool on the sidelines and traced the circuitous journey that had brought him to this underground arena. He moved with his family from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal when he was 9. Eight years ago, he arrived in New York.

I come from a dark place, Mr. Da Costa said. To illustrate his point, he went to a computer and pulled up a YouTube video showing the unpaved streets of Marianas sa ta Caba, the Portuguese village where he was raised. On the screen were images of boys being beaten with baseball bats and people being pulled from their homes at gunpoint, their shanties razed and burned.

The most beautiful flower grows in a dark place, he said quietly, his eyes on the computer screen. His voice was so soft, one had to lean in to hear the words. Look at the lotus, he said.

Mr. Da Costa has a special affinity for very young boxers, in part because he himself started honing his skills at an early age. When you're 5 or 6 years old, he said, you start looking for the person you're meant to be.

He has an affectionate way with children, and he rigorously supervises the trainers who teach them. The children respond. That afternoon, as the gym reopened to the general population, the place took on an atmosphere more in keeping with a kindergarten than a champion's training ground.

Among those present were James Cacioppo Jr., a 4-year-old who lives in nearby Carnegie Hill and who had flung himself into his lesson by running across the room and leaping into the arms of Robert Rodriguez, a trainer, who embraced him with bulked-up, tattooed arms.

Grabbing a ball, Mr. Rodriguez began a game of keep-away. James's belly laughs flooded the space. Gimme! the child shouted as he leaped up to catch the ball that the trainer had tossed above his head and behind his back.

The two laughed, dodged about, and ran around the room in what looked like random play. Not so, Mr. Da Costa said. There was a serious point to the apparent spontaneity. Keep-away provides training in the boxer's art of pretending you're going to do one thing and then doing another. It focuses the mind and sharpens hand-eye coordination. And it's fun.

You can't teach children in an adult way, Mr. Da Costa said. You let them learn in their own way. First you make sure they're excited to be here. Then you move the kid from place to place, get him to jump around, get the kid laughing with pleasure and excitement. Kids can only learn with movement. Focus comes from movement.

A parent in pinstripes was listening from the sidelines. Tell that to my kid's fifth-grade teacher, he muttered.

Mr. Da Costa slipped under the ropes and into the ring to spar with James's mother, Jennifer Cacioppo. Watching her son playing on the floor nearby, she mentioned that his teacher at school had asked everyone in the class to name something for which they were grateful: He said 'boxing.'

It's not unusual for sideline mothers to come to the sport as a result of observing their children's delight, and the number of women at the gym has increased.

Women are better fighters because they go out 100 percent, Mr. Da Costa said. They don't care about protecting themselves as much as men.

Nor do they show off. Men try to prove themselves right away, he said. A woman will pace herself. When you're training a man, you have to get them tired so they stop trying to prove how strong they are. Then you can begin to train them.

Perhaps, he suggested, women are good fighters because they are less fearful and therefore less violent than men.

Fear exists to protect us, but fear also stops a lot of people from being great, Mr. Da Costa said. They're afraid of putting themselves out there. Boxing teaches you to understand fear and respect it. It's when you don't understand it that you become violent.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: BOBBING AND WEAVING Upper East Siders working out at Punch Fitness Center on Madison Avenue near East 78th Street. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY SUZANNE DECHILLO/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.CY1); You have to give the client confidence, advises Adelino Da Costa, left, who presides over the boxing gym on Madison Avenue.; I'm mentally, physically stronger from boxing, says Alan Pollack, left, a k a Silver Fox.; James Cacioppo Jr., above, a 4-year-old from the neighborhood, with his trainer Robert Rodriguez. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY SUZANNE DECHILLO/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.CY8)