Now windows are boarded up or knocked out. The four towering pillars that served as a three-story entrance to Masters Electric look like ruins you might find from ancient Rome. Weeds grow up in the courtyards. A brick smokestack stands like totem of a time long past.
But in the labyrinth of hallways in the blocks-long building, you find a few small new businesses and innovative ventures and one place that especially reverberates with the rat-tat-tat of life nearly every evening around 6.
It’s the Original East Dayton Boxing Gym, a place — after an ownership reshuffle — now run by Brandon Wigginton, a 29-year-old, one-time amateur boxer with a nose that runs down his face like a zig-zagging mountain road, and his cousin Lee Slorp.
Their one-room facility, bearing a fresh coat of red, black and white paint, is dominated by a small sparring ring in the middle and has four heavy bags and three versions of speed bags around the sides.
An American flag hangs from a nail, padded mitts are stuck on pegs on the wall, and there’s a big mirror in one corner. But for a truer reflection of the place, look instead at veteran trainer Craig Thurmond.
“It’s really the character of everybody here that makes a gym,” he said as he looked around at the dozen boxers working out.
And Wednesday evening, you could find character — and some “characters” — all around the place.
Just back here from Las Vegas was 21-year-old lightweight DaQuan Mays, a Trotwood-Madison graduate who has won 84 of 96 amateur fights, has recently represented the United States in the World Series of Boxing and has fought in Algeria, Italy, China and El Salvador.
Living in Vegas the past year, he had everyone from Mike Tyson and Floyd Mayweather to Top Rank wanting to represent him as he turns pro. Instead he’s come back home for the summer to prepare for his pro debut next month in Cincinnati.
At the other end of the spectrum Wednesday was Tony Rowlett, a beefy 32-year-old with thick, heavily-inked arms and a pea-sized diamond tattooed beneath his left eye.
He’s a bouncer at three area bars and also works as a bodyguard for Crystal Rayne a South Carolina-based adult film star, gentleman’s club entertainer and model. While on tour with her in Texas recently. the Fairmont High graduate said he got homesick for the Gem City and got the diamond to remind him of his hometown.
The real gems here, though, are Thurmond and especially Ron Daniels, two of the best boxing trainers in the Miami Valley.
The 67-year-old Daniels, once a promising boxer out of Dunbar High, was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam in 1968. Ever since, he’s been dealing with the effects of Agent Orange. Although he worked 35 years at the Truck and Bus plant, his real passion was the prizefight ring and over the years he instilled the “old school” brand of training he learned from his dad and other local trainers into some of the area’s best boxers, including Donnie Branch, LaMark Davis, Michael Evans, Michael Blount and Chris Pearson, the nationally acclaimed amateur middleweight who’s now 11-0 as a pro and trains mostly in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
The 44-year-old Thurman was a high school hoops star at Patterson Co-op, when a summertime accident working a factory punch press machine cost him his left thumb, index and middle fingers.
“After that happened I wanted to prove I could still play basketball at the Division I level in college,” he said. And he did.
The season after the accident he won All-Ohio honors at Patterson, then played at Cuyahoga Community College and walked on at the University of Tennessee but was then sidelined by a shoulder separation.
As Daniels has dealt with some recent health issues he’s wanted to make sure Thurmond carries on their brand of old-school training.
“We want them to be smart, skillful, two-handed fighters,” Daniels said. “If they master that, they will be hard to beat.”
‘Humbling times’
After high school Mays was invited to join the U.S. Olympic Education Center boxing team at Northern Michigan University, but that program is being revamped, so a year ago he relocated to Las Vegas to jump-start his career.
His only contact out there was Will Clemons, who had trained with him in Trotwood and was getting some sparring work at Mayweather’s gym.
“That shows you what DaQuan’s made of,” Thurmond said. “He made the initiative on his own to get himself known and he did. The things he learned here served him well out there.”
After his World Series of Boxing travels, Mays decided to spend part of the summer back home, though he admits life here is “a daily hustle” as he tries to make the daily trips from his West Dayton home to the East Dayton gym despite having no car.
“These are humbling times,” he said.
Whether it’s catching rides, riding the bus or jogging across town, he makes the daily commute, not only to train but to be with the local boxing fraternity.
Fellow boxer Dimitri Glenn, a Sinclair student who will be fighting at the upcoming Ohio State Fair tournament, put it best after making the trek with Mays on foot:
“I like everything about the gym — the work ethic, the skill, the spirit, the atmosphere, the people. It’s like family.”
Knowledge at a price
The lessons learned in the gym are appreciated by all the guys, none more so than Rowlett.
He could have used them that night at Ned Peppers bar in the Oregon District a while back.
“We had 11 bouncers working that night,” he said. “It was 2:15 and we were pulling everybody’s drinks and kicking them out when two big guys show up and say they want to come in. We tell them we’re closed, so one guy takes off his watch and jewelry and immediately starts swinging. These two guys were as big as Warren Sapp.
“Well, I hit the guy and he just laughed, grabbed me by the throat and slammed me through a table. Those two guys pretty much beat up all 11 of us. And they were gone by the time the police came.”
This happened before he came to the gym.
“In the five months I’ve been here, I’ve learned more from Coach Ron and Coach Craig than in all the time I’ve been bouncing (13 years),” he said. “It’s all about fundamentals, footwork, patience and what to look for.”
The other day everybody was into their own training sessions on the bags or hitting the mitts, but then came the moment when they all gravitated to the ring to watch the entire fight tableau unfold in a spirited sparring session.
Winston Simba Wilks, who had played three sports at Cincinnati Shroder High and is about to debut his middleweight boxing career at the State Fair, got in the ring with Mays for two black-and-blue rounds of education.
Mays, with a two-day-old tattoo of an AK-47 inside his left upper arm — “that’s the hand I put everybody down with,” he explained — began to unload an assault that gave Wilks more than anything he’ll face at the State Fair.
“That was very intense,” Wilks said afterward. “And once his juices got flowing, there was no stopping him.”
Dara Tith, a married 32-year-old commercial sales rep for a food service company who has just returned to boxing, put the whole scene in perspective:
“Once I got married and we had two kids and I got settled, it still felt like something was missing. I came back to boxing because it’s all about soul and passion and truth. There’s no b.s. in the ring.
“A lot of people, even in the business world, can portray a certain image and it sells, but not in the boxing ring. In there, it’s as real as real can get.”
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