Togetherness for Carlos and Jovita Castaneda includes going a few rounds—sometimes against each other—in the gym.
By David Murray
Part One
On a Thursday afternoon in early March, a couple of boxers are working out in the gym, training for their next fight.
To the rhythm of shrill tones that transform time in here into an infinite series of three-minute rounds and one-minute breaks, the two boxers skip rope, shadow box, slug the heavy bag and paddle the speed bag.
They take little notice of other boxers in the gym. In fact, they take little notice of each other, except between rounds, when he comes over and helps her wrap her hands. She would do it herself, but her left thumb is broken. She broke it a couple of weeks ago, punching him in the forehead during a sparring match.
She's worried the thumb won't heal in time for her next fight in a few weeks; he's concerned she's going to fight anyway and hurt herself worse.
But he's got his own fight to worry about.
Such is the strange married life of Carlos and Jovita Castaneda, two of many upwardly mobile people who have taken up a sport long ceded to young men who had to get hit to get ahead.
Of course, the hardscrabble ambition of these poor young men--and, now, young women--still feeds the various professional boxing ranks. But these days, boxing also serves a more comfortable class of people whose hunger is harder to define.
"There's tons of BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes in the parking lot at night," said Tina Park, who helps manage the Jabb Boxing Gym, where the Castanedas work out.
Located in a surprisingly cheerful West Town loft, Jabb is a common ground for the pro pugs and pugilistic business professionals. It serves as the headquarters for 8-Count Productions, a pro boxing promotion firm owned by Park's husband, Dominic Pesoli. Jabb helps fund 8-Count with dough earned from what the industry calls "white-collar boxers" like the Castanedas. They pay to work out at the gym, and some of them participate in amateur "fight clubs" put on quarterly by 8-Count.
Jabb's business model is similar to that of many boxing gyms these days: Fund the professional boxing business by teaching professional businesspeople to box. For instance, at the legendary Gleason's Gym in New York, owner Bruce Silverglade reports that out of the gym's 1,100 members, 350 are white-collar boxers; each white-collar boxer pays about $1,000 in annual membership fees.
And thanks to a spate of boxing in the entertainment media lately, boxing is becoming more than just popular, says Park: "It's becoming chic."
Not that Carlos Castaneda started boxing because it was chic. Now 36 and the manager of a grocery store in the city, he joined Jabb three years ago because he thought it would be a good way to lose some weight he'd gained when he quit smoking a few years before.
Boxing quickly came to mean a great deal to Carlos--and to his wife.
No sports, no gangs
Both American-born children of Mexican immigrants, Carlos and Jovita met at Bowen High School on the South Side. It was a tough place, and they were gentle souls--not into sports, let alone the gangs that ruled the school.
"We tried to blend in," said Jovita, a stay-home mom. But it wasn't always possible, she says with a rueful laugh as she remembers how she and Carlos were once beaten up together.
Though the Castanedas have taken their two children far away from the old neighborhood to the suburb of Tinley Park, Carlos says he still deals with rough customers in the grocery store he manages. He handles them more assertively since he has been working out at Jabb and participating in the fight clubs. And as a fight club veteran--he has fought three bouts, winning two and losing one--he walks around the gym with a swagger that makes it hard to imagine his wimpy young years.
"Now I've got an `S' on my chest," he said.
The tall (5 foot 9), shy Jovita joined Jabb after seeing a woman box at one of Carlos' fight club matches. Her tall side said, "I could do better than this girl." Her shy side--the one that hunches a little to hide her height--giggled, "I have to be crazy to do this. It's so silly."
The tall side won out, even over the objections of her family members,
who were displeased to see their daughter and sister sporting an
occasional black eye. Only her brother attended her first fight, last
fall.
Though she lost that bout, she sees herself having another couple of
fights, her only question on this day in early March is whether the
next one will be on March 31.
Hoping against hope, she hasn't told the 8-Count people she's out. And she's training almost as hard as Carlos, who works out at the gym five nights a week, runs three days a week and spars. He diets and abstains from alcohol (and, in the weeks before the fight, sex).
Thanks to her bum thumb, sparring is the one thing Jovita can't do. Which is just as well for Carlos. Although he enjoys their workouts together and watching televised boxing with her--"we've been together so long it seems like we're brother and sister," he said--Jovita is not his favorite sparring partner.
Her southpaw stance makes it awkward for Carlos. Also, she sometimes complains that he hits her too hard.
"The only reason I ever hit you hard is to teach you," he countered.
"He works me out well," she agreed. "He throws good punches."
The tension builds
With the fight club only a few weeks away, the Castanedas are battling their emotions. Typically, Carlos is excited before a fight, while Jovita is all nerves.
Whatever nervous energy they don't expend in training goes to doing their part to bring the hundreds of fight fans expected at Lincoln Park's Park West Theater on March 31. (For his first fight, Carlos sold $2,000 worth of tickets to friends and relatives at $30 to $50 per ticket.)
It's just like the pros, says Tina Park. "The boxers get to keep a percentage of their ticket sales. They get to pick their own entrance music. They come in with their own corner men carrying their own spit buckets, and everyone cheers."
The only difference is who's cheering. Whereas 8-Count's professional fight nights draw working-class Hispanics, Park says, the fight clubs "skew toward a Gold Coast crowd."
But for the fighters, it's the same as any other boxing match--and it's totally different from sparring.
Jovita summed up the experience: "She wants to win, obviously, and I want to win, obviously."
And how does it feel to get hit in the head by someone who wants to win? "It feels like you're drowning," Carlos said.
Not that their 12-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter are worried. They take their parents' hobby in stride, Carlos says. On the quiet ride to the Park West on March 31, he says, "The only question they'll ask is, `Can we have some pizza?'"
***
Part Two
Leading up to his March 31 amateur "white collar" boxing match, it seems that Carlos Castaneda's fourth fight might be his last.
At 36, maybe he's getting to old for this stuff. The dieting is difficult and he's worried about making weight. He's getting beat up in sparring matches. He isn't sleeping well. And his emotions are getting the best of him.
A couple of weeks before the bout, he is asked by a writer for permission to hang around on the afternoon of the fight, before he starts getting charged up. "I'm getting charged up already!" Castaneda says with a nervous laugh.
On the Tuesday before the Friday "fight club," Castaneda doesn't have anyone to fight, as his originally scheduled opponent got hurt in a Golden Gloves bout. Asked if he's worried that the organizers won't be able to find a stand-in, Castaneda grumbles, "I'm more worried that they will."
Driving to the Park West Theatre on a late rainy Friday afternoon with his wife and three kids, he seems subdued and says his hands are sweating, a complaint a clammy handshake confirms.
But now, sitting in a chair getting his hands taped in the steamy, sweat-smelly small upstairs room where he and the 19 other amateur boxers are preparing to test their courage and risk their dignity in front their friends and family and hundreds of strangers, Carlos Castaneda looks like the calmest man in the room.
Of course, that's not saying much. It's a pretty tense room.
`Let's have fun out there'
Outside, meanwhile, more than 700 fight fans are getting looser and looser; typically, the first fight doesn't start until long after the official 8 o'clock start time, giving the crowd extra time to drink.
Carlos' wife, Jovita, isn't drinking. Alas, she's not fighting either. As chronicled in Part 1 of this series last Sunday, Jovita was slated to fight tonight, too, but she broke her thumb on her husband's head in a sparring match. She has decided to sit this fight club out. Maybe she'll fight in the next one, in June. But tonight, as she laughs easily with her kids and her mother-in-law, Jovita seems too fastidious, too agreeable and too gentle to ever hit anyone.
The same could be said of Carlos, who kibitzes with his new opponent, an ex-basketball player named George Turner, who works out with Castaneda at Jabb Gym. The two don't know each other well, but they've sparred before. Turner is taller, and "he has a good jab," Castaneda says. But he's being gracious; he knows he has a big edge on Turner because this is his fourth fight and it's Turner's first.
Is Turner nervous? "A little," he says, with a smile that admits, "a lot."
"Let's have fun out there," Castaneda tells him.
A knockout enterprise
Jabb Gym co-owners Dominic Pesoli and Mike Garcia have a pretty nifty thing going with the fight clubs they put on every quarter.
The boxers sell most of the $30 to $50 tickets themselves, to their friends and relatives. Sponsors kick in money or provide, as in the case of Sauza Tequila this night, the card girls. The Park West doesn't do badly either, selling lots of pricey drinks throughout the two-plus hours of action.
And the boxers aren't complaining, because they get to keep 20 percent of the amount they sell. Castaneda sold $1,000 worth for this fight--to his brother, his parents, his boss and other friends and relatives. The $200 he pocketed was enough to pay for an almost-ringside table for Jovita and the kids.
The economic tidiness of the fight club scheme and the lighthearted buzzing of the crowd around the empty ring leave an observer open to a surprise punch: the reminder, in the upstairs ready room, that boxing is boxing and these mostly white-collar men are facing blue-collar fear. For many of them, this is their first fight. They've sparred before but they know that a 90-second competitive round in front of a crowd seems infinitely longer than a three-minute round in the gym.
"It's an eternity," one fight club veteran says.
As the fighters' trainers tape their hands and direct them through warm-up exercises, as they smear Vaseline over their faces and headgear and murmur last-minute reminders, one antithetical piece of advice dominates all others: "Relax."
The boxers' butterflies are dispersed now and then by a boxer's triumphant return. (And every return is triumphant, whether or not the man is carrying a winner's belt.)
Kenneth Spagnolo, a salesman and a brash young fighter who calls himself "Gorgeous," knocks his opponent down at the end of the first round and the referee stops the fight in the second. The crowd cheers Spagnolo until he lifts his shirt to show his ripped abdominal muscles and begins kissing his own arms.
The boos are just beginning to die down when Spagnolo roars into the ready room laughing and wanting to know if anyone saw his fight: "How did I look?"
Most fighters effect a more humble attitude. Like 50-ish Chicago firefighter Tom O'Donnell, who staggers red-faced into the room with his two knee braces and his winner's belt and speaks only of how his opponent had hit him hard a couple of times too.
And the young trader Scott Crepeau, who also wins the belt but isn't sure he really won the fight. All he knows for sure is what he's going to do next: "I'm gonna take a shower and get [messed] up."
Castaneda's fight is the last one on the card. He spends most of the night giving advice and encouragement to fighters going out and debriefing fighters coming in.
Asked what he's doing after his fight, Castaneda says he plans to take a Jacuzzi and have a glass of wine. No wild celebration for the father of three?
"I guess I'm just not that type of person," he says quietly.
Careful strategy
Castaneda-Turner will not be remembered as one of the great fights of the century.
Castaneda follows his careful strategy of fighting defensively early in the bout and hoping the first-time fighter will tire from the tension in his arms. When he inevitably does, Castaneda gradually punches him more often, though not much harder. He wins all three rounds--and thus the fight--on points.
Throughout the action, Jovita stares with a steady, admiring smile. "We've been together a long time," Carlos says of his high school sweetheart. "I think she's a little overconfident in me."
The kids are confident too. As 11-year-old Celeste said before the fight, "I know he's gonna beat some butt and stuff."
Mom's not too happy
The only one in Castaneda's life who doesn't like his boxing is, perhaps predictably, his mother. Though Carlos and Jovita have long left the South Side for Tinley Park, Guadalupe still lives in the old neighborhood of South Chicago. She says she comes to these matches to spend the time with her grandchildren--not to see her son fight.
After the fight, he asks her if she covered her eyes during his bout. "She said, `No, this time I just turned my head.'"
She wishes he would quit boxing, and before this match she had reason to hope. His dread was only one factor. The Dan Ryan construction promised to make the Castanedas' long commute to Jabb Gym in West Town even more arduous. And since they plan to run in the Chicago Marathon next fall, both Carlos and Jovita were talking about hanging up the gloves for a while.
But in that hot tub on Friday night, they split a bottle of wine and talk about her next match, in June. And in the deep slumber of the nights after his bout, Carlos says he had a recurring dream that he wasn't boxing anymore.
"It seemed like something was missing," he says. "Maybe this has become a part of me."
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